Chapter 1: What introduction sets the stage for the D.B. Cooper heist?
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Chapter 2: What key details are revealed about the D.B. Cooper hijacking?
We're going to get off stage and come back out. I can't believe what we've been talking about here this evening already. Okay, let's all just take it down a notch, all right? So we're podcasting. We're about to start podcasting. I think I already started the podcast. Oh, God, which means that's going to be on like the thing we... That's why I said we should start over.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
It stays here, everybody. Yeah, it's all our secret. 500 people. Okay. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And we are live here at the beautiful Neptune Theater in Seattle, Washington. Thank you. Man, times two. That's even better. That's an in-joke. People will be like, even better than what? Really?
There's more crossover between our fans and Howard Stern than our fans and Mariners fans, I think. Boy, there's a Venn diagram out there that's confusing me already. Okay, so Chuck. Yes. This is a little bit of history. Yeah. So we're going to go back in the Wayback Machine. That's right. If you listen to the PR Live podcast, you know that the Wayback Machine is imaginary, so settle down.
They heard that live. Yeah.
Yeah.
That was a good one, too. There are PR professionals here because they emailed me today. Oh, really? Yeah. I can tell. There they are. That's the call of the PR professional. Caw, caw. So we're going back to a cold, stormy, rainy, pretty nasty Thanksgiving Eve in 1971. And the story begins at PDX, Portland Airport.
And a man walked into PDX, took a picture of his shoe on the carpet, and then walked along to the Northwest Orient Airlines ticket desk. That's right. And he walked up and he said, hi, I am really interested in finding more about flight 305, the flight to Seattle. Would that happen to be a Boeing 727-100 airplane that you guys are going to fly on that route?
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Chapter 3: What were the circumstances leading to the hijacking?
It was no big deal. I knew it was a hijacking. You really had me stumped there for a second. I'm role playing. Game seven. So, SeaTac is circling, right? They're circling, circling, an hour, killing time, but just burning off gas. And Florence Schaffner has gone away to take the note to Alice Hancock, who takes notes to the cockpit. She's on the relay team, basically, now. And D.B.
Cooper says, well, Dan Cooper says, hey, Tina Mucklau, why don't you sit beside me for a while? And she did. And she ended up kind of taking a bit of a seat in history, if you will, if you'll allow us that terrible analogy. And she sat down and she spent a lot of time with Dan Cooper. And they ended up chatting.
And she said Dan Cooper kept a level head during a very tense situation like the whole time. And they chatted about things like Tina Mucklau's home state, which is Minnesota. They talked about a nearby Air Force base and how long it took to drive to SeaTac. It was like 20 minutes or something. You guys can actually probably guess the Air Force base. We don't know. That one.
And then they also, at one point, he looked out the window and he said, it looks like we're over Tacoma. So all this would indicate a lot to the FBI later on, right? That this guy was maybe a local. Yeah, I'm kind of curious. Could anyone here recognize Tacoma from an airplane? From an airplane? From an airplane? Wow. Do they have a huge, like, field cut out of grass that says Tacoma? Corn?
What are they saying? I think they're saying corn. Yeah? The smell? Oh, boy. Okay. I knew this would go over well here. By the way, we didn't mention they diverted all the other flights away from SeaTac at the time because they wanted that to be the only plane in the area.
And to me, the most remarkable part of this whole story is one of the other planes in the air, the pilot gets on and tells everyone else on that plane what's going on. Well, he like, he patched into the comm link between flight 305 and SeaTac for the listening enjoyment of the passengers on his flight. It's insane.
It's like, I'm sorry we're delayed, but here's what's going on on another flight nearby. Right. Just sit back and listen to the dulcet tones of a skyjacking. Again, it was the 70s. Everyone was drinking. They were like, this is remarkable. Thank God it's not us. Everything's better when you're drinking. All right, so he recognizes Tacoma, which apparently everyone in this room could do.
Yeah, right. We were impressed by that, but it's nothing. Occasionally... He went, smells like Tacoma. So all of these are sort of clues, though. If he recognized Tacoma, he knew by the Air Force Base that Clearly, maybe the guy's kind of from the area. Right. Might be a clue later on. So Mucklaw at this point asked Dan Cooper, she said, do you have a grudge against our airline, sir?
And he said, no, ma'am, I don't have a grudge against your airline. I just have a grudge. Critic. Right. She was like. Yeah, like they did. So back on the ground, the FBI is like going crazy. The local cops are going crazy. Everybody's going crazy trying to get 200 grand in cash together. Turns out that was the easiest part of this whole thing.
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Chapter 4: How did the FBI respond to the D.B. Cooper case?
He said some other weird stuff, too, but he said... We're like, he's going to blow us up. We should really butter this guy up. That's right. And we could have left on that rope swing, and we stayed because of you. Rope ladder. So they call. They do call, and the pilot is like, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring. Oh, a Mike Hoover? Yes. Ring, ring. He let it ring a couple of times. Ring, ring.
Ring, ring. Uh, Dan Cooper, hijacker. Uh, Mr. Cooper, we want to make sure your flight is as comfortable as possible. Is there anything we can do to help you back there to make your hijacking more successful, sir? No. Click. I know, it's kind of rude. He said no, hung up, and then at 8.12 p.m., the crew felt the plane kind of jiggle a little bit as...
if someone had jumped off the rear of it, and they said, Tina, go check. We're flying the plane. She's like, wait a minute, only one of you is flying. No, it takes both of us. You don't know. And that's it. So from the moment that Tina Mucklaw left, shut that first-class curtain, nobody, to anyone's knowledge, ever saw Dan Cooper again. Yeah. But that's not the end of the show. No, it's not.
So there was a manhunt, right? So Dan Cooper had pretty clearly signaled his intentions that he was going to jump off the back of the 727. And the FBI was like, we need to scramble some jets. Let's get some fighter jets that are in the area. We're going to scramble them to go follow the 727. What is the scrambling? I never get that. It's like, go. I know, but they all...
It just sounds chaotic, like they're scrambling jets. I think that's the point. People are supposed to run around and bump into each other and fall out and then get up and get in their jets and fly off. That's scrambling. That's classic scrambling. I would have renamed it. It would be like activate the jets. That's not bad. That's not bad at all. Scramble the jets.
Sounds desperate, you're right. Activate the jets. So, however the jets were brought into this picture, there was a problem with them in that they were way too fast for the 727, which is putzing along at 190 miles an hour. And all of a sudden, there's a jet that goes... And then the next one comes... And they're like, what are we going to do? Well, we'll stick a helicopter on them.
This is like Goldilocks. The helicopter was too slow. 727 is just putzing along. People are going and trying to catch up. Nothing happening. They should have scrambled a 727 and just followed right behind them. That makes sense as a matter of fact. With the headlights on. Right? Right? So they're scrambling. The point is nobody saw Dan Cooper jump when he jumped. So they used that 8.12 p.m.
oscillation to kind of figure out where they should start looking. And they zeroed in on a place called Ariel, Washington near the Lewis River. Anybody from Ariel? Good, because we got Ariel jokes. Nobody from Ariel. Anyone ever heard of the Lewis River? Okay. Okay. So they get this manhunt going. They're scrambling and combing. Those are the two things you do if you're in the FBI.
It was a massive manhunt, too. There was like a thousand troops and cops combing this area. Yeah, no one from Seattle PD, of course. They were just sitting around stoned. Hanging out in Nisiqua. Waiting for Rambo. Here's another fun fact. There was a millionaire, a local millionaire who we don't know. Do you know the name? No, I've looked. If anybody knows, just tell us.
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Chapter 5: What unusual method did a millionaire use to search for D.B. Cooper?
It was on the news. So this local millionaire says, you know what? That's near Lake Merwin. And I'm going to rent a submarine there. Because I'm a millionaire, and that's, you know, we're... That's what I do. Yeah. I don't work. I'm a millionaire. He got a submarine, and he trolled the depths of Lake Merwin. He said he rented a small submarine. Because he's not an extravagant local millionaire.
No, no.
Chapter 6: How did the CIA become involved in the D.B. Cooper case?
He's a 30.
20-footer will do. The 25 seems ostentatious. The hydraulics on it. Who needs that in a submarine? Does it have a metal detector? Mm-hmm. Which would not have helped because it was cash bills. Exactly. See, you'd make a great local millionaire. I would. If only. The other weird thing that happened was the CIA got involved, which is a little bit strange. Yeah.
And they scrambled the SR-71 Blackbird... Right? They scrambled it several times. Yeah, it was almost over easy.
Chapter 7: What evidence was found years later related to D.B. Cooper?
Terrible. Whoever said woo, you should be ashamed of that. It doesn't even make sense. Because once you scramble it, it can't be over easy. Terrible joke, Chuck. That's what I say. It's all right. Rebound, rebound. Is this really happening? Did you talk about long nipples? All right. The SR-71 Blackbird was at the time super secret.
We all know about it now, but at the time it was very secret, and it was kind of a big deal to get this thing up in the air. Especially multiple times. Like one time, it's like your dad is the head of CIA and you're the head of Seattle PD. So you can make it happen maybe once, right? Multiple times, that's weird that the SR-71 was scrambled, right?
The FBI is very studious and likes to do a lot of obvious stuff. So they interviewed everybody in the area with the last name of Cooper.
Yeah.
Which, there's like a square one. Sure. This is like square negative five. Yeah, yeah, sure. No, it's negative five. I looked it up. Okay. So you look up all the Coopers in the area, and at this point, they have a press conference. And if you've noticed, we've been calling this dude Dan Cooper the whole time. Yeah. Because up until this time, he was just Dan Cooper.
So they have a press conference, and there's sort of... I don't think we know who messed it up, right? It depends on who you ask. Either a file clerk or a cop who's talking in front of a reporter. Either UPI or AP, depending on who you ask. And they were saying what Cooper could have done something like this. And somebody said, well, there's a Dane Cooper who's a cat burglar in the area.
Right.
That's a terrible suggestion.
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Chapter 8: What are some theories about D.B. Cooper's fate?
Cat burglar does not go to hijacker, you know? And this reporter was like, what a scoop. And hit the wire with cops looking for D.B. Cooper. Yeah, he said D.B. Cooper. Did I say Dan Cooper? Yeah, that's all right. The little part of my brain was like, you just said Dan. Let's start over. So a cop was talking in front of an AP reporter, and they said, what Cooper do you know could have done this?
And the cop said, well, there's this DB Cooper. What did you just say? Did you just say AD Cooper? I said, there's a DB Cooper. I got it that time. He's a cat burglar. And the reporter said, this is hitting the wire. And he reported that the cops were looking for a D.B. Cooper. And it just changed from that point on. Yeah, I mean, he was never D.B. Cooper. It was literally a mistake.
So that's why we all know him as D.B. Cooper today. And the FBI actually, a little smart, believe it or not, and they said, you know what, let's keep it that way. That way we'll know if any tips come in on a Dan Cooper, we'll know it's a hot lead. So it actually ended up kind of working in their favor.
Yeah, and any time a tip like that came in, like the office prankster would come in with the facts and be like, hot lead, hot lead. It was like a joke around the Portland office. Everybody loved Richard. This will come up later, too, when it comes time to solve the crime. Later on, the FBI learned that there was a comic book
in the 1950s about a Dan Cooper who was a Canadian jet pilot and it was a Belgian comic, which is a little weird. But it was, you know, there was literally a Dan Cooper who jumped out of planes in comic book form.
Right, exactly.
So it could be a clue maybe. And that's a niche comic, right? I would say so. Printed in Belgium, in the French, about a Canadian fighter pilot. In the French? All they had to do was find like the 10 people who knew of that comic and be like, what'd you do? We know it was one of you. So the FBI had a pretty clear belief, a very openly stated belief that D.B. Cooper died in the jump.
It was just the line that they took right off the bat. They're like, there's no way this guy survived. And he wasn't the lead agent on the case, but he became the most famous agent, Ralph Himmelsbach. Any Himmelsbachs in the house? No, you're a liar, sir. Yeah, you're a liar.
So Himmelsbach, like I said, he wasn't the lead agent, but he was out of the Seattle office, and he became the most famous agent associated with it. And he actually gave the case its official name, Norjack, which is stupid. No, Northwest Jack, Sky Jack. Right, but remove the C. Just call it the D.B. Cooper case, you know, or Heist even better.
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