The Hijacker Who Vanished: The Mystery of DB Cooper - Storyville

What a tremendous true-life mystery. It’s got everything – a parachute escape by an aeroplane hijacker, death-bed confessions, grizzled FBI agents, missing cigarette butts, buried money, prison breakouts… and no real resolution.

In 1971 a man calling himself “DB Cooper” passed a note to an air stewardess on board a flight from Portland to Seattle saying if he didn’t receive a $200,000 ransom, he would detonate a bomb in his briefcase. The plane landed to pick up the money, then took off again, and he parachuted from the plane with his cash as it flew to Reno.

What followed transfixed America and remains the country’s only unsolved air-crime. This terrific Storyville from John Dower picks apart what became a Robin Hood story and hears from retired FBI agents involved the in case, and the friends and family members of a handful of suspects.

To this day no one knows who “DB Cooper” was (or is) and the story still exerts a powerful hold over its army of devotees.