CRIME: $200,000 and a Parachute: D.B. Cooper

In November 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper boarded a commercial flight in Portland, Oregon, told a flight attendant he had a bomb, and demanded $200,000 and four parachutes. After releasing the passengers in Seattle, he ordered the crew back into the air, then lowered the plane's rear stairs and leapt into the freezing night somewhere over the Pacific Northwest. He was never seen again. The hijacking exposed just how little security existed in the early days of commercial aviation, when passengers boarded without screening and a man in a suit could carry a bomb onto a plane unquestioned. Despite one of the longest investigations in FBI history, no one ever identified him or recovered his body, and only a small portion of the ransom money was ever found. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson revisits the only unsolved skyjacking in American history, the security gaps that made it possible, and the enduring question of who D.B. Cooper really was and whether he survived the jump.

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