Will the real DB Cooper please stand up?
Newly released FBI files provide new insights into G-men’s probe into the mysterious case of airline hijacker Cooper — including that one potential suspect was a man in a wheelchair.
The 398-page trove unveiled Tuesday details the FBI’s dogged efforts to investigate tips from people claiming to know the still-elusive man who leaped out of a Boeing plane with $200,000 in cash after taking passengers and crew hostage in 1971.
But suspect after suspect appeared to be a dead end, such as a wheelchair-bound man, one document revealed.
“A man confined to a wheel chair [sic] did not hijack the plane in this case,” the document dryly notes.
DB Cooper is the moniker given to the skyjacker — a dapper, dark-haired man apparently in his mid-40s who called himself Dan Cooper.
The mystery man passed a flight attendant a note while on a Northwest Orient Airlines flight in Portland, Oregon, bound for Seattle on Nov. 24, 1971.
The note claimed he had a bomb in his briefcase, which he opened to show a tangle of wires and red sticks.
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When the Boeing aircraft landed in Seattle, the man who became known as DB Cooper freed 36 passengers in exchange for a mountain of cash and four parachutes.
The plane then took off with several crew members aboard, bound for Mexico City on his orders.
Cooper, at an altitude of 10,000 feet between Seattle and Reno, Nevada, jumped from the back of the jetliner with a parachute and the ransom money, vanishing into history.
The case remains unsolved, despite a manhunt, the FBI tenaciously interviewing hundreds of people and a cottage industry of true crime buffs poring through evidence.
The newly revealed files largely follow a similar pattern: A suspect is identified, FBI agents investigate and, in many cases, show photographs to the hijacking’s witnesses.
“Eliminated” is handwritten on many of those suspects’ files.
Popular suspects such as Richard McCoy Jr. — whose children last year claimed he was DB Cooper — largely do not appear in the files.
Instead, the suspects are otherwise anonymous people largely lost to history: an Alabama man who died of cancer months after the skyjacking, airline pilots, parachutists and Boeing employees.
But one would-be DB Cooper named in the files has entered the murky case’s lore.
Donald Sylvester Murphy actually claimed to be DB Cooper — at least to a former Newsweek editor, according to the files.
But the claim was part of a plot to extort $30,000 from the editor by impersonating DB Cooper.
Murphy even posed for photographs “wearing a wig and glasses and otherwise appearing much like the widely circulated ‘artist’s conception’ of ‘D.B. Cooper,’” a court document included in the files states.
He also copied three $20 bills with serial numbers superimposed to match those from the ransom money, the files state.
Murphy and a conspirator received prison sentences for the fraud, the New York Times reported in 1973.
