Episode 24
He Jumped With $200,000 and VANISHED
The documented facts
- On November 24, 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper hijacked Northwest Orient Flight 305 from Portland to Seattle, claiming he had a bomb.
- He demanded $200,000 in $20 bills and four parachutes, released the passengers in Seattle, then ordered the crew to fly south with the aft stairs lowered.
- Somewhere over southwestern Washington he jumped from the plane at night in a storm, wearing a business suit, and was never seen again.
- In 1980 a boy found $5,800 of the ransom on a Columbia River beach; the FBI closed the case in 2016 after 45 years, the only unsolved skyjacking in U.S. history.
The full narration
Two hundred thousand dollars. One parachute. Ten thousand feet of black storm. And he jumped.
November twenty-fourth, nineteen seventy-one. A man in a black suit hands a flight attendant a note. He has a bomb.
The airline pays. Two hundred thousand in twenties, four parachutes. The passengers walk free. Then he orders the plane low into the storm, back stairs down.
Over the black wilderness, the tail drops. The stairs bounce in the wind. And he is gone. If he died that night, why did his ransom wash up on a riverbank nine years later?
The FBI chased the ghost for forty-five years. No body. No parachute. Only soggy bills on a riverbank. The money survived. The man never did.
D B Cooper pulled off the perfect crime. Stitch this if you would have jumped. Follow for a new true nightmare every day. Sleep with the lights on, if you can.
Dramatized for the telling. The facts above are documented; the narration is the Draugr’s retelling of them.