<= span style=3D'mso-ansi-font-size:9.0pt;mso-ascii-font-family:Verdana;mso-hansi-f= ont-family: Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";color:#305CB6;mso-ansi-font-= style: normal;text-decoration:none;text-underline:none'>D.B. Cooper l= egend lives

Sunday, Novem= ber 24, 1996

By Bryan Denson of = The Oregonian staff

Twenty-five years ago today, a chain-smoking man in a business suit climbed aboard a Boeing 727 in Portland carrying an attaché case full of dynamite. Then he committed one of = America's weirdest and most enduring unsolved crimes.

In six hours, the man now known as D.B. Cooper flew to Seattle, extorted nearly $2= 00,000 and four parachutes from Northwest Orient Airlines, strapped on a chute lik= e an old pro, vaulted into the skies over Western Washing= ton and disappeared.

Cooper jumped from a jet doing nearly 2= 00 mph, into a gale and in the dark. He wore alligator-print loafers. He became the only person in U= .S. history to get away with a skyjacking.

Was this a brilliantly crafted crime or= a disastrous hop into the hereafter? No one knows.

And a quarter-century later, it doesn't seem to matter. Cooper--whoever he was--vanished and emerged a celebrity, a wild mix of John Dillinger, Evil Knievel and your neighborhood CPA.

The flying felon is immortalized in mov= ies, television documentaries, a play, a song and a few yearly beer bashes. At l= east three books chronicle his crime. An anniversary party in Ariel, Wash., draws hun= dreds for a D.B. Cooper look-alike contest. Some people cling to the image of a grinning Cooper cooling his loafers on a distant beach.

A few of the 41 D.B. Coopers listed in = U.S. phone books belong to taverns of the = same name, although one belongs to a German shepherd that died six years ago in = Soquel, Calif. The departed dog's owner, a first-name-only guy named Jim, admired Cooper's ingenuity.

"He was an inventor. He was creati= ve. He did something that's never been done," Jim said. "Invented a new category, kind of like the Wright brothers."

Like Orville and Wilbur, Cooper changed American aviation.

Before his crime, the rear doors of some passenger planes, including the Boeing 727-100, could be lowered so that someone could parachute in midair. Engineers redesigned them to deploy on t= he ground only, naming their new gadget the "Cooper Vane."

The hijacker joined others who would ch= ange airports to security zones choked with metal detectors, luggage inspectors = and ticket agents who demand photo ID.

Much water has run down the Columbia River since 1971, when hot pants were in v= ogue, the microprocessor had just hit the streets, and a TV voice groaned, "I can't believe I ate the whole thing." But= America that year was anything but innocent. Hijackings--all aimed at Cuba before Cooper--were beco= ming routine.

Still, the Cooper caper flew in the fac= e of modern law enforcement. Federal agents have chased down D.B. Cooper leads through six presidencies, five "Rocky" movies and no telling how = many cups of Starbucks coffee.

They continue to search but not vigorou= sly.

"We still look into what we consid= er are viable leads," said special agent Dick Thurston, assigned to the F= BI in Seattle. But people weigh in with tips almost exclusively around the anniversary of the skyjacking, he said; "Surprise, surprise."

The man standing at the Northwest Orient Airlines ticket counter that day in 1971 wore a dark business suit and look= ed to be 5-feet-10, 170 pounds and maybe 40 years old--normal but for on detai= l. As clouds readied to dump nearly a half-inch of water on Portland, this man wore dark sunglasses= .

He put down $20 for the one-way fare to= Seattle and identi= fied himself as Dan Cooper. Later, a reporter racing a deadline would misinterpr= et the name over a scratchy phone line and print D.B. Cooper. The mistake would stick.

Cooper boarded Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 carrying his black attaché case. He took a seat in the la= st row, drank a bourbon and water and smoked Raleigh cigarettes one after another.

Eventually, he showed a flight attendant his cargo: sticks of what he claimed to be dynamite rigged to a battery. He passed a note to the pilots, demanding four parachutes, $200,000 and a fuel truck on the left side of the airplane.

"No funny stuff," he warned.<= o:p>

On the runway at Seattle-Tacoma Inte= rnational Airport, Cooper all= owed the other passengers to disembark. Only on the ground did they learn what h= ad happened. A flight attendant hustled in Cooper's money and parachutes.=

Twenties as a tip

Before taking off, the hijacker allowed= two flight attendants to leave the plane and offered them clumps of twenties as a tip. But they declined. FBI agents later would winc= e at the lost opportunity for fingerprints.

The plane zoomed out of Sea-Tac about 7= :30 p.m. Cooper ordered the plane to 10,000 feet, depressurized. "Set the flaps at 15 degrees," he said. He wanted to fly to Mexico. The pilots encouraged Cooper to let them fly south over the Pacific.

"I wanted to get him out over the ocean, so if he jumped, he would drown," co-pilot Bill Rataczak, still flying for the airline, recently told the San Francisco Chronicle. "He= was threatening our lives, and my objective was to kill him, pure and simple.&q= uot;

Cooper crossed up the crew, making them= fly toward Reno, Nev. As Rataczak and Capt. William Sco= tt, now deceased, flew the plane, the hijacker pocketed his cigarette butts to avoid leaving fingerprints. He cut lines from one of his chutes and tied the money bag to his body.

A few minutes after 8 p.m., he opened t= he rear door of the roaring jet and ordered a flight attendant into the cockpi= t. Then he complained over the intercom that the plane was moving too quickly = to drop the back stairs.

Moments later, with the plane cruising = at a pedestrian 175 mph, Cooper pitched himself into the teeth of a rainstorm and hurtled toward the spiky tops of evergreens and the frigid waters of the Columbia River.

Cooper left behind a clip-on tie, a mother-of-pearl tie clasp and a lingering question: Who was he?<= /span>

A sketch artist, using details from witnesses, drew a composite of the mystery man. He looks a bit like a young Ross Perot, without the teacup-handle ears.

Nine years and hundreds of dead-end lea= ds later, the FBI's lead case agent, a bulldog detective named Ralph Himmelsba= ch, found himself looking at a clump of moldy $20 bills. Brian Ingram, 8, had f= ound them while hunting for firewood along the Columbia River near Vancouver, Wash.=

The serial numbers on the rounded notes--$5,880 worth--matched those given to Cooper. It was the first and la= st decent piece of evidence in the case Himmelsbach has taken into retirement.=

For a Christmas present one year, Himmelsbach's wife paid $100 for one of the aging twenties, the detective s= aid Saturday on the eve of the anniversary. A court released 140 of the bills to Northwest Airlines' insurer and another 140 to Ingram's family. Some go for= as much as $1,000, Himmelsbach said.

A few of the twenties, now locked up as evidence at the FBI office in = Portland, flake like the pages of an ancient book.

The last entry in the four-foot wide ca= se file notes that Assistant U.S. Attorney Fred Weinhouse had taken up the prosecution on Oct. 4, 1995. So far, he has had no cause to open it.

"But we have it," he said, "and it's an open case. It's the oldest case in the office. And should= he be located and identified, hopefully we could try it."

Only a fluke kept the government's case alive. A day before the statute of limitations ran out in 1976, veteran prosecutor Sack Collins realized no one had filed charges on Cooper. Horrif= ied, he imagined the next day's headline: "D.B., come home--case dismissed!"

The prosecutor scrambled to present the case to a Portland<= /st1:place> grand jury, which handed up a "John Doe" indictment. But Cooper's whereabouts remains nothing but theories.

Himmelsbach long has championed one: Co= oper could not have survived his leap into the rarefied air, made freezing by the speed of his plunge, or the bone-crunching landing on the uneven ground or = the numbing chop of the Columbia River.=

Collins concurs with him: "His phr= ase is, 'Don't speak ill of the dead.'"

Vietnam veteran blam= ed

Several former FBI agents have champion= ed another theory: Cooper was really a Vietnam veteran and former Gr= een Beret free-fall expert named Richard Floyd McCoy Jr.

On April 7, 1972, McCoy carried a .45-c= aliber pistol and a hand grenade onto Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 855, bound = from Denver to Los Angeles. The plane was identical to the one Cooper hijacked.

Twenty minutes in the air, McCoy handed= a flight attendant a bullet, a grenade pin and a typewritten note. His demands were eerily similar to those made by Cooper 19 weeks earlier: four parachut= es, a fuel truck on the left side of the plane, $500,000 cash.

Shortly after 11 p.m., 14,000 feet above the Utah desert near Salt Lake City, McCoy hurtled out of th= e same style of rear exit Cooper had used. But the feds, who had bugged McCoy's ch= ute, nabbed him two days later.

He landed in the federal penitentiary a= t Lewisburg, Pa., but broke out with three others two years later. On Nov. 9, 1974, McCoy wal= ked into an ambush when he returned to his house in Virginia Beach, Va.

Hiding in the shadows of McCoy's apartm= ent, FBI agent Nicholas O'Hara introduced himself.

"FBI," he said. "Come in. Close the door. Be quiet."

McCoy opened fire, and three agents cut loose. O'Hara fired a load of buckshot from the Remington 12-gauge shotgun = his wife had given him for Christmas. McCoy shouted, "I'm killed," an= d he was right.

"He shot first," said O'Hara,= now retired from the FBI and working as superintendant of the Minnesota Bureau = of Criminal Apprehension.

"It was such a tragedy," he s= aid. "Here was a decorated vet who did full circles--from a war hero to an outlaw. What a terrible way to go out, split from his family, running from = the law."

O'Hara is almost certain McCoy and Coop= er were the same. The crimes were too similar, he said. The composite sketch of Cooper bore an uncanny resemblance to McCoy.

Some federal agents dismissed McCoy as a suspect, saying he was nowhere near Portland during the Cooper Skyjacking. They labeled him a copycat.=

Case still fascinates lawman=
But O'Hara clings to one damning piece of evidence: the clip-on tie and cla= sp Cooper left behind. McCoy's mother-in-law and sister-in-law positively identified them as McCoy's, O'Hara said.

The Minnesota lawman remains fascinated by the Cooper case and, the daredevil nature of t= he crime. I But he won't permit himself much more than grudging awe.

"I'm a cop," he said. "T= hese are great cases to solve, but it's very aggravating for me to see people pu= ll this kind of thing and get away with it."

Himmelsbach, slightly annoyed by Cooper= 's status as the celebrated underdog who tweaked Uncle Sam's nose, concurred: "He's not a Robin Hood type. He's just a dirty scum criminal."

Some observers like Himmelsbach still c= ling to the hope Cooper will be brought to justice, including Northwest Airlines, which put up a $25,000 reward in 1971.

Said airline spokeswoman Sara Steig: "The offer still stands."

=

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