Amboy, Wash. — A tattered, half-buried parachute unearthed by kids had D.B. Cooper country chattering Wednesday over the fate of the skyjacker, who leaped from a plane 36 years ago and into the lore of the Pacific Northwest.
The parachute is about all most people in this neck of the southwestern Washington woods ever expected would be found as evidence of Mr. Cooper's daredevil escape attempt.
“Hunters are all through here,” Idy Gilbert said Wednesday as she served drinks at Nick's Bar and Grill. “They find lots of bodies up here all the time, people who are missing. They would have found some bones. All they found was a chute.”
In November 1971, a man identifying himself as Dan Cooper, later mistakenly identified as D.B. Cooper, hijacked a Northwest Orient flight, claiming he had a bomb. He demanded and got $200,000 (U.S.), then jumped out the back of the plane somewhere near the Oregon line.
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A torn and tangled parachute found by children in southwest Washington state may belong to famed hijacker
He might have landed in the area where children playing outside their home near Amboy found fabric sticking up from the ground where their father had been grading a road, FBI agent Larry Carr said Tuesday.
The children, responding to a publicity campaign, urged their father to call the FBI, Mr. Carr said, and when their find became public this week, it reignited talk of the region's favourite folk hero.
In Ariel, about 20 miles northwest of Amboy, the Ariel Store has an annual D.B. Cooper party.
Dona Elliot, owner of the store, said Wednesday she thinks Mr. Cooper hid out in brush and trees for an accomplice to take him to the airport in Portland, about 90 kilometres south.
“It's the perfect place; no one would have looked for him there,” she said.
The T-shirt for this year's party will have a parachute theme, she said, even though she's skeptical that the artifact the kids found is Mr. Cooper's.
“It will be 37 years in November,” she said. “There can't be too much left of that parachute.”
The FBI doesn't want to excavate the property until it confirms, either through an expert's examination or scientific analysis of the fabric, whether the chute is the right kind.
If it is Mr. Cooper's parachute, that will solve one mystery — where he apparently landed — but it will raise another, Mr. Carr said.
In 1980, a family on a picnic found $5,880 of Mr. Cooper's money in a bag on a Columbia River beach, near Vancouver, Wash. Some investigators believed it might have been washed down to the beach by the Washougal River. But if Mr. Cooper landed near Amboy and stashed the money bag there, there's no way it could have naturally reached the Washougal.
“If this is D.B. Cooper's parachute, the money could not have arrived at its discovery location by natural means,” Mr. Carr said. “That whole theory is out the window.”
The FBI doubts Cooper survived because conditions were poor and the terrain was rough, but few signs of his fate have been found.
Locals prefer to think he made it.
“I think he's out there enjoying his money,” Ms. Gilbert said. “Most people here say they think he made it. We may never know.”
