‘It makes you question your own sanity’: The true story behind Netflix’s DB Cooper: Where Are You?!

On 24 November 1971, a man in a dark business suit and dark sunglasses asked a flight attendant for $200,000 and four parachutes. The case remains the only unsolved skyjacking in the history of commercial air travel.

It’s also one of the most tempting for citizen sleuths, whose pursuit of the criminal known as DB Cooper is partly the focus of a new four-part documentary series from Netflix. Because DB Cooper: Where are you?! is as much about the fugitive thief as it is about the people – FBI bigwigs and armchair gumshoes alike – who’ve spent the last 50 years trying to smoke him out.

As the series’ trailer puts it: “This case forces you to question your own sanity.” But there are some facts about this audacious true crime caper that we know for sure.

The crime

On the day before Thanksgiving – one of the busiest in the US travel calendar – a man calling himself Dan Cooper paid cash for a ticket to board a 37-minute puddle-jumper from Portland, Oregon to Seattle, Washington. While on board, he told a flight attendant that he had a suitcase bomb, which he would detonate unless he was provided with $200,000 – about $1.4m (£1.1m) in today’s currency – and four parachutes. The implication was that Cooper would be taking hostages on his reckless plunge to the ground.

When the plane landed in Seattle, Cooper got what he asked for and allowed the plane’s passengers – who were clueless that the skyjacking had even occurred – to disembark. But it’s what happens next that earns Cooper a reputation as a “badass”, as one of the documentary’s talking heads puts it in episode one. After asking the pilot of the Boeing 727 to fly him out of the country, Cooper strapped on one of the parachutes and jumped into the dark, stormy Washington night by himself – no hostages.

Police search parties failed to find him and Dan Cooper, who became DB Cooper due to a miscommunication in early reporting, was never heard from again.

The aftermath

Naturally, the crime was a media sensation, inspiring DB Cooper fans and even kitschy DB Cooper themed sports bars that are still open today. He’s become such a persistent pop culture icon that his name was a punchline in a season two episode of Breaking Bad, when drug kingpin Walter White shows up to see his new lawyer for the first time. “Should I call the FBI and tell them I found DB Cooper?” Saul asks. At one point, extremely online Mad Men fans suggested Jon Hamm’s Don Draper might turn out to be the real DB Cooper.

And it’s easy to understand why the victimless crime could win fans for its anti-hero perpetrator. “He got away with it, he stuck it to the man, and he didn’t hurt any civilians doing it,” says a commentator from the Netflix series. But not everyone’s content to see DB Cooper escape justice. Six years after the FBI closed its 45-year active investigationin 2016, an online community of citizen sleuths is carrying on the manhunt, often at tremendous personal expense.

Where the case stands

There have been many theories as to who DB Cooper is and whatever happened to him. The FBI’s earliest assumption was that the skyjacker didn’t survive his initial jump over heavily forested terrain in the dead of night. What’s more, the stolen bills never turned up in circulation, except for a few thousand dollars that washed up on the banks of the Columbia River in 1980.

The older the case gets, though, the more potential “evidence” becomes available online – think digitised newspapers, property information, personnel records, high school yearbooks, etc. There are multiple websites devoted to the chase for Cooper, plus active boards on more generalised cold case files sites. And every few years some new revelation comes to light. In 2017, a group of citizen investigators claimed to find Cooper’s old parachute strap. More than one person has been fingered as the real DB Cooper and a lack of follow-up by the FBI has incited rumours of a cover-up.

DB Cooper: Where Are You?!, which premieres on Netflix on Wednesday (13 July), lays out the twisty case methodically, but it doesn’t do better police work than the actual police. In the end, DB Cooper remains where he’s been since the night he jumped out of the plane: a misremembered alias, lost in the wind.