The Mystery of the Cooper Curse

A major criminal (NOTE: subscribers can still listen to this show) has been hunted by the FBI for 40 years. He is "D.B. Cooper," who, in November of 1971, boarded a plane in Portland that was headed for Seattle. He hijacked the flight and forced the plane to land, demanding a parachute and $200,000 in cash as ransom for the passengers. Once he received his requests and the plane was in the air again, he strapped the cash to his waist, opened the plane’s rear door and used the parachute to dive into the remote forest of the Pacific Northwest. He was never seen again.

In the August 6-7 edition of the Wall Street Journal, Geoffrey Gray writes, "The reason that Cooper has never been caught is not so much a lack of good evidence (though there’s In the spring, more than 250 soldiers from nearby Fort Lewis attempted to make it into the woods, and the Curse struck again. They faced freezing rain, sleet and sometimes 6 to 12 inches of snow. plenty of that) or missing evidence (some of that, too). It’s something more mysterious and powerful: the Cooper Curse."

Gray quotes former FBI agent Larry Carr as saying, "Oh, it exists." The Cooper Cruse includes missing fingerprints and documents. The following spring, 250 soldiers from a nearby military base searched the forest for signs of Cooper’s parachute landing, but there was still 6 to 12 inches of snow on the ground, so the search was discontinued.

In the August 7th edition of the New York Times, Geoffrey Gray writes, "Even if Cooper survived the jump, lived to a ripe old age and appeared today as a guest on David Letterman’s ‘Late Show,’ it would be very difficult to confirm that he was who he said he was. The long and fruitless history of Cooper suspects and hoaxsters reminds us how little physical evidence there is to prove or disprove anyone’s claim. Even the DNA sample from the case (a trace of saliva on Cooper’s clip–on a tie that may or may not be his) isn’t good enough to allow a definitive match."

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