Wednesday, April 02, 2008
Wrong Chute
Earl Cossey sounded weary last week, assessing the importance of a newfound parachute. The Dan "D.B" Cooper/parachute expert had seen it all, over and over. This week, he laughed recalling his reaction to seeing a parachute found last month near Amboy, Wash. Some believed it might be linked to Cooper's Nov. 24, 1971, jump into the rainy night sky with $200,000 in ransom strapped to his body. As Cossey suspected last week, it wasn't the one. - Oregonlive Bummer. You know, if Deep Throat can come out of the closet, how come we can't figure out what happened to Cooper? I was crossing my fingers on that one.
Labels: Crime, D.B. Cooper
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
D.B. Cooper
AMBOY, Wash. - There could be a major break in the biggest crime mystery in Northwest history.The FBI in Seattle is beginning analysis of a long-buried parachute - the same type used by skyjacker D.B. Cooper when he jumped from an Northwest Orient Airlines 727 with a 25 pound money bag containing 200-thousand dollars ransom on Thanksgiving eve 1971. The children of a Clark County contractor found the parachute buried in a field that their father has recently plowed for a road. The chute is white and conical shaped, dirty and deteriorated. Seattle Agent Larry Carr will clean it and search for a label, which could match the chute to a companion reserve chute left behind by Cooper in the plane. - KOIN How freaking cool is that?
Labels: Crime, D.B. Cooper
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
More Cooper News...
In 1980, 8-year-old Brian Ingram found the sole link to the only unsolved airline hijacking in U.S. history buried in the sandy banks of the Columbia River.
Now 36, Ingram hopes to auction the weathered bundle of $20 bills as the Federal Bureau of Investigations launches a new effort to find the unknown hijacker who parachuted into the night after taking over the 1971 Northwest Orient Airlines flight.
"Think about it, it was the biggest manhunt. They never found any clues to this man," said Ingram, who followed family ties to Arkansas and now lives in Mena, west of Little Rock in the Ouachita Mountains. "The money that I found in 1980 is the only evidence ever linked to this guy that jumped out of the 727 at the altitude that he did with the weather." - OregonLive
Labels: Crime, D.B. Cooper
Tuesday, January 01, 2008
The Pursuit of D.B. Cooper
On a cold November night 36 years ago, in the driving wind and rain, somewhere between southern Washington state and just north of Portland, Oregon, a man calling himself Dan Cooper parachuted out of a plane he'd just hijacked clutching a bag filled with $200,000 in stolen cash.
Who was Cooper? Did he survive the jump? And what happened to the loot, only a small part of which has ever surfaced?
It's a mystery, frankly. We've run down thousands of leads and considered all sorts of scenarios. And amateur sleuths have put forward plenty of their own theories. Yet the case remains unsolved.
Would we still like to get our man? Absolutely. And we have reignited the case - thanks to a Seattle case agent named Larry Carr and new technologies like DNA testing.
You can help. We're providing here, for the first time, a series of pictures and information on the case. Please look it all over carefully to see if it triggers a memory or if you can provide any useful information. - FBI.gov
I'm not one to get reflective come the holidays, but sooner or later I'm going to have address the fact that all of my heroes are criminals and junkies. (And puppets....)
Labels: Crime, D.B. Cooper
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Mystery lives, even if D.B. doesn't
I forgot to post this article. Along with my Butch Cassidy obsession, I can spend countless hours reading/researching D.B. Cooper.
"What to make of D.B. Cooper after all these years? That wasn't his real name, of course, as everyone knows. Or maybe everyone doesn't know, not 36 years after a man who became known as D.B. Cooper hijacked a Boeing 727 between Portland and Seattle, demanded $200,000 in cash and four parachutes from Northwest Airlines, ordered the plane to fly from Seattle to Mexico City and, somewhere over southwest Washington, bailed out with the money, never to be seen again. It is perhaps the most famous unsolved case in FBI history." - More @ OregonLive
Labels: Crime, D.B. Cooper
Friday, March 23, 2007
Danger Will Robinson!
"Once again, Nevada has a ranking and reputation Metro isn't too proud of: The most dangerous state in the country. That's according to a new survey. It's the fourth year in a row we've come out on top but officers aren't willing to accept the bad rap so quickly.
...
The report's publisher admits these rankings are controversial, but argues rates are what they are. For example, the survey pits Nevada's 8.56 murders for every 100,000 people against the national average which 5.6." - KVBC
Do we get some kind of plaque for this? Granted I'm a relative newbie to Nevada - we've been in Reno just shy of two years, before that Molliwogg and I lived in Las Vegas for a couple months sometime in the 90's - but I've seen less crime here than I did in Portland.
Metro's Sergeant John Loretto says the survey is misleading. "Not all incidents come from the Las Vegas Valley."
Sorry bud, but you're going to have eat this one. I did a little research - not a lot, mind you, just a little - and quickly found some statistics.
According to Morgan Quitino Press, the national average for murder in 2004 was 5.5 murders per 100,000 people. In that report, Las Vegas averaged 10.6 and North Las Vegas, 9.3 - nearly double the national average. In comparison, Reno averaged a lowly 4.5 - lower than Portland at 5.3, but higher than Seattle at 4.2.
Dig the top four on the list: 1) Camden, NJ - 60.8 2) New Orleans, LA - 56.0 3) Gary, IN - 53.7 4) Richmond, VA - 47.3 (Morgan Quitino Press report - PDF)
I realize population affects these figures and 4.5 is probably high for a smaller city, but give me Reno over Gary or Camden any day of the week.
Here's the funny thing - I'm switching over to Infoplease's statistics for Most Dangerous States and Most Livable States for these figures - Nevada is the most dangerous state, Oregon ranks #27, while New Jersey (apparently home to the murder capital of the U.S. - take that Santa Cruz!) ranks #32. In the "most livable" charts, New Jersey ranks #5, while the most dangerous state in the union ranks #24, above Oregon which scores a relatively low #33.
I never took statistics in high school or college, but it would seem to me that the designation of "Most Dangerous State" would affect your status on the "Most Livable State" charts. On that same note, harboring the city with the highest murder rate in the United States would appear to exclude you from ranking in the top five of most livable states.
Sticks and stones may break my bones (except in Camden!), but statistics will always confuse me.
Labels: Crime, Nevada, News
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