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In 1971, a man hijacked a plane, was given $200 000 in ransom money, parachuted out of said plane in a black suit, and was never seen again.

Ever since then, the story of the man known as DB Cooper has captivated millions, with thousands of theories mapping out what became of him.

Quite incredibly, the case remains the only unsolved plane hijacking in US history, which means it’s ripe for a true-crime doccie.

Enter The Hijacker Who Vanished: The Mystery of DB Cooper, an HBO doccie that lines up the prime suspects, says the Telegraph:

[They are] Duane Weber, an insurance salesman who made a deathbed confession; Barbara Dayton, a transgender pilot and accomplished parachutist; LD Cooper, a logger whose niece recalls him returning home battered and bloodied at Thanksgiving; and Richard Floyd McCoy, a Vietnam veteran who carried out a near-identical skyjacking just five months later.

Many investigations and examinations of the evidence have come before, and director John Dower says he’s not trying to solve the crime, but rather shine a light on people whose lives have been entirely consumed by unravelling the mystery.

That’s not to say some new information isn’t forthcoming, but let’s watch the trailer before we blurt anything out:

There are those who say that Cooper wouldn’t have survived the jump in the first place, but consider this:

More bizarre was the discovery of $5,800 in bundles of badly-damaged notes on a Columbia River beach, 45 miles south of where Cooper supposedly landed. They were found in February 1980…

The serial numbers matched those on notes from the ransom money. But, as Dower explains, it only deepened the mystery.

“The money couldn’t have been there for more than a year,” he says, “because the elastic bands were still intact. The company who manufactured them said there was no way they could have survived eight years in the sand and water. And the FBI dredging showed that, given where the money was in the layers of sand, it couldn’t have been there longer than a year.

“That says, I think, that Cooper survived and put the money there. Maybe as a bizarre sign or gesture.”

The FBI closed the case in 2016, so we may never officially know who plunged from the plane all those years ago.

In that respect, the legend of DB Cooper is set to live on.

[source:telegraph]