[imagesource: Joseph Laney / Seattle Met]

Heists may be well-orchestrated and efficient these days, but for sheer drama, nothing can rival the story of D.B Cooper.

It’s a story that’s been told many times before (notably in the excellent 2020 documentary, The Hijacker Who Vanished: The Mystery of D.B. Cooper), although there are still so many loose threads to tug on.

In a nutshell, the start of this decades-long mystery can be summarised as follows. Here’s Entertainment Weekly:

On Nov. 24, 1971, a man identifying himself as “Dan Cooper” boarded a flight from Portland, Ore., to Seattle, Wash. Wearing a suit and carrying an attaché case, he waited until the plane was in the air to pass a note to the flight attendant — a ransom note demanding $200,000 and claiming that he had a bomb.

Once his demands were met hours later, the man strapped on a parachute, opened the rear aircraft door, and disappeared into the night, never to be found.

How’s that for chutzpah?

More than 50 years later, and with countless theories about what happened next, there is still no concrete agreement on what became of Cooper.

Now the story is getting the Netflix treatment with a four-part docuseries that promises to bring new information to light.

That new lead uncovered by the citizen ‘detective’ has my interest piqued.

[source:entweekly]