A police sketch of DB Cooper.
The incident began when a mysterious man, who at the time went by the name Dan Cooper, boarded Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 to travel from Portland to Seattle.
During the trip Cooper called over one of the flight attendants and asked them to write out a note declaring that he had a bomb in his briefcase and that the plane was being hijacked.
When the aircraft stopped at Tacoma International Airport he allowed the passengers to leave in exchange for four parachutes and the sum of $200,000 in cash.
After the plane had taken off again, Cooper strapped the bag of money to himself, put on one of the parachutes and jumped out somewhere between Seattle and Reno. No trace of him was ever found.
Fast forward to the present day however and now a woman by the name of Lisa Lepsy has come forward to claim that DB Cooper may have actually been her father, a grocery store manager who had gone missing at around the same time that the hijacking had taken place.
She made the connection after recognizing him in a news report about the incident.
“When the composite sketch of DB Cooper came on the TV screen, everyone looked at each other and said, ‘That’s dad!'” she said. “We were stunned because the resemblance was unbelievable, and my brothers and I were all sure that was our dad.”
Even if she is right however much still remains unexplained about the case – especially what happened to Cooper after he had parachuted from the plane.
The discovery in 1980 of wads of rotting $20 bills matching the serial numbers of the notes given to him during the hijacking had long suggested that he may have perished after jumping out.
