Famed skyjacker's loot is up for sale

By Ron Jackson
Staff Writer
MENA, Ark. — D.B. Cooper.

For most with a clear memory of the 1970s, the name evokes images of a daring heist: A skyjacker who jumped from a commercial airliner in 1971 with $200,000 in ransom money and vanished. His is the only unsolved skyjacking in U.S. history.

For Oklahoma native Brian Ingram, the name and enduring mystery are much more personal.

Ingram, 36, and now living in Mena, Ark., became forever linked with the famed case in 1980 when as a child he discovered three bundles of fragmented money buried in the sandy banks of the Columbia River near Vancouver, Wash. FBI agents quickly authenticated the money at the time as part of the Cooper ransom by matching serial numbers on the wadded, weather-worn $20 bills.

Ingram says its time to sell of the famed bills, which are stored in a bank vault.

"I have a lot of reasons for wanting to sell some of the money now,” said Ingram, a 1990 Sallisaw High School graduate. "I've had the money for so long now. I thought it would be nice if someone else — perhaps some longtime buff of the D.B. Cooper case — got to enjoy owning some of the bills.

"Besides, maybe I can put a few kids through college, too.”

Ingram's timing could be based on the FBI's recent announcement that it was launching a new effort to crack the 37-year-old case. In November, the FBI posted a new Web page on the Cooper case, enticing the public to "Help Us Solve the Enduring Mystery.” The man known by the alias "D.B. Cooper” has never been identified, and the mystery over whether he survived the jump that fateful night remains unsolved.

FBI agent Larry Carr thought of the idea after the notorious cold case landed on his desk.

"I knew the agency wouldn't commit the manpower and resources to this case given that it's so old,” Carr said from his Seattle office. "So I figured I could either take my one or two new leads every week and stick them in a file, or take the case to the public and ask for help. Maybe it will jar a few memories. It's really a rather rare approach for the FBI.”

"This is really the ultimate who-done-it mystery in the his- tory of American crime. What happened to D.B. Cooper?”

Hidden treasure
Dwayne and Patricia Ingram enjoyed taking their two boys to a little stretch of sandy beach on the Columbia River near their Vancouver, Wash., home. Access to the beach was blocked by private property, but the Ingrams were friends with the landowners, and permission to pass through was never a problem.
Brian Ingram, then 8, fulfilled a number of childhood adventures at his family's special getaway spot, skipping rocks along the water and swimming in the river.

On Feb. 10, 1980, however, the youngster would experience an entirely new level of adventure.

"I remember it was getting chilly that day, and I asked my father if we could build a fire,” recalled Ingram, who was born in El Reno. "Really, I was looking for any excuse to build a fire, but my dad said yes. He told me to go gather up some wood. So before long, I came back with a bundle of wood in my arms, and we picked a spot on the beach to make the fire. Before starting the fire, though, I said, ‘Wait. Let me smooth out the sand.' And I got down on my knees and pushed the sand with my arm.

"That's when I first saw three bundles of money just below the surface, all meshed together. The rubber bands were still on them, but they were brittle to touch and just crumbled off.”

The boy and his father stared in wonder.

"My uncle was there, and he didn't think it was anything,” Ingram continued. "He thought we should just throw it in the fire, but my father said, ‘No, this is something.' We put the money in a bread sack, and the next day my parents called the police.”

Meeting the FBI
One telephone call led to another before Dwayne Ingram finally ended up speaking with an FBI agent. He was asked to read the serial numbers on the bills if any were still legible.
Ingram read the top $20 bill on one of the bundles. The agent's tone changed, and he asked Ingram if he and his wife could bring the money to their office.

FBI agent Ralph Himmelsbach was present when the Ingrams were escorted into a room. Fellow agents huddled around the table, staring and inspecting the clump of bundled cash.

Himmelsbach was on the verge of retirement at the time, and for the previous eight years had been the lead investigator on the unsolved D.B. Cooper hijacking case. He knew the case as intimately as anyone in the agency.

"Ralph Himmelsbach heard them read off the serial numbers,” Brian Ingram said. "He instantly lit up.”

At that moment Himmelsbach realized he was staring at part of the Cooper ransom — $5,880 of the original $200,000, to be exact. And Brian Ingram became an instant celebrity.

News crews were soon camped outside the Ingram home. Reporters would also follow the youngster to his elementary school.

"I was always the ugly duckling back then,” Ingram laughed. "Suddenly, I had girls flocking around me.”

The mystery
Only later as a teenager did he begin to fully appreciate his historical discovery along the banks of the Columbia River. By then, he was wholly ensnared by the mystery of D.B. Cooper.
On the day before Thanksgiving in 1971, passenger "Dan Cooper” boarded the Northwest Orient Airlines 727 in Portland bound for Seattle in plain clothes — a neatly pressed dark suit, a stiff, white-collared shirt, a mother-of-pearl tie clip, a black raincoat, loafers and dark sunglasses. Witnesses described him as ordinary.

Yet there was nothing ordinary about the man when he slipped a note to a young flight attendant named Florence Schaffner as the airliner taxied for takeoff at the Portland International Airport. Schaffner stuffed the unopened note into her pocket, only to have the man lean closer and whisper, "Miss, you'd better look at that note. I have a bomb.”

"I have a bomb in my briefcase,” the note read in part. "I will use it if necessary. I want you to sit next to me. You are being hijacked.”

The note further detailed Cooper's demands for a $200,000 ransom in unmarked $20 bills and two sets of parachutes. Once the ransom had been collected at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, he promised to release the 36 passengers on board. The airliner was then to continue to Reno, Nev., flying no higher than an altitude of 10,000 feet.

Within minutes, the FBI was notified about the hijacking and plans were set in motion to meet the man's demands.

A torrential downpour and fierce winds whipped over the skies of Washington that night as the 727 hurtled toward Nevada at 205 mph.

Then, somewhere over the Washington-Oregon state line, Cooper lowered the rear stairway and parachuted into the storm with a duffel bag full of cash tied to his waist.

He left behind minimal evidence.

New evidence
Walter Cronkite led off the CBS Evening newscast on Nov. 25, 1971, quoting a wire service description of D.B. Cooper: "Master criminal.”
As time passed, D.B. Cooper became a mythical character. Movies, books and magazine articles have all contributed to the legend.

"I'm 41, and growing up you were generally fascinated by three things — Bigfoot, UFOs, and D.B. Cooper,” Carr said. "There was just something alluring about knowing D.B. Cooper was running around down there in the woods with Bigfoot.”

Of course, Carr's professional analysis of Cooper falls far short of the legend.

"A lot of people have long surmised that D.B. Cooper must have been some ex-military paratrooper and so on and so forth,” Carr said. "That's all nonsense when you look at the facts.”

Carr points out a number of facts to support his claim:

•Cooper requested second-rate parachutes — "The type you could find at any Army supply store.”

•He didn't use the terminology of an expert skydiver. As an expert skydiver, he should have known he would be carrying an extra 20 pounds in money.

Why didn't he maximize his request? Why didn't he ask for $100 bundles instead of $20 bundles?

•A veteran skydiver likely would have realized a jump in those stormy conditions was suicide.

"We think he might have been someone like a loadmaster who worked for an airlines crew,” Carr said. "Someone who had been around planes enough to know how they worked, and enough to know you can't operate beyond 10,000 feet without oxygen.”

Cooper left other clues, including a clip-on tie that yielded a partial DNA profile in October 2007.

Then there is Ingram's discovery of the Cooper loot 28 years ago.

"If this case is ever solved, I believe the money is ultimately going to be the key piece of evidence,” Carr said. "I believe that money was still in the original duffel bag up until about 1979 — a year before Ingram found it on that beach.”

Investigators know that the beach was filled with sand from an August 1974 dredging of the Columbia River channel. In addition, the entire basin flooded a few years later.

"There's no way that money would have survived had it not been in that bag all that time,” Carr said. "It probably ripped off his waist shortly after jumping from that plane. I suspect the rest of the money eventually washed out into the ocean.

"What's really exciting for us is, based on all these factors, we now believe our original search area was off. We now think the search area is further south.”

Ingram's chapter
This isn't the first time Ingram has toyed with the idea of selling part of his treasure.
In 1986, and again living in El Reno, he finally saw the treasure returned by the FBI. Ingram and his family endured six years of legal battles over ownership of the money. A federal judge ordered the money split with Globe Indemnity Co., which insured Northwest Orient Airlines. Ingram ended up with about $3,000 of the money, and the FBI kept a few bills should anyone have to ever be prosecuted.

At that time, Ingram told The Oklahoman he planned to sell the bills to finance college educations for him and his two siblings.

Earlier this year, he posted a partial $20 bill on eBay to see what it might fetch. The bill attracted more than 40 bids, including a high bid of $4,200, but that was below his minimum acceptable bid.

Now Ingram has hired a marketing firm in to handle the next auction. The auctioneer is searching for a highly respected company to appraise the fragmented bills.

"Nobody knows what it's really worth because it's so unique,” said LeAnn Dilbeck of The Dilbeck Marketing Firm Inc. in Mena. "Brian is selling a piece of history, and it's about as perfect a crime as you will find in American history.”

And while Ingram describes the money as personally "priceless,” Dilbeck suspects the real treasure has been Ingram's experiences since his famous discovery.

"All the fascinating people he has met over the years and all the stories,” Dilbeck marveled. "I've already told him he should write a book.”