⌾Curio #37 - D.B. Cooper, Three Year Rule & Henry Mancini
Over the past couple of weeks, a beautiful red-tailed hawk has been perching itself on the tip of the street light just outside my apartment. It has light brown and cream-colored feathers, auburn eyes and scrawny banana yellow feet. Its wild elegance contrasts sharply with the surrounding concrete, steel and asphalt of the city, making it seem decidedly out of place, like spotting a marmalade tabby cat roaming the Serengeti or running into a palm tree in Alaska.
I presume the hawk has figured the street light is a useful spot to hunt for food. Frankly, I’m not surprised. I saw the biggest rat of my life last week. It was the size of a squirrel and was brazenly swaggering across the road. Various news items circulating recently suggest I’m not alone. A story from last month warned of ravenous, cannibalistic gangs of rats roaming New York and the CDC just released a warning of "unusual or aggressive rodent behavior" caused by starvation from the lack of food waste from restaurants. On reading these stories, I imagine the horror of walking home at night down an empty alleyway and seeing nothing but beady eyes looking back at me in the darkness, ready to pounce. As far as I’m concerned, the hawk on the street light can keep on hunting.
Clara Peeters - Still Life with Cheeses, Artichoke, and Cherries (1625)
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Oli
In Search of D.B. Cooper
On November 24, 1971, a man bought a ticket in cash for a Boeing-727 Northwest Airlines flight from Portland to Seattle under the name ‘D.B. Cooper’. He wore an understated suit and tie and carried a briefcase. He settled into his seat and ordered a bourbon and soda before take off. Once in the air, Cooper calmly passed a hand-written note to Florence Schaffner, a female flight attendant sitting close by. She assumed he was passing her his number and so dropped the piece of paper into her bag without looking at it. Seeing this, Cooper sidled up to her and whispered, “Miss, you'd better look at that note. I have a bomb.”
Schaffner picked up the note, read it and her eyes widened. She sat down in the seat next to Cooper and asked to see it for herself. Cooper opened up the briefcase to reveal an ominous tangle of cylinders and wires. Schaffner took the note listing Cooper's demands to the pilots in the cockpit. He wanted USD200,000, four parachutes and a truck standing by in Seattle to refuel the aircraft upon arrival. The pilot contacted air traffic control, which informed local and federal authorities as well as the airline’s president, who authorized payment of the ransom and ordered all employees to fully cooperate with the hijacker’s demands.
When Schaffner returned from the cockpit, Cooper (wearing dark sunglasses) ordered a second bourbon and soda and paid his drink tab. The other passengers were told over the speaker that their arrival in Seattle would be delayed because of a "minor mechanical difficulty." Once Cooper was informed his demands had been met, the aircraft landed at Seattle Airport and came to a stop. He instructed the crew to close each window shade in the cabin to deter police snipers. An airline employee approached the aircraft and delivered a bag with USD200,000 in marked notes and four parachutes. The passengers alighted, leaving the captain and crew members to stay on the plane at Cooper’s request. After refuelling, the plane took off again. Cooper insisted they fly south, to Nevada and then Mexico.
Once safely in the air, Cooper ordered all the remaining crew into the cockpit. The cockpit door didn’t have any peepholes so the crew couldn’t see what he was doing. The FBI scrambled two fighter jets to follow the plane, but visibility was terrible due to stormy weather and the fact it was night time.
Just after 8pm the captain saw that the stairs at the rear of the plane had been activated and at around 8:13pm the plane jolted up, suggesting someone had jumped out. When the plane landed in Reno a few hours later the stairs were still down. Cooper was gone. The FBI stormed the plane and recovered his fingerprints, as well as his black clip-on tie, his tie clip and two of the four parachutes.
Cooper’s tie that he left on the plane
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An enormous manhunt began. The flight attendants provided his physical details and composite sketches were drawn.
The FBI composite sketches of Cooper based on multiple eyewitnesses
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Teams of people scoured the forested areas where Cooper could have landed. Northwest Airlines offered a reward for any information as to Cooper’s whereabouts and in early 1972, the U.S. Attorney General released the serial numbers of the ransom money to the general public.
FBI Wanted poster of Cooper
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To this day, no trace of D.B. Cooper has ever been found. The investigation was closed in 2016 and remains the only unsolved case of air piracy in commercial aviation history.
Evidence
On the FBI website, all the files related to the case are open to the public to read. There are two bits of evidence worth noting:
In November 1978, a placard printed with instructions for lowering the rear aircraft stairs of a Boeing-727 was found by a deer hunter under the flight path of the hijacking
In February, 1980, an eight-year-old boy was vacationing with his family on Columbia River in Washingston State and was digging in a sandy riverbank when he uncovered three packets cash. The bills had significantly disintegrated, but were still bundled in rubber bands. FBI technicians confirmed that the money was indeed a portion of the Cooper ransom, all arranged in the same order as when given to Cooper in 1971
Suspects
Between 1971 and 2016, the FBI processed over a thousand "serious suspects", but nothing more than circumstantial evidence could be found to implicate any of them. Just who D.B. Cooper actually was and what happened to him appears likely to remain a mystery.
The Three Year Rule
For anyone who has reevaluated their plans and goals during this lockdown period, the below video by Matt D’Avella could be useful.
One of the problems with modern media is that it can be guilty of creating the impression that certain people (e.g. tech founders or authors or podcasters) gain success overnight. Yet, what D’Avella highlights is that to make something meaningful, it can often take time — much more time than many people are willing to wait.
The Three Year Rule is the opposite of instant gratification. D’Avella argues that if you judge your success over a period of, say, three years rather than three weeks, you’ll no longer be dissuaded by your inevitable short term failures. The underlying message: if you have a goal, give yourself enough time to achieve it.
TLDR: Rome wasn’t built in a day
Henry Mancini
When I listen to this evocative track by Henry Mancini (1924 – 1994), I picture myself somewhere warm (probably the Cote d'Azur) and near the ocean. I have a delicious pre-dinner cocktail in hand and am staring at a flamingo-pink sunset on the horizon. Life is good.
Mancini was one of the greatest film composers of the twentieth century. His prolific output included the theme music for The Pink Panther film series as well as "Moon River" from Breakfast at Tiffany's and earned him four Academy Awards, a Golden Globe, and twenty Grammy Awards, plus a posthumous Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995.
“Curiosity is what separates us from the cabbages. It's accelerative. The more we know, the more we want to know”
- David McCullough
Curio is a newsletter for curious minds seeking an escape from the noise of the news cycle. It is put together by Oli Duchesne