a.k.a. D.B. Cooper

In 1971, a man known as D.B. Cooper, left, hijacked an airplane, strapped on a parachute and made away with $200,000. He was never caught. Now a Florida woman says she knows who he really was: Duane Weber, right, her late husband.

By ROBIN MITCHELL

© St. Petersburg Times, published August 1, 2000

On the night before Thanksgiving 1971, a man wearing a business suit, loafers and a parachute plunged from a Northwest Orient Airlines 727, vanishing into a black sky, freezing rain and infamy.

Skyjacker D.B. Cooper was toting $200,000 in used $20 bills when he vanished.

Up in Pace, a Florida panhandle town just north of Pensacola, real estate agent Jo Weber says she knows what happened to Cooper.

She landed him.

But Weber says she didn't know the man to whom she was married 17 years was the folk anti-hero Cooper until 1995, when her dying husband motioned her closer to his deathbed.

"I've got a secret to tell you," said Duane Weber.

"I'm Dan Cooper."

The FBI and just about everyone else has been looking for D.B. Cooper. It's the only unsolved skyjacking in the United States.

Only $5,880 of the loot ever turned up, found in 1980 by a boy playing on the banks of the Columbia River in southwestern Washington state.

The man who bought a ticket -- seat 18F in coach -- for that flight on Nov. 24. 1971, used the name Dan Cooper. A police officer erroneously called him "D.B. Cooper" and that name stuck, going onto a movie title, ballad and not a few taverns.

Jo and Duane met in the lounge at the Atlanta airport Holiday Inn six years after the skyjacking. It was her birthday. He bought her a bottle of champagne and wrapped a $100 bill around it. They married the following year in Colorado, where he was an insurance agent.

Jo Weber said the clues were there, but she failed then to recognize them. There was a Northwest Seattle-Tacoma ticket she found among tax papers in 1994, then never saw again; and a bank bag she found in a cooler in his truck that resembled the bag that held the money.

He explained an old knee injury just before his last trip to the hospital, saying it happened when he jumped out of a plane. He had a nightmare about leaving his fingerprints on a plane. Weber even confided to her you that could make a box of flares look like a bomb -- Cooper had said he had a bomb.

In 1979, the couple went to Seattle, "a sentimental journey," Duane told Jo Weber, with a visit to the Columbia River.

Retired FBI agent Ralph Himmelsbach of Woodburn, Ore., who was in charge of the investigation through 1980, said Jo Weber's story is persuasive.

A forensic reconstructionist who has worked with the FBI also said the similarities between composite drawings of the skyjacker and contemporary photos of Duane Weber are a close match.

Other evidence includes Duane Weber's familiarity with the area where Cooper bailed out, his Army service and a criminal record that included serving time in a prison near Seattle.

Himmelsbach said the deathbed admission is the most compelling factor.

The FBI, which keeps 60 volumes of interviews and other documents on the case, still checks out tips.

The FBI investigated her story and concluded in 1998 there was insufficient evidence to make a determination.

"I've been going on for years, breaking a brick loose here and a brick loose there," Jo Weber said of her own investigation of D.B. Cooper. "I've been fighting one hell of a battle, uphill and downhill, with the FBI."

Her goal is to come face-to-face with the flight attendant Tina Mucklow Larson, thought now to be a nun, and ask her privately if Duane Weber is the same man.

"I will never reveal whether he was the same man," she said. "I just want to know.

"I believe my husband was D.B. Cooper."

"We worked for 17 years as a team," she said of her husband.

When a progressive kidney disease forced him to slow down, they moved to Pace in 1988 to the house where she lives today.

"We moved as close as we could get to the sea."

Duane Weber operated the Peddlers' Shop, an antiques and collectibles business they co-owned, in Pensacola in the early 1990s.

In his final days, when Duane Weber told his secret to his wife and she failed to grasp he was that D.B. Cooper, he angrily called out, "Oh, let it die with me."

Later, Jo Weber said,while under sedation and seldom lucid, Duane Weber offered a final lament, "I put $173,000 in a bucket and can't find the bucket."

- Information from the Pensacola News Journal was used in this report.

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