The Sturgeon That Ate D.B. Cooper

“I really don’t have much to say,” says Pearl Carraway of Live Oak, Florida, who, at the age of 25, was one of 36 passengers aboard Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 on November 24, 1971.

The now 72-year-old sounds weary over the telephone, perhaps because she’s recently been released from the hospital following an appendectomy, or maybe because she doesn’t like revisiting her traumatic past.

Regardless, she indulges my questions: “I wasn’t involved in that,” she adds, referring to the infamous D.B. Cooper case, the only unsolved skyjacking in the history of the United States. “It was kind of — hold on a minute.”

I hear laughter in the background; it sounds like children. There’s movement, too, as though Pearl’s shuffling through rooms and brandishing her cellphone through air.

She collects herself and says, “They unloaded us, you know, there in Seattle. We weren’t really involved in it too much. I was on the plane and everything, but we didn’t really experience much except the excitement of it after it was over.”

She tries to brush me off by telling me I can look it up online . . . all of it. Maybe she’s having second thoughts about agreeing to an interview?

I’ve done my research, I tell her. Based on what’s been accounted for, I know what happened on November, 24, 1971. It goes like this:

A middle-aged man approached the Northwest Orient Airlines counter in Portland, Oregon. According to an FBI bulletin, he was a white male in his mid-40s, between 5'10" and 6'. He was average to well-built, somewhere in the range of 170 to 180 pounds, and had an olive, Latin appearance with a medium smooth complexion.

His hair was dark brown or black, “normal style,” parted on the left, combed back; his sideburns were “low ear level.” His eyes were possibly brown, although during the latter part of the flight he put on dark, wraparound sunglasses with dark rims. His voice is remembered as low, and he spoke intelligibly with no particular accent—possibly from the Midwest.

Here the FBI bulletin gets more specific: He’s described as a “heavy smoker of Raleigh Filter Tip Cigarettes,” a man who wore a black suit, white shirt, narrow black tie, black rain-type overcoat, dark briefcase or attaché case, and brown shoes. He’s also described as having carried a 4" x 12" x 14" paper bag.

This mystery man, who referred to himself as Dan Cooper, used cash to purchase a twenty-dollar one-way ticket on Flight 305, bound for Seattle, Washington. The media would later mistake his name as D.B. Cooper, an alias that’s stuck to this day.

And thus, one of America’s strangest true-crime stories was set into motion, one of the great unsolved mysteries in FBI history.

As the FBI describes on its website, “[Cooper] ordered a drink — bourbon and soda — while the flight was waiting to take off. A short time after 3:00 p.m., he handed the stewardess a note indicating that he had a bomb in his briefcase and wanted her to sit with him.”

At first the flight attendant, Florence Schaffner, then 23-years-old and a former beauty queen from Arkansas, regarded the man as nothing more than a coquet; she tucked the note in her pocket.

Moments later, though, Cooper turned to her and said, “Miss, I think you better have a look at that.”

At which point Schaffner removed the note. And, while it cannot be quoted verbatim—because Cooper eventually reclaimed it—the note said something to the effect of “Miss, I have a bomb in my briefcase. I will use it if necessary. I want you to sit next to me. You are being hijacked.”

Stunned, Schaffner complied.

The FBI’s official account continues with the following: “Opening a cheap attaché case, Cooper showed her a glimpse of a mass of wires and red colored sticks and demanded that she write down what he told her. Soon, she was walking a new note to the captain of the plane that demanded four parachutes”—two primary chutes and two reserves—“and $200,000 in twenty-dollar bills,” the equivalent of about $1,210,000 today.

When the flight landed in Seattle, Cooper quietly exchanged the 36 passengers for the cash and parachutes. He demanded the crew members — First Officer Bill Rataczak, Co-pilot William Scott, Purser Alice Hancock, and rookie attendants Florence Schaffer and Tina Mucklow — remain onboard.

After refueling, the plane took off again, heading toward Mexico City by Cooper’s demand.

“Somewhere between Seattle and Reno,” notes the FBI, “a little after 8:00 p.m., the hijacker did the incredible: He jumped out of the back of the plane with a parachute and the ransom money. The pilots landed safely, but Cooper had disappeared into the night and his ultimate fate remains a mystery to this day.”

“Nobody knew what was going on at the time,” Pearl Carraway continues, although she mentions one of the flight attendants seemed fidgety. “They got on the intercom and told us to stay in our seats, keep our seatbelts on. And there was a turbulence problem — I think that’s what [the pilot] said, I don’t remember. I think that’s what he said. He said there was a turbulence problem or something like that. Again, I don’t remember. And those are things you don’t want to remember.”

When asked if she recalls where she was sitting in relation to the back of the aircraft where Cooper was stealthily pulling the strings in row 18, Pearl says, “You know, this was so long ago. Do you realize how long this has been? I don’t remember where I was sitting. I don’t remember. I know I was sitting next to a priest. I remember that. And he was drinking like a fish.”

She laughs.

“So you never got a glimpse of him then?” I ask, re: Cooper.

“I might’ve and not known it,” Pearl says. Again she emphasizes that, aside from the crew, nobody on board really knew the circumstances. That is, until they landed in Seattle.

“When we got off the plane, we were bombarded by a bunch of people. It was scary. It really was. But what really made me angry was it was the night before Thanksgiving and we were supposed to get home with our families. My dad had passed away in Pennsylvania and I was on my way home [to Washington].”

In spite of distress, her interview reservations seem to fade. “I was young,” she adds, and lets out a wan laugh.

When asked if she has any lingering PTSD-like symptoms, she goes, “Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah! I didn’t fly for years. Matter of fact, I still don’t do much of it. I get scared every time I get on a plane now.”

I ask her what she thinks happened to D.B. Cooper because there are theories galore about his escape.

“Well,” she says, “I think he landed in the river. And I think a sturgeon probably ate him.” She laughs again, but this time her laugh sounds chirpier, as though believing in her theory reaffirms her conviction that karma is alive and well.

“I don’t know if you know what a sturgeon is, but they get—mercy—they get about 14 feet long! And the Columbia River’s full of them. And I think that’s exactly what happened to him because they found money on the beach,” she says, referring to a portion of the disintegrated ransom money discovered by eight-year-old Brian Ingram in February of 1980 along the bank of the river.

“And when you think about it, it makes sense. How did the money get there? You know, just think about it. How did the money get there?”