By Bruce A. Smith

CooperCon 23, this year’s iteration of DB Cooper Conferences held annually, was an investigatory success, along with providing warm comraderie among Cooperites who often quarrel in on-line chat rooms. The three-day conference was held at Seattle’s Museum of Flight, whereas past conferences had been located in Portland and Vancouver. The change of venue provided an ambiance that added to the importance of the conference.

As in past gatherings, Tom Kaye’s presentations electrified the conferees. Kaye, as the Director of the Citizen Sleuth Research Team, continues to be hard-working and inventive. His first discussion centered on new research into the strange and numerous particles found on the tie left behind on the plane by DB Cooper. To begin, Kaye has acquired a new electron microscope and has reviewed the findings delivered by the original testing lab, McCrone, that first analyzed the tie particles in 2016. Kaye has discovered that the tantalizing find of titanium-antimony particles may actually be titanium-calcium, thus casting a harsh light on whether DB Cooper may have worked at Rem-Cru Industries of Pittsburgh, PA, a Boeing subcontractor and facility that did singular research on rare minerals such as antimony.

In addition, Kaye revealed that the aluminum particles found on the tie also contained 5% magnesium, which makes this a strange alloy. The most common alloys of aluminum contain only a tenth of that amount of magnesium, and thus this finding suggests that DB Cooper worked in a unique manufacturing facility. Nevertheless, Kaye said that he still believes that Rem-Cru may still be a viable corporation in which to search for DB Cooper.

Kaye’s second presentation dealt with issues concerning the money found at Tina Bar in 1980, which is the only physical evidence recovered from the skyjacking. The lad who found the money, Brian Ingram, volunteered several of his remaining bills to the Citizen Sleuths, including a chunk that contained at least four highly-compressed bills. Kaye explored this chunk and re-visited the twenty-dollar bills donated by Mark Meltzer, finding that the greatest concentration of diatoms was in the middle portion of the bills. Hence, Kaye concluded that the bills were most tightly secured at the end portions of the packets of bills, most likely by rubber bands. This would have been in contrast to the bank’s practice of paper strapping on bundle of twenties, and then wrapping five bundles with rubber bands for greater security

Adding more weight to these findings was Bill Grinnell, the SeaFirst bank employee who actually delivered the ransom money – in the company of a Seattle PD homicide detective Owen McKenna – to Northwest Orient Airline officials at Sea-Tac airport. Grinnell said that many bank employees hurriedly assembled the packets of twenties, so rubber bands and paper bank straps could possibly be used in various configurations. “There was lots of chaos when we were preparing the money,” Grinnell said. Regardless, Ingram found three bundles of twenties, totaling nearly $6000, and he said he found them wrapped with rubber bands, which crumbled immediately upon handling.

Grinnell also said that he believed that most bank tellers were diligent in searching for a “Cooper Twenty” in the weeks that followed the skyjacking. “Every teller in the Pacific Northwest wanted to find a Cooper bill,” he told the audience. However, Grinnell acknowledged that after a month or so, interest in discovering a bill from the ransom had faded.

Grinnell also said that the ransom money was secured in a separate vault at the bank, whereas SeaFirst kept $60-70 million in cash in their main vault. The Cooper ransom came from a prepared stash of $250,000 in tens and twenties that had been secured by the FBI in anticipation of crimes of extortion, such as Cooper’s hijacking. Further, all the serial numbers had been recorded prior.

In a first for Cooper World, an all-women investigatory team – comprised of Pat Boland, Tessa Lauren, and Arlene Gray – gave a presentation of their efforts to retrieve DB Cooper’s DNA from skin cells, either from the “not-used” main parachute packing card pocket, or the strands remaining from the reserve chute shroud lines Cooper cut to fashion a harness to secure the money bag. In addition, CC23 host Eric Ulis, is suing the FBI to obtain access to Cooper’s tie to obtain human tissue that can be used to match DNA samples found from the parachutes, such as epithelial cells off the tie clasp.

However, not only is the FBI uncooperative in this endeavor, so too is the Washington State Historical Museum (WSHM), which owns the “not-used” chute recovered by the FBI in Reno and returned to Norman Hayden several years after the skyjacking. Hayden reportedly sold this parachute to the WSHM in 2016 for $1. In addition, no one knows the current location of the cut-up reserve chute. The FBI had possession of it at its Seattle Office in 2016, but presumably it was sent to Washington, DC when the Bureau closed the case.

Nonetheless, the Washington State Historical Museum is reportedly hosting a DB Cooper exhibit in September 2024, and will feature the main parachute obtained from Hayden.

In addition, Tom Kaye claimed that he has asked the WSHM if he can apply sticky stubs to the fabric of the parachute’s container to ascertain if any of the mysterious particles on the tie came from the engine exhaust of Flight 305 – which might have blown back into the cabin area when the stairs were lowered. However, the museum has refused his request.

Other informative bits and pieces of Cooper lore were gleaned at the conference, such as Mark Meltzer sharing that the Sage Radar main terminals had 70,000 vacuum tubes, and that he had learned from a fellow skydiver who was also a jet pilot in the Air Force that the F-106s that chased Cooper could actually fly at slow speeds, such as the 165 knots Cooper demanded of Flight 305. However, the pilot also said that most pilots would not operate so close to their stall speed at night. In addition, Meltzer claimed that he believes the Air Traffic Control was able to see Cooper exit the plane via their radar screens.