Getting Away With It

The official version [wink] is that nobody knows where all the money that regular people used to have went, but hey, they're starting to make some progress in the old D. B. Cooper case, so that's something. "D. B." is not the hijacker's real name, but a journalist's typo for "Dan Cooper," which is also not the hijacker's real name, which might be Tim, or Mitt, or Michele. At any rate, he boarded a plane from Portland to Seattle one night forty years ago, and held the passengers for ransom, eventually exchanging them for $200,000 in cash and four parachutes, and he bailed out of the airplane somewhere over the wilds of Washington during a raging storm. He has not been seen since.

Sasquatch Hypothesis Has Historical Precedent

A few personal effects were retrieved, including his necktie and a number of Raleigh filter cigarette butts left on the plane. Now the FBI has identified a credible person of interest in the case, a person who is currently dead, but only ten years dead, which is less dead than D. B. would have been if he had perished in the jump. Now they would like to retest the cigarettes for DNA and compare that to some relic from the dead suspect or germane corpse particles, but no one can find the butts. The agent in charge of the case believes they might be in Las Vegas.

Nine years after the hijacking, a small portion of the ransom money was found in a river bank. This supports the hypothesis that Mr. Cooper died in the parachute attempt, or, as some have seriously suggested, soon afterwards, possibly after an encounter with Sasquatch.

Whatever his fate, D. B. Cooper has become something of a folk hero to many who cheer his moxie and hope that he might have gotten away with the caper. Many Americans are strangely moved by the thought that it is possible to make off with oodles of someone else's money, and are willing to overlook the fact that each of us is paying for it in one way or another.

So let's review. Someone whose identity remains in the shadows pulled off a heist, stole money he had not earned, flew directly into a storm and engineered a bailout, stashed some of the money in a bank and hid the rest, and planted stories about bogeymen to steer us off his trail. The FBI lost their butts in Las Vegas, and everyone else is so dazzled by the money and the audacity of the crime that they are willing to overlook grand larceny even if it was some of their own money that was stolen. It's just another great American success story, according to representatives at Republican National Committee headquarters, interviewed during the recent dedication of their new D. B. Cooper wing.