No One Saw Him Jump: Flight 305, D B Cooper, and the Night He Stepped Into the Dark

On the afternoon before Thanksgiving, 1971, a man in a dark suit paid cash for a one-way ticket from Portland to Seattle and wrote his name as Dan Cooper. Shortly after takeoff he passed a note to a flight attendant. He had a bomb. He wanted $200,000 in twenty-dollar bills and four parachutes.By nightfall he had the money. The passengers walked free at Seattle. The jet climbed back into the rain with its landing gear down, flaps lowered, cabin unpressurized, and one man alone in the rear. At 8:13 p.m. the tail lifted. When the plane landed in Reno, the rear staircase was still hanging open and the cabin was empty.No One Saw Him Jump reconstructs Flight 305 minute by minute from the FBI file, the crew's statements, the weather over southwest Washington, and the evidence left behind: a clip-on tie, eight cigarette butts, two parachutes, and three rotted packets of ransom money a boy raked out of a Columbia River sandbar eight years later. Every suspect is weighed against the record. Every theory faces the evidence.Fifty-five years on, one question remains open. Did he reach the ground alive?