There are a handful of people and stories that never get out of my head. They are, in order of my fascination: The JFK Assassination, D.B. Cooper, the sinking of the Titanic and the 1962 Alcatraz Escape.
All of these have one thing in common: How the hell did they ever happen?
JFK is pretty self-explanatory. It's such a deep rabbit hole, because, well, the truth is likely more complicated than we will ever know. The Titanic's makers tempted fate by calling the boat "Unsinkable." But how an iceberg wasn't seen because of a combination of hubris and a missing key to a binoculars case is astounding. The 1962 escape from Alcatraz, was led by Frank Lee Morris, a prisoner with a 133 IQ. Not only did they escape from the inescapable, but substantive remnants of their escape, for the most part, were never found in the water.
There's one element of D.B. Cooper has than none of the others have. There was an encore.
From November 1971 through January 1980, the only unsolved American hijacking wasn't all that well known nationwide. But when an 8-year-old boy named Brian Ingram came across $5,800 in $20 bills that matched the FBI dossier from the Cooper ransom list, the legend expanded its reach.
It also made no sense, which added to the mystery. Ingram found the bills bundled together in a Columbia River beach called Tena Bar. Except Tena Bar wasn't close to the FBI flight path, so, either the flight path was wrong or the money would have had to flow down smaller rivers into the Columbia. But how was the money bundles still intact with the rubber bands? Could it mean that, at some point, the bundles were in the bank bag that the money originally came in? Or was it deposited at a later time to throw things off.
Either way, the FBI didn't find more money and never found "Cooper," dead or alive.
After holding on to 14 of the bills, the FBI released the money in 1986 to Ingram and the Royal Globe Insurance Co., the insurance provider of Northwest, who was forced to pay the airline for the Cooper ransom after losing a lawsuit. The money was now technically also theirs now.
Royal Globe said it would immediately start to sell their lot as collectors items, but there's no evidence that ever happened. Ingram has parted with very little, other than selling a few through Heritage Auctions in 2008.
In 2023, I got the chance to buy one of Ingram's bills that had popped up from the original buyer. But I was recently put in touch with someone who had a bill from Royal Globe Insurance's allotment and, on the 46th anniversary, I picked it up today. It joins the ticket that I have from Bill Mitchell, the passenger who was the closest to D.B. Cooper on Northwest Flight 305.
Darren Rovell is the founder of cllct and one of the country's leading reporters on the collectibles market. He previously worked for ESPN, CNBC and The Action Network.