THE passenger who sat closest to DB Cooper during his infamous unsolved skyjacking believes the FBI composite sketches of the mysterious crook are missing a key detail that may have helped to drastically narrow down the suspect pool.

Bill Mitchell was a 20-year-old sophomore at the University of Oregon when his flight, Northwest Orient 305, was hijacked by a mild-mannered man identifying himself as Dan Cooper on November 24, 1971.

Cooper hijacked the Boeing 727 during what was meant to be a short 35-minute flight from Portland to Seattle on the eve of Thanksgiving.

Mitchell was sitting across the aisle from Cooper, but he and the other 35 passengers onboard were completely oblivious to the dangerous plot that was quietly unfolding in the cabin.

Moments after takeoff, Cooper – wearing sunglasses and a suit – had handed a note to a flight attendant warning her he had a bomb in his suitcase and ordered her to sit down next to him.

In exchange for the lives of everyone onboard, Cooper was seeking two things: $200,000 in twenty-dollar bills and four parachutes that were to be hand-delivered to him upon arrival in Seattle.

Mitchell told The U.S. Sun he’d taken notice of Cooper when he first boarded the plane.

What he thought was odd about the 6-foot-tall, mid-forty-something man was that he’d kept his sunglasses on after takeoff despite the weather outside being cloudy and rainy.

He also couldn’t understand why one of the stewardesses, who would later be identified as Tina Mucklow, was seemingly paying the “old-looking” Cooper so much attention while otherwise ignoring him.

“I remember looking over to DB on the back right and there was a flight attendant in the aisle seat next to him. He had a briefcase on the window seat and a couple of other things,” remembered Mitchell, 72.

“But what I couldn’t understand was – I was a college kid, right? And this flight attendant wouldn’t even pay attention to me, she was just talking to this guy in his suit, skinny tie, and dress shoes – which I thought were tacky.

“I remember thinking, ‘Why are you wasting so much time with him?’

“But another thing I remember is that he’d put his hand in his briefcase periodically, set it in there, then pull it out and put it back quite frequently, which I thought was a little unusual.”

Mitchell never overheard anything that was discussed between Cooper and Mucklow.

The only inclination he had that something was wrong aboard Flight 305 came when the pilot announced over the intercom that the aircraft was experiencing engine trouble and they needed to “run out some fuel.”

In reality, the pilot was circling above Seattle to buy authorities enough time to scramble together Cooper’s ransom money and parachutes and mobilize other emergency personnel.

All the passengers were asked to move up to first class and everybody obliged, except for Mitchell and Cooper.

“I already had everything settled and I thought if this plane is going to blow up or crash, what good is sitting in first class going to do for me? So I didn’t move,” said Mitchell.

“Eventually, a flight attendant came up and said, ‘Sir, can you please move forward?’ which again I thought was strange, but I was tired and hours into what was meant to be a 37-minute flight, so I moved and that’s when we started to land.”

PIECING IT TOGETHER

When Northwest 305 finally touched down at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, the 727 parked far away from the terminal and all other aircraft.

Mitchell looked out of his window to see the terminal in the distance and asked himself, “What’s going on here?”

“I wasn’t aware of a domestic hijacking that had happened before so that never crossed my mind,” he said.

“We weren’t told about anything of a hijacking, we just thought we were flying around for a couple of hours.

“Then I remember the flight attendant walking on carrying this bag, passing me all the way to the back of the plane, which I later learned was the ransom money.

“But I didn’t know it at the time and they finally let us off. I remember seeing the parachutes in the front of the plane as I left.”

It was only after they’d stepped off the plane that Mitchell and the other passengers became aware of what had happened: the flight had been hijacked, an FBI agent told them, and the passenger responsible had a bomb in his briefcase.

“I looked around and didn’t see the guy who’d been sitting in the aisle across from me, so that’s when I started piecing everything together,” recounted Mitchell.

“The FBI took us onto the bus and started going through the list of passengers. My name was called first, and then Dan Cooper’s who nobody answered for, and they carried on through the list.”

While Mitchell and the other passengers were being escorted to the SeaTac terminal, Northwest 305 was ordered by Cooper to refuel and take off in the direction of New Mexico.

The hijacker gave the cockpit detailed instructions for how to fly the aircraft and told them to keep altitude at 10,000 feet at the minimum airspeed possible without stalling.

Flight 305 took off for a second time at 7:40pm and, shortly after, Cooper ordered all remaining crew to stay in the cockpit as he made his way towards the aft ramp in the tail of the plane.

One stewardess caught a glimpse of Cooper standing in the aisle, tying what appeared to be the bag of money around his waist.

That was the last anyone ever saw of Dan Cooper. (He’d later become known as DB Cooper when a journalist at the time accidentally mistyped Dan as DB in a report and the name stuck).

A little after 8 pm, somewhere over southwest Washington, a light flashed up on the instrument panel in the cockpit, indicating the rear exit door had been opened.

With that, Cooper was gone, parachuting out into the stormy night sky with his ransom and the briefcase and brown paper bag he’d boarded the plane with.

Virtually all traces of the hijacker vanished therein.

A CRUCIAL MISSING DETAIL?

Back in the terminal, Mitchell was being interviewed by the FBI in Northwest Orient’s VIP lounge while a frenzy of press gathered in the terminal.

The agents advised him not to speak with any reporters while Cooper remained at large.

He kept his head down as he walked through the terminal to be greeted by his parents, who’d been watching on in horror at the news for the past few hours.

Over the next few days, Mitchell would be visited numerous times by federal agents with early drafts of a sketch of Cooper for him to sign off with his approval.

The first drawing of Cooper, known otherwise as “Composite A”, was developed by the FBI almost immediately and was put together by one of their top sketch artists, Roy Rose.

The black and white sketch – which showed Cooper with and without sunglasses – was comprised mainly using the observations of three flight attendants, including Mucklow, with input from Mitchell and three other passengers.

It did bother me. It took me a bit of time to realize that I was sitting next to eight sticks of dynamite, and one small action could’ve ended in a very different outcome. I could’ve been blown up.

Bill MitchellFlight 305 passenger

Mitchell said he wasn’t overly convinced by the likeness of the first sketch because Cooper looked too young.

However, he deferred to Mucklow and the other flight attendants because they had been in closer proximity to him and spent more time interacting with him.

Because of the discrepancies in witness descriptions of Cooper, the FBI commissioned a second sketch – this time in color – in August 1972, in which Mitchell played a more instrumental part.

In the second sketch, Cooper appears older with an olive skin tone, a more solid hairline, and a protruding lower lip.

Still, Mitchell believes one key element was missed by the Bureau.

“I remember he had this turkey wobble on his neck, a little dangle of skin,” he said. “I remember it clearly but the flight attendants didn’t mention that at all.

“But he had this loose skin underneath there, and that would have put him perhaps even older than early-to-mid forties.

“But they didn’t think so and you have to kind of think they knew more than me but I’ve thought about that a lot over the years. That would’ve been a distinguishing feature.”

In the years that followed, Mitchell was visited regularly by the FBI with polaroids of potential suspects but none of which he presented matched his memory of the “tackily-dressed” Cooper.

He said it took him quite some time to fully process the frightening ordeal for which he’d unknowingly been provided a front-row seat.

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When the reality of the situation set in, he lost several nights of sleep and today still objects to any claims that Cooper’s heist was a victimless crime.

Mitchell said: “It did bother me. It took me a bit of time to realize that I was sitting next to eight sticks of dynamite, and one small action could’ve ended in a very different outcome. I could’ve been blown up.

“So I’ve never considered this a victimless crime.

“This guy was a criminal who put people’s lives in danger, he wasn’t a hero of any kind.”

A STRANGE OCCURRENCE

Where Cooper landed, and whether or not he even survived his perilous jump, has never been determined.

The FBI considered more than 800 potential suspects in the five years after the heist, though failed to find any evidence to determine a conclusive match.

The only trace of Cooper ever yielded came in 1980 when a child digging along the banks of the Columbia River in Tena Bar, north of Portland, unearthed stacks of rotting $20 bills totaling $5,800.

Further investigation linked the bills back to Cooper’s ransom.

The FBI published the bills’ serial numbers in the hope of fresh leads, but the vast majority of the cash was never recovered.

Cooper’s trail went cold again and the case has continued to baffle law enforcement and amateur detectives alike in the years since.

Today, the hijacking of Northwest 305 remains the only unsolved skyjacking in U.S. history. The FBI closed its investigation into DB Cooper for good in 2016.

Mitchell doesn’t believe Cooper survived the jump but is confident the case can one day be solved.

A key to finally unmasking Cooper may lie in a strange incident that happened over Eugene, Washington, the night before the heist, says Cliff Ammerman, a retired air traffic controller who supervised Northwest 305 after its second takeoff.

Ammerman had just returned from his lunch break when he was informed by a colleague he would be supervising a “hijacked aircraft pretty soon” once it crossed over into Woodland, Washington.

“That was the first I heard about it,” remembered Ammerman, 81, in an interview with The U.S. Sun.

“We didn’t know much about what was happening onboard because we weren’t getting a lot of knowledge from the pilot. They were busy in the cockpit communicating with the company and other people on the ground.

“Also, you have to assume the hijacker is in the cockpit […] so we were being really careful with everything we transmitted.”

Ammerman said he had no idea the hijacker claimed to have a bomb onboard. He was, however, aware of the ransom fee paid out and the number of parachutes Cooper had requested.

Ammerman said he was worried that the hijacker was going to make the crew bail out of the aircraft with him, leaving the 727 to crash to the ground unmanned.

The controller’s fears would prove unfounded, with Cooper skydiving out of the aircraft around 8:13pm.

Ammerman continued to assist Flight 305 up until it passed over Eugene, Oregon.

It later landed safely in Reno, Nevada, some seven hours after the terrifying ordeal began.

Ammerman was never interviewed by the Bureau. He believes the FBI may have overlooked a few key details in their initial investigation, including a strange incident he was alerted to near Eugene, Oregon, the night before the skyjacking.

“They didn’t contact me, but the only thing I thought the FBI should know […] was something that happened the night before the hijacking that may have been pertinent,” he said.

“I was working another swing shift and late in the evening, sometime around 10pm or 10:30pm, someone from the Eugene [air traffic control] tower called and said there’s someone from an airplane dropping flares down by Cottage Grove, which is a community southeast of Eugene.

“He asked me if I’d heard anything about it and I hadn’t. So I checked the NOTAMs [Notice to Airmen] to see if anything was mentioned and there was nothing there.

“But after that hijacking happened I thought to myself, ‘if this guy’s got someone on the ground waiting for him in a certain area, what better way to see a guy coming down than if he was using a flare?'”

When Cooper first hijacked Flight 305, he opened his briefcase and showed Mucklow what she later described as a tangle of wires and two rows of four red cylinders – which she assumed was dynamite – attached to a battery.

However, Ammerman believes the red stick may have instead been flares – and the incident over Eugene the night prior may have been Cooper conducting a test run for his jump.

He explained: “My thought was if they’re going to practice their getaway they’re not going to do it where they were going to jump out.

“I made sure my supervisor contacted the FBI the next day and let them know about the incident but I never got any feedback from them.

“So I just assumed they checked it out and nothing came from it.”

FLIGHT PATH CONFUSION

The FBI long believed that whoever DB Cooper was he was familiar with the area in which the hijacking was staged.

The subject of whether or not Cooper could’ve survived his jump has been fiercely contested for decades.

If he did, the FBI forecasted he likely jumped somewhere near the town of La Center, Washington.

The prediction was made using the Bureau’s estimated flight path for Northwest 305 and testimony from the pilots who reported feeling a change in pressure on the aircraft at around 8:13pm.

However, numerous independent investigators believe the Bureau miscalculated Flight 305’s path.

Among them is Eric Ulis, who told The U.S. Sun last month that – after meticulously analyzing wind speeds, “free fall” data, and other information – he believes the FBI accidentally mapped the flight path of one of the military jets scrambled to follow the plane, which was also being advised by Ammerman.

Ulis believes Cooper instead landed on Bachelor’s Island along the Columbia River, north of where his stash of money was found in 1980.

Ammerman agrees with Ulis that the FBI’s flight path data may not strictly be accurate.

He also stated that the change in air pressure reported by the crew in the cockpit may not be a reliable way to determine Cooper’s jump time.

“There was some really crummy weather that night so there was not a lot of traffic in the sky,” Ammerman said.

“The pilot was deviating off the centerline [of his designated flight path, Victor-23], likely to avoid weather cells that he would see, but I also found out later from one of the stewardesses that when he flew over areas like Vancouver and Portland, he was trying to avoid areas that were lit up.

“And the reason he was doing that was because he didn’t want that airplane blowing up and debris falling down on a city.”

Compounding the mystery, Ammerman added, is that it’s not known precisely when Cooper jumped.

“We don’t even know if he even went out of the airplane when the FBI thinks he did.

“Their thinking is he walking down the rear stairs and then jumped, which caused the stairs to hammer against the back due to the wind force, giving them a pressure bump inside the airplane.

“I’ve talked to people who used to fly C-141s [a military cargo plane], and they worked lots of missions dropping cargo and paratroopers, and they said you will always get pressure bumps on that aircraft with the back open.

“Flight 305 had the rear exit open until it landed in Reno. They probably had several pressure bumps during the course of the flight, so I’m not so sure he even jumped out when they think he did – that’s another mystery.”

ENGINEER OR AIR FORCE VET?

Unlike Mitchell, Ammerman doesn’t believe the case will ever be solved – but he does believe Cooper survived.

He also believes the hijacker had a detailed understanding of Boeing 727s and how they operated, hinting that he may have previously worked for the airplane manufacturer or was potentially ex-military.

Evidencing his belief is a series of covert military operations conducted by the U.S. Government during the Vietnam War that involved 727s.

The point of the tests – which were successful – was to determine whether the aircraft could be used for clandestine air drops – including cargo and jumpers – by modifying their built-in rear air stairs with a trough.

Cooper lowered the rear staircase of Northwest 305 himself before jumping and was very detailed in his instructions for how the aircraft should be flown: gear down, wing flaps at 15 degrees, and flying no higher than 10,000 feet with a de-pressured passenger cabin.

“He knew that it could fly with the stairs down at a slow speed and have the gear and the flaps set at the positions they were and so it makes you wonder if he didn’t have something to do with either Boeing testing that or the Air Force doing the jumps,” said Ammerman.

“Because I do understand that the Air Force during the Vietnam era did drop spies into North Vietnam with that airplane, walking down that rear stairway, and of course at the time that was classified.

“It makes me think that there was some knowledge there that he had of that.

“Where it came from, I’m not sure, but you would think it was either from Boeing or being one of those people in the Air Force who were a part of the mission.”