THE daughter of a leading suspect in the DB Cooper case is fighting to clear her dad’s name.

On Thanksgiving Eve 1971, a man who would become known as DB Cooper hijacked Northwest Airlines Flight 305 and parachuted out of the plane at 10,000 feet with $200,000 strapped to his waist.

Cooper disappeared into thin air and was never seen again.

His identity – and whether or not he even survived his daring jump – has been the subject of fierce debate and investigation for decades.

More than 800 potential suspects were considered by the FBI in the years following the crime but none were deemed to be a compelling match and no arrests were ever made.

The Bureau officially closed its investigation into the Cooper heist in 2016, rendering it the only unsolved skyjacking in US history.

But refusing to give up the hunt is investigator Eric Ulis, who has been digging into the case for the last 13 years.

In late 2022, Ulis named Vince Petersen as his prime suspect.

Petersen, a metallurgist who died in 2002, would’ve been 52 at the time of the skyjacking and shared a number of physical traits with the crook.

One of the key items of evidence that led Ulis to Petersen’s door was a series of chemicals found on a clip-on tie left behind by Cooper that were consistent with rare, specialty metals from the aerospace sector.

Further analysis of those elements led Ulis to a now-defunct specialty facility in Pittsburgh called Crucible Steel, where Petersen worked as an engineer.

Last year, the investigator sued the FBI to gain access to the tie to test it for DNA but the case was dismissed last month.

Now, he has enlisted the help of Vince Petersen’s daughter, Julie Dunbar, to appeal directly to the Bureau to release the artifact and help solve the case once and for all.

Unlike Ulis, Dunbar doesn’t believe her dad was DB Cooper.

She told The U.S. Sun, “I told Eric I understand all the evidence he’s gathered and that he’s claiming the research leads to where my dad worked and everything, and that’s fine.

“But it’s my dad’s character you really need to rely on because this is not something he would’ve done.

“He wouldn’t have dived out of a plane. He wouldn’t have abandoned the family the day before Thanksgiving and flown out to Washington, decided to hijack a plane and asked for four parachutes and $200k, and then jumped out of the plane in the dark of night when it was raining.

“That’s just not my dad. He was a very well-educated man, he didn’t do anything on the spur of the moment, and something like this is just so far out of his character.”

Dunbar added, “Eric’s story is very compelling, I’ll give him that.

“But it does not change my point of view that my dad was not DB Cooper.”

‘A NORMAL DAD’

Petersen worked at Crucible Steel for more than two decades.

The facility was one of the major suppliers of titanium and stainless steel parts for Boeing during the 1960s and 70s, Ulis says.

The plane Cooper hijacked was a Boeing 727, and it’s long believed he had ties to the aerospace industry because of his near-constant use of aviation jargon during the heist and his seemingly intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the aircraft.

Ulis was led to Crucible by several titanium particles found on Cooper’s tie that the company had patents for at the time of the hijacking.

The investigator believes Cooper worked at the plant and that Petersen is the most compelling match for him.

He identified a new particle on Cooper’s tie earlier this month – pure titanium smeared with stainless steel – that Ulis says fortifies Cooper’s links to Crucible.

Smearing titanium with steel is a process known as “cold rolling,” which Crucible was one of very few facilities practicing during the 60s and 70s, according to Ulis.

Theorizing a potential motive, Ulis notes that Crucible and Boeing both experienced mass layoffs in 1971 because of a sharp downturn in the aerospace sector that year.

Cooper also famously told one of the stewardesses aboard Flight 305 of his reasoning for carrying out the skyjacking, “I don’t have a grudge against your airline, miss. I just have a grudge.”

According to Dunbar, her father didn’t have any experience flying a plane or jumping out of one.

He did serve in the Merchant Marines, she said, but otherwise had no additional military experience.

“He was just a normal, everyday father,” said Dunbar.

“He enjoyed being with his family, going on trips with us, going finishing, or playing golf.

“He was exactly what you would want him to be as a dad.”

Imagining how her father would react to insinuations he was DB Cooper, Dunbar said he’d be stunned.

She continued, “He would be totally shocked; he’d be flabbergasted, to say the very least.

“He would say, ‘Well that’s stupid’. He’d call DB Cooper stupid and ask what that person was thinking.”

CONFLICTING BELIEFS

Dunbar said she never heard of the name DB Cooper growing up and only became aware of the case four years ago when a documentary about the unsolved hijacking happened to come on the TV channel she was watching.

She didn’t give the case a second thought until last week, when her son sent her a news article from a local Pittsburgh news station, naming her father as an unofficial suspect in the case.

Dunbar said she was initially very shocked, upset, and slightly angry at the insinuations Ulis was making.

She reached out to him over email and the pair arranged to speak on the phone.

While Ulis didn’t convince her that Petersen could’ve been the skyjacker, she said his investigation as a whole was interesting and she believes her dad may have known the real culprit – though she was almost certainly unaware they’d pulled off the heist.

“Anything is possible,” said Dunbar, who would’ve been 7 years old at the time of Cooper’s feat.

“I spoke to Eric about this clip-on tie. As far as I know, my dad didn’t have one in his wardrobe. Maybe it was something that he kept at work […] and someone else could’ve borrowed it and not returned it.

“But as far as my dad being DB Cooper himself, definitely not.

“He would’ve returned home late on Thanksgiving [if it was him] and he was in charge of carving the turkey every year.

“My mom would’ve been furious if he wasn’t home and my dad wouldn’t have left on a holiday like that unless it was absolutely mandatory for work.”

PUSHING FOR ANSWERS

Seeking to clear her father’s name, Dunbar has agreed to team up with Ulis to lobby the FBI to release Cooper’s tie so it can be tested for DNA.

While the tie has twice been tested before to no avail, Ulis believes investigators overlooked a key component that may still hold Cooper’s DNA: a small spindle hidden in the back of the knot.

To help Ulis, Dunbar has provided him with a letter sealed and stamped by her father in 1961 to use for DNA analysis should the FBI decide to grant his request.

Ulis called the FBI’s unwillingness to allow him to analyze the tie “ridiculous,” insisting it would only take him 10 minutes to prove his case either way.

“If the FBI gives us access for just 10 minutes, we literally have the potential to pull DNA off that spindle area, bring it into a private lab, have it sequenced, and then ‘Bingo!’ – there you go,” Ulis told The U.S. Sun on Wednesday.

“Not only would we be able to compare that to Vince Petersen and prove one way or the other if he’s Cooper, but at the very least, even if it doesn’t match, we still have DNA to work with that we could reverse engineer starting with Crucible Steel and the people that worked in the lab there.”

Ulis added that he believes the agency is fearful of getting “egg on its face” should he, an independent investigator, finally be able to solve it after all these years.

Ulis said, “The only obstacle stopping us from solving this case is the FBI.

“The only explanation I can come up with is they don’t want to end up with egg on their face. That’s it.

“Perhaps they’re worried about a public relations embarrassment, that after 45 years, they couldn’t solve the case, and then a private citizen comes along shortly thereafter and solves it.

“But the entire charade is ridiculous […] the FBI has the opportunity to do the right thing and look like the good guy.

“This case is 52 years old, it’s unsolved, and it’s done. There’s no risk of compromising anything, there will be no cost to the government or the taxpayer.

“I hope that somebody in the FBI has a heart and a desire to move this case forward – and then we can finally get some answers.”

Dunbar agrees, adding that she is baffled as to why “the FBI is acting this way.”

She said, “Eric isn’t asking for much and if they can’t solve it, let someone else do it. 

“I think maybe it’s going to hurt their ego – I don’t know.”

The FBI declined to comment about the DB Cooper case and Ulis’ push for answers.

Ulis said he’s incredibly grateful to Dunbar for agreeing to help him, even though their opinions about Petersen’s potential involvement in the case differ greatly.

“From her perspective, she sees it as an opportunity to prove her father wasn’t DB Cooper, and there’s also a secondary benefit of finding solid DNA evidence to find out who this guy really was,” he said.

“And for me, I’ve been very clear that I’m not taking a position either way about her father, I just want the science to speak for itself.

“This case may be solvable within the year,” he continued.

“To that end, I have several specialists willing to help in this endeavor, utilizing private resources alone. We simply need the FBI to grant us access to the tie for 10 minutes. That’s it.”

MYSTERY NEARING CLOSURE?

DB Cooper hijacked Northwest Orient Flight 305 on November 24, 1971, during a short trip between Portland and Seattle.

Shortly after take-off, Cooper handed a note to a flight attendant sitting behind him, informing her he had a bomb in his briefcase.

In exchange for the lives of the 36 other passengers and six crew on board, the mild-mannered hijacker demanded $200,000 in stacks of $20 bills and four parachutes.

When the flight landed in Seattle, the cash and parachutes were exchanged for all of the passengers and some of the crew.

Following Cooper’s instructions, the Boeing 727 was refueled and took off for a second time – this time in the direction of Mexico City.

But around 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 in tow.

Virtually all traces of Cooper vanished therein.

The only item left behind on Flight 305 by Cooper was a black, clip-on JCPenney tie with a gold pin.

Investigators later yielded a DNA sample from the tie and other items of evidentiary value, but they don’t believe the DNA sample belonged to Cooper.

The only other trace yielded of Cooper since came in 1980 when a young boy digging along the banks of the Columbia River in Tena bar unearthed $5,800 in $20 bills buried in the earth.

The serial numbers of the bills matched those issued to Cooper during the skyjacking but the discovery failed to bring any new leads.

Despite the lack of progress in the case, Ulis believes he can solve the case by the end of the year.

“We’re dealing with a very small universe of people,” said Ulis of the remaining suspect pool.

“I know there are others who have combed through north of 100 men [who] worked for Crucible and other similar facilities but nobody checks the Cooper boxes like Vince Petersen.

“That doesn’t prove he was DB Cooper, of course, but it is compelling.

“Given time, I think I’ll come up with something that’s going to seal the deal one way or the other.

“But we are sniffing around the right neighborhood.

“There’s just no doubt about that at this point.”