Was D.B. Cooper's money ever found?
Verdict summary
Only a small part. D.B. Cooper took $200,000 in ransom when he hijacked a plane on 24 November 1971 and parachuted out over the Pacific Northwest. In February 1980 a boy found about $5,800 of the ransom bills on Tena Bar on the Columbia River. The rest has never been found, and Cooper was never identified.
The FBI suspended its active investigation in 2016. How the bills reached Tena Bar is still debated.
Sources: FBI case history (NORJAK).
What famous robbery loot was never recovered? Famous unrecovered loot includes most of D.B. Cooper's $200,000 ransom (1971), the 13 artworks stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (1990), and most of the cash and jewels from the 1978 Lufthansa heist at JFK Airport. Old West stagecoach and train robberies left many cache legends, though few have contemporary records of a hidden cache.
Primary sources cited
- FBI case history (NORJAK)