What famous robbery loot was never recovered?
Verdict summary
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.
Newspaper reports and court files from the time show how much was taken and how much was recovered; many legends inflate the amount.
Sources: FBI; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; Wells Fargo robbery records.
Was D.B. Cooper's money ever found? 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.
What famous treasures are still unfound? Famous treasures still unfound include the Amber Room (lost in 1945), the Lost Dutchman Mine in Arizona, the Beale treasure in Virginia, the Oak Island money pit in Nova Scotia, the Treasure of Lima, Paititi (the lost Inca city of gold) and the Kruger millions in South Africa. Many rest on a single late retelling, so some may never have existed.
Primary sources cited
- FBI
- Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
- Wells Fargo robbery records