D. B. Cooper: What Really Happened

Chicago, IL: Contemporary Books, c1985. First? Edition. First? Printing. Hardcover. very good/very good. 24 cm, 215, illus., some wear, soiling, and sticker residue to DJ, former owner's embossed stamp on half-title. Max Gunther (1927-1998) was an Anglo-American journalist and writer. He was the author of 26 books, including his best-seller, The Zurich Axioms. Born in England, Gunther moved to the United States at age of 11 after his father, Franz Heinrich (Frank Henry) became the manager of the New York branch of a leading Swiss bank. Gunther's book, The Zurich Axioms is largely based on his father's trading advice. Gunther graduated from Princeton University in 1949 and served in theUnited States Army from 1950 to 1951. The skyjacking of a Northwest Airlines flight in 1971 by D. B. Cooper and his escape by parachute with $200, 000 are now part of the folklore of the Northwest. D. B. Cooper is a media epithet popularly used to refer to an unidentified man who hijacked a Goeing 727 aircraft in the airspace between Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, on November 24, 1971, extorted $200,000 in ransom (equivalent to $1,170,000 in 2015), and parachuted to an uncertain fate. Despite an extensive manhunt and protracted FBI investigation, the perpetrator has never been located or identified. While FBI investigators stated from the beginning that Cooper probably did not survive his risky jump, they nevertheless pursued all credible leads, evidence, and witnesses over a 45-year period following the crime. As yet, no conclusive evidence has surfaced regarding Cooper's true identity or whereabouts. (The suspect purchased his airline ticket using the alias Dan Cooper, but because of a news media miscommunication he became known in popular lore as "D. B. Cooper".) Numerous theories of widely varying plausibility have been proposed over the years by experts, reporters, and amateur enthusiasts. The discovery of a small cache of ransom bills in 1980 triggered renewed interest, but ultimately only deepened the mystery, and the great majority of the ransom remains unrecovered. The case remains the only unsolved air piracy in American aviation history. The FBI officially suspended active investigation of the case in July 2016, but continues to solicit submission of any physical evidence related to the parachutes or the ransom money that might emerge.