We finish up the strange evidence in this case as we move towards theories. And tomorrow, a bonus episode.
Errata: Although a phlebotomist might be able to surreptitiously acquire drugs due to their position in a medical field, they do not have regular access to drugs and do not administer drugs.
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He gave me a book on art forgery. I found myself drawn to these old masters. How did these artists take paint from a palette, arrange it on a canvas, I began to unlock the secrets. I was a storehouse of knowledge of how to create an illusion. Present it to a experienced expert. Manipulate his mind and convince him and bring him to the inevitable conclusion that the painting is genuine. We flooded the market with my paintings and I couldn't believe what I did. I couldn't believe it. Then the dominoes started falling and eventually the FBI were led to my door. They uncovered a mountain of evidence against me. But they never actually got you. At this point, you've sold a lot. You've got, like, $1,000,000 in cash. You sold one painting for 717,000. Why did it go away? Why did you never get indicted? And how are we having this conversation? I guess it's the greatest story of all. To hear how Ken Pareni made millions in art forgery, dodged the mafia and the FBI, subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show and check out episode 282 in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now. I'm Brett. And I'm Alice. And we are the prosecutors. Today on The Prosecutors, we continue our look at DB Cooper and the money he took. Hello, everybody, and welcome to this episode of The Prosecutors. I'm Brett, and I'm joined as always, by my cohost who is definitely worth more than $200,000 even accounting for inflation, Alice. Hello, Alice. Hi, Brett. Way to bring in some economics. Everybody loves. It was. Everybody goes a good comparison. Exactly. That was Sojos, one of the kids from Lititz Elementary who helped us. And I would have called you my eclipsed co host, but I decided to stick to the theme instead. Hope all of you guys enjoyed the eclipse that happened last week. Alice was right in the middle of it in the heart of darkness. Totality. Totality, man. So I I read that it an eclipse happens, what, every 18 months, but we can only see it every, you know, many, many years. Isn't that crazy? I mean, I know a lot of people are like, oh, it's because the world's ending or this or that or all these bad things. I can only see the, like, utter amazement and wonder that something like that happens, and that's something that we get to, like, witness. Maybe I shouldn't be more scared about the world ending, but I just think it's like it was an incredible sight to behold. And if you get a chance in 21 years to see a total eclipse, I recommend trying to drive or fly to it. And on my plane, like, I was there for work, but almost everyone on the plane was there to see the eclipse. So, like, the whole airplane was, like, super sight. The entire plane ride. It was just a great community building moment. Yeah. I mean, I can imagine if if you didn't know an eclipse was coming and you're just living your life and every day the sun came up and the sun went down and no big deal. And then one day, all of a sudden, the sun is extinguished in the middle of the day. That would be frightening. I can imagine sacrificing some chickens at that point. Definitely. And, also, like, definitely understand why the dinosaurs died off with no sunlight. So if that's what happened, who knows? I still I still have to come up with a reason all the time when my kids are like, why do dinosaurs not live? But, you know, remnants of dinosaur ages still live. Have you seen a crocodile? And, also, I found a snake skin in my garage today. So Wow. I will never leave my house again, basically, is what I'm saying. I feel like we're just we're just really we're going off the the reservation now. We got a lot of lot of interesting We got a lot to talk about. About. You know why? You know why? It's because when I don't have an answer to one of our cases, I just delay, delay, delay. Because I'm like, who is DB Cooper? I don't know. But Yeah. We should probably stop delaying and just jump to it. Yeah. Well, this is for all the, what is it, g's for the forties and the chicks with beepers. See you guys. Those of you who get that reference, at which Alice is certainly not one. We are talking about DB Cooper today. Again, following up on our episode last week, which we just had a great time. And I gotta tell you guys, I have really fallen down the rabbit hole on this DB Cooper thing. Like, I have been watching all the documentaries. I've been reading all the books. I mean, it is absolutely fascinating. And the more I look into it, the more I understand why people are so obsessed with this case. So we're gonna do this, and then I may just continue being obsessed with it. So we may have to have, like, an update for some crazy theory I have of who it is going to be. We're gonna go through at some point who the possible candidates are. You know what? We've talked about writing a book for a very long time. This might be the perfect candidate for that because of everything you said. There are just, like, endless rabbit trails. There you go. There you go. There are endless rabbit trails, and every single suspect is absolutely fascinating. There are all these incredibly interesting people. The person who probably actually did it was probably incredibly boring person other than this one event in their life, but the actual suspects are crazy. So if you have not had an opportunity to to look into this, there are a lot of great books. Skyjack, Into the Blast. We talked about that one. The the documentaries are fantastic. There's there's a lot if you've enjoyed our coverage that you should get into, but that's enough. That's enough talking. Let's talk about the case. We ended last time with where some people think DB Cooper ended, which was jumping into a maelstrom to parachute into the darkness and try to escape with the $200,000 that he had taken. And so now we're going to get into the investigation. So that brings us to November 25, 1971. Now investigators are eager to start this investigation. They want to get on the ground as soon as possible. Remember, it's quite possible that DB Cooper jumped into a very remote area. It could have taken him a while if he survived the jump to get out of the forest. Moreover, he could be injured. In fact, there were some people in the FBI who believed it was impossible for him to make this jump and not be injured. That means if you can get on the ground quickly, get into the forest quickly, you may be able to catch him before he even has a chance to get out and nothing else. Maybe you'll come across some people who are witnesses. Maybe you'll see some remnants of the parachute or whatever. You're looking for evidence as quickly as possible. But the same weather that had made it difficult for DB Cooper to survive this jump made it very difficult for the search. And really this continued for months. At one point, there was a nearby army base, and the soldiers at the army base were tasked with doing the search. And the search was so difficult and the weather was so bad that at some point, the general in charge wrote a memo to the Department of Defense. I was like, look. We gotta pull our guys out. They're completely exhausted. You know they cannot continue doing this anymore. So that's how tough this was and they weren't able to get out there as quickly as they would have liked. They tried all sorts of things. They had an SR 70 1 Blackbird which is the spy plane with all sorts of abilities, high powered cameras that they flew over the area several times, but it was so cloudy and so stormy that it could not get any photographs of the area that they could use. It's the fastest plane in the world. Actually, in case you're ever in the DC airport, the Smithsonian store in the DCA airport has model s 71 Blackbirds, and I learned that it made it from Los Angeles to New York in, how long do you think, the fastest that it ever clocked. An hour? Close. Hour 4 minutes. Wow. Isn't that insane? All all to say is the the point of that is that this is the best and the brightest of anything our military had. They deployed it for DB Cooper. So they were treating this as if this was the highest national priority. I mean, the SR 71 isn't deployed for, like, just any old hijacker, But they have, you know, the Department of Defense on it, our highest and best use spy planes. And this is not something where it's like, oh, they didn't investigate. You know, we are throwing all of our national defense resources at it. And those of you who are in law enforcement, if you've worked around law enforcement, you know, when you have an incident like this that is unique, daring, dangerous, and expensive it is very important to find and apprehend the person as quickly as possible because it's not just the media and interested folks at home who are watching. It's other people who are thinking, that seems like a pretty good way to make money. If that guy can get away with it, maybe I can get away with it too. So they really wanna catch this guy. They really wanna show this is not something that you should try at home and so they're deploying as many resources as they can but they're finding it extremely difficult to find DB Cooper. And as we're gonna talk about in a second, this difficulty is heightened because they don't know exactly where to look. The problem is it was so stormy and the flight path was not as exact as you might think. It's especially in the seventies. It's not like we're using geo spatial technology here. We're we're plotting these flight maps on pen and paper. So they have a really good good enough for government work, good enough to get from airport to airport idea of where they are. But when you're talking about a guy jumping out the back of a plane in a 200 mile an hour wind, and in addition to that, the storm, and he's in a parachute, knowing exactly where to look is is difficult, particularly when you don't know exactly when he jumped. They had sort of a good idea because of the pressure change, but even a matter of minutes, in fact, one minute is going to become important later, can have many, many miles, square miles effect on where he might be and where you should be searching. You know, one thing just to show you how deeply invested we are in researching all the theories in this case. Brett and I attended an air show this past weekend and watched a lot of military people parachute out of airplanes in military fashion. And, actually, I thought I thought that I don't know if you caught this, Brett, with, like, all of the rep reporting they were doing over the thousands of people who are 100 of thousands of people who are watching. But they were demonstrating how the parachuters were able to manipulate incredibly effectively in the sky. I've always kinda thought of parachuting as, like, you're just gonna land where you're gonna land. Like, hope it's not among the trees. But especially with, like, their military training, they were able to essentially, like, land in a square spot exactly where they wanted to be amidst flying planes and other parachuters in the air. So we'll talk about theories later as to who we think DB Cooper is. But if he has an idea where people are gonna be looking for him, and even if we have an idea exactly where he jumped, if he's very sophisticated of a parachuter, may or may not be the case based on the parachute that he took, he could have incredible manipulative effect on where he ultimately lands that could be outside of any scope if they're treating him as just a regular Joe who jumped out of an airplane. And that's what's fascinating one of the many things that's fascinating about this case is because it's almost in order to find him, you have to know who he is because his ability to do exactly what Alice said, to manipulate that parachute also has a vast effect on where he might have landed. If he's not able to do so either because of the style of parachute or just because he is not very sophisticated parachutist, he's more likely to be in the search area. If he's somebody who has jumped out of a lot of planes and can manipulate parachutes that maybe the average person couldn't and can direct himself somewhere, then he is more likely to have been able to escape which will make it much harder to find him. So if you knew his background, it would be much easier to find out who it is. But in order to know his background, you gotta know who it is. And so that's what leads these people down these rabbit trails where they pick a suspect and they build all these reasons. You think it's him. And they're sort of like doing it backwards, right? Because there's not a whole lot of actual evidence about who it is. There's just what he did and how he did it and what kind of person could do that. I'm sure the behavioral analysis unit and FBI has a has a room full of D. B. Cooper files because that is the kind of thing you're doing here. You're trying to figure out what kind of person would do this and then see if you can narrow it down. Well, in any event, the media picks up the story and look would this have been a big story if Dan Cooper had hijacked this plane and gotten away with it? Still would have been the only person who ever got away with it. But he certainly wasn't the only person to hijack a plane. He wasn't the only person to jump out of a plane with a bunch of money. But something happens because of the storms. The storms are having such an effect. So a local reporter for The Oregonian newspaper is on the phone with the FBI and the lines were really bad that night because it's storming and there's a lot of interference and he's trying to get from his source a name that he can put in his report. And he is told Dan Cooper, but what he hears is DB Cooper and that's what he runs with. And he puts DB Cooper into his report and he just so happens to be working in the same building, in fact, next door to the AP reporter who puts out the AP press reports that you you some the wire reports that you sometimes see even now. A lot of stories, they're not written by your local reporters. They're written by an AP wire reporter. It goes out over the wire and then every newspaper, every news outlet that has some sort of contract with AP can take that language and put it in their own paper and use it for content. Well, they all work together and the AP reporter is like, Hey, you got a line on the guy's name. He's like, Yeah, his name is DP Cooper. So it goes out over the AP wire, and to this day, that is what he's called, DB Cooper, not Dan Cooper, to the point that the police, the FBI, everyone who talks about this case, nobody's calls it the Dan Cooper case. They all call it the D. B. Cooper case. And this just shows you how, like, powerful media and, honestly, popular culture can be. Because part of the reason the police even switched to calling them DB Cooper is when you're doing an investigation, people may not know who you're talking about when you say Dan Cooper. But if you say DB Cooper, the recognition level jumps way up. So, like, this this has changed the course of this case. I mean, it doesn't really matter because he's not DB or Dan. Well and it it may have had a couple effects. Number 1, his name suddenly became a holdback evidence, which you wouldn't normally expect, but the FBI took advantage of this. So they start getting reports, People saying, I know a DB Cooper. People saying, I am DB Cooper. Letters coming in signed by DB Cooper. Well, every time they get something by DB Cooper, they know it's probably somebody just saying what they've read in the newspaper. It's probably a crank or a fake or or some sort of joke. And it becomes interesting for the investigation because some of these people we're gonna talk about later are deathbed confessions. And if you you know, 50 years later, if you tell your family, I am DB Cooper, well, maybe you're just saying what he's called, so that doesn't necessarily rule you out. But if you tell your family on your deathbed, I'm Dan Cooper, all of the sudden that becomes much more powerful because why would you use that name? I mean now we know that that's his name but why would you use that name and not D. B. Cooper? It sort of gives some of those deathbed confessions, and I say some of those because there have been multiple ones which cuts against my argument, but it gives those a little bit more credibility when people are using the right name and not the famous name but absolutely D. B. Cooper became a name, burned into people's mind. He became a folk hero. There are songs about him, ba whadda ba, to bang to bang, diggy diggy said a boogie said up, jump the boogie. Just one example of a song that mentions DB Cooper. And, you know, those of you who've seen Loki, I mean, it's like it is part of Americana now, and I don't think that woulda happened if the dude's name had just been Dan. The Prosecutors is sponsored by BetterHelp. Guys, we all carry around different stressors, big and small. Every single person is dealing with something. I don't care who you are. I don't care how well your life is going. There are things that are weighing you down, and oftentimes, we keep them bottled up, and it can start to affect us negatively. I know I have been there and I have felt it. Therapy is a safe space to get things off your chest and to figure out how to work through whatever's weighing you down, and that's where BetterHelp can help you. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. Get it off your chest with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com/prosecutors today to get 10% off your 1st month. That's betterhelphelp dotcom/ prosecutors. You know that's the sound of another sale on your online Shopify store, but did you know Shopify powers selling in person too? That's right. Shopify is the sound of selling everywhere, online, in store, on social media, and beyond. Track every sale across your business in one place and know exactly what's in stock. Connect with customers in line and online. Do retail right with Shopify. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/truecrime. Okay. So that's November 25th. On November 26th, the FBI is now really into this. They are deploying their agents all over the place. They're collecting evidence. They collect evidence, some really good evidence, including cigarette butts, which could be just packed full of DNA, fingerprints on the plane. They know that he was drinking bourbon. He's probably got fingerprints and DNA all over that glass, but you know what? In one of those lessons to all of us about how things go in these investigations, all of this evidence is eventually lost. The cigarette butts have been lost. All we know is they were Raleigh cigarettes, which is a somewhat obscure brand. It was called Coupon Cigarettes, which I guess when you bought them, you got coupons, which you could then redeem for other cigarettes. So they tended to be cheaper cigarettes, kind of bargain basement cigarettes. I don't really know a lot about cigarettes to be honest with you, but but that's my understanding. Not a well known brand but they were from Raleigh, North Carolina which is I guess what they're called Raleigh cigarettes. So the glass that Cooper drank out of somehow got mixed up with all the other glasses and washed, So they ended up not having the fingerprints. Yes. This just makes me think of JonBenet Ramsey when, like, the the victim impact team comes in and just, like, cleans the kitchen, the kitchen where JonBenet likely had to pass through on her way down to the basement where, sadly, her life ended. And it's like, you washed it? Really? The one time you decide to clean is now. Yeah. And the problem was the fingerprints. They had fingerprints, but, man, there were a ton of fingerprints. There were lots of people's fingerprints. It's a plane. There's gonna be a lot of fingerprints. So it's very difficult them to isolate out anything in particular. Though they did try and do that to remove as many of those fingerprints as possible which left them with a large number of unknown fingerprints but they still have it. So now they're thinking, look the way we got to do this it's the people. We hate to do that as you guys know eyewitness accounts are pretty bad. This one longer than most. This is not I saw a guy for 3 seconds and I'm gonna give you a detailed description of him. There are a lot of people on that plane for a long time. So they start interviewing passengers and crew members. The problem was the passengers were generally unaware of the hijacking. They didn't pay much attention to this mystery man who's in the back of the plane. It's funny there was actually a federal prosecutor on the plane. He didn't notice anything so you know he missed out on an opportunity there. But there was this college student we've mentioned before. He was actually sitting across from DB Cooper. He's one of the few people in the back of the plane. He was a college student, Bill Mitchell, and he did notice this guy and he paid attention to him. He noticed one thing that was pretty interesting. He thought that he noticed long underwear sticking out from underneath his suit, which was a detail he remembered because it struck him as strange. He didn't know why he would be wearing that. Now we know he's about to jump into freezing cold weather, which is a good reason to have long underwear on. But that was something he noticed and it helped him be able to give the FBI a little bit of information. The passengers were all over the place on what DB Cooper looked like. Some of them said he was tall, close to 6 foot. Some of them said he was short, close to 5 8. Some of them said he had straight hair. Some of them said he had wavy hair. Some of them described him as swarthy. Others said he's just a white guy. One guy said he had his hair styled in, like, some sort of French style that I don't even never even heard of. He was, like, he was a barber, so you might think he actually knew what he's talking about, but who knows? But you gotta remember, most of these people, they saw him for very little time. So the FBI is listening to what they're saying, but they're not taking them all that seriously. And that just you know, just as a reminder, he sat in the very back row. And so if anyone saw him, it would have been when he was walking onto the plane or if they somehow turned around during the flight or walked back towards him. And so it's not surprising that they don't remember much, and it's not surprising. Think about the last time you're on a plane. I was on a plane yesterday. Apparently, someone I'd known for a very long time sat directly behind me. No idea that she was there until the end of the plane ride, and she said my name out loud. So this is very typical of, first of all, first account, eyewitnesses. We know that eyewitnesses, especially when you don't know what you're looking at is important, you don't kind of register what's going on. 2nd of all, there's a lot of people on the plane, and this person was trying to be nondescript, and he did a good job of it. So I think that the police knew what they were gonna get from these interviews, and, unfortunately, they were right, kind of useless interviews from these folks. Now the 2 people who would have known the most were Florence Schaffner and Tina Mucklow. They were the 2 flight attendants who knew this hijacking was going on and who had direct interaction with DB Cooper. You may remember Tina Mucklow is one of the last people to see him. Interestingly, she later became a nun. I don't know if that has anything to do with this but just what she did with her life. So they spent a lot of time with him. The FBI actually interviewed them in 2 different cities. They didn't do it on purpose so much as Florence Schaffner was able to get off the plane when they landed. Tina Mucklow stayed on the plane during the hijacking so they ended up interviewing her in Reno, but it was good to have 2 interviews with these people in different places. They can't get together on you know their what they're talking about so you expect they're gonna get you know I mean there's always the possibility this is an inside job right so you don't necessarily want the witnesses in the same room, you don't want them talking to each other, you want to get their independent stories. What they said was close, but it was still a little different, you know, down to which side did he part his hair on, that kind of thing. And it's just it's this just goes this is the ultimate eyewitness accounts are not entirely reliable, and this is one reason that this case is tough because Florence Schaffner or Tina Mucklow, I can't remember which one it was, but only one of them saw his eyes, for instance. The other one only saw him while he was wearing sunglasses. Remember he put sunglasses on and the one who saw him, whichever one it was, said that he had brown eyes and described them as piercing brown eyes. She definitely noticed that. Well, that has become a big problem when you're talking about suspects because a lot of the suspects don't have brown eyes. They'll have blue eyes. Blue eyes seem pretty different than brown eyes. Some of them will have hazel eyes, and it's like, yeah, it's pretty close. I don't know. You could call that brown. Right? But this has been something that the FBI has used to rule out a lot of people, the eye color. But you only have one witness who says it, and you just have to wonder how accurate was she in that. But, nevertheless, the FBI, they're able to gather a description, though it turns out to be a rather generic one that probably fits a large number of people in the United States. Described as he's a white male in his mid forties. Now Tina Mucklow was adamant that he was in his mid forties and she was adamant that he was around 6 feet tall, saying he was a little bit taller than her. She was a pretty tall lady. Florence Schaffner thought he was younger. She thought he might be in his twenties or thirties. At the end of the day, the FBI went with the forties, but that's a pretty big difference and, once again, is going to affect your suspect pool. And, you know, we're gonna have to have Juliet back on to talk about profiling, but the first thing that strikes me as the mid forties description is that you have a very bold hijacking that involves jumping out of a plane with a parachute. Not that a mid forties person can't do that, but that tends to be one of those, like, mission impossible, absolute, you know, adrenaline thumping thrill that you may see in a profile of someone who is younger, right, someone in their twenties or thirties. If you didn't tell me their age and you just said, this is these are the facts of the crime, I would initially think that they were someone on the younger side because jumping out of plane just you know? Typically, well, look, recidivism is still pretty high in your forties, so this is just based on what we see. But that he could be the most fit 40 something year old jumping out of a plane. But I don't know. I don't know if you had thoughts about the age when you first saw that. I've always questioned the mid forties description. I mean, if you guys seen a yearbook from the seventies, Everybody in high school looks like they're in their thirties. I mean, I I don't I don't know what happened. I don't I don't know what those people were going through when they were growing up. Everybody in the seventies looked older, so I don't necessarily think that that he was in his mid forties, but that's sort of our starting point. And And the problem with this is I don't think you can use any of this to definitively rule anybody out, though they are things that people point to. The other thing he's described is having, well he's between 5 10 6 feet tall, approximately £175 with an average build and an olive complexion. This is another thing people argue about. Some people said he looked like he was Native American or Hispanic. Other people have suggested he might have just been wearing makeup as part of his disguise to make his skin look a little bit darker than it would be in normal life, but this is something you're gonna have to deal with when you start looking at some of these suspects. Some of them are part Native American, for instance, and that is often used as sort of a, look, maybe that's where this olive complexion description comes from and that's something we're gonna see as we start to work through things. He wore a dark suit with a black tie. Now, the interesting thing about the suit and tie was the tie was sort of a skinny tie and it was a tie that had gone out of style. So it was an older style clip on tie. Not we're not talking 20 years older but 4 or 5 years probably from its prime. Men had started to wear broader ties at the beginning of the seventies and that is something the FBI noticed as well and they wondered, is this an older suit or possibly a suit that he just picked up at a secondhand store or something like that, which is also gonna have an effect later on because the tie is going to have DNA on it. And the question, of course, is is it DB Cooper's DNA or is it someone else's? And when that DNA is used to rule out suspects, can we count on that or should we ignore it? And they also knew that early on in the hijacking, he had put on that pair of dark sunglasses to hide his eyes, but we still had that report of piercing brown eyes, which would go along with if he were Hispanic or something along those lines that he might have darker eyes. So they are now going to work. They're trying to figure out the most important thing for them is where did he jump. They're going over this flight path. They're interviewing the pilots. They're meticulously trying to work things out, and they assume and they later test this. They fly a plane out over the ocean and they start dropping stuff out the back of it to see what'll happen to the plane, and they become pretty confident that that pressure bump when it seemed like something had happened in the plane was him jumping out of the plane and the stairs lifting up, partially closing, changing the pressure in the plane, coming back down, changing the pressure again, that that was the moment he jumped off. So they had a decent idea of the time he jumped off. And the area of the search was relatively large. They put it about 25 square miles east of the Columbia River. Now the problem was, number 1, the pilot did not know exactly where he was. He did not know exactly what path he was traveling. Also, they didn't know exactly when Cooper jumped off. They had a pretty good idea within a couple minutes, but but they didn't know exactly And because they didn't know the exact path, they could not coordinate those 2 to create a good drop zone and they messed up. They lost a minute in the course of plotting this out. For some reason, they lost a minute. They went from, like, 802 to 805 or excuse me. 802 that's more than 1 minute. 802 to 804. And so when they did that, they're plotting each minute where would they be if this flight path was correct, Where would they be over? Well, by losing a minute, you lost those miles that they traveled to. And now you have him in that spot later on when in fact they'd already passed over there, which means and this is incredibly important because the initial place that they plotted out, the place that was so hard to search that it wore down army veterans and was impossible to get through because it was so tangled and forested and thick in the kind of place you would think, if anybody jumped out of a plane and landed in here, they're in big trouble and they're never gonna make it. The problem is, if you add that one minute back in, all of a sudden, the drop zone shifts to a much less forested area. An area that most people think if you jumped over that area, you could have survived. And this was a huge, huge problem for the FBI when they're trying to figure out exactly where to search. And over the years, this potential jump location has shifted many many times in many many miles with people who know this case arguing to the death over where it was that DB Cooper actually would have landed. So with all of this, it was no surprise that the search for DB Cooper was completely unsuccessful. Not only that they can't find him, there's absolutely no sign of him, or even evidence of the jump discovered. I mean, you might be able to find, you know, scraps of his clothing if had caught on, you know, debris, his pack, the money. Remember, $200,000 and $20 bills is 10 did we say 10,000? 10,000 bills. It's a lot of opportunity for things to fly out of bag. We didn't find that until later. Put a pin in that. We didn't find the parachute. We didn't find anything that could have led to the fact that he even jumped. And here's the thing. Decades later, investigators are no closer to figuring out DB Cooper's true identity. But they do identify one piece of information that may have pointed to a lack of general knowledge of parachutes on DB Cooper's part. We talked a little earlier about, you know, is he a sophisticated peer parachuter? If he is, he could really manipulate where he lands, especially, by the way, if he knows how to use the wind from this massive storm to his advantage. So instead of being a detriment, if it were something he could leverage to get him even farther, you can imagine how this eve opens up his landing place by even many more square miles. But one potential piece of evidence that may show that he wasn't that sophisticated of a parachuter was that he asked for 2 sets of parachutes. Each of the sets had a main parachute that went on the back and a small reserve pack that's worn on the chest. 1 of the sets that was delivered was actually a dummy reserve parachute that's used for training purposes and sewn shut. We've talked about this before where there should be no mistake because no one wants to accidentally give someone the wrong reserve parachute. And so it says, like, reserve. It's sewn shut. You can't open it. Anyone who knows something, even if you could read probably, would know that this is a parachute that does not have a reserve pack that works. If you're jumping out of a plane, I would think you want to pick the pack that gives you the greatest chance of survival. Now for unknown reasons, Cooper used the set with a dummy reserve parachute instead of the operational set. So And this was an accident, by the way. This was not that they gave him a a dummy. Oh, was that an accident? I just thought they were trying to, like, mess with him. No. The parachutes were the hardest thing to get, so it was a real rush job to get the parachutes, and the guy who worked at the parachute place just ran into the office, grabbed the first four shoots he found, and gave them to the FBI, and nobody noticed, including DV Cooper. And one of them was a fake shoot. So it turned out Wait real quick then. How did they figure out after the fact? Because it was the one taken. So how did they know it was reserved? Is that That's a great question. I actually don't know the answer to that. I don't know. To ask questions. I don't know if when the guy when they did the Maybe when they did the only parachutes they had left, because it was the guy who gave them the shoots that figured out that one of the shoots didn't work. Okay. This is just me. This is me. Done some sort of inventory. The fact that it wasn't on purpose is going to make me question this whole line anyway. Why not? We should question everything because we have no answers many decades later anyway. Maybe they had a perfect inventory of what they had, and they they knew after the fact that it was the reserve parachute. But the fact that it wasn't on purpose, I thought it was a plant, you know, just like level of success lower or whatever, for whatever reason, something like that. But if that was not on purpose, there's human error in terms of how you track your parachutes and especially if it was so hurried. And that was the chute that went out with them and it's never been found. Maybe. I don't know how much stock I'm gonna put into knowing for a fact that that was a reserve parachute or that he DB Cooper messed up by picking it. So I'm gonna be that weird person who's gonna just call into question that piece of evidence. Yeah. I mean, either way, it was his reserve sheets. So presumably, he didn't need it, but they didn't wanna give him any fake sheets. I mean, some people have said, well, yeah, they probably did it on purpose. Well, the reason they didn't do it on purpose is because they believed. And in fact, the FAA psychologist, who knew they had one, who did all the research on hijackers, had told the pilots back when they're trying to get him to get out the front of the plane that his plan was he was gonna jump out of the plane. He was gonna make Tina Mucklow jump out with him, and he was gonna blow up the plane And so to remove all the evidence. So they didn't wanna give They didn't know it was just gonna be one shoot that was needed. And just to make clear in case this was confusing to anyone, it didn't really matter that it the reserve shoot was a dummy shoot because he still had an operational main shoot on his back, so that one was gone. So if that opened up like it should have, everything would have been fine. It would have just been in the instance where the main shoot didn't open and he needed to use his backup shoot. He did not have a backup chute if, in fact, he had the dummy one. So he had an opportunity basically to parachute successfully. He had one that did work. But that makes sense that they did not mean to give one because that could be terrible for the other person who may have had to jump with him. He was, innocent bystander. The other thing that people have thought a lot about are the weather conditions because this turned into just a horrendous storm that is absolutely not ideal whatsoever for jumping out of a plane in and try to get away. So because of the weather, people have speculated that DB Cooper may not have known what he was doing. Now, you know, we talked about when he showed up at the ticket counter to buy his one way ticket. He asked what type of plane it was. And so you would think if he had in mind the type of plane, which involved understanding of the physicality and the physics of the plane, how slow really it could fly and still stay in the air with the stairs down, all these sorts of different metrics that he would've, of course, factored in a huge thing that affects planes, weather conditions and wind. And so the fact that it was raining and hailing, and the wind gusts were extreme and the temperature in the air would have been frigid, people have speculated that maybe he wasn't as sophisticated as we've given him credit for. You see, Cooper would have jumped into a 15 degree incredibly windy, incredibly rainy storm while carrying 10,000 bills strapped to him with a parachute that is, of course, beholden to wind. I don't know. I could see that going both ways. Right? Because it worked in his favor that the storm was so bad. The storm lasted so long that they couldn't do a proper search for him. It made the jump incredibly risky, but the whole endeavor was really risky anyway. And we can barely predict the weather today. It's very possible that it was not supposed to be that bad or it got worse very quickly. I mean, today I don't know about you, Brett, but my kids all got out of school early dismissal by noon because they expected tornadoes to hit all over the area. We didn't get a drop of rain until 5 PM, and then it wasn't it was rain, but barely any thunder and certainly no tornadoes, but they canceled school for it. And so this is, you know, more than 50 years later, and he we haven't speculated that DB Cooper is a weatherman. We think maybe he's a parachuter, a military man, or an airplane mechanic, but I don't know how much to read into the fact that it ended up being a very rainy day. It could have been that it was part of his plan or that he, like so many people after him, are unable to predict the weather. 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As we've talked about it, we've talked about evidence and and what are clues that we have. I think the the first thing we always have to guard against is our assumption, and we talk about this in a lot of different cases, that all criminals are geniuses and everything they do is intentional. We get that from movies. Right? In movies, criminals make no mistakes. It's really it's impossible to solve their crimes and it's only because of the plucky resources of the hero detective that were able to unravel their incredibly complicated, incredibly sophisticated plan. Right? I mean, that's that's the movies. In real life, that's not how it goes at all. In real life, Murphy's Law is never more in effect than it is when you're committing a crime, and things happen that you don't anticipate. So, you know, you can look at this case and think that every single thing DB Cooper did was intentional. You know, when he's standing on those stairs, the stairs have been down for 15 minutes before he jumps. He's he's peering through the the sky, the topography, which he knows, like the back of his hand, waiting for the perfect moment to leap from the plane so he'll land exactly where he wants to be. Or he's standing there thinking, I have made a terrible mistake. What am I thinking? And then finally, he's just like, well, there's no going back now, and he leaps into the void. Right? And it's hard to say which one of those is going on here. You know, did he take the the reserve parachute that was sewn shut because he knew he didn't need it and he thought, they gave me one of these. This will throw them off. I'm gonna take this one. Or was it a mistake and did he land and look at his parachute and realize, oh, well, I'm glad my main one opened because this one doesn't even work. It's it's hard to say. Now the thing that I'll say I am absolutely certain of, I think he had a working knowledge of this plane one way or the other. He did not have a perfect knowledge. It seems like, for instance, that he did not know exactly how to open those back stairs. He sort of got a run through from Tina Mucklow. He looked at the at the instructions and then he did it himself, but he knew enough about airplane to know that it had the stairs, to know that it could take off and land with the stairs down, to know about putting the flaps at 15 degrees to to make it fly slower. Same thing with the wheels down. Knew that it could fly at that speed at 10,000 feet with no problem, which was something that even the pilots weren't sure of. Interestingly, one group of people who did know that you could fly that plane with the stairs down was let's just go ahead. See the wrap hole about to dive right into it. Was the CIA because CIA had used these planes in covert operations in, Air America, for instance, in various places around the world to drop cargo out the backup. They drop that back stairs down, and they would push stuff out for people they were supporting in other countries. So they knew about it even if they didn't work for Boeing, for instance. And, of course, that has led a lot of people down that pathway, that this person was a CIA operator, someone who had been involved in this, the kind of person who would be bold enough to do something, like jump out the back of a plane after calmly doing everything he did with $200,000 strapped to. It's hard to say. Basically, we can talk through, like, any piece of evidence could go from, like, he's a superhero to he's an idiot. Yes. Yeah. Exactly. Now look. And and maybe this is my bias, but I don't think you plan this crime the way he planned it unless you were comfortable jumping out of planes. Like, I just don't think it I would not pick that. As someone who's never jumped out of a plane, if I was trying to come up with a way to get money, hijacking a plane and jumping out the back of it would not be the plan I would come up with. Because there were other hijackings as we know, many hundreds of hijackings where it did not involve jumping out of a plane, where they got away with hijacking. Right? It was lots of demands. It was bomb threats. They land the plane, and they end up somewhere else. So it's not like this was the only way to hijack a plane either in terms of all the examples he had around him. Yeah. Mallory in the chat thinks her grandfather is DB Cooper, so maybe we'll have to Look. All I'm saying is go look for some journals, some written word. Yeah. Okay. Like to pay for things in twenties? That's right. Maybe go look at your your $20 trust fund and see what the serial numbers are. So over the course of the next 2 months, ground and air searches continue over 100 of square miles. But as we know, there is no sign of DB Cooper at all. And as you can tell from these episodes and the facts of this case, DB Cooper has become a folk hero to many Americans nationwide. The case maintained publicity for months years, really decades to come, and tips and confessions have poured in by the 1,000, including, as we've talked about, false confessions of who DB Cooper is. There were even several elaborate hoaxes claiming to know who the real DB Cooper was, but nothing has ever proved fruitful. Over the first 5 years of the investigation, the FBI considered over 8 100 suspects. That's a lot of people. In other words, there was very little narrowing as to who they thought this was, but they put their best and their brightest on it. They poured resources into it. They had, like, the best planes and the military in on trying to figure this case out, and it remains unsolved to this day. We're gonna get through the timeline here before we end today. I know that we've I just love this case. Well, even as we talk, and I know this case. I'm like, That was the first time I thought about the reserve pack. You know? Like, there is so much here, and this is worth talking about because if this hadn't been a case that was 50 years unsolved, then just go with the timeline. But clearly, we've missed something along the way. Right. And that's that's the thing. And people spend their lives on this case. So December 8, 1971, the US attorney general John Mitchell made an announcement that they were going to release the serial numbers of the, remember, $10,020 bills that made up Cooper's ransom. Now at first, no bills with the matching cereals were found, which fuels speculation that Cooper died jumping from the plane and led to a lot of people walking through the woods trying to find the ransom money. Because if Cooper died, then there's $200,000 sitting in the forest somewhere that somebody could find. And there are a lot of great television radio interviews of people who lived around there about what they do if they found the money, and the universal opinion was they would keep it. So you could imagine that's a problem. Now look, they released these serial numbers, but we're gonna talk about when we get into some of the details of this case, why that actually wasn't that helpful in finding out who DB Cooper was. So that's 1971. Not much happens for another 7 years. And then in November of 1978, there's a hunter. If people ever stop hunting, we're just gonna stop being able to solve any crimes. There's a hunter wandering around in Castle Rock, Washington. Now this is in the general flight path of the 727, and he finds a plastic placard with the operating instructions for the aft stairs, and this placard was linked to Cooper's plane. So this was probably the placard that he read to lower those stairs and I'll just say if that's for sale anywhere, I wanna go in on the the auction. That's that's a piece of memorabilia that I would like to own. It's the placard. So but I don't know if it is. It's probably in some FBI vault somewhere, but they find it's with the cigarette butts in the gla*s. Yeah. There you go. If you bought it, they there's a better chance of it being preserved. Then in February 1980, the main FBI agent who'd worked this case, the guy who went up in the helicopter at the the very first day to try and follow the plane, but didn't get there in time. He's been working this case for 9 years. He's getting ready to retire. I believe it is actually on the very day he is going to retire. A major find. Brian Ingram, who is an 8 year old boy, finds $5,800 in decomposing $20 bills by the edge of the Columbia River near Vancouver, Washington. This area is called Tina Bar, but while this is exciting, it also is the first indication that the FBI is probably completely wrong about where D. B. Cooper landed unless, which we'll get into, this money was planted. This is 45 miles 45 miles Southwest from the search location where the FBI believed DB Cooper had landed, and it was in fact in the opposite direction. The wind was blowing that day. So does not seem like if they had the original search area correct, that that is the area he would jump. Now interestingly, if this was the area he landed other than the river, this would have been a much better place to jump because there are many more places to land. Now you may be thinking, well, obviously, if the money was found in the river, then he must have landed in the river. It is much more complicated than that. We're gonna spend some time on this money, what the fact that it still existed means, whether or not it was in the river that whole time, the money in some ways is almost a greater mystery than what happened to D. B. Cooper because it's sort of inexplicable that this money was found where it was in the condition it was 9 years after D B Cooper jumped out of a plane. K. I know we're not gonna spend time on it right now, but we are gonna nerd out about this money later as we should because this is the only thing that we have found that even shows that DB Cooper was a real person. Right? Like, this is not made up in lore. This is not some movie that now has just, like, worked its way into the American psyche. This is, like, tangible evidence that gravity worked even on this superhero of a man that we have now come to revere as folklore. And by the way, just in case, you know, you're thinking, well, if they've got the serial numbers, if he spent the money, they would find it. Just a little story about this. These people find this money. They're like, this is D. B. Cooper's money. So they go to the FBI and the guy who's getting ready to retire, he's like eating his cake or whatever, putting on his gold watch. They come in and they say, hey. We found some TV Cooper money. He's like, oh, sure you have. And he's like, well, it's gotta be from, like, 1957 and from this mint. And he looks at one of the bills and it's from and this is I'm making this up, the 1957 thing. He's like, well, it is from 1957, and it wasn't minted in San Francisco or wherever. She's like, okay. Fine. So he goes he leaves them in a room. They're probably eating some of his retirement cake. He goes back and he gets out the massive book, The Ledger, with 10,000 serial numbers. Before the days of control f 5. And he sits there, and for the next, like, 45 minutes goes through every single serial number trying to find this $20 bill. And, of course, you know, it's like it's always like this. Right? Bill. And, of course, you know, it's like it's always like this. Right? It's on, like, the last page. He finally finds the serial number that matches the one they've brought in. And he's like, oh my goodness. It is DB Cooper's money. But just imagine if every time somebody went to a 711 to buy a Coke, the 711 Clark's like, okay. Well, they paid for the 20. I guess I gotta get the book out now and check to see whether this is DB Cooper's money. And, anyway, that's spoiler alert on why having the serial numbers actually didn't work out that well. And spoiler alert. Just because it hasn't been identified as being in circulation doesn't mean it wasn't actually in circulation. We just don't know whether it was in circulation. Because if it was that difficult for, like, an FBI agent to find it yeah. He was, like, dedicated to this case. Can you imagine if there's, like, a line at the 7:11? And the clerk was like, hold, please. 45 minutes later, $20 cleared. Next person, please. Would you like to buy some Raleigh cigarettes with your $20 bill? Hold, please. So the check is only as good. There was not some, like, wonderful database that you could just run your money through, and, you know, immediately, it would ding or something like that. You know? Today, what they do is they they put ink, just so you know, so you don't go rob a bank. They put ink blots or whatever it's called, exploding ink things in the bag of money so that the second you touch it, you don't have to check the the serial numbers because there will be this dye all over the bills, which is like, man, we should have done that from the beginning. You know? That's way more easy to identify because any 711 clerk, for example, could look down and be like, that's interesting. Think about, like, if you go to a a clothing store, like Old Navy or The Gap, and there's that, like, tag that's on the clothes. And if you try to pull it off, it, I think, tears a hole into your clothes or something like that. That's essentially what they do for money that you steal these days. So we've really gone backwards in terms of, like, the level of sophistication for what we're looking for. It's because if you want people to actually find all these thousands of bills, it has to be something readily identifiable for masses of people. Let me just say just real quick. This was like the worst thing that ever happened to the Ingram family. There people call it the Cooper curse. If you get too close to the DB Cooper case, we gotta avoid this Alice. You become cursed. And so Brian Ingram, he finds this money. They get this burst of fame. There are all these rewards I think they're gonna get. Well, first, turns out all the rewards have expired. So they don't get any rewards. There's all this national coverage. Well, the family had moved from Oklahoma and when they moved from Oklahoma they took their car as one might do. But because of some sort of like reporting snafu or something, the place that they bought their car from didn't have their address so they couldn't send them the bills. So at some point they became delinquent on the car and they actually issued a warrant for Brian Ingram's father's arrest, but nobody thinks about it or finds him or anything. Well, then this becomes a national story and the sheriff in that little county is watching the news and is like, that's that guy with a car loan warrant. And they actually and I can't imagine I mean, this is this is how law enforcement has changed because I can't imagine anybody doing this. They go out to where they live and arrest the guy in, like, Washington or wherever he is for this car loan this delinquent car loan. And then there's a, like, a national press story that's like, son gets father arrested, which you can only imagine how how it made this 8 year old feel when his dad gets arrested because of this. It caused like a lot of there was a lot of problems in the family because you know people wanted money. They thought they'd got a bunch of money so they wanted money. So it was a really just disaster for them. Brian Ingram eventually, though, became like a big DP Cooper scholar and researcher. So he's he's at peace with it, but nevertheless, just just a wild story about how fame can affect you. Totally. That that's sounds that's really sad. It's kinda like all the lottery stories you hear when anyone wins anything from the lottery, even if it's a small amount. Seems like their life is ruined. Okay. We're almost almost the end of the timeline. Almost. July okay. So that was February of 1980 when Brian Ingram finds the decomposing money. You must think now we're going 9 years later, but now the investigation is going. We have evidence. We're gonna search around that area. We're gonna find the rest of the money, or we're gonna find the parachute, or we're going to find DB Cooper or signs of him. Right? Wrong. Nothing happens for decades. So much nothing happens, in fact, that on July 12, 2016, the FBI officially declares that they will no longer actively investigating the Norjack case, and their official statement is this, which I'm gonna read to you verbatim. Following one of the longest and most exhaustive investigations in our history, on July 8, 20 16, the FBI redirected resources allocated to the DB Cooper case in order to focus on other investigative priorities. During the course of the 45 year Norjack investigation, the FBI exhaustively reviewed all credible leads, coordinated between multiple field offices to conduct searches, collected all available evidence, and interviewed all identified witnesses. Over the years, the FBI has applied numerous new and innovative investigative techniques as well as examined countless items at the FBI laboratory. Evidence obtained during the course of the investigation will now be preserved for historical purposes at FBI headquarters in Washington DC. The mystery surrounding the hijacking of a Northwest Orient Airlines flight in November 1971 by a still unknown individual resulted in significant international attention and a decades long manhunt. Although the FBI appreciated the immense number of tips provided by members of the public, none to date have resulted in a definitive identification of the hijacker. The tips have conveyed plausible theories, descriptive information about individuals potentially matching the hijacker, and anecdotes to include accounts of sudden, unexplained wealth. In order to solve a case, the FBI must prove culpability beyond a reasonable doubt, and, unfortunately, none of the well meaning tips or applications of new investigative technology have yielded the necessary proof. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Let's face it. Sometimes multitasking can be overwhelming, like when your favorite podcast is playing and the person next to you is talking and your car fan is blasting, all while you're trying to find the perfect parking spot. But then again, sometimes multitasking is easy, like quoting with Progressive Insurance. They do the hard work of comparing rates so you can find a great rate that works for you even if it's not with them. Give their nifty comparison tool a try, and you might just find getting the rate and coverage you deserve is easy. All you need to do is visit Progressive's website to get a quote with all the coverages you want, like comprehensive and collision coverage or personal injury protection. Then you'll see Progressive's direct rate, and their tool will provide options from other companies all lined up and ready to compare so it's simple to choose the rate and coverage as you like. Press play on comparing auto rates. Quote at progressive.com to join the over 28,000,000 drivers who trust Progressive. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates, comparison rates not available in all states of situations. Prices vary based on how you buy. Every time the FBI assesses additional tips for the Norjack case, investigative resources and manpower are diverted from programs that more urgently need attention. Although the FBI will no longer actively investigate this case, should specific physical evidence emerge related specifically to the parachutes or the money taken by the hijacker, individuals with those materials are asked to contact their local FBI field office. So there's your challenge, guys. Go find the parachute. They've turned it over to you. They can't do it. The only people who can solve this case are listeners to this podcast. So That's a very defensive statement, by the way. It is. And this is like, look, guys. I tried everything. I tried statement, by the way. It is. And this is like, look, guys. I tried every day. I tried every day. We're no match for DB Cooper. He's just too much for us. He's too good. He's too We we work on a lot of press releases from the alphabet soup agencies and from our offices. So we like, our job is to review for a lot of time. This one is unlike any press release, really. It's very defensive. It's But I don't know what they don't normally say when they're gonna stop investigating. They just, like, I don't know. We're still investigating. You just close it. Right? You don't say anything about it because what happens in those cases, you get a tip, and if it's closed, you don't have to investigate it. Just put it into a file. Keep going. Right. Exactly. So I don't know. I think it's pretty interesting. And and some people have said this is the first case where the FBI ever really tried to use crowdsourcing to solve it. They and they did. They shared evidence. We're gonna talk about the money and and some other things and the tie later on, which a lot of the things that were discovered that have really been breakthroughs in this case were discovered by people who are really interested in this case. There's I think there's like a website called like the vortex or something. I can't I can't remember, but where a lot of these people, they're scientists. There's one guy who apparently lives in Alabama named Sluggo. He's super involved, but the FBI at some point just starts sending out their evidence, these people. They're like, do what you can. And they're like, well, I have an electron microscope, so I'll look at the tie under the electron microscope. And they start discovering things. That missing minute we talked about, that was discovered by a sort of web sleuth type person. So if you're out there and you're fascinated by this case, you could be the one to crack it, or you could become forever lost in this case and lose everything you ever loved because of it. So watch out. That is my warning to you, but next week, we're going to go through some of the things we've hinted at. We're gonna talk about in more detail. Some of the interesting aspects of this case, some of the facts that maybe are a little different and then we're going to get into suspects. We're gonna talk about copycats. We're gonna talk about people who worked for the airline. People who were very clearly involved in clandestine operations. We're gonna talk about 1 woman who could be DB Cooper. Turn that over in your heads. It's Jessica in the chat's favorite favorite suspect. I had only done a couple sentences on her, but now I'm going to expand it because she's pretty interesting, actually. But anyways, we got a lot of suspects that we're gonna look through. I have my favorite suspect. Alice, I don't know if you have picked a favorite suspect yet. The more I look into it, the more I think my favorite suspect is probably not the suspect. But nevertheless, I'm sticking to it because I I just like him. So I'm gonna stick to it. I think none of the named suspects are close to the real person. So it's more like the idea of who the suspect is, like the profile. I think if this is ever solved, it probably will be something that no one is looking at. It's gonna be like Joe D'Angelo in the Golden State Killer case where, like, people had exhaustive 1,000 person spreadsheets of possible suspects and it turned out there was nobody anybody was looking at. I totally could see that happening here. Though the uniqueness of this case, it's not just some random person killing people. I mean there there's a lot going on here that you would think would enable you to narrow this down. So maybe one of the known suspects is the person. I mean somebody did it unless they didn't because that's another theory. We'll talk about that as well. I'm gonna talk about all that in a future episode. But for now, Alice, would you like to answer questions? Absolutely. Okay. Let's answer some questions. We have so many now. We have hundreds of questions. It's it's always hard. Wood wants to know, besides finding the body, what will it take to make an arrest and prosecute the suspect in the Kyron Horman disappearance? That's a case that we did I guess over a year ago now. Also in a similar area. Also in a similar area in in in the wilderness there made it difficult. I would say, number 1, I don't think they'll I don't think they'll find a body at this point. It's been so long. I would be surprised. But you never know. Obviously, that would be helpful. But the only other thing is if someone knows something, saying something. That's true in a lot of cases. I think at this point, it's not gonna be forensics or anything like that that solves it because unfortunately there is so little evidence in that case. He truly did seem to vanish into thin air, and and I think that's why this case has been so hard to solve. Alice, I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. I don't think I think the I don't think the lack of prosecution in this case is because of the lack of a body. You can prosecute a case without a body, And I don't know that finding a body at this point would even yield enough, like, forensic evidence to point one theory or the other. So I think it's someone talking, someone confessing, someone knowing something that they're able to come forward with and and try the case, which is very sad because he was just a young young child. Yes. It's it's an incredibly sad case. It's one that I would love to see solved. I hope it's solved one day. I hope that family gets closure, but it's going to take something and that's why the the best we can do is to keep spreading it as much as possible and hope that one day it will be solved. Aunt Dana wants to know or Dana could be Dana, do you ever feel burned out or do you have a broader range of cases that you're able to work to keep fresh? What about you, Al? Do I feel burned out? Laughed because I was like, do I feel burned out, like, in life all the time? But I think he meant professionally. I don't. I I I truly do not feel burned out in the practice of law, if that's what you're talking about. Podcasting, never. This podcasting is so much fun because I get to do a few. And partly law is the same. Right? I get very exhausted after a very intense case that we may have tried. That happens after every big trial. I think I feel very tired, and I feel like I'll never be able to do it again. But that's not burned out. That's more like you finally finish the race, and you are sitting down to, like, rest. And I think that's why I'm drawn to the practice of law is every new case, even if it's the same subject matter, is going to be different based on the specific facts of that case. So you kind of have to relearn everything, and you get to learn new areas of the law and of life all the time. I learn about, like, swaths of the world that I otherwise wouldn't know anything about because of the cases I have. For some, that's, like, a nightmare because you never get comfortable in your own skin as a lawyer, essentially. Everything is kind of always shifting sands. But to me, that's really exciting because I don't sit at a desk and, like, press a widget button all day. And my job never will be that, which is why it's so exciting. And a lot of people have asked, like, why are you guys crazy people? Why do you still work, like, highly intense day jobs as lawyers and, you know, raise families and podcasts? And part of it is I kinda love lawyering because of the excitement and ability for me to learn areas of the world that I otherwise wouldn't know about. Like, I probably will never be a farmer, but I've been able to learn because of a case so much about an area of farming, you know, whether it be soybeans or meat or processing. And you, like, get to dive in and interview witnesses and know everything about that area and then apply it to the law, which is the special part. That was a really law nerd answer. That was. No. I mean, I think we're both very fortunate alcoholism, depression, and stuff like that, drug use. And a lot of legal jobs are incredibly draining and can be the kind of things that burn you out. Alice and I, I think, have been very fortunate in the jobs we've gotten to do. Even when they've been hard and draining, they are always exciting and different. So I think we're very lucky and that's not everyone's experience in the law. You know for the podcast, I never get tired of doing the podcast, and I can't imagine being burned out of that. I get tired of some of the the stuff around it. I'll be honest with you. I am more and more frustrated with with some of the stuff that that surrounds podcasting and interacting with people. But that's just I mean, that's my fault because I'm very involved in social media. It is not your fault, Brett. It is not your fault. We're having a little therapy session right here. Yeah. It's not. But it's just that that can be draining. But, I mean, that's just you just have to take a step back from that because the actual doing the podcast, like, this is a lot of fun. Interacting with the people who are here now from our from our patron is great. You know? So, you know, some of the cases are tough. Some of the cases weigh on you. You know, if you really care about this stuff and you do it, the cases, they can really start to affect you because you learn a lot about the worst things that ever happened to people, some of which are children, you know, and you get to know the families. I mean it is hard to overstate if you have not been involved in a crime or suffered from a crime or worked in criminal justice, you really cannot understand the impact that a crime has on people. We had a case in my office. I won't say too much about it because part of it is still ongoing, but there's a murder case. We don't have many murder cases. Very rare that we have a murder case. We did have a murder case. And as you guys know, I do the appeals and there will be an appeal in this case. I knew there'd be an appeal in this case, so I was working on it with the folks who were trying it, and I was there for the verdict. And I walked into the courtroom and the family was all they were in one of the the benches. They were all on their knees and they were praying because this was the moment. I mean as stressful as this is for lawyers when you know the jury's coming back, just imagine Just imagine if one of your loved ones had been murdered and you truly believe the person who has been accused of this did it. And now 12 people are going to walk in that room and tell you whether you're ever going to get justice. And I just and that had an effect on me seeing that and the person was convicted and seeing their reaction, but that stuff can weigh on you. So you just have to keep everything in perspective and and the podcast, I mean, really is just fun. I mean we we have fun doing it, but this is weighty stuff. I mean, DB Cooper not so much. That's one reason I enjoy doing DB Cooper so much. Not so much weighty stuff, but a lot of stuff is and I think it's really important I'm rambling now but it's really important for all of us who are true crime consumers, true crime creators to always remember that we are doing this for entertainment and don't lie to yourself and say you're not, but there are very real people who have suffered some horrible things that we're talking about, and you have to keep that at the front of your mind. And what Brett just said right now about being affected by our by our daily daily life job, I think helps us in the podcast world. That's partly why I'm kind of unwilling to give up, you know, the the foot we have in each world. Because when you live your life entirely behind a computer, behind a microphone, it's pretty easy to forget that these are real people's lives. And I'm not just talking about the victims. I'm also talking about the suspects we're talking about, the investigators we're talking about, who we say lost cigarette butts and lost, you know, x, y, and z. Those may have been the worst days of those people's lives. But when you hide behind a microphone, you hide behind a screen name or a Twitter or x handle, all of a sudden, you become 11 feet tall, and you think your words can spout off as you wish. And when you see real people in court on a daily basis with real tears and real impacts of their lives based on what is happening in the legal system, based on investigations and cases that you prosecute, it brings you down to reality real fast. And that it absolutely informs the way we do this podcast, And it informs the way I live my life every single day. You know, it's certainly made me a more compassionate person because I'm like, whoo. There's a lot of darkness in this world. And I think we all, as true crime consumers, would benefit from recognizing that you cannot remind yourself too much of this. Every single person we talk about in every single one of these stories, not just the victims, are real people with immense complexity in their lives leading up to the moment in which we are talking about them in this one slice of a story. This one slice of the story is but a second in their entire lives. And having a responsibility to discuss it with maturity and compassion is the very least that we can do as podcasters and also all of you as consumers of these podcasts when you talk about it as well, which is why I really love this community because I do think the gravity is imparted on the the conversations that we see about the cases we discuss by this group, by these people who listen. But so, really, that's just patting you all on the back. But a reminder, be kind in how you talk about these cases. Be kind in how you speak in everyday life. We see obviously kind of the most extremes of humanity through the podcast, but also through our jobs. But everything you encounter on a daily basis, we're just on that spectrum. Just because we see one side of the spectrum doesn't mean we're not all on the same spectrum. Sometimes that person at the grocery store is, like, one step away from completely breaking down. And you cutting them off at the checkout line could make the difference. So, long way of saying not burned out, but exhausted often. Yeah. So we'll end on one last question. This is from Grace Rules, and it's it's a fairly straightforward question. Could you give a shout out to Grammy aka Robin? Hi, Grammy aka Robin. Grace loves you very much. We love you too. I'm gonna assume you're listening for giving a shout out to you. Shout out to you. For supporting us. I love that. I love that someone used their question to do that. That is very sweet. Me too. Me too. So awesome. That was great. Okay. So we're gonna be back next week with more on d b Cooper. We wanna hear your thoughts. We wanna hear your theory. Shoot us an email, prosecutors pod@gmail.com@prosecutors pod. Yeah. For all your social media, I only say this every episode, for all your social media, including TikTok, Twitter, whatever we call it now, Facebook, join the gallery. Gallery's fantastic. We're close to 10,000 members. If you're not a member, you should be a member. Just great discussions. I'll just tell you, they've been talking about this Apple River case that you guys are obsessed with on the gallery, and it has been some of the best discussion as a divisive case and great discussion and analysis from people on both sides and that's what you can get on there. It is a place you can go. You can disagree. You can have the opposite views on things. It's fantastic. So I'm I'm a love that place. No. We didn't start it. We we can't take any credit for it. The moderators are fantastic. They do so much work to keep it that way. So join it. Enjoy it. Take advantage of it. It's really great. Also for those you don't know we do have a store, people like to buy merchandise, we just put some new merchandise up. I'll post a link if you're listening to this it'll be in the show notes. I'll post a link so you can check out some of our latest stuff as well as the stuff we have And I only mention it because very soon, we'll be in CrimeCon. So if you want to wear some merch representing the prosecutors, we'd love to see you in it. We hope that you'll come to see us in Nashville. It is not too late. Though it may be getting pretty close to sold out, you can use code prosecutors for 10% off. We are really excited to see you there. And last but certainly not least, thank you to everyone who has joined Patreon where you can listen to these episodes early and ad free or if you so desire. Join us live for the recordings as some 60 people are currently with us talking about everything except DB Cooper as is often the case. Alright, Alice. Do you have anything else you wanna add before we sign off for today? No. Thanks for joining us on this, like, roller coaster of an emotions, man. From eclipses to DB Coopers to air shows to soulful questions. As it is with the prosecutors always. I do wanna show for those of you watching live. So we have the kids did artwork for DB Cooper. So I'm gonna show some of the artwork work. To say that Brett took all of that. He wouldn't let me do any of them. As I do. As I do. He wouldn't he wouldn't let me take even one. Some of them have, like, a real future. I mean, some of them draw like I do. No offense, kids. But some of them are, like, really incredible. Good ones. They tried to do it in the style of Hannah Hill, our amazing artists. These kids are just amazing. Their descriptors Her debut. Music, their artwork. It was it was such a joy to go to Littitz. We I don't think that will be our last time there. Oh, it will not be. We're definitely gonna go back. I just love littitz. I may move to littitz. It's the cutest So don't move there. Cutest tiny little town ever. It is. Alright. We've talked enough. We'll be back next week. But until then, I'm Brett. And I'm Alice. And we are the prosecutors. Let me check my levels real quick. Okay. Whenever I, like, leave town, I have to really check my levels because, like, this closet ain't protected. Guys. Okay. Did anyone else see the total eclipse? Because I was in Dallas, and it was incredible. Like, it was I knew it was gonna be amazing, and it was as amazing as I thought it was going to be. Like, when, you know, when you watch it, like, totally eclipse, the whole, like, where I was standing, there were a bunch of people just because everyone that comes out of the buildings to watch, like, just started, like, cheering. It was like it was so great. Was, like, a great moment of humanity. But, anyways It really got a little dark here. I know. Well, that's here here's the crazy thing. This is how powerful the sun is. Right? Like, it doesn't get it's like the light switches off. It's not quite I don't know. I don't know if other people had different experiences. So it wasn't, like, pitch black at all. But the difference between, like, like, the second before total eclipse and actual eclipse was stark. Pluto TV has over 300 channels and thousands of TV shows and movies for whatever mood you're in. Just open the app with something good will already be playing because it's curated by people who love TV as much as you do. So if you're in the mood for comedy, there's 18 channels that'll make you laugh. Looking for drama? We got so much of it, you'll cry tears of joy. Reality shows, game shows, sports, Star Trek, and even more Star Trek. No matter what mood you're in, there's something on Pluto TV. 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