SEATTLE — Forty-five years after a tall, dark-complected man hijacked a Seattle-bound Boeing 727 on Thanksgiving Eve and parachuted into history from the rear of the plane with $200,000 in cash, the FBI has officially closed the investigation.
The 1971 hijacking became one of the federal agency’s “longest and most exhaustive investigations,” the bureau said in a statement released Tuesday.
“On July 8, 2016, the FBI redirected resources allocated to the D.B. Cooper case in order to focus on other investigative priorities,” the statement said.
During the course of the decades-long investigation and manhunt, the FBI reviewed thousands of leads, claims and plausible theories, conducted scores of searches, interviewed witnesses and collected evidence — all in vain.
The mystery surrounding the Nov. 24, 1971 skyjacking of a Northwest Orient Airlines flight remains unsolved.
The bureau said tips from the public, which included information about individuals potentially matching descriptions of the hijacker and stories about people with sudden, unexplained wealth, never yielded enough proof to link someone with what became one of the most high-profile cases in history.
The FBI said that while it will no longer actively investigate the case, anyone who discovers specific physical evidence related to the parachutes or the money taken by the hijacker should still contact their local FBI field office.
According to the FBI, evidence obtained during the course of the investigation will be preserved for historical purposes at FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C.