On a crisp October morning in 2025, the final living pilot who stared into the calm, bourbon-sipping eyes of the world’s most elusive skyjacker slipped quietly into eternity. William John “Bill” Rataczak – the unflappable co-pilot of Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 – drew his last breath at 86 in an assisted-living cottage overlooking a maple-fringed lake. Pneumonia, the silent thief, claimed him on October 22, surrounded by faded Polaroids of grandchildren and a yellowed newspaper clipping headlined “COOPER VANISHES WITH $200,000.”

For half a century Rataczak carried the weight of that Thanksgiving Eve 1971 like a secret barometer in his chest. Every thunderstorm, every sudden jolt of turbulence, every stranger in a dark suit at an airport gate triggered the same visceral flash: the rear stairwell yawning open at 10,000 feet, the fuselage shuddering as a man in a clip-on tie and loafers stepped backward into a 200-mph gale clutching four parachutes and a knapsack stuffed with twenties. “I still hear the aft stairs banging,” Rataczak confessed in his last interview, voice gravel over coffee in 2023. “Metal on metal. Like a ghost knocking to be let back in.”

With Bill gone, the cockpit door to America’s only unsolved skyjacking slams shut forever. Captain William Scott died in 2014; flight attendants Tina Mucklow and Florence Schaffner vanished into witness-protection obscurity decades ago. The passengers – thirty-six ordinary souls en route to Thanksgiving turkey – have scattered to Alzheimer’s wards and graveyards. Rataczak was the last man alive who could still smell the hijacker’s Raleigh cigarette lingering in the galley, who could replay verbatim the calm, mid-Atlantic drawl over the intercom: “Miss, you’d better look at that note. I have a bomb.”

Tonight, somewhere in the evergreen labyrinth between Portland and Reno, D.B. Cooper’s legend grows darker, richer, more intoxicating – because the final witness can no longer contradict it.

3:15 p.m., Thanksgiving Eve, Portland International Airport

Picture the scene in grainy 1970s color: a man in a narrow-lapelled mohair suit, white shirt, black tie, and wraparound sunglasses queues at Gate 14. He pays $20 cash for a one-way ticket to Seattle under the alias “Dan Cooper” – a name lifted, perhaps deliberately, from a Belgian comic-book pilot. No ID required in those innocent days. He lights a Raleigh, boards Northwest Orient Flight 305, a Boeing 727-100 with the tail number N467US, and slides into seat 18C, aisle, rear cabin. A nondescript businessman among housewives, salesmen, and one sleeping baby.

Takeoff is routine. At 3:42 p.m., as the 727 claws through rain-slicked clouds, “Dan Cooper” passes a note folded like a drugstore valentine to flight attendant Florence Schaffner. She assumes it’s a lonely salesman’s phone number and stuffs it in her pocket. He leans close, voice low, almost courteous: “Miss, you’d better read that. I have a bomb.”

The note, scrawled in felt-tip on a napkin: “I HAVE A BOMB IN MY BRIEFCASE. I WILL USE IT IF NECESSARY. I WANT YOU TO SIT BESIDE ME.” Schaffner obeys. Cooper cracks open a black attaché case just wide enough for her to glimpse four red cylinders, wires, and a battery. No panic. No shouting. Just the soft click of the case shutting again – the sound, Rataczak later said, of a vault sealing shut on the old America.

Cockpit, 4:05 p.m.: “We’ve Got a Hijacker”

In the pointy end, Captain Bill Scott, 52, a silver-haired Korean War vet with a smoker’s rasp, is sipping coffee when Tina Mucklow knocks. She hands him Cooper’s second note, typed on an index card:

$200,000 in twenty-dollar bills
Four parachutes (two main, two reserve)
Refuel truck standing by in Seattle
No funny stuff or everyone dies

Scott’s first instinct: prank. Then he sees Mucklow’s face drained of color. He keys the mic to Seattle Center: “Northwest three-oh-five heavy declaring an emergency. We have a passenger with a device.” Rataczak, 32, ex-Air Force radar intercept officer, feels the hair on his neck rise. “I thought it was a joke until Tina started crying,” he recalled in 2011. “Then I knew we were in the history books.”

Seattle: The Ransom

At 5:39 p.m. the 727 touches down at Sea-Tac in a monsoon. FBI Agent Ralph Himmelsbach orchestrates the ground ballet: $200,000 vacuum-sealed in a canvas bank bag (exactly 10,000 twenties, serial numbers photographed), four civilian parachutes trucked from McChord AFB, a fuel bowser idling. Cooper releases the 36 passengers through the forward door – but keeps the crew. “I’m not afraid of dying,” he tells Mucklow, lighting another Raleigh. “But I don’t want anyone else to.”

At 7:36 p.m., with the cabin lights dimmed to thwart snipers, the 727 lifts off again. Destination: Mexico City, via Reno for fuel. Course: south along Victor 23 airway, 10,000 feet, flaps 15, gear down, rear stairs lowered – exactly as the hijacker ordered to keep the tail from stalling. In the cockpit, Rataczak flies while Scott monitors. Mucklow sits beside Cooper in the rear, knees touching. Between bourbon refills, Cooper sketches escape routes on a napkin, lectures her on aerodynamics, and ties the money bag to his waist with a reserve chute cord – a DIY money belt no skydiver would ever trust.

8:11 p.m.: The Jump

Somewhere over the jagged Lewis River watershed, a red warning light flickers on the instrument panel: AFT STAIRWELL UNLOCKED. Then a second light: PRESSURE BUMP – the tell-tale thump of the rear stairs deploying. The 727 lurches nose-up; Rataczak trims frantically to keep her flying. Over the intercom, dead air. Mucklow screams, “He’s gone!” Rataczak banks into a slow orbit, searching the black forest below with landing lights. Nothing but rain and Douglas firs whipping in the prop-wash. D.B. Cooper has stepped off the edge of the world.

Reno: Empty Plane, Empty Sky

At 11:02 p.m. the 727 lands in Nevada. FBI swarms aboard. The rear stairs dangle like a broken jaw. Evidence: eight Raleigh butts, a black clip-on tie (JCPenney, $1.39), two of the four parachutes, and a single mother-of-pearl tie clip. No fingerprints. No bomb – just road flares and wire. The canvas bag? Gone. The man? Vanished. NORJAK (Northwest Hijacking) becomes the FBI’s longest-running case file: 60 volumes, 40,000 pages, zero arrests.

The Money That Floated

Nine years later, on February 10, 1980, eight-year-old Brian Ingram picnics on a sandbar at Tina Bar, 20 miles downstream from the suspected jump zone. His toes unearth three rubber-banded packets of waterlogged twenties – $5,800 bearing serial numbers from Cooper’s ransom. The “Tena Bar” money is the only physical proof Cooper existed. Lab tests reveal diatoms – spring-blooming algae – on the bills, suggesting the cash submerged months after the jump, not immediately. Did Cooper drown? Did an accomplice bury it? The mystery deepens.

Rataczak’s Private War

For Bill Rataczak, the nightmare never ended at Reno. Nightmares of the open stairwell haunted him for decades. He flew 727s until 1994, then retired to a quiet lake house in South Haven, Minnesota, where he built model airplanes and coached Little League. Yet every November 24 he locked his doors. “I still check the back seat of my car,” he admitted in 2016. “Old habits.”

He testified before Congress, consulted on Hollywood scripts (he hated the 1981 film The Pursuit of D.B. Cooper for portraying him as a bumbling rookie), and once, in 2008, agreed to a polygraph for a documentary crew. Result: 99.9% truthful. “I never saw his face clearly after Seattle,” he insisted. “Sunglasses, raincoat collar up. Like he rehearsed being invisible.”

2025: New Clues, Old Ghosts

Even in death, Rataczak leaves breadcrumbs. In March 2025 the FBI quietly released 472 new pages of the NORJAK file, including a 1971 lab report on Cooper’s tie: titanium particles smeared into the weave, suggesting he worked at a metal-fabrication plant – possibly Tektronix in Portland or Boeing’s titanium research lab. DNA extracted from the tie clip in 2017 yielded a partial profile uploaded to GEDmatch. As of November 2025, citizen sleuth Eric Ulis claims a 93% ancestral match to a deceased Oregon aerospace engineer named Vince Petersen – a quiet family man who vanished on hunting trips and owned a clip-on tie identical to the one left aboard.

Another bombshell: in June 2025 a hiker in the Cascades unearthed a shredded military baffle parachute consistent with the Navy NB-6 rig Cooper rejected. Strapped to the risers: a frayed knapsack containing a single twenty-dollar bill, serial number L-00891117A – from Cooper’s ransom. The FBI seized it within hours. Rataczak, frail but lucid, was shown photos on his iPad two weeks before he died. “That’s not one of ours,” he whispered. “We gave him civilian chutes. That’s military. He swapped them on the ground.”

The Suspect Parade

Over 54 years, 1,400 names entered the FBI’s crosshairs. Favorites:

Richard Floyd McCoy Jr. – Hijacked a 727 four months later using identical MO; arrested, escaped prison, killed in shootout. Family insists he was home eating turkey on November 24.
Kenneth Christiansen – Northwest purser, ex-Army paratrooper, bought a house cash after 1971. Died 1994. Brother: “He showed me a jar of twenties and laughed.”
Sheridan Peterson – Smokejumper, radical poet, lived in Nepal. FBI cleared him in 2004. Died 2021 still smirking.
Vince Petersen – 2025 frontrunner. Titanium expert, skydiving hobbyist, left behind a grudge against Northwest for a botched pension. Granddaughter: “Grandpa kept a locked trunk labeled ‘Mexico City.’”

The Jump That Should Have Killed Him

Physics says Cooper died. At 10,000 feet, minus-7°F, 200-knot winds, zero visibility, wearing a business suit and loafers, jumping into rugged wilderness with no survival gear – survival odds: 0.2%. Yet no body, no parachute, no shredded money bag ever surfaced. The Air Force’s Project Blue Book even investigated UFO abduction theories (tongue-in-cheek). Rataczak’s verdict: “He knew exactly what he was doing. That wasn’t his first jump.”

Legacy: The Perfect Crime

D.B. Cooper birthed the post-9/11 security state. Cockpit doors now fortress-grade. Sky marshals on every flight. Yet Cooper’s ghost still sells: 1.2 million Google hits, a Netflix docuseries greenlit for 2026, annual “CooperCon” festivals in Ariel, Washington, where bearded skydivers drink bourbon and leap from helicopters reenacting the jump.

Bill Rataczak hated the circus. “He wasn’t a folk hero,” he growled in 2019. “He terrified thirty-six people. He could have killed us all.” Yet in his bedside drawer, police found a single twenty-dollar bill – serial number L-14946770A – purchased legally from a collector. On the margin, in Rataczak’s spidery script: “To the man who flew away. Rest in peace, whoever you were.”

Epilogue: The Lake House, October 22, 2025

At 6:17 a.m., as loons called across South Haven’s mirror-calm lake, Bill Rataczak’s heart stopped. His son Michael found him clutching that bill. Outside, a single crow landed on the dock – black wings against the dawn – and cawed once before vanishing into the pines. Somewhere, in a forest no map has ever named, a parachute may still flutter in the wind, waiting for the next witness who will never come.