‘The Mystery of D.B. Cooper’ is a perfect Thanksgiving fable… with a dash of transphobia
By: Eric Langberg
Tags: Film, True Crime, Movies, Documentary, Film Reviews

On Thanksgiving Eve in 1971, a man in a black suit and sunglasses boarded a jetliner in Portland and sat in the back row. He ordered a bourbon and soda, handed a note to a stewardess, and warned her that he had a bomb. By the time the ordeal was over hours later, the man — who had purchased his plane ticket with cash and had given the name Dan Cooper — had parachuted out of the plane with a duffel bag containing $200,000, never to be seen again.

Just in time for Thanksgiving this year, HBO is releasing new documentary The Mystery of D.B. Cooper. (Supposedly, a reporting mistake early in the story meant the public learned of Dan Cooper as D.B., and the misnomer stuck). The film re-investigates the hijacking, which is still the only unsolved hijacking in American aviation history, and proposes a series of suspects who, for one reason or another, may be the elusive criminal who passed from the plane into the American subconscious.

My Scientology Movie director John Dowd helms this film, which is structured intricately. The actual details of the D.B. Cooper case — the narrative of what happened and when — are parceled out throughout the film, interwoven with segments about the people whose friends and relatives are now claiming to have been D.B. Cooper. I’m pretty familiar with the case; I’ve found myself on the D.B. Cooper wikipedia page several times late at night and have watched a handful of Youtube videos about the situation. Still, though, I found myself wishing that the case was more clearly laid out before the documentary asks me to judge the veracity of the various claims to his identity; it’s sometimes hard to tell whether someone’s story is plausible if you’re not comparing it to the specific events.

The crew of the hijacked plane, from left: Second Officer Harold ‘Andy’ Anderson, Co-Pilot William Rataczak, Pilot William Scott, Stewardesses Tina Mucklow, Florence Schaffner and Alice Hancock. / courtesy HBO

The sections that do deal with the case itself are gripping. The Mystery of D.B. Cooper features interviews with a number of people who were on the plane, including stewardesses, pilots, and other passengers; it’s easy to read about this on Wikipedia as something that happened a long time ago, in a drastically different era of aviation, but many of the people who were present for the hijacking are very much still alive. I’m always a sucker for stories about ordinary people who find themselves caught up in extraordinary situations, who without warning are unwitting participants to events that pass into myth.

For the people who believe their friends or family members were the elusive D.B. Cooper, though, the situation is reversed, as the myth becomes human. The parade of suspects includes a secretive husband who made a deathbed confession, a family friend and pilot who reveals herself to have been assigned male at birth, a mysterious uncle who came back bleeding and victorious one Thanksgiving day, and a copycat skyjacker arrested months later for executing a similar crime.

Barb Dayton / courtesy HBO

The case of Barbara Dayton is a particularly complicated one, which the film fumbles significantly. Barb was a pilot who became friends with a couple named Ron and Pat Forman, who are interviewed in the doc. They tell the camera that she sat them down after about a year of friendship and admitted that she had been born a man, but that she was the first woman to have received gender reassignment surgery in Washington State. Ron and Pat both seem accepting of their friend, using the correct pronouns and talking about Barbara as a woman. However, after Ron mentions her surgery, the voice behind the camera interjects and corrects him, saying that she was the first man to get the surgery. Ron laughs and agrees, but seems uncomfortable. Shortly thereafter, Pat says she had nightmares about Barbara coming to kill them to cover up the secret of her identity.

The killer trans person is a harmful trope as old as cinema, as Netflix’s Disclosure documentary enumerates. Norman Bates, Buffalo Bill, Angela… the list of evil cross-dressing villains goes on. It’s a trope because it leads to harmful legislation based on fear of trans people, when in fact trans people are exponentially more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it. To be clear, Barb Dayton did not threaten Pat Forman. Barb Dayton in fact willingly disclosed her identity, and the Formans accepted her and continued to be friends with her. She was, by all accounts, a perfectly normal person who was not a danger to herself or anyone around her — except, maybe, as a parachuting hijacker — so there was no reason at all for The Mystery of D.B. Cooper to raise the specter of the killer trans person and to laugh about the fact that she’s actually a man.

A recovered bill from D.B. Cooper’s ransom. / courtesy HBO

Far more compelling (and far less problematic) is the first suspect named in the documentary, Duane Weber, who reportedly told his husband Jo on his deathbed that he was Dan Cooper. She has a fascinating story of traveling with her husband to a place near a river several years after the hijacking, where she remembers that he dug something up and tossed it into the water… remarkably, just around the riverbend from where a bunch of D.B. Cooper’s money was inexplicably discovered a few years after that. If any of the four suspects in the documentary are the actual D.B. Cooper, I believe Weber most of all.

The Mystery of D.B. Cooper’s recreations of the event are glossy and atmospheric, and the film is at its strongest when it treats the hijacker as a folk hero. This story is perhaps a uniquely American one, especially resonant this year—aside from the fact that the story takes place on Thanksgiving, the holiday this year is marred by months of social unrest and the fact that the tenuous, untenable financial foundations of our society have been laid bare for all to see. D.B. Cooper is a person who was unsatisfied with his lot in life, people in the documentary say, someone who saw an opportunity to get ahead and took it. This is a fascinating, strange, eerie case that has endured through the decades, enthralling true-crime fans with each new proposed answer, and The Mystery of D.B. Cooper does an admirable job packaging it all together. It’s a shame about the transphobia, because this is otherwise a solid documentary that would make for some great cozy couch viewing.