The $5,800 in ransom cash that surfaced on a riverbank 9 years after the jump

Eight years after the jump, a boy was walking the sand of the Columbia River in Washington.

He found a rotting bundle of cash, $5,800 in twenty-dollar bills, half-buried in the muck.

The serial numbers matched the $200,000 ransom paid to the hijacker in 1971.

The FBI evidence log confirmed the match.

The discovery suggested Cooper had survived the jump.

It suggested he had come down somewhere near that riverbank, or that the money had come down without him, or that someone else had carried it there.

No body was ever found.

No further evidence was ever recovered from that stretch of shore.

The record does not establish whether the cash was dropped by Cooper, lost, or placed there.

It does not establish that he lived, and it does not establish that he died.

What the record does establish is this: the bundle found by that boy is the only physical link to the hijacker ever recovered.

Nine years of manhunts, hundreds of suspects, a nationwide list of serial numbers distributed to banks — and the one trace of the ghost was turned up by a child on a riverbank.

The money was real.

The serial numbers were real.

The rest, everything after the boy's discovery, is theory.

NOVEMBER 24, 1971 — THE NOTE AND THE JUMP

The note was handed over shortly after takeoff.

A flight attendant received it, a note claiming a bomb and demanding $200,000 in cash, four parachutes, and a fuel truck standing by in Seattle.

She passed it to the captain.

The plane landed in Seattle, and the money and parachutes were delivered.

Cooper released the passengers and most of the crew.

Then he gave the pilots their orders: fly toward Mexico City, low altitude, slow speed.

Somewhere over southwestern Washington, he opened the rear stairway and jumped into the night.

The plane landed in Reno, Nevada, with Cooper gone.

The flight manifest listed the passenger as "Dan Cooper," a man who bought a one-way ticket from Portland to Seattle on the evening of November 24, 1971.

The press misreported his alias as "D.B. Cooper," and that name stuck in public memory.

Whether Cooper actually had a bomb was never confirmed.

No explosive device was ever found.

The demand was real, the money was real, the jump was real.

What he carried in that briefcase was not established.

The pilots communicated with ground control.

The flight record showed the landing in Reno.

The man who gave the name Dan Cooper was gone, and the case was just beginning.