On a winter afternoon in 1980, an ordinary family picnic along the Columbia River turned into an international news story and a lasting mystery.
On Feb. 10, 1980, 8-year-old Brian Ingram was smoothing sand on Tena Bar, a stretch of beach on the Washington side of the Columbia River in Clark County, when his hand struck something unusual.
Buried beneath the sand were three deteriorating packets of $20 bills, still bound with rubber bands.
The cash had last been seen on Nov. 24, 1971 — the night a hijacker known as D. B. Cooper extorted $200,000 and four parachutes from a flight traveling from Portland to Seattle, then jumped from the plane somewhere over southwestern Washington.
The FBI later said Ingram’s find was the bureau’s first physical evidence since Cooper vanished into the night — and decades later, it remains its most compelling.
The hijacking began the day before Thanksgiving in 1971, when a man in a black suit bought a one-way ticket from Portland to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport using $20 cash.
The ticket was signed “Dan Cooper” in red ink.
During the flight, the man passed a note to a flight attendant that read in part, “I have a bomb.”
He later opened a briefcase to show what appeared to be wires, a battery and red sticks.
Cooper demanded $200,000 — roughly $1.5 million in today’s dollars — and four parachutes.
After the plane landed in Seattle and the demands were met, passengers were released and the aircraft refueled.
The plane then took off again, bound for Mexico.
About 20 miles north of Portland, Cooper lowered the rear stairs of the Boeing 727 — something authorities did not realize could be done in flight — and jumped from the aircraft at roughly 10,000 feet while traveling about 196 mph.
The wind chill was well below zero.
Despite an extensive search, Cooper was never found.
The case remains the world’s only unsolved airplane hijacking.
The hijacker became known as “D. B. Cooper” due to a reporting error by United Press International.
Although the FBI corrected the name the next day, the nickname stuck.
Nearly nine years later, the case resurfaced unexpectedly.
Ingram and his parents, Harold and Patricia, were picnicking on Tena Bar, about 10 miles northwest of Vancouver, when Brian uncovered the money while preparing a spot for a campfire.
“I took my arm and raked it along the sand, and then I felt something fluffed up in the sand,” Ingram told The Oklahoman in 1986.
The cash was buried anywhere from a few inches to as much as three feet below the surface.
Some bills were so deteriorated they were unreadable.
Others had shrunk to the size of business cards or turned black.
The family estimated only about 30 bills were still in relatively good condition.
Ingram’s parents initially thought the money was counterfeit.
The family placed it in a plastic bread bag and continued their picnic.
The next day, they turned the cash over to the FBI.
Using serial numbers recorded on microfilm by Seattle First National Bank before the hijacking, the FBI confirmed the bills came from Cooper’s ransom.
The money had been packaged exactly as it was delivered in 1971: two bundles of 100 $20 bills and a third bundle of 90.
An assistant special agent in charge of the Portland FBI office said the discovery was the first real lead since the night of the hijacking.
The Ingrams’ discovery made headlines worldwide.
They spent days with FBI agents and reporters, but the attention quickly became a burden.
“My husband lost 1 1/2 days of pay,” Patricia Ingram told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1980. “We’ve gone in the hole as the result of this.”
Brian’s father lost about $100 in wages.
The family was living paycheck to paycheck and did not have a phone.
FBI agents returned to the site two days later and found additional bill fragments the size of coins buried several feet away.
A backhoe and experts in soil, archaeology and river currents were brought in to search the area, which was also popular with steelhead fishermen.
No additional intact money was found.
The FBI has never reached a definitive conclusion on how the bills ended up on the Columbia River bank.
Agents said the money may have washed downstream years after the hijacking, possibly carried by a tributary.
An Army Corps of Engineers hydrologist said the Washougal River was the only tributary that might explain how the money reached the site.
Ralph Himmelsbach, the FBI agent who led the investigation until his retirement in 1980, believed the money had been stored in a bag near a stream and gradually carried downstream as the bag degraded.
John D. Pringle, a senior FBI official at the time, said he believed Cooper either died or dropped the money.
Ownership of the recovered cash was disputed by the FBI, Brian Ingram and his parents, Northwest Orient Airlines, and the airline’s insurance company.
In 1986, a proposed court judgment awarded the FBI a small portion of the bills as evidence, with the remaining money split between Ingram and the insurance company.
Ingram received $2,760.
Years later, as an adult, Ingram began auctioning pieces of the recovered ransom.
In 2008, 15 authenticated bills sold for $37,000 through a Dallas auction house — two to three times more than expected.
By the mid-1970s, the FBI had chased thousands of leads and eliminated hundreds of suspects.
Over the years, deathbed confessions, hoaxes and conspiracy theories surfaced, but none led to proof.
In 2016, the FBI announced it was no longer actively investigating the case, known as NORJACK, citing the need to focus resources elsewhere.
Officials said none of the tips produced evidence strong enough to identify Cooper beyond a reasonable doubt.
As for the man himself, investigators have long pushed back against the romanticized image.
“There’s this idea of a debonair guy,” author Geoffrey Gray told CBS News. “But his suit didn’t match, his tie was a clip-on, and investigators doubt he realized one of the parachutes was sewn shut.”
More than half a century later, the mystery endures and the money found by a child on a quiet riverbank remains the strongest physical link to a hijacker who vanished into history.
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