Search:

AMBOY, Wash.—A tattered, half-buried parachute unearthed by kids had D.B. Cooper country chattering Wednesday over the fate of the skyjacker, who leaped from a plane 36 years ago and into the lore of the Pacific Northwest.

The parachute is about all most people in this neck of the southwestern Washington woods ever expected would be found as evidence of Cooper’s daredevil escape attempt.

“Hunters are all through here,” Idy Gilbert said Wednesday as she served drinks at Nick’s Bar and Grill. “They find lots of bodies up here all the time, people who are missing. They would have found some bones. All they found was a chute.”

In November 1971, a man identifying himself as Dan Cooper, later mistakenly identified as D.B. Cooper, hijacked a Northwest Orient flight, claiming he had a bomb. He demanded and got $200,000, then jumped out the back of the plane somewhere near the Oregon line.

He may have landed around Amboy, not 30 miles from Portland, Ore. That’s the same area where children playing outside their home recently found fabric sticking up from the ground where their father had been grading a road, FBI agent Larry Carr said Tuesday.