“I have a bomb here and I would like you to sit by me personally.”

That was the take note handed to a stewardess with a mild-mannered passenger on a Northwest Orient airline flight in 1971. It had been the beginning of one of the most amazing whodunits in the annals of American true criminal offense: how one man extorted $200,000 from an airline, then parachuted in to the wilds of the Pacific Northwest and into oblivion. D. B. Cooper’s case is among the most stuff of story and obsessed and cursed his pursuers with from about SKYJACK: The Search for D. B. Cooper personal bankruptcy to suicidal despair. Now with SKYJACK, journalist Geoffrey Grey delves into this unsolved mystery uncovering new prospects in the infamous case.

Starting with a tip from a private investigator into a appealing suspect (a Cooper lookalike, Northwest worker, and trained paratrooper), Gray is normally propelled in to the murky depths of a decades-old mystery, performing new interviews and finding a first-ever look at Cooper’s FBI file. Beginning with a heartstopping and unprecedented recreation from the criminal offense itself, from cabin to cockpit to tower, and uncanny portraits of character types who either chased Cooper or may have dedicated the criminal offense, including Ralph Himmelsbach, probably the most dogged of FBI realtors, who watched with horror being a legal became a counter-culture folk hero who supposedly shafted the program…Karl Fleming, a respected reporter whose profession was destroyed by a Cooper scoop that was a rip-off…and Barbara (nee Bobby) Dayton, a transgendered pilot who insisted she was Cooper herself.

With explosive new information and exclusive usage of FBI data files and forensic evidence, SKYJACK reopens one of the great cold cases of the 20th century.