After 20 Years, Solution to Mystery of D.B. Cooper Is Still up in the Air : Crime: Fans will mark the 20th anniversary of the hijacking. The identity of the man who parachuted from a plane with $200,000 in ransom money is unknown.

Today is D.B. Cooper’s 20th anniversary. But the question remains: Is it the 20th year of the famous skyjacker’s death, or 20 years since he began a new and splendid life with a bagful of stolen greenbacks?

As is their annual custom, D.B. Cooper fans from Seattle to San Jose to Salt Lake City will gather to honor their hero, who they believe melted back into society after committing the perfect crime--parachuting from an airliner over Washington state with $200,000 in ransom money on Nov. 24, 1971.

Two decades after the unique exploit, which a retired FBI agent calls stupid and most certainly fatal--Cooper’s real identity is still a mystery. And nobody knows if he is a pile of bleached bones in the mountains of Washington or the guy next door.

D.B.’s crime, in which nobody was hurt, seems almost quaint in today’s violent world. And his $200,000 in marked money--its value ravaged by an inflation rate totaling 337% over 20 years--would hardly make D.B. a rich man.

The saga of D.B. Cooper began the evening of Thanksgiving Eve 1971, when a man dressed in black and wearing dark glasses boarded a Northwest-Orient Airlines Boeing 727 at Portland International Airport in Oregon.

Once airborne, Cooper handed the stewardess a note saying he had a dynamite bomb in his attache case. The man, who chain-smoked Raleigh filter-tipped cigarettes and who appeared to be in his mid- to late-40s, demanded $200,000 in used $20 bills.

He collected the money--provided by the airline--during a brief stop at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport where the 36 passengers were released and the four crew members kept aboard.

Airborne again, Cooper parachuted into a freezing rainstorm at 10,000 feet near the tiny town of Ariel in southwest Washington, wearing only a business suit and loafers. The temperature was 7 below zero, not counting the windchill factor at the plane’s speed of 200 m.p.h.

“It was obviously not well thought out. You don’t think his loafers blew off in the wind for instance? It was stupid,” said Ralph Himmelsbach, the retired FBI agent who spent nearly a decade investigating the crime.

If Cooper didn’t freeze to death on his way down, he probably died when he hit the ground wearing an “extremely fast” parachute provided by authorities in Seattle, said Himmelsbach, reached at his home in Redmond, Ore.

“And he came down right smack dab in the middle of the woods in really rugged country. There are steep, up and down ravines in really heavily wood country. It was a bad place to land, and it is doubtful we would ever find the body,” he said.

“You get to know somebody when you investigate them,” Himmelsbach said. “This guy had all the markings of an ex-con. This was a desperate act you wouldn’t expect from a normal man in his mid-40s. This was something you would expect from somebody who had nothing to lose,” he said.

The very fact that Cooper’s identity has never emerged tells Himmelsbach that the man probably is a jailbird. “When guys like that aren’t around, they’re not missed because when they are around, they’re trouble.”

Himmelsbach said he was further convinced that Cooper was dead after boys playing on the Columbia River in February, 1980, found $5,200 in crumbling $20 bills that turned out to be from Cooper’s loot. Either Cooper landed in the Columbia and drowned, or died in the mountains and the money was washed out, Himmelsbach speculated.

But as usual, D.B. Cooper true believers are having none of that. Many will turn out for anniversary celebrations at taverns named D.B. Cooper in Salt Lake City and San Jose and at the little bar in Ariel, where, legend has it, Cooper paid an anonymous visit during an earlier party in his honor.

At the Salt Lake City tavern, customers this year have a new explanation of Cooper’s fate, said bartender John Nicolaisen. A recently published book argues that Cooper was actually Richard F. McCoy, a Provo, Utah, man arrested and convicted of a similar hijacking in 1972. McCoy was later killed after a prison escape.

“A lot of us think it was McCoy now,” said Nicolaisen, a touch of pride in his voice that the mystery skyjacker could be a fellow Utahn. As usual, the tavern plans a raucous “jump night” celebration--complete with free champagne, hors d’oeuvres and a door prize of a free trip to Seattle, he said.

Folks in Ariel don’t buy the McCoy theory, though. “We got a book here that says something different and we don’t think it was McCoy,” said Chris Fisher, the proprietor of the Ariel tavern. “And we don’t think he’s dead either,” Fisher said.

Fisher said sky divers “will land right here on the property” during this year’s annual anniversary celebration. “We expect to get a lot of people out for it,” he said.

And who knows. Among the crowd might be a man in his mid-60s, a man who launched a legend, a man they call D.B. Cooper.