The discovery of $5,800 dollars on Tina Bar in February 1980 heavily implied what the folk legend didn’t want to accept: D.B. Cooper had perished. And he had perished far from where anybody had searched. “Tourists who want to look for more Cooper money,” suggested Agent Ken Moore, “probably should look in the Washougal River.”

   The location was suggested merely because the loot had gotten into the Columbia River. Nothing in the known clues of that dark night had suggested this location.

   This major tributary is also too far for wind drift to convey Cooper from the point near Ariel where the airliner experienced the air pressure oscillations, the evidence used to mark the location where Cooper had jumped.

     Now retired, the original lead FBI agent Ralph Himmelsbach was delighted. He had hated the glorified image of D.B. Cooper. “He was a sleazy bastard and a criminal,” he had always insisted.

     Yet neither he nor the Bureau explained how the sleek villain could have drifted to any tributary of the Columbia River.

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