DB Cooper: Where Are You?! TV review — why an unsolved hijacking still fascinates after 50 years

From Jesse James and John Dillinger to Bonnie and Clyde, if there’s one thing that America loves to mythologise more than a self-made individual, it’s a charismatic outlaw. That’s especially true of the man pseudonymously known as DB Cooper, who has entered modern folklore. More than half a century after he hijacked a passenger plane and parachuted into the night with a $200,000 ransom, he has yet to be identified, let alone caught.

A new four-part Netflix docu-series presents a deep dive into “the holy grail of cold cases”, which has flummoxed FBI agents for decades, consumed amateur sleuths and spawned everything from themed bars to clothing lines, escape rooms to conventions.

What’s remarkable is that this enduring legend is built entirely around the events of just a handful of hours on November 24 1971. All the known facts about Cooper could be listed on the back of a packet of aeroplane peanuts. Beyond witness accounts that he was smartly dressed, polite — he discreetly alerted a stewardess that he was carrying a bomb — and that he disembarked somewhere over the American west, there’s very little to go on.

Given this paucity of concrete information, the show concerns itself with the hypotheses proffered by the countless hobbyist investigators, the most prominent being Tom Colbert, who has, amusingly and alarmingly, sunk more of his own money into discovering “the truth” than Cooper ever stole. It’s no spoiler that this didn’t prove to be a fruitful investment.

“Once you’re sucked in you can’t escape,” we hear a number of “Cooperites” say throughout the series. But as with a joke, the more this mystery is dissected — and its supposed intricacies, historical significance and exhilarating nature oversold — the more it loses its appeal. What begins as a curious, jauntily told caper is drained of all its romance by the time we see a physicist calculate the trajectory of the jump or catch up with Colbert and his team as their pursuit of one vaguely credible suspect becomes tinged with desperation.

The series is more compelling in the infrequent moments when it shifts from asking where Cooper is to the more human questions of why people are so taken by him. Or indeed what leads them to devote their lives to proving that this man was in fact a CIA operative, a trans librarian or — sacré bleu! — a French Canadian. With the amount of nonsense that’s been circulating about him over the years, it’s no wonder Cooper never bothered to reveal himself.

★★★☆☆

On Netflix now