An utterly bizarre mystery that couldn’t fail to entertain
Here’s an illustration of how times have changed: being on a hijacked aeroplane was once considered fun. “Typically, it was Cuban nationals who wanted to return to their homeland. Everybody on the aeroplane would get a bottle of rum and a couple of cigars, they got back on the aeroplane, flew home and thought it was a really fun thing,” chuckled former captain William Rataczak.
The Hijacker Who Vanished: The Mystery of DB Cooper (BBC Four) was a documentary that couldn’t fail to entertain. The case is one of those delicious, stranger-than-fiction mysteries. On November 24, 1971 a hijacker who gave his name as DB Cooper boarded a plane in Portland, Oregon. He handed the stewardess a note demanding $200,000 and four parachutes, and calmly opened his briefcase to reveal what appeared to be a bomb. Once in possession of the money and parachutes, he instructed the crew to lower the air stairs at the back of the plane and jumped. No trace of him was ever found.
The crime turned Cooper into a folk hero. “I think he’s one of the slickest cats who ever walked on the face of the Earth,” said one man in a news bulletin. John Dower’s film picked up on the eccentricity of the story and its
characters. He introduced us to people who were convinced they knew Cooper’s true identity. Jo Weber said her husband, Duane, made a deathbed confession. Marla Cooper claimed her uncle, LD, was the man, and that as a child she had overheard another uncle tell him: “Well, we did it, we hijacked the aeroplane, we’re rich and our troubles are over.”
Richard Floyd Mccoy didn’t seem a bad bet – five months after the Cooper case, Mccoy pulled off a copycat hijacking. His former probation officer believed Mccoy and Cooper were one and the same. And then there was the couple who said their friend, Barbara Dayton – formerly Robert Dayton, the first man to have a sex change in Washington State – had confessed to the crime.
Then Dower’s camera pulled back from the pictures of these four suspects to reveal dozens of others. It wasn’t a film about the identity of DB Cooper, but about the power of myth, the unreliability of memory and our desperation to believe in something. If the real DB Cooper ever does stand up, there’ll be a heck of a lot of disappointed people out there.
Panorama is currently in the news for all the wrong reasons, with its greatest scoop – the famous interview with Diana, Princess of
Wales – now tarnished by allegations about Martin Bashir’s methods and questions about a subsequent cover-up. Last night’s offering, Return from ISIS: A Family Story (BBC One) from film-maker Josh Baker, was about a woman from Indiana who travelled to Syria and lived under Islamic State.
Baker informed us that he had spent four years filming this documentary and obtaining interviews with Samantha Sally, who eventually pleaded guilty to financing terrorism by providing funds for her husband and his brother to join Islamic State. She married Moussa Elhassani, who hailed from a wealthy Moroccan family and lived in the US, in 2013 and he became stepfather to her son, Matthew.
Sally said that her husband tricked her into believing they were emigrating to Morocco with a stopover for some shopping in Turkey, then forced her to follow him across the border to Syria because he had their baby girl in his arms. But the way Baker prefaced each sentence with a disbelieving “Sam says” signalled that we should treat her account with scepticism.
Baker found evidence to back up some of her story – a woman imprisoned alongside her in Raqqa corroborated Sally’s account of being tortured, for example. But he also spoke to her parents and ex-partner, who described her as a compulsive liar willing to go to Syria for the thrill of it.
Sally’s account felt partial, but so did this film. Frustratingly, given it was four years in the making, there were many avenues unexplored. Towards the end, Baker threw in the revelation that a chilling propaganda video of 10-yearold Matthew threatening to blow himself up to kill American soldiers was filmed by Sally. Yet he asked her nothing about this, except to urge her to accept she had made bad choices.
By far the most powerful part of the film was an interview with Matthew, now safely back in the US and being cared for by his father. It was tough to listen to this poor kid trying to shrug off the horrors that he’d lived through. “It’s all behind me now,” he said, but sadly that can’t be true either.
The Hijacker Who Vanished: The Mystery of DB Cooper ★★★★ Panorama: Return from ISIS: A Family Story ★★★