AMBOY, Wash. - There could be a major break in the biggest crime mystery in Northwest history.The FBI in Seattle is beginning analysis of a long-buried parachute - the same type used by skyjacker D.B. Cooper when he jumped from an Northwest Orient Airlines 727 with a 25 pound money bag containing 200-thousand dollars ransom on Thanksgiving eve 1971.

The children of a Clark County contractor found the parachute buried in a field that their father has recently plowed for a road. The chute is white and conical shaped, dirty and deteriorated. Seattle Agent Larry Carr will clean it and search for a label, which could match the chute to a companion reserve chute left behind by Cooper in the plane.

Carr, who's now in charge of the Cooper case, says the parachute was found near the center of the original jump zone identified by searchers in November 1971, between the towns of Ariel and Amboy, Washington. In 1980, a family on a picnic found 58-hundred dollars of the loot on a Columbia River beach, near Vancouver. How it got there is another mystery. Some scientists believed the money bag traveled down the Washougal River, which is upstream from the beach, miles from where this parachute was recently found.

The Clark County property owner says the plow blade unearthed something. He didn't notice it at first, but later his children, playing there, saw some cloth sticking above the earth. They pulled on it, and more cloth came out. They kept pulling, until the chute's shroud lines appeared. They cut them and notified the FBI in Seattle. Part of the chute remains buried in the field and will need to be dug out with heavy equipment.

Agent Carr showed KOIN News 6 other evidence items in his possession, including Cooper's clip-on tie and clasp, from which FBI forensics experts were able to extract the hijacker's DNA. The agency is releasing this information to the public, hoping it will produce more information about the hijacking case.

3/24/2008