# Eight Cigarette Butts
*D.B. Cooper and the Case That Was Made Unsolvable* — Legendary Biographies No. 270

- **Subject:** D.B. Cooper
- **Written by:** Ruth Kellerman
- **Shelf:** Crime / Crime
- **Published:** 2026
- **Extent:** 224 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink
- **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-550-3)
- **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Edmund Hartley (ISBN 979-8-90623-659-3)

Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/270-eight-cigarette-butts.html

## About this book

The book takes no position on who he was, because none is available. The man who left Northwest Orient Flight 305 on the night of 24 November 1971 has no established name; he bought his ticket as Dan Cooper, and a reporter's deadline error made him D.B., which every outlet in America copied. Eight Raleigh cigarette butts came out of the ashtray at seat 18-E, the only material from that cabin that six professional witnesses watched him produce. They went to the FBI Laboratory, came back to Las Vegas, and at some point were destroyed. The Bureau found out in 1998, when it went looking for them to attempt DNA.

The density of the evidence and the density of the belief run in opposite directions. Six of the twenty-one chapters stay with that one evening, the only stretch where the evidence is good: the note Florence Schaffner put in her purse assuming it was a phone number, ten thousand twenty-dollar bills microfilmed while the aircraft held over Puget Sound, and the demand set, the best evidence of what he knew — airstair deployable in flight, gear down, cabin unpressurized, below ten thousand feet, the slowest airspeed short of a stall. The record ends at about 8:13 p.m., when the crew felt the tail pitch.

What filled the empty part was fifteen named suspects, a four-decade party at a general store in Ariel, Washington, and families who have gone on the record to name their own dead father or brother as a federal felon. The claiming is the subject, and it is sorted here into seven routes, almost all sincere and none evidentiary. It is the first general account written entirely after the FBI suspended NORJAK in 2016, working from pages Thomas Colbert's FOIA litigation forced into view. The last of it belongs to the six who worked the flight — among them Tina Mucklow, twenty-two, sent to sit beside a man who had shown her a bomb — and to the thirty-six passengers who walked off at Sea-Tac without being told why.

## Contents

1. Seat 18-E
2. I Have a Bomb
3. Ten Thousand Twenties
4. Fifteen Degrees of Flap
5. 8:13
6. What Was Left On The Airplane
7. Whose Name Was Dan
8. Himmelsbach's Woods
9. The Copycats
10. January the Fifth
11. Tena Bar. 10 February 1980
12. The Real McCoy
13. Deathbeds And Brothers
14. Marla Cooper's Thanksgiving. 2011
15. Rackstraw
16. Tape Recordings Of Dead Men
17. Eight Cigarette Butts
18. Titanium
19. Suspended
20. Ariel, Washington
21. The Balance Of Probability

## Questions

**Who is Eight Cigarette Butts about?**

D.B. Cooper. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case Eight Cigarette Butts — and the name goes on the line underneath.

**Is this an authorised biography?**

No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented.

**Can I read some of it before buying?**

Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,294 words of the book.

**How long is it?**

About 68,500 words, 21 chapters, 224 pages in the paperback.

## The writer

Ruth Kellerman is a former particle physicist who left the field for science journalism and has written for Nature, The New Yorker, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Her first book, on the Berkeley Rad Lab generation, was a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.