ONE ROTTED $20 FROM THE D.B. COOPER RANSOM JUST SOLD FOR $134,200

A single $20 bill from the D.B. Cooper ransom sold for $134,200 at a Heritage Auctions currency sale this month. Face value: twenty dollars. That is 6,710 times what the Treasury had in mind, for a piece of paper that spent nine years rotting underground. Quick refresher for anyone who skipped the 1971 portion of American crime history. A man calling himself Dan Cooper hijacked a Northwest Orient 727 out of Portland, said he had a bomb, and collected $200,000 in ten thousand twenty-dollar bills. He jumped out the back of the plane over southwest Washington and nobody has found him since. In February 1980, an 8-year-old named Brian Ingram was digging in the sand along the Columbia River and turned up three disintegrating bundles totaling roughly $5,800. The FBI matched the serial numbers. That is still the only piece of the money anyone has ever recovered. The winning scrap measures about 4.5 inches by 1.5 inches, which is enough to show Andrew Jackson, both seals, and the serial number that proves where it came from. That completeness is the whole ballgame. Back in 2024, a tiny fragment showing only the Federal Reserve district seal went for $4,000. Collectors are paying by the square inch of unsolved mystery.

Why you should give a shit: At $134,200 a bill, the bag Cooper jumped with would be worth roughly $1.3 billion to collectors today, which makes him the only man in history to successfully rob a plane and still get the trade horribly wrong.