Two days later, FBI agents returned to Tena Bar and found additional fragments near the original site, approximately five feet away and buried roughly three feet under the sand.
Brian Ingram found his name in newspapers around the world.
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## What the Bills Said—and Didn’t
The recovery of the Tena Bar bills was, on its surface, the biggest break in the D.B. Cooper case since the hijacking itself. Here was physical evidence. Here were the ransom bills, their serial numbers intact and confirmed. Here was something tangible in a case that had produced almost nothing tangible for eight years.
But the bills answered almost nothing about what had happened to Cooper.
The most basic question they raised was how they got there. Tena Bar is on the Columbia River, and the river does flow through the general region of the southwest Washington landscape where Cooper was believed to have landed. If Cooper had drowned in the Columbia or a tributary, his money bag could have eventually deposited on a sandbar or beach. If he had survived and buried the money, or lost it in the woods and it eventually washed into a river system, the same general drift pattern might apply.
But the condition of the bills complicated any simple theory. Decades of research by specialists who examined the degradation pattern suggested the bills had been in a wet environment for a long time—consistent with burial or submersion. On the other hand, the three packets were still bound by rubber bands, which is not what would be expected of a bag that had washed freely through a river for years. The bills were deteriorated, but they had not been scattered; they were still together, still grouped in their original order.