None of them were able to add, in the years since, an identification of who Cooper was. They described the man they saw. They described his behavior. They gave the FBI everything they could observe about a stranger who sat in the back of a plane for a few hours one November evening and then disappeared.
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## The Ingram Bills and Their Aftermath
After the February 1980 discovery, the Tena Bar bills became artifacts of the case as well as evidence.
The FBI kept 14 of the bills—280 dollars in face value—as permanent evidence. In 1986, a legal proceeding divided the remaining bills between Brian Ingram and the insurance company that had covered the ransom, Royal Globe Insurance. Ingram received $2,760 of the recovered money—his share of the $5,520 remaining after the FBI’s evidence set was removed.
Brian Ingram held onto his bills for more than two decades. In 2008, when he was 36 years old, he had 15 of his bills professionally authenticated by PCGS Currency, the same service used for coin and currency collectors. He sold the 15 bills through Heritage Auction Galleries, where they brought a total of $37,433.38—nearly six and a half times their face value, and a price that reflected not the money’s purchasing power but its place in one of the most enduring mysteries in American crime.
Ingram was clear in interviews that his find, remarkable as it was, had not answered the questions that mattered. He knew he had found part of the ransom. He did not know—and no one knew—how it had gotten there, who had brought it to Tena Bar, or what had become of the man who originally carried it out of that airplane.