Skyjacker cash sold at auction

Buyers at a Dallas auction on Friday paid a total of $37,433 for 15 tattered $20 bills taken by notorious skyjacker D.B. Cooper in 1971.

The bills went for as much as three times as much as expected, Heritage Auction Galleries said in a news release.

Two of the bills that bear the clearly visible handwritten initials of investigators who handled the money after it was discovered in 1980 went for $6,572 each. A buyer paid $358 for a remnant of a note that consisted of a small portion of the printed San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank seal in the design.

Cooper hijacked a jetliner in the U.S. Northwest, was given $200,000 in $20 bills, and then parachuted somewhere between Reno, Nev., and Seattle. He was never apprehended.

Brian Ingram of Mena, Ark., was 8-years-old in 1980 when he found the money in the sand along the banks of the Columbia River near Vancouver, Wash.