Eric Ulis loves mysteries. So long as they’re almost impossible to crack.
That’s why he started digging into infamous, long-cold unsolved crimes. He was convinced he could succeed where the FBI – and scores of both professional and armchair detectives – had failed. And he just might have.
He’s certain he has figured out who pulled off the audacious robbery of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston that garnered international headlines in 1990. And, after years of chasing leads, he believes there’s a very good chance that by the end of 2026 he’ll finally be able to unmask “D.B. Cooper,” the unknown man behind the 1971 takeover of Northwest Orient Flight 305, the only unsolved skyjacking in U.S. history.
No one can accuse him of lacking confidence. The tagline he uses to promote himself on his website and business cards: “Identifying the Clues Everyone Missed.”
Card Sharp
Ulis, now 60 years old, grew up in Salt Lake City and spent a year at the University of Utah before deciding he couldn’t wait any longer to get out into the world. From a young age, it was clear he was a bit different. He’d get focused on a task and just wouldn’t let it go.
“I was the kid who had to figure out Rubik’s Cube,” he told Collier’s Magazine. “I’ve always been that way.”
He did figure out Rubik’s Cube, by the way. Quickly.
After leaving college, Ulis tried the conventional path, working as an independent currency analyst and then as a licensed stockbroker. This wasn’t the life for him.
He decided to be a professional gambler instead – a blackjack player.
Except he didn’t call it gambling. He considered it investing, just an unusual form of it, one that required him to sit at a table in a brightly lit casino hour after hour and “manually massage that investment.”
It wasn’t gambling, he believed, because he was very good at counting cards. Freakishly good. This gave him an advantage over the house – it’s believed a highly proficient card counter might get a boost of up to 2 percent.
“It’s a small edge, and, of course, if you’ve got somebody who’s making even one mistake an hour, that can completely wipe out that advantage,” he noted. “But if you’re betting at a high enough level, and you’re getting a return of essentially 2% off of that every hour, you can see that it adds up.”
It did add up. Ulis found himself making a very good living.
Card-counting in blackjack is simple enough. You keep track of the ratio of high cards to low cards in the deck, as well as when they come out of the deck. This informs how you play your hand, how much you bet, whether you hit or hold.
In practice, however, it’s a lot to keep in your head.
One summer in the early 1990s, Ulis and his father decided to take a card-counting road trip. There weren’t many tribal casinos yet, and gambling remained tightly restricted in most of the country. The options for serious gamblers were Nevada — and especially Las Vegas, of course — or Atlantic City in New Jersey. Ulis and his dad chose Nevada.
They drove from town to town in the Silver State and used a series of fake names so the casinos couldn’t spread the word that there was a duo out there that was unusually good at blackjack.
Well, a duo where one of them was unusually good.
Ulis’s father, John, a former NASA programming contractor with a mind for math, spent six months before the trip learning the card-counting system his son used. He discovered it was much harder than he thought it would be.
When you’re sitting at a blackjack table in a casino, actually trying to count cards during a real game, John said in an interview, “you want to yell out, ‘Stop making noise!’”
The noise didn’t bother his twenty-something kid.
“It was fun – I enjoyed myself,” Eric Ulis said. “It was exciting.”
But he recognized, even in his twenties, that constant excitement wasn’t going to work in his favor, not in the long run. So he normalized his gambling life. He had a wife and young children, and the family settled in Seattle, not Las Vegas. He flew to Nevada every Friday and returned every Sunday, a set schedule. “I racked up about 800,000 miles on Delta Airlines doing that,” he said.
To be clear, it’s perfectly legal to count cards – as long as you’re using just your brain and not a card-counting device or partners. But casinos obviously don’t like it, and in Nevada they’re allowed to put a stop to the activity when they spot it.
“I got barred probably a dozen times over the years,” Ulis said, but he makes clear that no Martin Scorsese-worthy set pieces resulted. The mob’s rule in Nevada casinos was over by then, so he never got pulled into a back room and worked over.
Instead, a pit boss would politely tap him on the shoulder and ask to speak with him privately. He’d be told he could play anything else in the casino, just not blackjack anymore. Often, they’d offer to buy him a nice dinner.
“They were usually very gracious about it,” Ulis said.
In the midst of his tenure as a pro blackjack player, he decided to try his hand in a different field, one where the cold logic of numbers and odds had less purchase: politics.
Over the course of about a decade, starting in his early thirties, he ran for various local offices, in Washington and California and Arizona. He never presented himself as a hard-case partisan, running in the Republican primary in one race, as a Democrat in another. The first time he threw his hat in the ring, going for a Washington state legislature seat, he impressed political observers with his wonkiness, particularly his willingness to think outside the box on taxes and economic incentives. The Seattle Times called him “a promising newcomer.”
But this focus on policy solutions came just as identity politics was beginning to surge in the country. Voters didn’t want wonks anymore. Ulis lost every time.
His last attempt came in 2021 when he announced he was running for Congress in Arizona, hoping to push Republican U.S. Rep. David Schweikert out of office. He was infuriated that Schweikert had objected to Congress’s certification of the 2020 presidential results.
Ulis never really got out of the starting gate. Struggling to raise money, he dropped out of the race after only a few months.
Art Lover
Ulis left Arizona a couple of years ago, landing in Rhode Island.
This put him close to one of his latest preoccupations: Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
Before dawn on St. Patrick’s Day in 1990, two police officers walked into the small museum and told the security guards they had received a call about a disturbance at the building. But they weren’t actually cops. After being buzzed into the museum, the fake police officers, armed with pistols, gagged and bound the guards. They then spent the next hour crisscrossing the four-story building, cutting out of their frames masterworks by Johannes Vermeer, Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, and Rembrandt – as well as grabbing a priceless Napoleonic finial and an ancient Chinese bronze beaker.
The thirteen stolen works are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, making the heist the largest property crime in U.S. history. The artwork has never surfaced, despite a $10 million reward offered by the museum, and no one has ever been arrested in the case.
In the days after the robbery, the FBI zeroed in on the Boston mob — and it stuck with that focus. In 2013, twenty-three years after the heist, the bureau publicly announced that the investigation had reached its “final chapter” and that it knew the identities of the thieves.
“We’ve vetted it out,” an FBI spokesman said. “We don’t make this kind of announcement lightly.”
At the time, the bureau refused to name the people it had determined were responsible or even say whether they were alive. It stated only that the robbers were part of a “New England criminal organization.”
(Under pressure from Gardner case aficionados and journalists, the federal law-enforcement agency two years later said gangsters George Reissfelder and Leonard DiMuzzo were its chief suspects. They both died under unusual circumstances within a year-and-a-half of the heist — with DiMuzzo being found in the trunk of a car. The FBI said it was still looking for the artwork and believed the loot had changed hands multiple times over the years.)
Ulis didn’t buy any of it, believing that the FBI, dancing as fast as it could, was embarrassed it couldn’t solve the case. He started investigating the robbery himself.
All these years later, he points to Brian McDevitt, an insouciant Massachusetts con man, thief, and wannabe screenwriter who died in 2004 in Colombia at age 43.
McDevitt, who lived near the Boston museum when the robbery happened and who had spent time in prison in the early 1980s for a bungled attempt to steal a Rembrandt from New York’s Hyde Collection, was a suspect from the beginning. But his fingerprints didn’t match those found at the Gardner, and the FBI moved on to its theory about the Boston mob.
But Ulis remained intrigued by McDevitt and started to dig, ultimately shoveling deeper into McDevitt’s world than the feds appear to have done. Affable as well as insistent, Ulis gained the trust of McDevitt’s former girlfriend, who he discovered had been a prolific and detailed daily diary writer for much of her life. This helped Ulis establish that McDevitt did have motive and opportunity. Later — “through a confidential source,” he claimed — he got ahold of a lengthy 2003 email correspondence between McDevitt and a friend in which McDevitt appears to confess to the crime.
McDevitt had told the police and the FBI, and later the TV news program 60 Minutes, that he had nothing to do with the robbery. But in the email exchange a decade later, he took offense that investigators and journalists had decided he didn’t have the right stuff for the heist.
“I know who pulled off the world’s biggest art theft and, in the end, that’s all that really matters,” McDevitt wrote.
Ulis’s detective work brought him to the conclusion not only that McDevitt led the robbery but that he burned the paintings seven months after the heist. The robbers were hoping to defraud the museum’s insurer — to get a 10% “finder’s fee” for the artworks’s return, Ulis believes. But it turned out the museum, facing financial pressures in the 1980s, had quietly let its insurance lapse.
Ulis suspects the finial and the beaker were tossed into Lake Pemadumcook in Maine. He hopes the FBI or some other organization will search the lake bottom — an expensive, time-consuming undertaking — and prove him right or wrong.
He also has recently discovered an abandoned safe-deposit box in McDevitt’s name in Lewiston, Maine. McDevitt’s family wasn’t aware of the vault holding — and the FBI probably never knew about it. (The bureau’s not talking.) All Ulis knows about the box so far is that its contents have “a value greater than $25.”
This being America, the Gardner museum has leaned into the robbery that raised its profile, leaving the empty frames on the walls and holding tours in the building led by the museum’s security chief that retrace the robbers’s steps (all of which were captured by motion detectors). The museum’s $10 million reward remains on offer.
Fall Guy
What started Eric Ulis’s pivot into cold-case investigations was a childhood fascination with a different crime – the hijacking of Northwest Orient Flight 305. D.B. Cooper, the name popularly attached to the man who hijacked the flight out of Portland, Oregon, on Thanksgiving Eve in 1971, leapt from the Boeing 727 somewhere over the Pacific Northwest with $200,000 in ransom, never to be seen again.
Having disappeared into the ether, the skyjacker became a folk hero — a symbol, at a time when Americans felt the world spinning out of their control, of the country’s outlaw and go-your-own-way spirit. Investigators put out books about the case. Rock bands wrote songs about D.B. Cooper. Teenagers wore a popular T-shirt that read, “D.B. Cooper, Where Are You?”
The FBI investigated thousands of leads over forty-five years before mothballing the investigation in 2016. Its official theory: The skyjacker – who dived out of the plane into a freezing, rainy night, wearing a parachute, a business suit and loafers – died on the night of the hijacking, possibly before he reached the ground. The bureau believes his skeleton is out there somewhere in Washington’s vast forest, perhaps up in a tree.
Ulis, like most of the people captivated by the case, is convinced the skyjacker survived his plummet to earth. He took up his own investigation in the early 2000s, bothered that the case had never been solved. It started out as a “guilty pleasure,” a hobby for his spare time, but it quickly became an obsession.
His goal, first and foremost, was to solve the mystery. He loved to solve mysteries, whatever it took, and he diligently taught himself the detective’s trade. A side goal, meanwhile, was to debunk conspiracy theories, a cultural blight he’d come across in his forays into politics and which deeply infected the D.B. Cooper world too. He wanted facts, actual evidence, to carry the day.
Within a few years he had become one of the best-known D.B. Cooper researchers in the country, interviewed on numerous TV news programs and featured in documentaries as well as his own YouTube channel. He stood in front of so many video cameras that some in the Cooper community derided him as an attention junkie, in it for celebrity.
Maybe he is, but this much is certain: He takes the hunt for D.B. Cooper seriously. Unlike many of his fellow case obsessives, Ulis hasn’t limited himself to going through the hundreds of pages of redacted FBI case files that have been publicly released.
He has tracked down and interviewed surviving suspects and persons of interest mentioned in those case files — and the family members of those no longer alive.
Hoping to locate the skyjacker’s parachute, he talked his way onto the privately held Tena Bar property along the Columbia River, where $5,800 of the ransom was discovered shallowly buried in 1980.
Using documented wind speeds on the night of the skyjacking, overlooked data from area airport control towers and beacons, and “free fall” calculations, he worked out that the FBI had misidentified the skyjacker’s “jump zone” and so had searched the wrong expanse of forest after the skyjacking. He came up with another location and did his best to explore it.
So far, no luck.
He’s now focused on the microscopic rare metals — including pure titanium and bismuth — speckled on D.B. Cooper’s clip-on tie, which the skyjacker left behind on the plane. Ulis is convinced that this surprising discovery, made by forensic scientists in 2011, means the skyjacker worked in one of only a handful of American factories in the 1960s and ’70s.
He’s doggedly tracking down lists of employees from those businesses and looking into those who fit his parameters.
“I think we have all the pieces of the riddle that we need to solve this case,” he said. “It’s just a matter of sifting through it all and applying the metrics, if you will, to men who worked there during that period of time, just painstakingly going through person by person.”
This is needle-in-a-haystack, eye-crossing work. Investigative drudgery the FBI doesn’t want to do, seeing as the skyjacker, if he did survive that Thanksgiving Eve more than half a century ago, likely would have died of old age by now. So, as with the Gardner Museum robbery, the definitive solution to the D.B. Cooper case is still out of reach.
Coming up short of his goals isn’t something Eric Ulis is willing to accept, which is why he isn’t giving up. He continues to pursue the Gardner Museum and D.B. Cooper cases. He also has dipped his toe into the 1969 Chappaquiddick scandal, the JFK assassination, and even a 1945 Bermuda Triangle mystery, all but guaranteeing himself more exasperation.
These cold cases might prove eternally cold — that’s a big part of their allure. But the world around them has changed. If Ulis needs to work off some of the frustration from these mysteries remaining mysterious despite his years of hard work, he has an easy outlet. There are now two casinos in Rhode Island.
