Dan Cooper is an Internal Affairs officer at the SBPD under the leadership of March. Even though his job mostly involved chasing paper trails and upholding professional standards, Henry explains that he made a lot of enemies in his time. It is therefore not necessarily surprising that he ends up murdered, although Lassiter and Juliet are not quite convinced it even happened since they consider the only witness, Nicole Reed from the Box Canyon Commune, a "crazy hippie girl". When Cooper is in fact missing, however, an investigation is started and Shawn deduces Cooper must have been looking into Pierce, a crooked cop stealing drugs from Evidence Inventory who therefore would have had ample reason to kill him. Pierce is arrested for the murder and the case seems closed.
However, Nicole later reveals in the commune's Barn of Truth that the reason she was present to witness his murder is because she was about to meet with him. She explains that all he wanted was to ask her a few questions about the commune, but her ex-husband Geoffrey believes his motives were impure. Based on this reaction Lassiter and Juliet suspect Geoffrey and go to search his hut, where they indeed find Cooper's body in the shed. Geoffrey is arrested, but Shawn saves the day by correctly deducing that it was in fact Eli, the leader of the commune, who murdered Cooper. He had been stealing from the commune members for years, which Cooper discovered when his sister Cynthia left the commune and found that Eli had stolen all of her belongings. Cooper had been building a case against Eli for the last six years and set up the meeting with Nicole to gather more information, but Eli knew about this from reading her emails and killed Cooper before she could ever meet him.
Trivia[]
- He is named after D. B. Cooper, the infamous plane hijacker.
- He had "a very heavy presence" according to Nicole.
- His email address is LoudIrish@TFI.com.
- He was single.