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Post by aprillynn93 on Nov 14, 2018 18:04:50 GMT -5
Yeah this case is much like that of Jack the Ripper...always a another person coming forward claiming to have solved the crime, but not really.
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Post by JoannaL on Jul 11, 2019 1:25:45 GMT -5
Robert Rackshaw, D.B. Cooper Candidate, Dead at 75
Robert Rackshaw, a 75-year-old man who led an eventful life and who some thought may have been D.B. Cooper, the legendary hijacker who pulled off one of the most daring heists in modern history, died Tuesday at his condominium in San Diego. An Army veteran and pilot, Rackstraw was often the target for amateur sleuths who thought he was the man who jumped from a plane over Washington state in 1971.
Calling himself Dan Cooper, the suspect told a flight attendant there was a bomb in his briefcase before handing her a note demanding $200,000 in cash and four parachutes. Upon landing in Seattle, he released 36 hostages, then ordered the plane to fly to Mexico. He jumped out around 8 p.m. somewhere between Seattle and Reno, Nevada. Thereafter, the vanished without a trace and no one ever confirmed he survived the jump.
For a time, the FBI suspected Rackstraw, but ruled him out because of his age. He was 28 at the time of the crime, while according to witnesses, the suspect was between 35 and 40. He was featured in Thomas Colbert’s 2016 documentary, D.B. Cooper: Case Closed? that aired on the History Channel. Colbert was convinced Rickstraw was the hijacker.
“I told everybody I was,” Rackstraw told The San Diego Tribune before explaining his admission was a stunt.
Rackstraw, a high school dropout, was born in Ohio in 1943 and became an army paratrooper in the 1960s, serving 15 months in Vietnam. He was eventually discharged for misconduct and in 1978, was acquitted of killing his stepfather, after which he faked his own death by crashing a rented airplane and disappearing. He ultimately spent two years in prison for passing worthless checks and grand theft.
“While my cold-case team believes he was Cooper, he also was a husband, father, grandfather and great-grandfather,” Colbert told The Tribune. “Our condolences to the family.”
The case is one of the longest and most exhaustively-examined in FBI history. The agency ceased actively investigating the D.B. Cooper mystery in 2016.
Source: Louis Casiano, Fox News, July 10, 2019.
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Post by aprillynn93 on Jul 11, 2019 21:23:27 GMT -5
If it was him, he took it to his grave.
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Post by Isbeau on Sept 16, 2019 14:07:24 GMT -5
For years everybody, including the FBI, said that there was no way that D.B. Cooper could have survived the jump, then people, including the FBI, started trying to figure out who he is, or was, and all the suspects were still alive after his jump. Why did the FBI contradict themselves? Bruce A Smith, author of DB Cooper and the FBI, has some great Youtube videos by the same title. He's a good old style investigative journalist and clears up years of misinformation. Everyone was told that there was no other money found except the 5800 dollars found by the boy on the beach, but Smith tells us the FBI found an entire debris field of tiny pieces of money throughout the sand at Tina Bar. But you can’t beat Robert Blevins. He’ll cut through the dredged muck of the Columbia and he believes it was Kenneth Christiansen. Now we know the money could easily have been spent because no one was looking for the ten thousand non sequential serial numbers after the first three months. m.youtube.com/watch?v=BCCApukLAB4&t=1075s
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Post by Isbeau on Sept 19, 2019 18:09:30 GMT -5
Robert Blevins Youtube videos about Kenny Christiansen have got me believing. Kenny died in 1994 and didn't become a suspect until his brother saw a show on the hijacking in 2003. At this point, for the FBI to confirm that a dead person, who died years after the crime, is admitting defeat. The alleged accomplice is still alive though I believe.
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Post by JoannaL on Jan 30, 2021 20:47:39 GMT -5
Another D.B. Cooper Suspect DiesSheridan Peterson, whom some believe was the infamous D.B. Cooper, died January 8, 2021, at his home in Northern California. He was 94-years-old. Eric Ullis, a Phoenix businessman, spent years trying to figure out the identity of the man who hijacked a plane on November 24, 1971, and bailed out somewhere north of Portland, Oregon. Finally, he reported he was “98% certain that Peterson was the man behind the famous heist.”
There’s no doubt Peterson claimed to have been D.B. Cooper on a number of occasions. For example, in 2007, he wrote in Smokejumper Magazine, “Actually, the FBI had good reason to suspect me. Friends and associates agreed that I was without a doubt D.B. Cooper. There were too many circumstances involved for it to be a coincidence.”
Peterson was 44-years-old in 1971, which was the approximate age of D.B. Cooper and none can deny he closely resembled the sketch of the hijacker. Although on one occasion, he was photographed in the exact same attire reportedly worn by Cooper, Peterson later insisted he was actually in Nepal at the time of the skyjacking.
Peterson isn’t the only suspect. In 2019, Robert Rackstraw, whom many amateur sleuths believed was D.B. Cooper, died at the age of 75. Rackstraw once jokingly admitted to being the jumper, however he was only 28 at the time of the hijacking and witnesses swore Cooper was between 35 and 45 years of age.
In 2018, yet another researcher determined William J. Smith was the legendary hijacker and he had taken the name D.B. Cooper (actually “Dan Cooper”) from that of his deceased friend, Ira Daniel Cooper.Sources: Peter Aitken, Fox News, January 30, 2021; and OregonLive, January 29, 2021.
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