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Post by Joanna on Jul 3, 2016 4:04:02 GMT -5
Who Was, and What Happened to, Skyjacker D.B. Cooper? On November 24, 1971, a mysterious man hijacked a flight from Portland to Seattle, demanded parachutes and $200,000, and skydived into folk-hero history. The identity of the man who came to be known as “D. B. Cooper” and his fate remain unknown, but theories abound.
Cooper – who actually purchased his plane ticket, which cost $20 including tax, under the name “Dan Cooper,” the “D.B.” was misreported early on and stuck – left very few clues. One clue was his clip-on tie, from which DNA was extracted in 2001 – a forensic advancement that has helped rule out a few promising suspects. He also left behind a parachute and its bag (he used part of the chute to tie up his money). In 1980, $5,800 of Cooper’s ransom money was discovered by an eight-year-old boy on a camping trip.
The Cooper case is a challenge to law enforcement. Special Agent Larry Carr of the FBI reignited interest in the case in 2007 and amateur detectives pore over its details in online message boards. Cooper is still a pop-culture touchstone; there’s even a music festival named for him. But who was he and what happened after he leapt from Flight 305? Following are some of the theories that have been considered over the past four decades:
He died in the fall. The first and most obvious conclusion is that D.B. Cooper, whoever he was, did not survive the jump. The FBI considers this a possibility: “We originally thought Cooper was an experienced jumper, perhaps even a paratrooper,” says Carr. “We concluded after a few years this was simply not true. No experienced parachutist would have jumped in the pitch-black night, in the rain, with a 200-mile-an-hour wind in his face, wearing loafers and a trench coat. It was simply too risky. He also missed that his reserve chute was only for training and had been sewn shut – something a skilled skydiver would have checked.”
Even if he made it to the ground alive, it was winter and he was dressed for air travel, not forest survival. It’s almost certain he had no accomplices waiting to meet him. For instance, there would have been no way for anyone to track his location; his instructions to the pilot were simply “Fly to Mexico” and he jumped at a random location with zero ground visibility, according to Carr. Additionally, as many agents before him, Carr thinks it highly unlikely that Cooper survived the jump. “Diving into the wilderness without a plan, without the right equipment, in such terrible conditions, he probably never even got his chute open.” However, neither his body nor his parachute have never been found.
He was Kenneth Christiansen. In 2007, Geoffrey Gray’s New York Magazine article, “Unmasking D. B. Cooper,” and subsequent book, Skyjack: The Hunt for D.B. Cooper, offered an in-depth look at the case. He was the first reporter given access to the FBI’s Cooper case files, so his perspective is unusually detailed. Gray’s article began with a New York private detective being contacted by an elderly man, Lyle Christiansen, who was convinced his late brother Kenneth, known as “Kenny,” was D B. Cooper and he was obsessed with getting Nora Ephron to make a movie – with the suggested title Bashful in Seattle – about how he “solved” the case.
Kenneth Christiansen had been a paratrooper whose first deployment came just after World War II. After leaving the military, he worked as a mechanic and flight purser for Northwest Orient Airlines, the carrier that Cooper chose for his hijacking. There were other eerie similarities, too, such as the fact that Kenneth loved bourbon and he’d bought a modest house not long after the incident. Gray showed Kenneth’s photo to the only hijacking witness still alive, a woman who had been a flight attendant that November night, and she acknowledged the resemblance, but with reservations. But most intriguingly, on his deathbed, Lyle remembers, his older brother pulled him close. He then said something that didn’t make sense to him at the time.
According to Lyle, his brother said, “There’s something you should know, but I cannot tell you!” Lyle didn’t want to know and replied, “I don’t care what it is you cannot tell me about. We all love you.”
But the FBI doubt’s Lyle Christiansen’s claims and its response to Gray’s initial article pointed to the fact Christiansen had been a paratrooper and the agency believed the hijacker wasn’t one. Second, Christensen was shorter and slighter than eyewitness descriptions of Cooper. Also, the hijacker had hair, while Christiansen was balding ... though, as one acquaintance of Christiansen recalled, “Kenny sometimes wore a toupee.”
He was Lynn Doyle “L.D.” Cooper. In 2011, a woman named Marla Cooper publicly suggested her late uncle, Lynn Doyle Cooper (or “L.D.”), pictured above, was D. B. Cooper. Her mother, Grace Hailey, was L. D.’s sister. She agreed with her daughter’s theory and had some interesting evidence to back up the family’s claims.
According to an ABC News report, Hailey didn’t remember much about Thanksgiving 1971when her brother-in-law returned to the house in Sisters, Oregon, but believed he could be the hijacker. Hailey’s statements were one reason the FBI thought the tip from Marla Cooper was credible. “I’ve always had a gut feeling it was L.D.,” Hailey told ABC News. “I think it was more what I didn’t know is what made me suspicious than what I did know, because whenever the topic came up, it immediately got cut off again.”
Hailey said that L.D. grew up in Sisters and was familiar with the area where the hijacker jumped – a fact consistent with the FBI’s theory that D.B. Cooper knew the Pacific Northwest. He was also a war veteran, which matches the theory that the hijacker had a military background, [and he] was a logger and an outdoorsman – tough enough, Hailey believed, to leap out of plane into the wilderness. He also showed up to a family Thanksgiving gathering in 1971 looking quite beat-up and claiming he had been in a car accident. For purposes of fingerprint identification, Marla Cooper gave the FBI a guitar strap that L.D. left behind, but it was found “not conducive to lifting fingerprints.” DNA evidence taken from the sample pulled from the hijacker’s tie, assumed to be that of the elusive Cooper – but a matter of some contention – did not match L. D.’s DNA. However, according to Special Agent Frederick Gutt “has not been ruled out as a suspect.”
He was Duane Weber. The FBI contends DNA testing ruled out “Duane Weber,” pictured below, who confessed on his deathbed that he was D.B. Cooper, but in 2000, he was a promising suspect. According to a CBS News report at the time, Weber was hospitalized with kidney disease in Florida. As he lay dying, he motioned to Jo Weber, his wife of 17 years, to come close. “Come here. Come closer,” he instructed. Then he said, “I have a secret to tell you. ... I’m Dan Cooper.”
After her husband’s death in 1995, Mrs. Weber started piecing together the hints her husband had dropped over the years. She recalled the sleep-talking nightmare Duane had about “leaving fingerprints on a plane,” an old knee injury he claimed he got from jumping out of a plane, the local library book on D.B. Cooper with Duane Weber’s handwriting in the margins .... “I can’t walk away from it,” she said. “Why would he have an old Northwest Airline ticket? Why would he take me to a place where eventually the money was found. Why all of this? There’s too many pieces of the puzzle that fit.”
At the time, the lead FBI agent on the case, Ralph Himmelsbach, believed her story, citing Weber’s physical resemblance to Cooper and his criminal background. As for DNA testing ruling him out – as Skyjack author in his magazine article, “inconclusive” is kinda “inconclusive” unto itself. Special Agent Fred Gutt said the DNA sample found on the tie had come from three different people and was not enough to rule Uncle L.D. out:
“In the past, other agents have used the partial DNA sample to rule out suspects, most notably Josephine Weber, who for the last fifteen years has been aggressively claiming her ex-husband Duane Weber (a career felon and con artist who also lived under the name John C. Collins until late in life) was Cooper ... Initially, Jo had no idea what he was talking about, and since she read about the actual alias the hijacker gave her (“Dan Cooper”) she’s been trying to prove her case.
“Agents took forensic samples from Duane, such as hair from his razor. Once the partial DNA sample was discovered on the tie in 2007, agents ruled Duane out, despite Jo’s shrill frustration about the quality of the sample. So if the DNA on the tie isn’t good enough to rule out Uncle L. D., is Cooper suspect Duane Weber back in? What about the others?”
He was Richard McCoy. D.B. Cooper’s daring (and apparently triumphant) escapade inspired more than a few copycats. The most high-profile was perpetrated by a man who some suspected wasn’t a copycat at all, Richard Floyd McCoy, Jr., a Vietnam veteran, former Green Beret helicopter pilot and avid skydiver, who was studying law at Brigham Young University. McCoy hijacked a plane in 1972 and parachuted to freedom with half-a-million dollars, but he was captured days later, having left behind way more evidence than who committed the 1971 heist. Convicted of the 1972 crime, McCoy busted out of jail in August 1974 and was killed three months later in an FBI shootout. Though his age – 29 at the time of the Cooper hijacking – and the fact he had an alibi cast some serious doubts, a 1991 book concerning his exploits raised his ranking on the “Who Was D.B. Cooper?” matrix.
D. B. Cooper: The Real McCoy, co-authored by an ex-FBI agent named Russell Calame, was published in 1991. The book speculated that Cooper and McCoy were really the same person, citing similar methods of hijacking and a tie left by Cooper similar to those worn by Brigham Young students. The author claimed McCoy “never admitted nor denied he was Cooper,” and when asked directly whether he was Cooper, replied “I don’t want to talk to you about it.” The agent who killed McCoy is quoted as saying, “When I shot Richard McCoy, I shot D.B. Cooper at the same time.” McCoy’s widow, Karen Burns McCoy, sued and won a settlement paid by the book’s co-authors and its publisher.
Was D.B. Cooper a He/She? Could D.B. Cooper have been a woman? Pilots-turned-authors Pat and Ron Forman believe so, citing a confession, later recanted, made by their friend Barbara Dayton – a World War II veteran who was born Robert Dayton. In 2008, the Formans spoke about their book, The Legend of D. . Cooper: Death by Natural Causes, to fellow author and Cooper enthusiast Bruce A. Smith, who wrote:
“The Formans say Dayton told them bits and pieces of her famous story over a life-long friendship that began in 1977. Perhaps even more startling than the notion that DB Cooper was a woman, the Formans verify Dayton’s claim that she received the first sex-change operation in Washington, which was performed in 1969. Thus, the Formans say, Dayton donned the supreme disguise by reverting to her male persona to become DB Cooper.
“One indisputable fact is that Barbara Dayton was a highly skilled pilot and parachutist, showing a fearlessness that bordered on reckless. In addition, she was a proficient machinist and explosive expert, all skills that DB Cooper displayed during his hijacking.
“... The Formans also say that Dayton never spent the money, and only did the crime to satisfy personal issues relating to her sex-change operation.
“Barb was a woman who always lived on the edge,” said the Formans. “She was a fascinating and remarkable woman.”
He was William Gossett. Described as a “quirky guy” with a military background and the necessary physical characteristics, college instructor Gossett, who died in 2003, told both his sons several times he was the hijacker. His son, Kirk, recalled taking a “strange trip” to Vancouver (Canada) with his father two years after the hijacking, possibly to stash the ransom money in a safety-deposit box.
The FBI was skeptical of Gossett’s claims, indicating t here wasn’t a single link to the Cooper case other than Gossett’s statements. However, others disagree. Galen Cook, a lawyer in Spokane, Wash., who has been investigating the Cooper case for more than two decades, said he submitted one of Gossett’s fingerprints to the Seattle FBI office and hopes it will confirm his theory, which he plans to publish in a book. Gossett had military experience, including wilderness survival training, and resembled the FBI composite sketch of Cooper, Cook said.
He was Family Killer John List. This irresistibly insane theory is included because it’s so improbable. John List killed his entire family in 1971, the same year D.B. Cooper took to the air. He was captured in 1989 after living under a false identity for 17 years until someone called in after he was featured on America’s Most Wanted.
Could he have been Cooper? Probably not, but just about anything is possible. According to the Los Angeles Times: “John List is one of any number of people suspected in the D. B. Cooper case,” FBI spokesman John Eyer said. ‘He will be investigated until he is eliminated.’”
Ralph Himmelsbach, a retired FBI agent who investigated the hijacking, believes Cooper died, but said List warrants an investigation. Himmelsbach, who now lives in Portland, Ore., said List and Cooper have similar descriptions. Cooper was described as in his mid-40s. List was 44 at the time of the slayings. Both were about the same height and weight and wore glasses. Himmelsbach also said List had spent the last $200,000 in his mother’s savings account shortly before the killings. Cooper demanded and received $200,000 before parachuting from the plane near Mount St. Helens in Washington state.Sources: Cheryl Eddy, io9, April 23, 2015, and CBS News.
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Post by Sam on Jul 3, 2016 23:00:09 GMT -5
I didn't know that John List was suspected of being D.B. Cooper. It's strange that after almost 50 years, the FBI hasn't been able to figure out who he was or if he survived the jump.
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Post by Graveyardbride on Jan 18, 2017 5:48:13 GMT -5
Did D.B. Cooper Work at Boeing?The FBI officially closed the file on D.B. Cooper last year, but that hasn’t stopped amateur detectives calling themselves “Citizen Sleuths” from continuing to work the case.
The nation’s only unsolved hijacking has captured national attention and speculation and prompted hundreds of theories since November 1971, when a person calling himself Dan Cooper hijacked a Portland-to-Seattle flight and demanded $200,000 in cash, four parachutes and food for the crew. About 45 minutes after Cooper let the passengers go and the crew took off from Seattle, Cooper donned a parachute, took the money and jumped out into the night somewhere north of Portland. Two remaining parachutes and a necktie were found where Cooper had been sitting. Interest in the mystery was reignited nine years later when a young boy found three bundles of cash worth nearly $6,000 that matched the serial numbers of the money given to Cooper in the sand near the Columbia River.
This year, Tom Kaye of Citizen Sleuths told KING 5 News that a new analysis of the tie left on the plane shows particulate matter that indicates the wearer smoked cigarettes regularly and may also have worked in one of the very rare industries where cerium, strontium sulfide and pure titanium are used. Kaye said these substances were used for Boeing’s high-tech Super Sonic Transport plane, developed in the 1960s and 70s, and wondered if Cooper could have been a manager, consultant or engineer at Boeing. Kaye and his group are asking for help from anyone who might be able to shed light on where that particular combination of metals could have been used. “Someone may be able to look at those particles and say ‘Oh my gosh. I know what that means having those particles on the tie,’” Kaye told the TV station. The amateur detectives also speculated that Cooper may have worked at a company that manufactured cathode ray tubes.
The testing of the tie was paid for by the Travel Channel television show Expedition Unknown, which will re-air the episode on D.B. Cooper and the Citizen Sleuths’ findings tonight at 8 p.m. Source: Christine Clarridge, The Seattle Times, January 17, 2017.
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Post by Sam on Jan 18, 2017 22:11:49 GMT -5
If he worked at Boeing in Seattle, wouldn't someone have recognized him from the drawing?
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Post by jason on Jan 19, 2017 0:43:48 GMT -5
What I never understood was why the man didn't bring the parachutes with him. If you were going to jump out of a plane, would you trust a parachute that you had demanded after hijacking a plane? I wouldn't!
And who the heck wears a clip-on tie?
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Post by Graveyardbride on Nov 19, 2017 11:43:41 GMT -5
Newly Released Letter Could Be from D.B. Cooper
Newly released FBI documents pertaining to the D.B. Cooper hijacking case include a letter that may only deepen the mystery surrounding the notorious unsolved crime which marks its 46th anniversary this week. “I knew from the start that I wouldn’t be caught,” says the undated, typewritten letter from a person claiming to be the man who said he had a bomb and commandeered a Northwest Airlines flight from Portland to Seattle on Nov. 24, 1971. After releasing passengers and crew members, the man then ordered the pilots to fly to Mexico, only to parachute out the back door somewhere over Washington’s rugged wooded terrain with $200,000.
“I didn’t rob Northwest Orient because I thought it would be romantic, heroic or any of the other euphemisms that seem to attach themselves to situations of high risk,” he continued. “I’m no modern-day Robin Hood. Unfortunately (I) do have only 14 months to live.”
The carbon-copy letter was turned over to the FBI three weeks after the hijacking by The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Seattle Times, which were each mailed a copy and published stories about its contents. The letter was in an envelope with a greater Seattle area postmark.
Last month, the FBI released a copy of the letter that was sent to The Post in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by acclaimed D.B. Cooper sleuth Tom Colbert, a Los Angeles TV and film producer. He believes the letter is real. “We have no doubt it’s from Cooper and the reason is that he cites he left no fingerprints on the plane,” he said. “The reason that’s critical is because it’s absolutely true. There were no prints found in the back of plane,” Colbert admitted. “They found 11 partial prints, that’s all, sides, fingers, tips and palm. But no prints of value were found.”
The FBI wrapped up its D.B. Cooper investigation last year without identifying the hijacker or ruling out the possibility that he could have been killed in the treacherous jump. The FBI says it considered 800 people as suspects. The agency also never established the authenticity of the letter to the four newspapers, or, for that matter, four other letters that also purported to be from the hijacker. Those letters were sent a few days after the hijacking.
The FBI got its biggest lead in the case in 1980 when a young boy walking along the Columbia River in Washington found a bundle of rotting $20 bills, the serial numbers of which matched those of the ransom money.
“My life has been one of hate, turmoil, hunger and more hate; this seemed to be the fastest and most profitable way to gain a few fast grains of peace of mind,” the writer of the letter said. “I don’t blame people for hating me for what I’ve done nor do I blame anybody for wanting me to be caught and punished, though this can never happen.” The writer indicated he wouldn’t get caught because he wasn’t a “boasting” man, left no fingerprints, wore a toupee and “wore putty make-up.” He added: “They could add or subtract from the composite a hundred times and not come up with an accurate description and we both know it.”
The person also said he was “not holed up in some obsure [sic] backwoods town” and was not a “psycho-pathic killer,” adding, “As a matter of fact I’ve never even received a speeding ticket.”
FBI agents in the field apprised FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover of their investigation into the letter, according to other documents the FBI turned over to Colbert along with the letter. “Efforts were made by [the Washington Field Office] to preserve the letter and envelope for latent fingerprints,” read an FBI memo. “However, both were handled by an unknown number of individuals at ‘The Washington Post’ prior to being obtained by WFO.” The memo also indicated that agents couldn’t figure out the significance of the typed number “717171684” opposite the name “Wash Post” in the bottom left corner of the letter.
In another memo, agents in Seattle requested that the FBI lab determine if the paper on which the letter was written could conceivably be from government stock, “noting that it resembles the carbon copy of the airtel material used by the Field Offices.”
Since January, the FBI has released more than 3,000 documents to Colbert, who formed a volunteer team of 40 former law enforcement officials to investigate the hijacking. The FBI indicated in court papers that it has more than 71,000 documents that may be responsive to Colbert’s lawsuit.
Colbert and his team believe D.B. Cooper is an individual named Robert Rackstraw who flew helicopters in Vietnam and is now 73 and living in the San Diego area. In March, Rackstraw sent the judge presiding over Colbert’s FOIA lawsuit a rambling 9-page letter that the judge took to be a motion to intervene in the case. In his letter, Rackstraw insisted he was not D. B. Cooper and accused Colbert of ruining his life.
The judge responded to the letter by issuing a ruling rejecting Rackstraw’s motion. In July, Rackstraw sent another letter to the court in which he again said he was not the hijacker.
Source: Robert Gearty, Fox News, November 19, 2017.
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Post by Joanna on Jun 28, 2018 12:17:50 GMT -5
Has D.B. Cooper Been Identified?The infamous skyjacker known as D.B. Cooper revealed his real identity to The Oregonian in March 1972, just a few months after he parachuted from Northwest Orient Flight 305 and disappeared. At least this is the conclusion of a longtime Cooper-case researcher who recently examined the letter with a former Army code-breaker. For the past couple of years, TV producer Thomas Colbert has been trying to convince the FBI that he and his team of retired law-enforcement and military officers have figured out who Cooper is – a former paratrooper and Vietnam War veteran named Robert Rackstraw.
Colbert is the author of the 2016 book The Last Master Outlaw, in which he lays out his evidence against Rackstraw, and producer of the History Channel documentary D.B. Cooper: Case Closed.
D.B. Cooper, whoever he actually is, became a folk hero after he took over Northwest’s Portland-to-Seattle flight on the evening of Nov. 24, 1971, secured $200,000 in ransom and then leapt from the plane somewhere over the Northwest. The skyjacker, who bought a seat on Flight 305 using the name “Dan Cooper,” has been the subject of songs, books and a Hollywood movie. The case officially remains unsolved. The popular myth presents D.B. Cooper as a romantic everyman who successfully hit out at The Establishment. But in Colbert’s telling, the real Cooper – Rackstraw – is a sociopath, a con man and quite possibly a murderer.
So far, the FBI doesn’t appear to be taking Colbert’s work seriously. The bureau closed the case without resolution in 2016 and has shown no sign of renewed interest. The reason for the FBI’s giving him the high-hat is, according to Colbert, because the bureau doesn’t want to admit that a group of volunteer investigators solved a high-profile case that its G-men couldn’t. “This is obviously about embarrassment and shame,” he told The Oregonian in February.
Arguably the strongest circumstantial evidence Colbert has are the encrypted codes he says Rackstraw included in letters sent to newspapers in 1971 and '72. Earlier this year, Colbert revealed that Rick Sherwood, a code breaker during the Vietnam War for the then-covert Army Security Agency and a new member of Colbert’s volunteer Cooper cold-case team, had identified an eye-opening code in a Dec. 11, 1971, letter sent to the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and Seattle Times.
Various newspapers received various D.B. Cooper letters in the months and years immediately after the skyjacking. Law enforcement deemed most of them to be hoaxes. But the Dec. 11, 1971, letter excited FBI investigators at the time because it revealed some details about the skyjacking that hadn’t been released to the public. It also included a series of seemingly random numbers on it. The FBI never made sense of them.
This is because the bureau’s agents didn’t know what they were looking for, Sherwood told The Oregonian in January. Sherwood, on the other hand, did know what he was looking for: He approached the numbers with Rackstraw as his suspect and with the knowledge that Rackstraw had the same Army “basic cryptology” training he had. Soon enough, Sherwood found possible cyphers in the numbers that identified Rackstraw’s Vietnam military units: the 371st Radio Research Unit, the 11th General Support Company and the Army Security Agency, the same outfit in which Sherwood also served.
Sherwood admitted it’s at least conceivable he’s simply seeing what he wants to see in the numbers. “It’s not impossible,” he said. “But what are the odds that these digits would add up to this? Astronomical. A million to one. Rackstraw didn’t think anyone would be able to break it.”
Rackstraw, who is retired and living in the San Diego area, was an FBI suspect in the skyjacking until he was “ruled out” in 1979. The former paratrooper made teasing comments to the media in the late 70s, hinting that he could be the hijacker, but in recent years he has insisted he is not D.B. Cooper. Rackstraw has not responded to phone calls from The Oregonian seeking comment.
Now Colbert has received another letter via the Freedom of Information Act. This one was sent in March 1972 from Jacksonville, Florida, to The Oregonian, which turned it over to the FBI. The letter’s author says he’s writing from the Bahamas, “so your silly troopers up there can stop looking for me. That is just how dumb this government is. I like your articles about me but you can stop them now. D.B. Cooper is not real.” The writer also offers a motive of sorts for why he pulled off the high-risk crime: “I had to do something with the experience Uncle [Sam] taught me, so here I am, a very rich man.” The letter adds: “And please tell the lackey cops D.B. Cooper is not my real name.”
Sherwood says the rather basic code in the March 1972 dispatch to The Oregonian is all about “converting letters to numbers and back to letters.” He noticed the author had repeated key words and phrases in the missive. “I knew that is where the writer had hidden messages,” he continued. Soon enough, he discovered the letter-writer, in “code-speak,” was identifying himself as “1st LT Robert Rackstraw.” Colbert calls it Rackstraw’s “confession.”
The D.B. Cooper skyjacking continues to fascinate the public all these years after it occurred – and suspects continue to surface. In May, a small publisher released a book claiming that a man named Walter Reca was the skyjacker. The evidence offered in support of the late Michigan man’s being Cooper isn’t especially compelling.
Colbert’s case against Rackstraw is much stronger, but it still has holes. The TV journalist has been accused by some fellow Cooper chasers of fitting facts to his theory and making assumptions. One example of the latter: Passengers and crew described the skyjacker as middle-aged, but Rackstraw was 28 in November 1971. Colbert explains Rackstraw was wearing a toupee and heavy makeup to make himself look older, though he lacks solid evidence to back up this assertion.
But with the letter cyphers in hand, Colbert is now convinced he not only has unmistakable evidence that Rackstraw is the skyjacker, but proof the former paratrooper has effectively admitted it. Of course, unless Colbert can snare a straightforward confession – or the FBI gets off the sidelines and offers its own conclusion – the debate over the D.B. Cooper case is certain to continue. Source: Douglas Perry, The Oregonian/OregonLive, June 28, 2018.
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Post by steve on Jun 28, 2018 23:54:50 GMT -5
So would that indicate that he is D.B. Cooper, or that he just doesn't want to get involved?
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Post by Isbeau on Jun 28, 2018 23:55:16 GMT -5
DB Cooper is the best "unsolved" case ever, even better than Zodiac and you don't have to look at gruesome crime scenes.
I'm on my fifth suspect at last count. I was sure I was right every time. I'm sure I'm right this time. Every other time I was totally wrong. These guys get it right the first time. Impossible. And they're totally ignoring the latest forensics on the tie. Titanium, radar elements.....I guess they figure he bought it used. Plus they have a book coming out so I just have to say....Good writers can make anything convincing....Unfortunately they fudge with the facts....
It was interesting to read the book written by the journalist who appeared on the first Rackstraw show. He got sucked into the French Canadian from Waterloo suspect from another Cooper book, the same first one I did. The book was very romantic. DB landing in a woman's backyard and she nursed his broken leg and they lived happily ever after.
www.readitforward.com/author-interview/geoffrey-gray-on-skyjack-the-hunt-for-d-b-cooper/
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Post by Sam on Jun 29, 2018 2:43:35 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?
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Post by Isbeau on Jun 29, 2018 13:11:01 GMT -5
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Post by kitty on Jun 30, 2018 19:50:45 GMT -5
A man could quit his job and say that he was moving to some other city to take a job and if he didn't have any close friends or family, he wouldn't be reported missing.
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Post by Isbeau on Jul 4, 2018 17:00:22 GMT -5
Yes and he could be reported missing in another country and the FBI might miss it.
I doubt the Canadian would have to go missing or fake his death after the DB Cooper hijack unless the police were onto him or thought they would be. There was probably no missing time in November that was unaccounted for either so I rule him out.
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Post by Graveyardbride on Nov 13, 2018 20:04:50 GMT -5
Was William J. Smith (right) D.B. Cooper? Has an Anonymous Researcher Identified D.B. Cooper? He didn’t want to get involved. But the crime and his suspicions were too big to pass up. So, fueled by an unlikely lead and a hunch, the data analyst started digging early this year. Soon enough, he found a man with a plethora of potential links to D.B. Cooper, possibly breaking wide open the only unsolved skyjacking case in U.S. history. Over the summer, he organized all his research and sent it to the FBI. “I am an analyst,” he wrote to the Bureau, “and in my professional opinion, there are too many connections to be simply a coincidence.” As he waited for a response, he kept digging – and slowly pieced together a fascinating tale of lives turned upside down by hard times, an unusual workplace friendship, and a daring plan to make a big statement.
For the uninitiated: On Nov. 24, 1971, a man using the name Dan Cooper hijacked Northwest Orient Flight 305 out of Portland and demanded money – a lot of it. “Do you have a grudge against Northwest?” a flight attendant asked Cooper during the skyjacking. His response: “I don’t have a grudge against your airline, Miss. I just have a grudge.” The polite, well-dressed criminal eventually parachuted from the Boeing 727 somewhere over the Pacific Northwest, with $200,000 in ransom strapped to his body. He disappeared into popular imagination.
Little is known about the skyjacker. Not his real name, nor his occupation, nor what led him to attempt such a daring crime, nor what happened to him or the vast majority of the stolen loot.
What we have are two police sketch-artist drawings that have fascinated true-crime aficionados for decades. The late journalist Darrell Bob Houston became obsessed with “the beautiful blandness of Cooper's face.” Offered author Geoffrey Gray: “What a face! ... The thin lips. The sloped forehead. The perky ears. The smile – that mischievous smile.”
Over the years, the search for the Flight 305 skyjacker has resulted in dozens of suspects. And, as it turned out, widespread interest in the case sparked to life again when the FBI officially abandoned the investigation in 2016. In just the past 12 months, various determined sleuths have argued, in turn, that the one true Dan Cooper – popularly known as D.B. Cooper – is a slippery Vietnam War veteran named Robert Rackstraw, long-time skydiving daredevil Sheridan Peterson and late self-proclaimed spy Walter Reca.
The data analyst does not believe any of those men is the notorious skyjacker, because he is convinced he has figured out the man’s true identity – and it’s someone no one else has ever identified as a suspect.
Our researcher is publicly remaining anonymous for now. A U.S. Army officer with a high security clearance, he has a solid professional reputation and wants to keep it that way. He’s worried his colleagues and supervisors will think he’s gone ‘round the bend. He is not one of the so-called “Cooperites,” the dismissive name used to describe amateur investigators who endlessly devote their free time to the case, and he doesn’t want to be identified as such.
Former investigative reporter Bruce Smith, author of the 2015 book D.B. Cooper and the FBI, doesn’t think the data analyst should be ashamed of his work. Smith spoke with the officer at length last spring, shortly after the man had begun his research. “He’s a legitimate guy,” says Smith, who, like The Oregonian, knows the man’s identity. “He’s done substantive work. I told him to go for it.”
The data analyst began researching the case because, simply enough, he had stumbled upon an obscure old book called D.B. Cooper: What Really Happened, by the late Max Gunther. The author claimed he was contacted in 1972 by a man who claimed to be the skyjacker. The man soon cut off communication and Gunther moved on. But a decade later, a woman calling herself Clara got in touch and insisted she was the widow of “Dan LeClair,” the man who told Gunther he was D.B. Cooper. Gunther’s book is Clara’s story about Cooper’s getaway and the love affair between two.
D.B. Cooper: What Really Happened was largely dismissed by both critics and Cooper fanatics when it came out in 1985. Schuyler Ingle, writing in the Los Angeles Times, described it as a “dumb book that falls somewhere in between nonfiction and speculation, depending on what the reader cares to believe.”
Others called it straight-up fiction and for good reason. A key subplot of the book – LeClair and Clara’s meet-cute experience in a small, unnamed Northwestern town the day after the skyjacking – is obviously untrue. However, this could be Clara’s attempt to keep her true identity hidden.
Another interpretation: Gunther just made it all up. Gunther interviewed retired FBI agent Ralph Himmelsbach for hours while researching his book. More than 30 years later, Himmelsbach, who led the Cooper investigation for almost a decade, rejects the book. “I think [Gunther] was highly unprofessional,” he told The Oregonian in August. “I would be leery of anything reported by him. I wouldn't count on anything he wrote.”
But our researcher, “Anonymous,” saw something in Gunther’s tome. Yes, the author played with the truth – purposely or not – turning a real-life crime mystery into an unreal romance for our times. But the data analyst is convinced someone did contact Gunther in 1972 claiming to be D.B. Cooper. And he wanted to find out who it was. Using the name “Dan LeClair” and various details from the book, as well as information from the FBI’s D.B. Cooper case files that have become public in recent years, Anonymous tracked the bread crumbs to a very real man named Dan Clair, a World War II Army veteran who died in 1990. The connection that made him realize he actually might be onto something: Dan Clair’s second wife was born March 2. In the book, Gunther writes that “LeClair,” with his careful initial correspondence, instructed the author to place an ad in The Village Voice on March 2 wishing his wife Clara a happy birthday. (Such an ad was indeed published in the New York newspaper on March 2, 1972. So if Gunther’s book, published 13 years later, was all a hoax perpetrated by the author, it was a very long con.)
The researcher – and, later, The Oregonian, – made multiple attempts to contact Gunther’s children, hoping to locate the author’s research notes or letters from “LeClair.” Perhaps recalling the shellacking their father took from critics when the book was released, they failed to respond.
Continuing his research, our anonymous army officer eventually determined that Clair probably wasn’t D.B. Cooper. More likely the skyjacker was a friend and co-worker of Clair’s, a native New Jerseyan by the name of William J. Smith, who died in January of this year at age 89. (Smith’s 1946 high-school yearbook includes a list of alumni killed in World War II. Among those memorialized: a man named Ira Daniel Cooper.)
Clair and Smith worked together at Penn Central Transportation Co. and one of its predecessors. For a while, they were both “yardies” at the Oak Island rail yard in Newark. It appears they bonded in the 1960s as Penn Central struggled to adapt to a changing economy. According to the analyst, the two men’s military backgrounds – Smith served in the Navy – and long experience in the railroad business would have made it possible for either of them to successfully parachute from a low-flying jetliner, find railroad tracks once they were on the ground and hop a freight train back to the East Coast. Poring over a 1971 railroad atlas, the hijacked plane’s flight path and the skyjacker’s likely jump zone, he determined that no matter where D.B. Cooper landed, he would have been no more than 5-to-7 miles from railroad tracks. “I believe he would have been able to see Interstate 5 from the air,” he says, adding that one rail line ran parallel to the highway.
As it all came together, the researcher found a 1980s photograph of Smith on a website devoted to the defunct Lehigh Valley Railroad – and he sat up with a start. That mischievous smile! The resemblance to the wanted-poster sketches was remarkable. The analyst theorizes that Smith probably used his friend’s life story to hide his true identity when corresponding with Gunther in 1972 and that his wife, Delores, took over the communications a decade later when Smith decided, once again, to tell his tale. “I would bet money it was Bill and Delores making the calls and sending the letters to Gunther,” he says. He also believes Smith and Clair may have been in on the skyjacking together, noting that Clair, who spent his career in relatively low-level jobs, retired in 1973 when he was just 54-years-old.
Then there’s his theory about the “grudge” the skyjacker famously mentioned to the Northwest flight attendant: It’s about the two men’s employer, Penn Central, which went belly-up in 1970. At the time, it was the largest American corporate bankruptcy ever. Thousands of workers lost their jobs in the 1960s as a series of railroad companies consolidated into Penn Central. With the bankruptcy, the pensions of thousands more were seriously threatened, prompting years-long court action. The data analyst is convinced Smith and Clair were “mad at the corporate establishment” in the U.S. and wanted to do something about it.
* * * Ultimately, the theory proffered by Anonymous hinges not on direct evidence of the crime, but on the narrative of a fanciful, 33-year-old book linking up with both Dan Clair’s life and information about the skyjacking that the FBI only recently released to the public. In the letter he sent to the FBI, the data analyst listed the key connections between the book’s D.B. Cooper and the real man whose life he believes the real Cooper assumed when talking to Gunther.
Both Gunther’s LeClair and the real Clair:
• Were born in Canada and ended up settling in New Jersey.
• Had no siblings.
• Served in the military during World War II. (Clair spent time at Fort Lewis in Washington state. The FBI concluded Cooper was likely familiar with the Seattle area.)
• Had two children, both born in the decade after World War II.
• Had a first wife who cheated on him. (Here the data analyst admits he’s making a supposition. In Gunther’s book, LeClair’s wife “grasped at love affairs” as her marriage and her husband’s career unraveled, becoming “less and less discreet.” Public records indicate the real Clair and his first wife, Carolyn, divorced the same year that Carolyn’s second husband broke up with his first wife.)
• Had a second wife who was divorced with no children. (And, as mentioned above, both the book’s Clara and Clair’s second wife, Jeanne, were born March 2.)
The researcher has found other interesting links and observations as well, including:
• Gunther’s book mentions that LeClair “had a scar on his left hand. It was a straight scar running from the knuckle at the base of the index finger to the fleshy part of the thumb.” Bill Smith’s Navy records, in which he indicates a “desire to fly” on his enrollment forms and applies for “combat aircrew training,” show he had a long scar on his right palm.
• About a year ago, the group Citizen Sleuths tested the clip-on tie D.B. Cooper left behind when he parachuted from the Boeing 727 and discovered it contained microscopic particles of metals such as titanium, aluminum, bismuth and stainless steel. This has led to speculation the skyjacker worked for Boeing. In his letter to the FBI, the data analyst cited the fact that railroads, of course, have maintenance facilities that contain exotic metals and that a clip-on tie “would be required for a manager working near a [rail yard’s] repair facility.” Smith was a manager – a yard master – in the latter part of his career.
• In the book, LeClair goes to a skydiving facility near Los Angeles in the summer of 1971. FBI case files, not available to the public until 2017, reveal that investigators believed the skyjacker likely visited the Elsinore Skydive Center near Los Angeles in 1971.
The researcher acknowledges he could be wrong about all this, or that Smith or Clair could have contacted Gunther, but were pulling an elaborate prank. But he doesn’t think so.
More pertinent: What about the FBI? Does the bureau take this new theory seriously? We don’t know. The bureau hasn’t responded to the army officer. And it offers only a boilerplate statement when the media asks about potential D.B. Cooper suspects. Commenting about specific tips, the FBI alleges, would be “inappropriate.”
The data analyst hopes that, by going public with his research, a surviving family member, friend or coworker will recall something potentially relevant that one of the men did or said, leading that person to contact the FBI.
He’d like to see the 47-year-old case solved, but he’s also found himself thinking about what led him down the D.B. Cooper rabbit hole in the first place. Is the skyjacker a hero, or just a not-very-common criminal? He’s decided there isn’t a straightforward answer. “If I was on that plane, I wouldn't have thought he was a hero,” he insists. “But after the fact, I might think, ‘OK, this took balls,’ especially if I knew he was an ordinary guy, a working man worried about his pension going away. That he wasn’t some arch-criminal. I would want to talk to that guy. I certainly wouldn’t [support] him over the FBI – that’s not who I am. But he is a kind of folk hero.”
Coming up: A free, day-long D.B. Cooper Conference, organized by case researcher Eric Ulis, will be held in Portland on Saturday, November 24.Source: Douglas Perry, The Oregonian/OregonLive, November 13, 2018.
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Post by Sam on Nov 13, 2018 21:32:10 GMT -5
This is at least the 8th person who someone has identified as D.B. Cooper. There's a resemblance between Smith and the sketch, but nobody can say that the sketch is completely accurate.
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