• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

D.B. Cooper: The Parachuting Airline-Hijacker

Do you reckon D B Cooper survived?

  • yes

    Votes: 20 50.0%
  • no

    Votes: 20 50.0%

  • Total voters
    40
The FBI has apparently reopened its investigation into the Cooper case:

In response to a story in New York this week, the FBI has decided to revive its decades-old file on D.B. Cooper, the mysterious hijacker who parachuted out of a Northwest Airplane in 1971 with $200,000 in ransom money and was never seen again. The case, one of the FBI’s most legendary, is the only skyjacking in history that remains unsolved. This week, New York presented a new suspect in the case, Kenneth Christiansen, a deceased Northwest purser and ex-paratrooper. The resemblance of Christiansen to a composite sketch of Cooper was “uncanny,” according to Larry Carr, a federal agent in Seattle now spearheading the Cooper case. “It was the piece that pushed it over the edge,” he says. Carr’s hope is that “a relative out there might think, ‘Boy, Uncle John was a lot like that and he disappeared around that time.’” Carr says that the prevalent view inside the bureau is that Cooper died the night of the jump. “Conditions were too poor,” he says. And Carr suspects that, contrary to popular belief, Cooper was not a professional skydiver. As for Christiansen, the agent was troubled by certain physical characteristics that didn’t match eyewitness accounts, like height and eye color. But he is not ruling out any suspect until “we get a new starting point in the case.”

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2007/10/fb ... ooper.html
 
It would be amazing if they tracked him down after all this time. And he turned out to be Lord Lucan.

Has there ever been a case solved so long after the crime?
 
I think we already have a DB Cooper thread... can the Mods do their merging stuff?
 
FBI revives mystery of the skydiving hijacker

One of the most perplexing crimes of American history - in which an unassuming airline passenger hijacked a plane in 1971 and skydived out of the aircraft with $200,000 in ransom money - has been revived by the FBI.

The bureau has, for the first time, released pictures and information from the case on its website in the hope of resolving the identity and the fate of the parachuting passenger known as Dan Cooper.

On Nov 24, 1971, a man in his mid-40s bought a ticket in the name of D B Cooper for a Northwest Orient flight from Portland to Seattle. After take-off, he handed a flight attendant a note saying he had a bomb in his suitcase.

In Seattle, he exchanged all 36 passengers for the ransom money and four parachutes, but kept several crew members on board as he ordered the plane to take off for Mexico City. Over a rural part of Washington state, "Cooper" jumped from the plane with a parachute. Dead or alive, he has never been seen since.

The D B Cooper mystery has led to decades of speculation, and inspired books, films and television shows including the 1981 film, The Pursuit of D B Cooper, starring Robert Duvall as the investigating police officer.
tHundreds of suspects have been questioned and several men claimed to be him until they were ruled out by DNA samples taken from a clip-on tie that "Cooper" removed before jumping.

Some of the money was found on the banks of Washington's Columbia river in 1980, but otherwise the trail has long since gone cold.

However, the case received new impetus when it was taken over six months ago by Larry Carr, an FBI special agent and confessed D B Cooper buff.

Unlike his predecessors, who thought the robber might be a paratrooper, Mr Carr believes "Cooper" was no expert skydiver and probably never managed to open his parachute. He hopes modern technology could locate "Cooper's" landing point.

link

maximus otter


edited by TheQuixote: created hyperlink and merged threads
 
He bought the ticket in the name of "Dan Cooper", but a local person with the name "DB Cooper" was questioned and due to a media mix-up the name DB Cooper stuck.

I have read a lot on this case, i would like to see it solved.
 
If it's not D.B.'s parachute, then who could it possibly belong to? How many people skydive over that area anyway?
 
William Pratt was Boris Karloff's real name. Probably not him though. I think we have a DB Cooper thread somewhere.
 
I tend to agree with several other posters here, namely, that Cooper probably didn't survive since he never spent any of the money. It's hard to imagine him risking his life to get all that cash and then not use it.
 
AMPHIARAUS said:
Cooper has not used his hijacking loot on tequila or anything else. The FBI distributed to law enforcers and banks 100,000 copies of a 34-page pamphlet listing all the serial numbers from the Cooper $20 bills. Besides those found on the Columbia River, not a single bill has ever shown up in circulation, as far as the FBI admits.

That pretty much sums it up for me, would have been nice if he had got away with it :(

Spent overseas? Or destroyed in bulk in an accident? It's exceedingly unlikely, but all it would take is for Cooper or the recipient of his case to have lost all the bills at the same time: a boat sinks or a house burns down. All very unlikely, I agree, but then the whole case is out of the ordinary.
 
rynner said:
FBI revives mystery of the skydiving hijacker
By Tom Leonard in New York
Last Updated: 2:20am GMT 03/01/2008

One of the most perplexing crimes of American history - in which an unassuming airline passenger hijacked a plane in 1971 and skydived out of the aircraft with $200,000 in ransom money - has been revived by the FBI.
http://tinyurl.com/2ou2t6

And again... (very long article)

The 40-year mystery of America’s greatest skyjacking
After hijacking an aeroplane and extorting $200,000 from the FBI, DB Cooper coolly made his escape via parachute. Forty years on, is America’s most elusive fugitive finally in sight?
By Alex Hannaford
9:00PM BST 30 Jul 2011

The night before Thanksgiving, 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper, wearing a suit and raincoat, walked up to the Northwest Orient desk at Portland airport in the United State’s Pacific Northwest and spent $20 on a one-way ticket to Seattle.

On the plane, he donned a pair of dark sunglasses, ordered a whiskey, lit up a cigarette and coolly handed the stewardess a note. In capital letters, it read: I HAVE A BOMB IN MY BRIEFCASE. I WILL USE IT IF NECESSARY. I WANT YOU TO SIT NEXT TO ME. YOU ARE BEING HIJACKED.

What happened next would ensure Cooper a place in the pantheon of American folk heroes. He asked the stewardess to relay the following request to the captain: he wanted $200,000 and four parachutes, and in return, he’d allow 36 people to leave the aircraft when the plane landed in Seattle. The FBI organised the swap, and when the plane was sky-bound again, with just the pilot, co-pilot, one stewardess and Cooper on board, his instructions were to head for Mexico, maintaining an altitude under 10,000 feet. Then, somewhere over the lower Cascade mountains, 25 miles north west of Portland, Cooper released the plane’s aft stairs, stepped out, and, with one of the parachutes strapped to his back, jumped into the stormy night and was never seen or heard from again.

etc..

...I was fairly sure an interview with the FBI about the Cooper case would really just be a matter of routine – that they’d said all they could say over the past 40 years. But then Dietrich says something that catches me entirely off-guard.

“You’re the first to know this, but we do actually have a new suspect we’re looking at. And it comes from a credible lead who came to our attention recently via a law enforcement colleague.” I’m stunned. Dietrich says she can’t tell me much more, but like all the Cooper sleuths I’ve met over the past few days, I too have become a little obsessed with the case. “The credible lead is somebody whose possible connection to the hijacker is strong,” she says. “And the suspect is not a name that’s come up before.” Dietrich says agents have sent an item that belongs to him for testing at the forensics lab in Quantico, Virginia. “We’re hoping there are fingerprints they can take off of it,” she says. “It would be a significant lead. And this is looking like our most promising one to date.”

It’s a pending investigation, and she can’t tell me any more. I push her to see if she can say whether the suspect is still alive. “Generally, the large majority of subjects we look into now are already deceased based on the timing of this,” she says. I follow up with Dietrich a week after my visit, but she says it could be some time before the FBI gets the results back.

Perhaps we are finally close to finding out the real identity of DB Cooper. Until then, people will continue to visit Cooper Country, picture that stormy night back in 1971 when a parachute landed somewhere out over the lower Cascades, and wonder: what did happen?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/8667 ... cking.html
 
The full article has been posted elsewhere on the board, but at the end there's this glimmer of fresh light:

At the FBI headquarters in Seattle, a nondescript Seventies-style building in the heart of the city’s downtown area, I meet Ayn Dietrich, a former analyst with the bureau who is now tasked with handling inquiries about the Cooper case.

Throughout our meeting, Dietrich fields calls about counter terrorism on her Blackberry, an indication perhaps of how the FBI sees the Cooper case today – it takes a back seat to more pressing investigations.

“Being an open but not active case, we respond to every report or lead,” she tells me. “Our case agent will check them out and determine whether they’re credible. We’re not out there combing for more evidence but we’ve kept it open in the belief that there could be something out there. The money has surfaced before and perhaps more will surface.” She insists all the suspects still being touted by Cooper sleuths have been ruled out – either because they don’t match the DNA or fingerprints they have on file, or because the descriptions just don’t match up.

Before I arrived, I was fairly sure an interview with the FBI about the Cooper case would really just be a matter of routine – that they’d said all they could say over the past 40 years. But then Dietrich says something that catches me entirely off-guard.

“You’re the first to know this, but we do actually have a new suspect we’re looking at. And it comes from a credible lead who came to our attention recently via a law enforcement colleague.” I’m stunned. Dietrich says she can’t tell me much more, but like all the Cooper sleuths I’ve met over the past few days, I too have become a little obsessed with the case. “The credible lead is somebody whose possible connection to the hijacker is strong,” she says. “And the suspect is not a name that’s come up before.” Dietrich says agents have sent an item that belongs to him for testing at the forensics lab in Quantico, Virginia. “We’re hoping there are fingerprints they can take off of it,” she says. “It would be a significant lead. And this is looking like our most promising one to date.”

It’s a pending investigation, and she can’t tell me any more. I push her to see if she can say whether the suspect is still alive. “Generally, the large majority of subjects we look into now are already deceased based on the timing of this,” she says. I follow up with Dietrich a week after my visit, but she says it could be some time before the FBI gets the results back.

Perhaps we are finally close to finding out the real identity of DB Cooper. Until then, people will continue to visit Cooper Country, picture that stormy night back in 1971 when a parachute landed somewhere out over the lower Cascades, and wonder: what did happen?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/8667 ... cking.html
 
DB Cooper may have lived 30 years after 1971 plane hijack as FBI reveal new suspect only died a decade ago
By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 1:33 PM on 2nd August 2011

- Dead suspect, described by FBI as 'most promising one to date', found in region where hijacker parachuted from jet with $200,000 ransom money
- Investigators trying to match DNA evidence with that of man's effects
- Revelation suspect died a decade ago could quash claims he died on landing
- FBI refuse to reveal exactly where body was found - saying only 'Pacific Northwest' - in case that has fascinated amateur sleuths for decades

The man behind America's only unsolved airline hijacking may have lived for 30 years after parachuting from the passenger jet over Washington with $200,000 cash and then vanishing.
The elusive DB Cooper, as the cool-looking culprit became known, could have died around a decade ago, the FBI revealed after remains were found of a new suspect for the 1971 crime.

The body, which was discovered after manhunt following a 'promising' recent tip over a new identity for the mystery hijacker, was found in an unspecified part of the Pacific Northwest.
Investigators are now trying to match DNA evidence left on Raleigh brand cigarette butts the perpetrator smoked on board the commandeered plane with that of the dead suspect.

[...]

However, if the latest lead, which the FBI have described as 'looking like our most promising one to date', proves true, it means the hijacker beat almost insurmountable odds to evade justice by surviving decades after one of America's most notorious crimes
It follows last week's revelation that investigators were tracing a new possible suspect.

Yesterday, FBI agent Fred Gutt, who revealed that the bureau received the tip from a retired law enforcement source over a possible identity, said DNA tests have so far proven inconclusive.
But forensic experts are continuing to search for more fingerprints or DNA on the dead man's effects to compare with items the hijacker left behind.
The suspect is someone who has not been previously investigated, and Mr Gutt said initial vetting supported the belief of the tipster.

But he cautioned that the new lead may not pan out and that investigators were still pursuing other possibilities.
‘Maybe this is just someone else who just happened to look like him and whose life story just kind of paralleled,’ Mr Gutt said.

He said the new lead is also promising because of the way it came to the FBI.
The tipster initially discussed the case with a retired law enforcement officer who then contacted the FBI.
Only after the FBI contacted the witness directly did the person discuss the Cooper case with investigators.
‘They're not seeking attention,’ Mr Gutt said. ‘To the contrary, they're looking to avoid it.’

etc...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... e-ago.html
 
I hope they solve this case, I've seen the photofit so many time I just want to see his real face now.
 
SOURCE - NY Times

Woman Says Her Uncle Was a Famous Hijacker
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Published: August 3, 2011

SEATTLE — Marla Cooper stepped forward Wednesday to claim that her uncle Lynn Doyle Cooper was the famed “D. B. Cooper” who mesmerized the world by hijacking a plane almost 40 years ago and bailing out somewhere over the rugged terrain of southwest Washington. His body was never found.

If Ms. Cooper is correct, it could mean that the hijacker survived the jump from 10,000 feet and that a four-decade-old mystery is solved.

Or not.

After Ms. Cooper told her story to ABC News and CNN, law enforcement officials advised caution. Over the past 40 years, they said, many similar accounts have been reported. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has received tips on more than 1,000 suspects in the case and has yet to find a lead that pans out.

So far, officials said, they have not found anything to contradict Ms. Cooper’s account, but neither have they found any evidence to confirm it. The caper remains the only unsolved hijacking in American history.

The F.B.I. is in the process of seeking items with Lynn Doyle Cooper’s fingerprints on them. Ms. Cooper said she gave the bureau a leather guitar strap belonging to her uncle, who died in 1999. Fred Gutt, a special agent in the Seattle office of the F.B.I., said the bureau had tested the strap but could not lift clear fingerprints from it.

In a call to CNN from Oklahoma City, where she lives, Ms. Cooper said that it was hard to locate anything now that might have his prints. Her uncle drifted away from the family and remarried at some point, she said, and she has not talked to his widow, whose location she did not disclose. Mr. Cooper is buried at the Pilot Butte Cemetery near Bend, in central Oregon, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. He served in Korea.

Nonetheless, Ms. Cooper said she was “certain” that the hijacker was her uncle. She said she was writing a book about her contention but told ABC News that this was not her prime motivation in speaking out.

She was 8 years old at the time of the skyjacking in 1971, she said, when she overheard L. D. and another uncle speaking at her grandmother’s house in Sisters, Ore.

“My two uncles, who I only saw at holiday time, were planning something very mischievous,” she told ABC. They went out on Thanksgiving to hunt for turkeys; when they returned, they said L. D. had been hurt in a car accident.

“My uncle L. D. was wearing a white T-shirt, and he was bloody and bruised and a mess, and I was horrified. I began to cry,” she said. “My other uncle, who was with L. D., said, ‘Marla, just shut up and go get your dad.’ ”

Ms. Cooper said that in 1995, her father told her just before he died about his long-lost brother, adding, “Don’t you remember he hijacked that airplane?” Then, two years ago, she said, her mother mentioned that she had “always suspected” that L. D. was the hijacker.

Ms. Cooper showed ABC a photograph of her uncle from 1972 that included the guitar strap. The man in the picture bore a resemblance to the F.B.I.’s composite sketch, which many Coopermaniacs have dubbed the “Bing Crosby picture” because of the similarity to the crooner.

The bureau may never be able to prove the identity of the hijacker conclusively. That has not deterred Ms. Cooper.

“There’s a crime that’s taken place that hasn’t been solved,” she told ABC, “and I’m the only one, as far as I know, who knows what happened.”
 
The first thing that comes to mind about Marla Cooper's story is, "Where's the other uncle?"

The second thing that comes to mind is whether the FBI thought a person actually named 'Cooper' with military experience living in the general area was too obvious to seek out back in the 1970's.
 
http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/1...adian-link-to-famous-60s-era-plane-hijacking/
FBI-backed team finds Canadian link to famous ’70s plane hijacking
Postmedia News Nov 24, 2011 – 4:12 PM ET

By Randy Boswell


Forty years after his daring flight into criminal history as the mysterious hijacker-parachutist “D.B. Cooper,” the unidentified man who got away with a $200,000 ransom — or died trying — has led an FBI-backed team of “citizen sleuths” to conclude that he may have been a military-trained, French-Canadian factory manager or chemical engineer, probably from outside of Quebec.

A potential Canadian connection to one of the FBI’s most famous cold cases was first raised in 2009, when the U.S. agency revealed that Cooper appeared to have fashioned his identity and modus operandi from a 1960s-era, French-language comic book about a Royal Canadian Air Force test pilot and space traveller named Dan Cooper.

The hijacker — while popularly known as D.B. Cooper because of a news reporter’s error after the crime took place — actually identified himself as “Dan Cooper” when he first boarded a Northwest Orient Boeing 727 on Nov. 24, 1971 at the airport in Portland, Oregon.

On the cover of one issue of the Belgium-produced comic — sold in Europe and French Canada shortly before Cooper’s hijacking of a Portland-to-Seattle flight — the Canadian superhero is shown parachuting from an aircraft. And that’s what the man calling himself Cooper did four decades ago this week — during a rainstorm while flying somewhere above the dense forests of the Pacific Northwest — to escape justice after receiving his ransom payoff from U.S. authorities.
Related

Skyjacker D.B. Cooper ‘enjoyed the Grey Cup game,’ according to 1971 letter attributed to him

Now, the Cooper Research Team, headed by three civilian investigators who have had “special access” to FBI evidence files since 2009, is scheduled to discuss its probe of the case at a 40th anniversary D.B. Cooper symposium on Saturday in Portland.

Postmedia News

Special Agent Larry Carr of the Seattle office of the FBI developed theories connecting the iconic skyjacker known as D.B. Cooper to the comic book when he took over the case four years ago.

The informally deputized investigators, who were invited to analyze the Cooper mystery by Seattle-based FBI agent Larry Carr, are Tom Kaye, a paleontologist at Seattle’s Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, Illinois-based metallurgical engineer Alan Stone and University of Chicago scientific illustrator Carol Abraczinskas.

Other “intriguing” details from the Dan Cooper comic, Abraczinskas told Postmedia News on Thursday, include an episode involving a ransom delivered in a knapsack — again matching the real-life hijacking from 1971.

“It’s hard to know if all these details are just super-coincidental or if the hijacker may have gotten a blueprint for his ideas from the comic,” she added. “It’s easy to get sucked into the D.B. Cooper case. Did he live? Did he die? Did he get away with the money? Did he lose it? I have had so much fun with this.”

The team’s forensic analysis of Cooper’s tie, which the hijacker left on his seat before leaping from the aircraft with his cash, showed distinct traces of titanium — interpreted as apparent proof that he was employed at a metalworking plant, probably as a manager or chemical engineer, whose daily attire would have included a tie.

And in the researchers’ overview of their two-year probe, now posted at the team’s website, they point to both the French-language comic book and the hijacker’s curious phrasing of his ransom demand — “negotiable American currency” — as strong suggestions of his non-U.S. background.

FBI

The tie D.B. Cooper left behind and money found nine years after the 1971 hijacking.

“The Dan Cooper comic was only published in French, making Cooper’s unusual request very interesting,” the team notes, highlighting the hijacker’s apparent knowledge of the language but also — according to witnesses held hostage on the plane — his accent-free use of English.

“Since no American citizen would use those terms (‘negotiable American currency’), it suggests that Cooper was not originally from this country,” the researchers state.

And if he was from another country, they add, then “his lack of accent points to French Canada as one of the few places in the world where (a French speaker) could hail from and not have an accent.”

They further note that “Franco-Manitobans, the Franco-Albertans, and possibly the Franco-Ontarians” are most likely to have both a good command of French and no discernible accent when speaking English, since French Canadians living outside of Quebec “live in a predominantly anglophone environment.”

Amateur sleuths, then, should “keep an eye out for a suspect from Canada, with military experience in airplanes,” the team advises.

“He would have come to this country to work in or around titanium metal fabrication. He was a gentleman, well dressed and smoked cigarettes,” the researchers add. “Most notably, he probably lived a normal life and had one big problem that required about $200,000 in cash to solve.”

The Cooper case was revived in 2006 when the FBI used the 35th anniversary of the hijacking to retell the story of what it calls “one of our greatest unsolved mysteries.”

Carr, appointed special agent in charge of the case, later released composite sketches of the suspect and photos of key evidence collected during the original investigation, inviting the public to send in fresh clues to help solve the mystery.

“Even though our investigation has remained open, it doesn’t make sense for the FBI to commit substantial resources to this nearly four-decade-old crime,” Carr said at the time. “So if the public can help, by whatever means, maybe we can shake something loose.”

The man calling himself Dan Cooper had claimed, during an afternoon flight between Portland and Seattle, to a have a bomb in his briefcase. When the plane landed in Seattle, 36 passengers were released after the hijacker received $200,000 in cash and four parachutes.

He then ordered the plane’s flight crew to take off for Mexico and — at an unknown location south of Seattle — the man parachuted from a rear door of the jet.

Carr and other experts have stated that it’s unlikely Cooper survived the nighttime jump over rugged land in a driving rain.

But the suspect’s body has never been found. In 1980, along the Columbia River in southwest Washington state, a boy found a rotting package of $5,800 in $20 bills that matched the serial numbers of the ransom money.

The Cooper case has inspired several books and the 1981 Hollywood film The Pursuit of D.B. Cooper, starring Treat Williams and Robert Duvall. Numerous websites devoted to unravelling the mystery attest to the public’s enduring fascination with the only unsolved airline hijacking in U.S. history.
 
I reviewed a serious book about Cooper and offered it to the FT. I got it a couple of months before release, without the FT needing to do anything.

I offered it and yet the FT didn't feel it even worth the effort of an email saying "No thanks, it was crap!"

The book was ... ok ... and I'd like to think my review was fair.

But can the editorial staff afford to be polite, even to tell me to "sod off, your review was lousy"? Nope. Too much effort, perhaps?

Anyhow, I still find Cooper's crime and (in more than one way) it's fallout fascinating!
 
You could always post the review here on this thread? Of course you won't get paid for it...
 
The way things are, I wouldn't get paid to publish in the mag. I got the review copy for free and my time is paid by other projects so I'm not bothered about being paid for my work.

I would've liked to have seen it in print, shoulder-to-shoulder with adverts for vibrators and reviews of slasher-movies.

er. Hang on.
 
Just as the Canadian angle opens up, the Marla Cooper angle surfaces again ...

DB Cooper Case Solved? Witness Marla Cooper Says FBI May Soon Close Investigation

Forty years after a man in a suit commandeered a 727 jet and parachuted into the night carrying $200,000, federal investigators may be close to cracking the only unsolved airplane hijacking in U.S. history.

The FBI could soon solve the mystery of DB Cooper, the man sought by authorities since the 1971 hijacking of a Northwest Orient Airlines flight from Portland to Seattle, according to a witness who has been described by the agency as credible, NWCN reports.

Investigators are currently attempting to link fingerprints left behind on the airplane with fingerprints obtained from the toothbrush of a man known as LD Cooper, the uncle of a tipster who contacted authorities with suspicions about her relative earlier this year.

Marla Cooper says her uncle was injured when he arrived at her family's home in Sisters, Ore. the day after the hijacking, but he blamed his wounds on a car crash.
"I knew he did it, it wasn't speculation, I was there when he pulled into the driveway," Marla Cooper told the news station.

LD Cooper died in 1999.

The hijacker bought his ticket under the alias "Dan Cooper," but news reports misidentified his name as DB Cooper.

The FBI won't comment on the specifics of the investigation, but Marla Cooper says a lead investigator informed her that the case was winding down.

"Regardless of the findings of the fingerprints, he told me the case was closing because they were certain my uncle did it," she said, according to told the news station.

The agency recently confirmed that it has started conducting forensic tests on evidence including partial fingerprints that could be linked to the hijacking.

SOURCE: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/0 ... 1%7C117858
 
After all those years of seeing the photofits, I'd love to see a photo of the guy who actually did it.
 
Another suspect (and yes, there's a book) :

The hijacker's true identity has remained a mystery but now author Ross Richardson believes Cooper was missing Michigan man Richard Lepsy.

In his book 'Still Missing' he details how the father-of-four vanished without a trace in October 1969, aged 33, leaving behind his wife and children.

His daughter, Lisa Lepsy, says the composite sketch of Cooper compiled in 1971 always bore a strong resemblance to her father.

According to Ms Lepsy, a skinny black tie found aboard hijacked plane, which belonged to the hijacker, looked identical to her dad's.

Her father vanished from work telling his bosses he would not be back.

“He didn't have anything with him expect the clothes on his back,” said Lisa.

It was later discovered $2,000 was missing from his work’s safe and a colleague told police Lepsy had bought a ticket to Mexico.

Two years after not hearing from her father the hijack took place.

As the news appeared on television Lisa recalled that when DB Cooper’s composite sketch was shown, everyone in her family looked at each other and said “That’s dad”.

“We were stunned because the resemblance was unbelievable, and my brothers and I were all sure that was our dad,” she said.

However despite their beliefs the FBI have played down Lepsy as a suspect, saying they are no longer actively looking for new information in the hijacking case.

“That said, when tips come in to us, we assess each one and, if credible, pursue the lead accordingly,” a statement from the agency read.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/mystery-db-cooper-hijacker-who-6906096
 
This latest connection seems worthy of a bit more interest from the FBI than they're showing, I would have thought. Mind you, so do most of the other named suspects on this thread, and they can't all be Cooper!
 
I love the idea of the whole crime - it's proper boy's own adventure type stuff - but with the ever increasing number of possible suspects along with the lack of any real evidence this is all starting to feel a bit like a modern Jack the Ripper to me. I get the feeling that we will never get to the true identity of D.B. Cooper, and people will probably be discussing it for a good while yet ...
 
Back
Top