After a 45-year comprehensive investigation, in 2016 the FBI finally called off its official search for DB Cooper, the mysterious man who, on November 24, 1971, hijacked a plane bound for Portland, Oregon, in Seattle, Washington. In one of the most daring and unforgettable crimes in aviation history, he parachuted from the Boeing 727 with a $ 200,000 ransom, escaping capture and delighting amateur detectors around the world.
In the decades since that brazen act, the bureau has eliminated all but two of the 1,000 suspects in the case. The most important leads included $ 5,800 of the ransom found by a boy in 1980 along the Columbia River in Washington State, and provocative letters received by several American newspapers. The letters, in particular, offered tantalizing clues to the identity of the man behind the alias who escaped with what would have been $ 1.2 million today.
READ MORE: Who Was DB Cooper?
Artist’s sketch by DB Cooper.
FBI
At least six letters – typed, handwritten, and made using cut-out ransom letters – were sent to several newspapers shortly after the hijacking, all claiming to be from Cooper. The FBI considered most of them to be hoaxes. But oddly enough, they withheld the last two letters from the public until the 2000s, which may indicate that they took them much more seriously.
A first letter, signed “DB Cooper” and sent from Oakdale, California to Reno Evening Gazette, was received on November 29, 1971. Using copy and paste letters from a Sacramento Bee newspaper, he read: “Attention! Thanks for the hospitality. Was in a rut.
A second letter, handwritten and signed “DB Cooper”, was postmarked on November 30, 1971 and sent to Province of Vancouver in British Columbia with the following message:
“The composite drawing on page 3 suspected by the FBI does not represent the truth.
“I enjoyed the Gray Cup game. I’m leaving Vancouver.
“Thanks for the hospitality.”
WATCH: DB Cooper: Case closed? on HISTORY Vault.
NorthWest Orient Airlines ticket from Dan Cooper, pseudonym of the unidentified man who hijacked a Boeing 727 on November 24, 1971. The man bought his plane ticket under the pseudonym Dan Cooper but has become known in the tradition popular under the name of DB Cooper.
Age fotostock / Alamy Stock Photo
A third letter, sent to northern Oregon on December 1, 1971, was received by the Portland Oregonian. Using letters cut from a Playboy magazine, he said, “I’m alive and well in my hometown. PO The system that beats the system. ”
Letter number four, received by the Reno Evening Gazette, was also posted on December 1 (but from the Sacramento, CA area). Glued from letters, it said, “Plan your retirement income” and was signed “DB Cooper”.
A fifth letter, signed “DB Cooper” and overflowing with taunts, was mailed on December 11, 1971 and sent to The New York Times, Seattle Times, Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post. –and The FBI released its contents after a private investigative team led by documentary filmmaker Thomas Colbert filed a Freedom of Information Act request.
“Gentlemen, I knew from the start that I would not be caught,” said the letter. “I didn’t fly the Northwest East because I thought it would be romantic, heroic, or whatever euphemism that seems to attach to situations I’m not modern day Robin Hood. Sadly I only have that 14 months to live.
“My life has been marked by hatred, unrest, hunger and more hate; it seemed like the fastest, most cost-effective way to quickly gain a few grains of peace of mind. I don’t blame people for hating me for what I’ve done, and I don’t blame anyone for wanting me caught and punished, although that can never happen. Here are some (not all) of the things that go against the authorities:
I’m not a boastful man
I left no fingerprints
I wore a toupee
I wore putty makeup
“They could add or subtract from the composite a hundred times and not come up with a precise description; and we both know it. I have been on several air flights before and am not locked in a dark backwood town. I’m not a psychopathic killer (sic) either. In fact, I never even got a speeding ticket.
Thank you for your attention.”
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Colbert’s team found codes in the fifth and sixth letters, including the digits “717171684 *”, which they deciphered as “I am LT Robert W. Rackstraw”. Rackstraw, a Vietnam War vet and former U.S. paratrooper who died in 2019, both denied and refused to consider himself the infamous skyjacker, according to the Oregonian. The FBI investigated and eliminated Rackstraw in the late 1970s.
A sixth letter, posted March 28, 1972, from Jacksonville, Florida to Portland Oregon and signed “A Rich Man”, read: “This letter is too (sic) to let you know that I am not dead but really alive and just returned from the Bahamas, so your stupid soldiers over there can stop to look for me. That is how stupid this government is. I love your posts about me but you can stop them now DB Cooper is not real.
“I had to do something with the experience my uncle gave me, so here I am, a very rich man. Uncle gave too much to the idiots of the world and no job for me. I had to do this to relieve myself of the frustration. I want to get out of the system and saw a path through good old Unk. Now you know. I go around the world and they’ll never find me because I’m smarter than the system lackeys cops and lame duck bosses. Now it’s uncle’s turn to cry and pay one of his own cash for change. (And please tell the lackey cops DB Cooper isn’t my real name).
Again, Colbert’s team says this letter is coded to say, “I am LT Robert W. Rackstraw, DB Cooper is not my real name” and “I want to exit the system and saw a means by hijacking a jet plane. “
But the identity of Cooper – and the author (s) of the letters – remains officially a mystery. FBI spokeswoman Ayn Sandalo Dietrich told the Reno Gazette Journal in 2014, the letters were sent to the FBI lab in Washington, DC for analysis, but nothing was found: “It was never proven whether the hijacker wrote the letters.”
