What is it that fascinates us about crime cases like this? Meaning a case where money is involved and no one gets hurt. It’s as if we are rooting for the bad guy to get away with the loot, yay! Stuck it to the man. D.B. Cooper did, a fascinating story where a man hijacked a jet liner and jumped out a door with a bag full of money that was paid as ransom, never to be found or seen again. But after 45 years to amateur sleuths think they have found Mr. Cooper.
On Nov. 24, 1971, a passenger who called himself Dan Cooper told a flight attendant on Northwest Orient Flight 305 from Portland to Seattle that he had a bomb in his briefcase. Once the plane landed, Cooper swapped the passengers for parachutes and a suitcase bearing $200,000 and demanded to be taken to Mexico. Minutes after takeoff, he jumped out of the plane and into oblivion, touching off decades of investigation, speculation and fascination.
“Dan Cooper, who was later erroneously identified by a reporter as “D.B. Cooper,” the name that has stuck for four decades, was never found dead or alive and the crime remains unresolved,” notes the complaint filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Washington by Thomas Colbert, which seeks to obtain the FBI’s entire file on its investigation.
The FBI announced in July it was no longer actively investigating the case, but Colbert, a TV and film executive with law enforcement experience, believes he and his team of 40 former FBI agents, criminologists, journalists and attorneys have figured out who Cooper was and what became of him.
Colbert’s team has zeroed in on San Diego resident Robert Rackstraw, who is alive and well at age 72, as the man who jumped out of a plane at 10,000 feet and into 200 mph winds in pitch darkness, taking with him a small fortune. The team named Rackstraw as the possible suspect on a two-part History Channel show in July. Rackstraw had been a person of interest, but was never charged by the FBI.
For me I hope the case is never solved, everybody likes a good Jesse James story, where the big banks who take advantage of the little people get their comeuppance. It’s just the romantic in me I guess. The one that got away. What do you think?