Posted on 11/25/2011 2:35:32 PM PST by DogByte6RER
D.B. Cooper: 40 years later
November 24th, 2011, marks the 40th anniversary of the legendary Cooper case, an unsolved crime that has baffled agents, detectives and amateur sleuths, and spurned one of the greatest manhunts in law enforcement history.
The FBI’s case file on D.B. Cooper runs some forty feet long. It is located in the basement archives of the Bureau’s field office in Seattle, where for four decades agents have hunted for the man who ransomed a passenger jet for a small fortune and parachutes, then jumped out the back over the rural Northwest, during the middle of a storm, never to be seen again.
This Thanksgiving, November 24th, 2011, marks the 40th anniversary of the legendary Cooper case, an unsolved crime that has baffled agents, detectives and amateur sleuths, and spurned one of the greatest manhunts in law enforcement history.
Geoffrey Gray, author of The New York Times bestseller SKYJACK: The Hunt for D.B. Cooper, was the first reporter to gain access to the FBI’s Cooper files. In addition to hundreds of documents, he was able to get his hands on the Bureau’s photos, some seen here for the first time.
This image: A 1971 artist's sketch released by the FBI shows the skyjacker known as 'Dan Cooper' and 'D.B. Cooper', was made from the recollections of passengers and crew of a Northwest Orient Airlines jet he hijacked between Portland and Seattle, Nov. 24, 1971, Thanksgiving eve. FBI spokeswoman Ayn Sandalo Dietrich tells The Seattle Times that a law enforcement member directed investigators to a person who might have helpful information on Cooper.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
P in the water
P in the water, chillun
P in the water,
[I’m not going to finish this]
If as suggested the FBI knew they’d given him a bum parachute, then they really did want to keep things hush hush. A money hunt I could see, a manhunt no!
Brad Meltzer’s show Decoded just did a show about Cooper. Not sure if you saw it or not but it was very interesting. Meltzer’s team seemed to think that Cooper could have been a pilot for Northwest Airlines and did indeed live long after the heist.
Wasn’t a pilot. Kenneth Christansen was a steward for Northwest on the international routes. Former paratrooper.
The FBI? Do you believe from the same GOVERNMENT that took 40+ years to say Roswell was a weather balloon?
The government started the weather balloon story within three or four days of the Roswell crash. Yeah, I can believe that the FBI gave Cooper a nonfunctioning parachute. I'm less inclined to believe it was an accident.
I don’t get the joke. What do three guys pissing in the water have to do with D.B. Cooper??
That is the show I saw on this topic.
From all I've read, Cooper demanded and received 2 front chutes and 2 back chutes. He strapped on one front and one back chutes for his dive.
The 2007 announcements sounds like FBI face saving BS to me.
Ahh... OK. I missed seeing that one. Thanks. I always thought Coopers plan was brilliant and that he probably got away clean.
Source: http://www.katu.com/news/weird/12985152.html - Man who found D. B. Cooper money to auction it off.
When I tried linking it to here it says not available.
The 2007 announcements sounds like FBI face saving BS to me.
Not FBI-face-saving-BS, just poor reading by Scoutmaster. Cooper asked for two main chutes and two reserve chutes. One of the reserve chutes was a dummy chute for classroom instruction.
On the plane, the FBI found two chutes - the more technical sport main chute (Cooper had taken the older main chute) and the working reserve chute, which had been opened and had two of the shroud lines cut from the canopy.
I was wrong. If Cooper's main chute worked, then he had no need for his reserve. If Cooper needed his reserve, then he didn't have a working reserve.
The first skyjacker ever CAUGHT was Richard LaPoint, a few weeks after the D.B.Cooper incident. He was tried in Denver.
I know, because I got to be the courtroom artist.
My art school was contacted by a local TV station looking for a sketch artist. One of the station managers remembered me because I had babysat for his daughters a few times six years before and used to sketch their baby sleeping.
The trial only lasted for one day because LaPoint had a breakdown in his cell and couldn’t take it anymore so he pleaded guilty. I was so disappointed! But my sketches were on TV and I was thrilled.
I never knew what happened to him until now, looking him up on Google: http://extras.denverpost.com/news/news0121g.htm
Interesting story about LaPoint. Do you still have any of the court sketches? I would love to see them. I looked up Richard Charles LaPoint on the Bureau of Prisons website ... no record there. His case was probably too old to be in the online database.
I DID locate this cemetery record though for a Richard Charles LaPoint at:
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=54679948
If the Find A Grave website is correct, then this is your man.
Oh, dear. “;’^(
Looks like our guy, doesn’t it.
I think I have a few slides left of the sketches somewhere, but haven’t run across them in quite awhile.
That was really fun, sketching in court. People usually have about three different poses and I kept ongoing sketches of different key characters as they’d shift, so there really was plenty of time to finish, at least the line part. The crunch came AFTER when I was shuttled into a room to color them quickly and hand them over for the TV deadline. I think courtroom artists these days use scanners onsite so they can transmit instantly. At one point, I spilled my markers and got an icy glare from the judge but he didn’t kick me out!
Gee, thanks for researching LaPoint. ‘Never heard of findagrave.com!
Note: this topic is from . Thanks again DogByte6RER.
This covers 'Civ's preferred suspect very well. "Dan Cooper" was probably never seen standing by most of the witnesses, so the height estimate (even without the usual discrepancies between eyewitness descriptions and reality) has never been an obstacle to this idenification.
Brad Meltzer's Decoded: Unsolved Mystery of D.B. Cooper (S1, E6) | Full Episode | History
We had a children’s book that I read to our kids.
Some boy gets lost in the woods near Mt. Saint Helens.
Gets rescued by a Bigfoot and brought into the “lava tube caves”.
Somewhere in the story is DB Cooper and his cash making it into the caves! (I can’t recall if he was rescued by a Bigfoot or not!?)
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