#263 The Best Podcast Episode on D.B. Cooper

D. B. Cooper is the name we use for a man who hijacked a Boeing 727 aircraft in the pacific northwest, in the airspace between Portland and Seattle on Wednesday, November 24, 1971. He demanded a ransom and leaped from the plane with a parachute…probably. Despite a manhunt and massive FBI investigation, the man has never been located or identified. It remains the only unsolved case of air piracy in commercial aviation history. The FBI maintained an active investigation for 45 years after the hijacking. The FBI kept the case open till July 2016.

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Other possible suspects not mentioned in the show:

William Gossett

Gossett was a veteran who saw action in Korea and Vietnam. His military experience included advanced jump training and wilderness survival. He was a crazy fan of DB Cooper, claiming he could "write the epitaph for D.B. Cooper". Late in his life he reportedly told three of his sons, a retired Utah judge, and a friend in the Salt Lake City public defender's office that he had committed the hijacking. Photos of Gossett taken circa 1971 bear a close resemblance to the most widely circulated Cooper composite drawing. According to Galen Cook, a lawyer who has studied Gossett for years, claimed Gossett once showed his sons a key to a Vancouver safe deposit box which, he claimed, contained the ransom money. Gossett's eldest son, Greg, said that his father, a compulsive gambler who was always "strapped for cash", showed him "wads of cash" just before Christmas 1971, weeks after the Cooper hijacking. He speculated that Gossett gambled the money away in Las Vegas. In 1988, Gossett changed his name to "Wolfgang" and became a Roman Catholic priest, which some interpreted as an effort to disguise his identity. The FBI has no direct evidence implicating Gossett and cannot even reliably place him in the Pacific Northwest at the time of the hijacking.

Richard McCoy, Jr.

McCoy was an Army veteran who served two tours of duty in Vietnam, first as a demolition expert, and later, with the Green Berets as a helicopter pilot. On April 7, 1972, McCoy staged the best-known of the so-called "copycat" hijackings. He boarded United Airlines' Flight 855 (a Boeing 727 with rear stairs) in Denver, Colorado, brandishing what later proved to be a paperweight resembling a hand grenade and an unloaded handgun, he demanded four parachutes and $500,000. After delivery of the money and parachutes at San Francisco International Airport, McCoy ordered the aircraft back into the sky and bailed out over Provo, Utah, leaving behind his handwritten hijacking instructions and his fingerprints on a magazine he was reading. He was arrested on April 9 with the ransom cash in his possession, and after trial and conviction, received a 45-year sentence. Two years later he escaped from Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary with several accomplices by crashing a garbage truck through the main gate. Tracked down three months later in Virginia Beach, McCoy was killed in a shootout with FBI agents. The FBI agent who killed McCoy said "When I shot Richard McCoy, I shot D. B. Cooper at the same time." Although there is no reasonable doubt that McCoy committed the Denver hijacking, the FBI does not consider him a suspect in the Cooper case because of mismatches in age and description; also he had a level of skydiving skill well above that thought to be possessed by the hijacker; and they also had evidence that McCoy was in Las Vegas on the day of the Portland hijacking, and at home in Utah the day after, having Thanksgiving with his family.

Walter R. Reca

Walter R. Reca was a Michigan-native, a military veteran and original member of the Michigan Parachute Team. He was proposed as a suspect by his friend Carl Laurin, a former commercial airline pilot and expert parachuter himself, at a press conference on May 17, 2018. In 2008, Reca confessed to being D.B. Cooper to Laurin via a recorded phone call. In July 2018, Principia Media released a four-part documentary detailing their investigation. Reca gave Laurin permission in a notarized letter to share his story after he passed away in 2014, at age 80. He also allowed Laurin to tape their phone conversations about the crime over a six-week period in late 2008. In the over three hours of recordings, Reca gave new details about the hijacking that the public had not heard before. He also confessed to his niece, Lisa Story. Using his years of training to determine the location of the jump, Laurin concluded that D.B. Cooper landed near Cle Elum, Washington. According to written testimony, Jeff Osiadacz, a Cle Elum, Washington native, was driving his dump truck near Cle Elum the night of November 24, 1971, when he saw a man walking down the side of the road in the inclement weather. He assumed the man's car had broken down and was walking to get assistance. However, he did not have room in his truck to pick him up. He continued toward his destination, the Teanaway Junction Café just outside of Cle Elum. After ordering coffee, the man from the side of the road also entered the café looking like a "drowned rat", according to Osiadacz. The man sat next to him and asked if he would be able to give his friend directions if he called him on the phone. Osiadacz agreed to this and spoke with the man's friend, giving him directions to the cafe. Shortly after that, Osiadacz left for the Grange Hall to play in a band. The man offered to pay for his coffee, and the two amicably parted. Laurin began his search for the witness, after Reca described the landscape he saw while on his way to the drop zone: two bridges, some distinct lights; and his description of the exterior and interior of the café, as well as his encounter with Osiadacz. He described Osiadacz in detail, recalling that he was wearing western gear and had a guitar case. He dubbed him "Cowboy". Laurin consulted a map to find these particular landmarks and began making phone calls about the "Cowboy who had driven a dump truck." Laurin was put in contact with Osiadacz, who recalled meeting a man that night, described what he was wearing and what he looked like, and confirmed his identity as Reca after seeing a photo Laurin sent him. In addition to the taped confession, Laurin also has a confession written by Reca and long underwear allegedly worn by Reca under his black pants during the hijacking. In 2016, Laurin took the information to publisher Principia Media, who consulted with Joe Koenig, a certified fraud examiner and forensic linguist with 45 years of investigative experience. He evaluated all documents, including passports, identification cards, photographs, and newspaper clippings. Koenig found no evidence of tampering or manipulation and deemed all documentation authentic. After comparing Laurin's research to the available FBI records, he found no discrepancies that eliminated Reca as a suspect. He also thought it particularly significant that Osiadacz's statement of events on the night of November 24, 1971 was identical to the account that Reca made five years earlier. Koenig publicly stated at the Principia Media press conference on May 17, 2018 that he believes that Walter R. Reca was D.B. Cooper.

Duane Weber

Duane L. Weber was a World War II Army veteran who served time in at least six prisons from 1945 to 1968 for burglary and forgery. He was proposed as a suspect by his widow, based primarily on a deathbed confession: Three days before he died in 1995, Weber told his wife, "I am Dan Cooper." The name meant nothing to her, she said; but months later, a friend told her of its significance in the hijacking. She went to her local library to research D.B. Cooper, found Max Gunther's book, and discovered notations in the margins in her husband's handwriting. She then recalled, in retrospect, that Weber once had a nightmare during which he talked in his sleep about jumping from a plane, leaving his fingerprints on the "aft stairs". He also reportedly told her that an old knee injury had been incurred by "jumping out of a plane". Like the hijacker, Weber drank bourbon and chain smoked. Other circumstantial evidence included a 1979 trip to Seattle and the Columbia River, during which Weber took a walk alone along the river bank in the Tina Bar area; four months later Brian Ingram made his ransom cash discovery in the same area. The FBI eliminated Weber as an active suspect in July 1998 when his fingerprints did not match any of those processed in the hijacked plane, and no other direct evidence could be found to implicate him. Later, his DNA also failed to match the samples recovered from Cooper's tie, though the bureau has since conceded that they cannot be certain that the organic material on the tie came from Cooper.