Investigators Claim They've Discovered D.B. Cooper's Identity (rollingstone.com) 131
A team of former FBI investigators is claiming to have proof of the real identity of D.B. Cooper, the notorious airplane hijacker who has remained at large since he parachuted out of a Seattle-bound plane with $200,000 in November 1971. From a report: According to filmmaker and author Thomas Colbert -- who has led the independent investigation into the cold case for the last seven years -- the real Cooper is a 74-year-old Vietnam veteran named Robert Rackstraw. And the proof is hidden in a series of letters allegedly written by Cooper in the months after the hijacking and his disappearance. Rackstraw -- a former Special Forces paratrooper, explosives expert and pilot with about 22 different aliases -- was once a person of interest in the case, but was eliminated as a suspect by the FBI in 1979. His elimination was controversial amongst the investigating agents, and he remained, for many, the most viable suspect in what remains the only unsolved case of air piracy in the United States. In 2016, the FBI announced they were ending their investigation into the case.
No! (Score:1)
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No, but he did invent systemd.
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That's worse than stealing the money!
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Considering how long it's taken to get this far in the case, the answer is most likely yes.
discovered is easy, demonstrated ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Conclusively demonstrating the identity is much harder than developing a hypothesis.
Now that he lives in a nursing home... (Score:1)
...he is known to the staff as as D.B. Pooper.
Strange dialogue around this guy (Score:3)
One theory claims D.B. Cooper must have died because he took a parachute that was a dummy parachute, and so would have had just a stuffed backpack when he jumped. People believe this despite obvious questions like "why would you have something like that on a commercial airplane?" and "where is the body?"
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But in earlier days, "Deep Throat" was the ANTIDOTE to "Deep State".
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People just love conspiracy theories and will make up facts to create a better story and further their agenda.
We're all story-tellers at heart.
Pathetic little people.
No need to get judgmental. The facts can speak for themselves.
But the truth is that the ending of this investigation just proves how corrupt the FBI is and how the Deep State has taken control of our government.
Bravo. An excellent demonstration of your conspiracy theory proposition.
And I'd also like to point out that we haven't heard much from Stormy Daniels lately. Coincidence?! I think not!!
Stormy Daniels has had a sex-change operation and is secretly married to Hillary. Their offspring, conceived using alien DNA, are the templates for a clone army being created, raised and trained on secret child sex-worker enslavement camps on Mars. When the time comes, they will board fleets of DC-9s and travel to Earth and unleash their u
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The parachutes were not on the plane. They were provided to him as part of the ransom and they mistakenly gave him a dummy chute.
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"Mistakenly" gave him a dummy chute. Sounds like something that would be good. Here is $200,000, and here is a 'parachute". Jump ---> splat.
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Again, why would you have a dummy parachute on a plane?
He demanded, and was given, the money and chutes when the plane landed in Seattle.
This seems very stupid to me. Why didn't he bring his own parachute?
Other evidence that he died: The money was never spent.
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The money was never spent.
How is that known? The money hasn't been recovered, and could have been spent overseas or in a non-recorded transaction.
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Supposedly they know the serial numbers of all the bills they gave him. If the money was spent, entered the money supply, and started to circulate, inevitably some of it would make it back to the US one way or another. And it wouldn't surprise me either if some foreign banks also check serial numbers of US currency that passes through them.
I guess it's possible that the money was spent once and now is just sitting in someone's vault Scrooge McDuck style, but that seems unlikely.
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Re:Strange dialogue around this guy (Score:5, Informative)
The parachutes weren't on the commercial plane to start with; commercial passenger planes do not have parachutes because it is not realistic that people will parachute from them. At least not survive parachuting from them!
The parachutes came from a Seattle parachuting club, I think. They were put on the plane because Cooper demanded it. Among these chutes was one training chute with the reserve sewn shut. This was the one Cooper used for his jump. So a real parachute, just without a working reserve chute.
My main argument for that he survived is that if he didn't, the parachute would have been left laying about in the terrain, and could easily have been seen by searchers from planes. The area where he jumped did not have any snow, so a white parachute would likely have been visible. It is also not a totally uninhabited area, lots of farms and houses, so people (or their dogs) could easily have found him. But if he survived he could have removed evidence.
Another possibility, of course, is that he did die, someone found him and hid the body and evidence and pocketed the money.
Re: Strange dialogue around this guy (Score:2)
My main argument for that he survived is that if he didn't, the parachute would have been left laying about in the terrain, and could easily have been seen by searchers from planes. The area where he jumped did not have any snow, so a white parachute would likely have been visible.
This assumes he successfully deployed the canopy. He could have been knocked unconscious by the force of the exit and never had the chance to pull it.
Another possibility, of course, is that he did die, someone found him and hid the body and evidence and pocketed the money.
.... and then never spent it? Sure, I guess that's possible in the same way that Russell's Teapot is possible ...
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And a bear ate the cash? Come on.
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A clump of bills from the ransom was found in the bank of the Columbia River and identified by the FBI [coinworld.com]
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What if he didn't open the parachute? I don't think anyone actually saw it open.
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I believe the spare was a dummy, not the main chute. The fact that he did not recognize the clearly marked dummy chute (among others) is the reason that Rackstraw was eliminated as a suspect. "D. B. Cooper", whoever he was, did not know what he was doing with a parachute. He had no protection from the insane chill factor and the extreme buffeting as he exited the plane.
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People believe this despite obvious questions like "why would you have something like that on a commercial airplane?" and "where is the body?"
The parachute was not on the plane. It was one his demands to release hostages.
So its entirely plausible that he'd be given a dummy parachute.
However, he requested multiple parachutes as part of his hijacking demands. So the idea that the police would have deliberately given him a dummy parachute is pretty much unthinkable, because asking for multiple parachutes was precisely to raise the possibility of him having a hostage from the plane jump with him... as insurance against the parachutes being sabotaged.
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Thanks, that helps. Not sure where I read that or if it's just been too long and my memory is distorted. There were all kinds of bizarre claims about this guy.
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He's been debunked multiple times (Score:3)
Two words: Duke Lacrosse (Score:5, Informative)
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I'm more concerned why the government is wasting resources on cases like this. Meanwhile you can call up the FBI and give them the name of a person who is going to shoot up a school and they toss it in the trash.
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You apparently cannot read, even though this story was quite short. The FBI stopped its investigation 2 years ago, that's right in the story. This is a private organization. The investigators PREVIOUSLY worked for the FBI. Geez.
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So they worked the case for only 45 years then instead of 47? What a relief!
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Maybe you failed to read this is an FBI investigation somehow, you poor accused rapist?
Oh yeah, like the history of FBI investigations isn't rife with failure?
Hell, just look at Robert Mueller's history:
$4.65 million paid to Steven Hatfill over Mueller's botched anthrax investigation [wikipedia.org]
Putting innocent men on death row to cover up FBI involvement with Boston mobster Whitey Bulger [washingtonpost.com]:
FBI Must Pay $102 Million In Mob Case
A federal judge in Boston yesterday ordered the government to pay a record nearly $102 million for the FBI's role in the 1968 wrongful murder convictions of four men, and she powerfully condemned misconduct that she said ran "all the way up to the FBI director."
U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner's scathing ruling runs for more than 200 pages, calling the charges leveled against the nation's law enforcement agency "shocking" and the government's defense "absurd."
"Now is the time to say and say without equivocation: this 'cost' -- to the liberty of four men, to our system of justice -- is not remotely acceptable," Gertner wrote in explaining the award. "This case is about intentional misconduct, subornation of perjury, conspiracy, the framing of innocent men."
Gertner said the FBI knew that the star witness in a murder trial -- a "top echelon" informant in the agency's war against La Cosa Nostra, the Italian Mafia -- was lying when he identified the four wrongfully convicted men as responsible for a 1965 gangland slaying. But Gertner said agents vouched for the witness's credibility and for years covered up the lie as the men attempted to prove their innocence.
"The FBI's conduct was intentional, it was outrageous, it caused plaintiffs immeasurable and unbearable pain and the FBI must be held accountable," Gertner wrote.
Two of the men convicted, Louis Greco and Henry Tameleo, died behind bars. The others, Peter Limone, 73, and Joseph Salvati, 74, spent three decades in prison -- Limone, for a time, on death row -- before being freed when their convictions were overturned in the late 1990s. The civil lawsuit against the FBI was filed in 2002.
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Robert Mueller was an assistant US attorney in Boston - and wrote multiple letters to the courts denying these four men parole that reiterated the known false charges against them:
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I'M WORRIED ABOUT COOP!
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I'll bet it's Tommy Wiseau!
Right. See this XKCD cartoon [xkcd.com].
Decoding? (Score:1)
“And please tell the lackey cops D.B. Cooper is not my real name,” was decoded to “I am 1st Lt. Robert Rackstraw, D.B. Cooper is not my real name.”
What? How does lackey cops translate to Robert Rackstraw?
This smacks of some weird numerology, and cop hunches. I sure don't see any actual evidence pointing to Rackstraw being Cooper. Just someout with a pet theory .
Re: Decoding? (Score:2)
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Which then decodes to D.B. Cooper!
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Confirmation bias? (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Settled, at last! (Score:5, Funny)
Also decoded: "Vreejack is the True King of Slashdot. Long May He Reign." They left that bit out of the article, but you can decode it from the D.B. Cooper letters at your leisure.
Re: Settled, at last! (Score:1)
Not quite, it seems there was a typo, âoefreejack is the true king of slashdotâ - itâ(TM)s a 5 digit conspiracy
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Yeah, this whole thing seems rather silly. Colbert describes Rackstraw as a “narcissistic sociopath who never thought he would be caught. He was trying to prove that he was smarter than anyone else.“ He also describes him as someone who likes to taunt the police. But they’ve got a grand total of six letters from a narcissistic sociopath who’s been roaming free for 40 years - all of which were written not long after the skyjacking?
For that matter, even if they could prove the author o
" allegedly written by Cooper " (Score:1)
Allegedly...
I've been following these knuckleheads for years and they still have no proof at all... just a bunch of conjecture and innuendo.
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Just stop with these nonsense stories. Every year or two for 20+ years there will be another "it has finally been revealed" story all over the news. Same with Amelia Earhardt, Jack the Ripper, and Area 52. These mysteries have been solved so many times already, but there is always another "for sure" answer. Lets stop giving them free press unless they produce hard evidence.
Um, "Area 52" is surely a mystery, but everyone knows that Area 51 is where the keep the crashed aliens.
“Investigators claim” (Score:2)
Um, the have drawings of DB Cooper (Score:2)
but no photos of Rackstraw? Does he look anything like the drawings?
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There's this from Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
so this former special forces and expert (Score:2)
Just pardon whoever did it. (Score:2)
Most crimes have some sort of statute of limitations, why not this? Declare the deed pardoned and let whoever did it come forward. It's in the public interest (i.e. curiosity) to know whodunit and if they indeed survived they can probably even repay the money from potential book/film rights and everybody's happy.
Re:Just pardon whoever did it. (Score:5, Informative)
Because he's made fools of the police, the FBI, and pretty much the entire media- for decades. Add to that the fact that he's become sort of a folk legend/hero and there is absolutely no chance of pardon.
If he was to come forward they would nail him to the wall for all to see, and then go after his family for the 200k adjusted for inflation with interest and tax evasion and everything else they can come up with.
If he lived, I expect he a doddering old mastermind at this point. I'm hoping his dying breath spills the beans while he flips them the bird.
Nonsense (Score:3)
Am I missing something in that there is no evidence presented around the actual message coding except for pictures of letters and then apparently the secret messages which have been conveniently 'decoded' from them?
Considering it's rather trivial to produce an enciphering scheme that will transliterate any plaintext into any other the designer desires (not that the "investigators" even bothered in this case) I find the whole thing pretty suspect.
So has anybody read ... (Score:2)
... the Colbert Report?
<ducks ... >
Known for a while now (Score:3)
to quote another career criminal.... (Score:1)
Seriously.... it doesn't really matter...
Rolling Stone? Really?? (Score:2)
That paragon of journalistic integrity?
Again? (Score:1)
Something new? (Score:2)
(checks link) ... Oh... According to a story in Drooling Stoner. Never mind.
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Either the