WASHINGTON (CN) - Triggering a collective of citizen sleuths known as Cooperites to circle the wagons, a team of private investigators says their code-breaker has definitively identified the man who hijacked a commercial plane in 1971 and parachuted off with a $200,00 ransom, never to be seen again.
"Our criminal investigation is finished,” said Thomas Colbert, a journalist and film producer who assembled the 40-member team. “We have the man, we know who he is.”
Gathered on Feb. 1 outside of FBI headquarters in Washington, the team said their decryption of several letters sent to newspapers in the days following the skyjacking confirm what they have believed for several years: that D.B. Cooper is Robert W. Rackstraw Sr., a Vietnam war veteran and former U.S. Army paratrooper now living near San Diego.
Rackstraw’s name actually came up in the Cooper investigation in the 1970s, and the connection was spurred on in part by his oblique reply to a NBC News reporter’s on-camera query. “I’m afraid of heights,” the former paratrooper replied with a smile. “Could have been. Could have been. I can’t commit myself on something like that.”
Colbert included the clip in a 2016 History Channel documentary of his earlier findings, but the Washington Post quoted D.B. Cooper authority Geoffrey Gray that year as saying Rackstraw was never a serious suspect.
Rackstraw has often denied that he is D.B. Cooper, but after Colbert’s Feb. 1 announcement he questioned why he should have to.
“There’s no denial whatsoever, my dear,” the 74-year-old Rackstraw said in a phone interview.
Of Colbert's investigative team, he added: "Have them sign under the penalty of perjury that everything they stated was true."
Rackstraw’s longtime attorney Dennis Roberts did not return a voice message seeking comment.
The FBI, which closed its investigation in 2016, has not announced plans to reopen the still-unsolved case.
CRACKING THE CODE
Though the name D.B. Cooper has taken on folk-hero status, it stems from a misidentification by the Associated Press in its initial reporting of the Nov. 24, 1971, hijacking of Northwest Orient Flight 305.
The Boeing 727 was taking off from Portland, Oregon, when a passenger who used the alias Dan Cooper passed a note to a flight attendant that demanded parachutes and $200,000, saying he had a bomb.
When the aircraft landed as scheduled in Seattle, Cooper traded the passengers for the ransom, then directed the pilots to fly to Mexico.
The plane was flying at Cooper’s requested 10,000 feet when he opened its rear staircase and parachuted out somewhere over the Pacific Northwest with the cash.
In the days following the hijacking, as the the largest manhunt in U.S. history turned up few leads, several newspapers received four mysterious letters. Only one was handwritten, but all are signed by D.B. Cooper.
Rick Sherwood, a code-breaker on Colbert’s team, said the first letter, sent on Nov. 27, 1971, contains a hidden message taunting the FBI.
Composed of cutout words and letters, the scrap of paper says "Attention!" and "Thanks for Hospitality," followed by "Was In A Rut."
Per Sherwood, those words contain two secret messages, "CAN FBI CATCH ME" and "SWS." He said SWS stands for the Special Warfare School, where Rackstraw would have learned the secret coding contained in the letters.