Skyjacker D.B. Cooper Lead

From the LA Times

D.B. Cooper hijacking mystery is revived with 'promising lead'

A reported tip has led investigators to a person who might have information on D.B. Cooper's 1971 jetliner skyjacking, and an unspecified item has been sent to a lab. It's the 'most promising lead we have right now' in a case that has captivated the public imagination, an FBI spokesperson tells a Seattle newspaper.

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D.B. Cooper Leaped into History 40 Years Ago.

It is truly a great unsolved crime. The facts are as follows:

On a rainy Thanksgiving Eve in 1971

(November 24, 1971)

A passenger who gave his name as ‘Dan Cooper’ (the "D.B." is based on later errors in the media, but has become more widely known) boarded Flight 305 in Portland, Oregon, bound for Seattle. Using the threat of a bomb in his suitcase, Cooper hijacked the plane shortly after take off.

It landed in Seattle, where Cooper released the passengers unharmed in exchange for his ransom demands being met: $200,000 in unmarked bills and 4 parachutes. After taking on these items, Cooper directed the crew to take off once more, and fly to Reno, Nevada.

During this second flight, he sent all the crew to the cockpit, and parachuted from the plane with the money. He was never apprehended, and although approximately $5000 was later found in the area that he parachuted into, nothing else ever was. Cooper has never been identified, and his true name may never be known. The FBI has stated that it believes him to have died upon landing, and decayed to nothing before he could be found. Of course, they also claimed that he was rude and abusive in conversations with them, which is at variance with the recollections of the crew members who heard these conversations, so it’s possible that the Bureau may be engaged in a certain amount of ass-covering.

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Update:
From : http://www.newsmeat.com

By Steve Olafson – 54 mins ago

OKLAHOMA CITY (Reuters) – A woman claiming to be the niece of the mysterious skyjacker dubbed D.B. Cooper, who bailed out of a jetliner with $200,000 in ransom, says she recalls her uncle plotting the sensational caper at a family gathering in 1971.

Marla Wynn Cooper, 48, of Oklahoma City, told ABC News that she is the person who recently furnished the FBI new clues pointing to a previously unknown suspect and sparking a renewed probe of the 40-year-old case, said to be the only unsolved hijacking in U.S. aviation history.

The FBI in Seattle acknowledged earlier this week that a person who was close to the new suspect had obtained objects now being examined to see if they bear fingerprints matching those left behind on the hijacked plane.

An FBI spokesman in Seattle, Fred Gutt, declined again on Wednesday to reveal the person who came forward with the latest information, saying, "We do not identify witnesses in an investigation."

But Marla Cooper said she is certain that her uncle, Lynn Doyle Cooper, who went by the name L.D. Cooper, was the man who seized a Seattle-bound Northwest Orient Airlines flight in November 1971 by claiming to have a bomb. He vanished when he jumped out of the rear of the plane in mid-air with a parachute and $200,000 in cash.

The plane was flying at about 10,000 feet at night through a storm over wooded, rugged terrain in the Pacific Northwest, and the hijacker was presumed by many to have likely perished.

Still, the sensational Thanksgiving eve caper triggered a massive manhunt, and the FBI went on to consider over 800 suspects in the first five years after the crime.

The only trace from his getaway was a crumbling batch of $20 bills matching the ransom money's serial numbers, unearthed by a boy from a sandbar along the Columbia River in 1980.

CHILDHOOD MEMORIES

Marla Cooper, a sales executive for a coffee company, told ABC News she decided to come forward after piecing together vague childhood memories, which were reinforced with comments each of her parents made to her in more recent years.

She recalled seeing L.D. Cooper and another uncle during a family gathering at her grandmother's house in Oregon around Thanksgiving 1971 "planning something very mischievous."

"I was watching them using some very expensive walkie-talkies that they had purchased," she said, recounting that her uncles then "left to supposedly go turkey hunting."

When they returned, "My uncle L.D. was wearing a white T-shirt and was bloody and bruised and a mess, and I was horrified. I began to cry," she told ABC. "I asked them what happened, and they told me they'd been in a car accident."

But she also recalled overhearing one of her uncles say, "'We did it, our money problems are over, we've hijacked an airplane,'" and she recounted hearing them ask her father to "help them go back into the woods and find the money."

Marla Cooper said she gave the FBI a leather guitar strap her uncle had made, along with a 1972 Christmas photo of him with the same strap, for the FBI to use in fingerprint matching analysis.

She told ABC that her uncle, whom she never saw again after he returned injured from the Thanksgiving holiday episode, had served in the Korean War but was not a paratrooper. However, she recalled he was obsessed with a Canadian cartoon skydiving hero named Dan Cooper and even kept a Dan Cooper comic book tacked to a wall.

According to the FBI, the man in the dark business suit who hijacked Northwest flight 305 called himself Dan Cooper when he purchased a one-way ticket in Portland, Oregon, but the moniker D.B. Cooper originated from media reports and stuck.

L.D. Cooper died in 1999, his niece told ABC.

UPDATED FROM LA TIMES :

D.B. Cooper legend lives on

The FBI says DNA testing has failed to conclusively link a potential new suspect to the D.B. Cooper hijacking case. But then again, test results haven't exactly ruled out a link, either.

And that's good news for mystery lovers: It might have been a little disappointing if the tests had shut the lid on one of the most tantalizing cases in U.S. law enforcement. On Twitter, Brad Meltzer, author and host of History Channel's mystery-cracking "Decoded," remarked on the news: "D.B. Cooper just keeps getting better, right?"

To this day, the case of D.B. Cooper remains the FBI's only unsolved hijacking case. And for now, Cooper continues to be the one that got away.