Might DB Cooper have finally been identified?

[Casey]

Back in 1971, a hijacker leapt from the cargo hold of a 727, and was never seen again. An early misidentification by the FBI tagged him as a "D.B. Cooper", and his whereabouts (and the $200,000 he demanded to avoid blowing up the plane) vanished into legend.

Or did they?

Most say he died that cold night in '71, parachuting into a national forest in Washington. Not a trace of him has ever been found.

Might the mystery finally be solved?

[Enchanting_eyes]

Was it this forum that some woman claimed she was the wife of D.B. Cooper ?. It may have been another message board, and it would have been on the old boards. Hmmm time to see how my google skills are this morning.

E*E

[Arriah]

No, no, we found out who DB Cooper was 9 years ago. He's Jimmy James

[Enchanting_eyes]

Originally Posted by Enchanting_eyes

Was it this forum that some woman claimed she was the wife of D.B. Cooper ?. It may have been another message board, and it would have been on the old boards. Hmmm time to see how my google skills are this morning.

E*E

My mistake, it was not this board but this one: http://www.sitcomsonline.com/boards/...d.php?t=193465

The screen name was Ms. Cooper. There was another thread on the same board and she came up with some interesting things to say about D.B. Cooper and whom she claimed he was.

[Johnny Slick]

I am DB Cooper. Some may doubt my story and even go so far as to point out that I was -3 years old when I hijacked that plane, but what they don't know is that I was always a precocious child.

[Floater]

Sorry, I couldn't read the whole story. The beginning of it:

Florence Schaffner was 23, cute, perky, the sexy stewardess. Working on planes, she’d been approached by so many men that she’d taken to wearing a wig onboard [sic] to disguise herself.

made my stomach start turning inside out and when I reached this gem:

Schaffner’s mind was reeling. She imagined her parents back in Arkansas watching the evening news. She imagined the plane exploding. She imagined this man taking her hard [sic] by the wrist and raping her right there.

I had to go to the toilet to throw up.

An acme of journalism indeed and I find it very hard to take it seriously.

[mouse goddess]

There's a strip club near us called "D.B. Cooper's Mansion." I always thought that was an odd name, but maybe he's throwing us off with the obviousness, and actually LIVES there.

[Lainie]

Originally Posted by Arriah

No, no, we found out who DB Cooper was 9 years ago. He's Jimmy James

You beat me to it!!!

[Ali Infree]

The story in the OP is interesting, but there are holes:

1) The serial numbers on the $20 bills were known, Christiansen couldn't have been spending them without raising an alarm;
2) Details about the jump--I realize that the brother didn't gt to ask him, but how did D.B. Cooper survive the initial jump? Not saying that it was impossible to survive, but the odds were against him.
3) Wouldn't Christiansen have been a little old for this escapade?

Ali "I hope he got away with it" Infree

[Brad from Georgia]

I suppose the time has come at last. I...am D.B. Cooper.

Oh, no, wait. I am Spartacus. Sorry, I knew I was somebody.

Originally Posted by mouse goddess

There's a strip club near us called "D.B. Cooper's Mansion."

Hey! I live in The Woodlands. I was just thinking about that strip club when I read this. That's funny.

[KingDavid8]

Originally Posted by Arriah

No, no, we found out who DB Cooper was 9 years ago. He's Jimmy James

No, he's Charles Westmoreland

David

[AndrewR]

Originally Posted by Brad from Georgia

I suppose the time has come at last. I...am D.B. Cooper.

Cannot...resist...temptation....

No, I'm D.B. Cooper, and so's my wife!

[Hans Off]

Originally Posted by Ali Infree

The story in the OP is interesting, but there are holes:

1) The serial numbers on the $20 bills were known, Christiansen couldn't have been spending them without raising an alarm;
2) Details about the jump--I realize that the brother didn't gt to ask him, but how did D.B. Cooper survive the initial jump? Not saying that it was impossible to survive, but the odds were against him.
3) Wouldn't Christiansen have been a little old for this escapade?

Ali "I hope he got away with it" Infree

The article was printed in entirety in today's Sunday Times... for point 1, they found some, but not all of the money in the Columbia River nine years after the hijacking ($5800 in decomposing $20 bills) This really points to the fact that he survived the drop.

Known serial numbers aside, his only large outlay of money was for $14000 on a ranch and a year later $1500 for a parcel of land.

It's quite plausable that he was able to spend some og the cash without being detected.

For 2, I realise that the odds were against him, but If you could pick anyone to do it, then he had all the boxes ticked. He was lucky to survive, but had the background to do so.

And as for 3, according to the article he would have only been 45! Hardly geriactric!!

[Ali Infree]

Hans Off wrote:

And as for 3, according to the article he would have only been 45! Hardly geriactric!!
Yesterday 10:24 AM

I agree that his age did not preclude Christiansen from doing this, but there is no sign that this middle-aged airline pursuer had kept himself in good shape for an ordeal of this nature.

Imagine landing in a very dark forest, shoeless, during a snowstorm, that is what D.B. Cooper was facing. Even with an accomplice, he would need to survive the night and find his way out in the morning, or thereafter. Could it be done? I suppose so, still the high-risk jump is the one reason to believe that D.B. Cooper died that night, never to be found. [Well, maybe, even Mallory's body was eventually found on Mt. Everest.]

Known serial numbers aside, his only large outlay of money was for $14000 on a ranch and a year later $1500 for a parcel of land.
It's quite plausable that he was able to spend some og the cash without being detected.

[u]All[u] of the bills' serial numbers were known, and it is much more likely that spending them a year after the hijack would raise alarm. However, since I wrote my original post, I have re-thought this. A purser might know how to get sums of dollars out of the country to be re-introduced as bank deposits without the serial numbers appearing. This laundering of the money could have allowed him to spend sums safely with the serial number money sitting on deposit off shore.

So, a definite maybe, but still unlikely.

Ali "on the third hand" Infree

[ARubberChickenWithAPulley]

DB Cooper is a great mystery, and like all great mysteries, it's always interesting to have a new suspect emerge. Ken Christiansen is definitely an intriguing suspect, but in the end, the only real "evidence" we have that Christiansen was DB Cooper is that Christiansen was a former paratrooper who drank bourbon and smoked, looked somewhat like the DB Cooper sketch, worked from Northwest, and was from Washington.

Intriguing coincidences, no doubt, but I have a feeling that there is more than one former paratrooper who lived in Washington and smoked and liked Whiskey. And his working for Northwest is interesting, but is really neither here nor there on DB Cooper -- there isn't any specific reason to either believe or rule out that Cooper worked for Northwest. And the conversation where Christiansen told his brother he had "something you should know, but I cannot tell you!" Unfortunately, he didn't tell him, and that secret could have been almost anything: he was gay, he killed someone, he admitted to liking disco -- virtually anything.

Christiansen is intriguing, but I don't think anyone can name him -- or anyone else -- as DB Cooper definitively without some sort of hard evidence. And right now, there is nothing to connect Christiansen to DB Cooper other than they possibly have a few things in common.

[rogue74656]

I thought I had read this somewhere on the board, but did not find it in a search:

http://www.king5.com/localnews/inves...1aca59217.html

Carr says the tie, and a tie clasp that was also recovered from the plane, are not just part of Cooper nostalgia. They are, perhaps, the most powerful pieces of evidence recovered during 36 years of investigation.

For the first time, the FBI confirms it has been able to develop a DNA sample from evidence collected from the tie in 2001.

......

A report from February excused Weber as a suspect

-Rogue

[HelloLlama]

I know this is just a major coincidence, but that tie they found sure looks like the one Christiansen is wearing with his uniform.

[ARubberChickenWithAPulley]

Originally Posted by rogue74656

I thought I had read this somewhere on the board, but did not find it in a search:

http://www.king5.com/localnews/inves...1aca59217.html


-Rogue

Well that's a neat new development. It looks like they rules out at least one major suspect, so I wonder what else will come of this. On the one hand, it is cool they have this pretty definitive way of checking suspects. On the other hand, I wouldn't get too hopeful.

They did the same thing in Zodiac Killer case, extracting DNA from the stamp on one of his letters. The DNA didn't match any of the major suspects they tested (at least one suspect they still didn't rule out, since it is always possible he somehow got someone else to lick the stamp, but it definitely didn't help there case).

[snopes]

The FBI is making a new stab at identifying mysterious skyjacker Dan Cooper, who bailed out of an airliner in 1971 and vanished, releasing new details that it hopes will jog someone's memory.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...TAM&SECTION=US