Posted on 05/20/2018 10:46:44 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
A 47-year-old mystery finally may be resolved. Grand Rapids-based publisher Principia Media announced yesterday it has released a book that allegedly reveals the real identity of “D.B. Cooper,” the infamous skyjacker who in 1971 demanded a $200,000 ransom on board a flight from Portland, Oregon to Seattle’s Sea-Tac airport, before jumping 10,000 feet to his escape. The book, “D.B. Cooper & Me: A Criminal, A Spy, My Best Friend,” is by Carl Laurin, an alleged friend of the skyjacker, and details an investigation into Cooper’s identity. Laurin claims that Cooper was the late "military paratrooper, daredevil and intelligence operative" Walter R. Reca, Principia Media said. Reca, of Oscoda, Michigan, was born in 1933 and died in 2014, said Julie Hurley, a spokesperson for Principia Media. Principia Media said it has a set of supporting "evidence": the flight path and landing zone; "witness" testimony from an individual Laurin claims spoke with Cooper within an hour of his jump; and documentation of how the $200,000 was spent. Laurin also claims to have three hours of audio recording from 2008 between himself and the skyjacker. The publisher hosted a press conference today at the Amway Grand Plaza in Grand Rapids to discuss the book. The author will be signing copies of the book at 5:30 p.m. today at Schuler Books in Grand Rapids, at 2660 28th St. SE.
(Excerpt) Read more at grbj.com ...
Or, the FBI may know who Cooper is, but they were waved off from naming or charging him because of Cooper’s intelligence community ties. Per investigative reporters and an acquaintance who was an Assistant US Attorney in South Florida, in the 1970s and 80s, there were a number of Cuban intelligence operatives and assets who had near categorical immunity from prosecution because of their work for the CIA and military intelligence. For years, they played havoc by running drugs, laundering money, and taking over and corrupting banks. It is easy enough to imagine DB Cooper as having achieved a similar sort of immunity.
Still isn’t chump change.
Here was a copycat case =>
“On June 23, 1972, Martin J. McNally hijacked American Airlines Flight 119 while in flight from St. Louis to Tulsa. After receiving a ransom of $502,500 he jumped out of the back of the Boeing 727 in what was the ninth copycat hijacking in the style of D. B. Cooper.
The entire ransom as well as a weapon were found near Peru. A fingerprint led to his arrest.[11] The money was found in a 45-pound (20 kg) sealed canvas mail bag by local farmer Lowell Elliott while he was working in his soybean field.”
>> and documentation of how the $200,000 was spent.
I thought only a small amount of the money was ever seen in circulation.
Can’t spend it if it doesn’t circulate.
Will there still be interest in Hillary’s unsolved/uncharged crimes 100 years from now?
Now there's a magnetic ID strip in the bills, there wasn't in 1971. And it's easy to forget how automated things are in general compared to then. Yes, it would have been possible for people working manually to do it, it just wasn't done because the activity that would flag bank employees to do the check -- large deposit -- didn't take place within a reasonable timeframe after the robbery. This new suspect did open a new acc't with a large chunk of the money, but he did it in Canada.
>> in what was the ninth copycat hijacking in the style of D. B. Cooper.
Media doesn’t believe that sensational coverage of notorious crimes (like school shootings, Tylenol tamperings, or sadistic serial killers) spawns copycats.
The farmer was offered $10,000 by American Airlines to turn over the ransome money. He wanted more. I don’t know how it was finally settled.
I would have kept it and kept my mouth shut....
$5800 of (ruined, weathered) cash was found on a riverbank up in the boonies in 1980.
Gov. Abercrombie “was there” as a witness and gifted the happy couple with little Barry’s autographed t-ball.
When old bills are sent in to be destroyed, are the serial numbers recorded?
That's part of the claim -- that he was ID'd by some plausible-denial freelancers who told him he'd have to work for them or go to prison. Apparently the evidence offered by the author is a pile of passports and fake IDs and diary entries by the suspect. BTW, those who watch the video may be struck by the total lack of reaction by those in attendance. Number one, there probably weren't hundreds in attendance, and number two, Grand Rapids audiences are a little more reserved than are those found elsewhere in the country. Except when Trump is here of course.
According to the gubmint websites, $20 bills last about 7.9 years, and "approximately 24.8 million notes a day with a face value of approximately $560 million" are printed (various denominations). Without attempting to estimate and do a bunch of math, at this glance I'll take a stab at it and say, such a recording of undamaged serial numbers might take place using current technology, but in the early 1970s, even with a lower volume of printing but a similar avg lifespan, it didn't. And since we're talkin' gov't operation, even if the serial numbers get recorded, there's probably no cross reference between those and the "fugitive" bills.
...Subsequent analyses indicated that the original landing zone estimate was inaccurate: Scott, who was flying the aircraft manually because of Cooper's speed and altitude demands, later determined that his flight path was significantly farther east than initially assumed.[5] Additional data from a variety of sources—in particular Continental Airlines pilot Tom Bohan, who was flying four minutes behind Flight 305—indicated that the wind direction factored into drop zone calculations had been wrong, possibly by as much as 80 degrees.[70] This and other supplemental data suggested that the actual drop zone was probably south-southeast of the original estimate, in the drainage area of the Washougal River... The 1980 cash discovery launched several new rounds of conjecture and ultimately raised more questions than it answered. Initial statements by investigators and scientific consultants were founded on the assumption that the bundled bills washed freely into the Columbia River from one of its many connecting tributaries. An Army Corps of Engineers hydrologist noted that the bills had disintegrated in a "rounded" fashion and were matted together, indicating that they had been deposited by river action, as opposed to having been deliberately buried.[109] That conclusion, if correct, supported the opinion that Cooper had not landed near Lake Merwin nor any tributary of the Lewis River, which feeds into the Columbia well downstream from Tina Bar. It also lent credence to supplemental speculation (see Later developments above) that placed the drop zone near the Washougal River, which merges with the Columbia upstream from the discovery site. But the "free floating" hypothesis presented its own difficulties; it did not explain the ten bills missing from one packet, nor was there a logical reason that the three packets would have remained together after separating from the rest of the money. Physical evidence was incompatible with geologic evidence: the FBI's chief investigator, Himmelsbach, observed that free-floating bundles would have had to wash up on the bank "within a couple of years" of the hijacking; otherwise the rubber bands would have long since deteriorated,[111] an observation confirmed experimentally by the Cooper Research Team (see #Subsequent FBI disclosures below).[90] Geological evidence suggested that the bills arrived at Tina Bar well after 1974, the year of a Corps of Engineers dredging operation on that stretch of the river. Geologist Leonard Palmer of Portland State University found two distinct layers of sand and sediment between the clay deposited on the riverbank by the dredge and the sand layer in which the bills were buried, indicating that the bills arrived long after dredging had been completed... Duane L. Weber... [took] 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... Walter R. Reca (born Walter R. Peca) was a Michigan-native, a military veteran and original member of the Michigan Parachute Team. He was proposed as a suspect by his best friend Carl Laurin, a former airline pilot and expert parachuter himself, and then verified by Grand Rapids, MI-based publisher Principia Media at a press conference on May 17, 2018. In 2008, Reca confessed to being D.B. Cooper to Laurin via a phone conversation... [purportedly] landed near Cle Elum, Washingon.
wikipedia
Hard to take someone seriously who can’t even get the name right. He purchased his ticket as Dan Cooper. The media erroneously called him “D.B. Cooper” in a news report.
Hard to take that criticism seriously.
Yep ... but he will be forever known to the public as D.B. Cooper.
*
DB Cooper was wearing loafers when he jumped out of the back of the plane on a rainy, windy night.
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