Free Republic

Headline: The search for D.B. Cooper: Investigators say they've confirmed skyjacker's identity by decoding long-lost 'confession' <>A team of cold-case investigators claim they’ve decoded a 1972 message by D.B. Cooper — and that it contains a confession from Vietnam veteran Robert Rackstraw, long suspected of being the infamous skyjacker. The letter was addressed to “The Portland Oregonian Newspaper.” Months earlier, a man identified as the fictitious Cooper had hijacked a Seattle-bound flight and later parachuted out of a plane with $200,000, never to be heard from again. “This letter is too (sic) let you know I am not dead but...

The man in the natty suit smoked a cigarette, ordered a bourbon and soda and carried a bomb in his briefcase. He sat in the rear of the passenger cabin on Northwest Orient Flight 305 from Portland to Seattle. Shortly after takeoff, he slipped the flight attendant a note explaining his intention to hijack the plane. Calmly, he put on a pair of sunglasses, demanded $200,000 in ransom and directed the pilot to land in Seattle. Once on the ground, the hijacker let 36 passengers exit, accepted the $200,000 and instructed the pilot to fly to Mexico. On Nov. 24,...

They were certain they knew the identity of the long-missing hijacker known as D.B. Cooper, and now the self-appointed investigators wanted their man to turn himself in to the FBI and sign over his life rights for a book and movie project... Rackstraw watched the documentary, he said in an interview. He watched himself being ambushed. He watched the man whose son found the ransom money along the Columbia River deny that it had been planted there. He watched a Northwest Orient flight attendant examine an old photo of him and his decades-old NBC interview and repeatedly say she didn’t...

It’s a bombshell development in a 45-year-old cold case mystery. A commercial airplane hijacker escaped with a daring parachute jump in 1971 and was never seen again. A team of private investigators says it has cracked a code that it says shows the infamous hijacker who went by the name D.B. Cooper is, in fact, a man who lives in San Diego named Robert Rackstraw. Rackstraw is a former Stockton resident, whose family also lived in Calaveras County.