Just in time for the holidays and an upcoming conference, another D.B. Cooper researcher who claims to be 'a U.S. Army officer with a security clearance' comes up with yet another possible suspect for the hijacking:
Over the years, the hunt for the Flight 305 perpetrator has surfaced dozens of suspects. And, as it turned out, widespread interest in the case sparked back to life when the FBI officially abandoned the investigation in 2016. In just the past 12 months, various determined sleuths have argued, in turn, that the one true Dan Cooper -- popularly known as D.B. Cooper -- is a slippery Vietnam War veteran named Robert Rackstraw, long-time skydiving daredevil Sheridan Peterson, and late self-proclaimed spy Walter Reca.
The data analyst does not believe any of those men is the notorious skyjacker. Because he's convinced he has figured out who really is -- and it's someone no one else has ever identified as a suspect.
Our researcher is publicly remaining anonymous for now. A U.S. Army officer with a security clearance, he has a solid professional reputation -- and he wants to keep it that way. He's worried that his colleagues and supervisors will think he's gone 'round the bend. He is not one of the so-called "Cooperites," the dismissive name given to the amateur investigators who endlessly devote their free time to the case, and he doesn't want to be identified as such.
Former investigative reporter Bruce Smith, author of the 2015 book "D.B. Cooper and the FBI," thinks the data analyst has nothing to be ashamed of. He spoke with the Army officer at length last spring, shortly after the man had begun his research.
"He's a legitimate guy," says Smith, who, like The Oregonian, knows the man's identity. "He's done substantive work. I told him to go for it."
The data analyst started his research because, simply enough, he had stumbled upon an obscure old book called "D.B. Cooper: What Really Happened," by the late author Max Gunther. Gunther wrote that he was contacted in 1972 by a man who claimed to be the skyjacker. The man soon cut off communication, and the author moved on. But a decade later, a woman calling herself Clara got in touch and insisted she was the widow of "Dan LeClair," the man who had told Gunther he was D.B. Cooper. Gunther's resulting book is Clara's story about Cooper's getaway and the love affair between Clara and Cooper.
"D.B. Cooper: What Really Happened" was largely dismissed by both critics and Cooper fanatics when it came out in 1985. Schuyler Ingle, writing in the Los Angeles Times, called it a "dumb book that falls somewhere in between nonfiction and speculation, depending on what the reader cares to believe."
Others called it straight-up fiction, and for good reason. A key subplot of the book -- LeClair and Clara's meet-cute experience in a small, unnamed Northwest town the day after the skyjacking -- is obviously untrue. This could be because Clara attempted to keep her real identity hidden from Gunther.
Another interpretation: Gunther just made it all up.
Gunther interviewed retired FBI agent Ralph Himmelsbach for hours while researching "D.B. Cooper: What Really Happened." More than 30 years later, Himmelsbach, who led the Cooper investigation for almost a decade, rejects the book.
"I think [Gunther] was highly unprofessional," he told The Oregonian in August. "I would be leery of anything reported by him. I wouldn't count on anything he wrote."
But our researcher, Anonymous, saw something in Gunther's tome. Yes, the author played with the truth, purposely or not, turning a real-life crime mystery into an unreal romance for our times. But the data analyst was convinced that someone did contact Gunther in 1972 claiming to be D.B. Cooper. And he wanted to find out who it was.
Using the name "Dan LeClair" and various details from the book, as well as information from the FBI's D.B. Cooper case files that have become public in recent years, Anonymous tracked the bread crumbs to a very real man named Dan Clair, a World War II Army veteran who died in 1990.
The rest of the theory about the hijacker jumping near a railroad to catch a freight train back East is in the latest
Oregonian article:
https://www.oregonlive.com/expo/news...per-skyja.html