Hijacker DB Cooper - 40 Years Ago Thursday

[jon]

There weren't a lot of News stories that impacted me when I was involved in the on-air side of Radio. But the DB Cooper hijacking on November 24, 1971, was one of them.

What started out as a quiet Wednesday evening operating at CHQM-FM after a day of classes and homework at UBC became very "interesting" very quickly. As was normal, I was one of two Operators, one for AM and one for FM as there was no simulcasting in the evening. And there was a Newsman who pre-recorded an hourly Newscast for FM and did live Newscasts on AM. Typical 8 hour News shift.

When the story broke and for each update, there was a Bulletin aired. At first, it was not too intrusive, wedged into the beginning of the commercial break of Candlelight & Wine.

But, before long, News Director Paul Taylor was in the building and the whole mood changed. News Bulletins were more frequent and they were aired immediately on both AM & FM.

Pretty soon we were past the 9pm end of Candlelight and Wine, and into Starlight Concert. 6 different pieces of classical music in two hours, including a complete symphony, every night on AM and FM, with no 10pm News to interrupt. The CHQM Rule on all classical programming was that, if there is any interruption, go back to the beginning and start the selection again. After I started the same piece for its third time, I got word from the AM operator that senior management had ruled that CHQM-FM was to be cut loose and air no more News Bulletins. Paul Taylor had fought the move, but lost.

I won't name the AM operator, lest he is now a Provincial Court Judge, but he was cheering for the hijacker. The soon to be famous DB Cooper.

[jon]

Quite a few different stories came out in the last 48 hours. I'll include a few, starting with the most interesting, at least to me.

Thu Nov 24, 06:51 AM
Sleuth thinks DB Cooper stashed cash in B.C. bank
The Canadian Press

VANCOUVER — The brazen hijacking of a commercial plane 40 years ago today is America's only unsolved hijacking, but one amateur sleuth is convinced a Canadian connection to the $200,000 in extorted cash will solve the puzzle.

The high-stakes heist was splashed across the front pages of the newspapers Galen Cook delivered as a boy and the Alaskan lawyer says the case never really left him, prompting him to follow a trail for years that he now believes leads to Vancouver.

Cook is convinced the outlaw stashed some of his cash in banks in the city in the days after the hijacker jumped out the rear stairs of a 727 jet with nothing but the money and two parachutes.

And the outlaw's son agrees with him.

It was the day before the American Thanksgiving, Nov. 24, 1971, when a man aboard a Northwest Orient Airlines flight from Portland, Ore., to Seattle, Wash., slipped a note to a flight attendant saying he had a bomb.

The 36 passengers were released when authorities in Seattle met the man's demands for $200,000 and four parachutes.

The plane was to then head towards Mexico City with a fuel stop in Reno, but about 45 minutes after leaving Seattle's airport, the pilots noticed an air pressure surge.

It's believed that's when DB Cooper lowered the stairs under the plane's tail and jumped out into a rain storm.

"This is one of the most intriguing unsolved crimes ever," Cook said in an interview with The Canadian Press.

"I think the answers are in Vancouver."

Over the decades, Cook has narrowed his list of suspects down to one man; William Gossett, a U.S. military veteran, who died at the age of 73 in 2003. Gossett was a veteran of the Korean and Vietnam wars and had parachuting experience, Cook said.

His suspicions began when one of Gossett's sons contacted Cook after hearing him talk about the DB Cooper case on a radio show.

Greg Gossett said he's "totally certain" his father was DB Cooper.

He describes his father as a gambler, a womanizer, a military man, a lawyer and a Catholic priest who one day invited Greg into the basement for a chat.

Gossett said his father pulled the FBI sketch of DB Cooper from a locked file drawer and asked if Greg recognized the picture.

Gossett said he told his father it looked like him. His father, he said, acknowledged he was DB Cooper.

Gossett said he was so shocked, he could muster only one question: "What did you do with the money?"

The elder Gossett replied that he had stashed it in a safe deposit box in Canada and then he showed his son the keys -- keys which Cook has spent years trying to hunt down.

"He always had a thing about Canada," Greg Gossett said in an interview

"He always loved Canada and I never really knew why. But now I do."

Another son of Gossett's told Cook that he and his father took a mysterious trip to Vancouver in 1973.

"(That) was the year Mr. Gossett retired from the military. The son had the presence of mind to use a brand new 8 mm movie camera and recorded the whole thing," Cook said.

Greg Gossett said his brother was a young boy who hadn't had a close relationship with his father and was thrilled at news he would be taking a Canadian vacation with his dad.

"So they go up to Canada, they check into a motel room. My dad says 'Stay here, I'll be back in a couple hours.' He comes back in a couple hours and he says 'OK son, we're going back to the States,"' Gossett said.

"As it turns out, my dad told him later on that he just took him up there because it looked like a better cover to have a child with him."

Cook has spent hours looking over the old film and is convinced Gossett hid his money in a safety deposit box in a bank in the city's Chinatown.

While Canada has defined guidelines for unclaimed cash in bank accounts, rules on handling unclaimed safety deposit boxes vary depending on the institution.

Police knew the serial numbers on the cash and none of it showed up after the hijacking, however almost $5,900 of the tattered and torn money was found in 1980 by an eight-year-old boy who stumbled on the cash on the banks of the Columbia River in Washington state.

Cook is convinced for another reason that Gossett or DB Cooper was in Vancouver in the days after the hijacking.

A picture of a letter sent to The Province, a Vancouver newspaper, in 1971 was published over top of an Associated Press story about the hijacking with the headline "Hijacker was here during Grey Cup?"

In the letter, the author complained that the composite drawing of the suspect handed out by the FBI wasn't a good likeness.

"I enjoyed the Grey Cup game. I'm leaving Vancouver now. Thanks for your hospitality," the letter finishes.

It was signed DB Cooper.

Vancouver Police told Cook they no longer have the letter. A spokesman for the police department was unavailable for comment about the letter or Cook's theory.

While Cook had hoped to get a possible DNA match from the letter, he maintained the note adds more evidence to his claim that Gossett was in the city after hijacking.

The Calgary Stampedes beat the Toronto Argonauts in the 59th Grey Cup game played Nov. 28, 1971 in Vancouver's Empire Stadium, four days after the hijacking.

"I do believe I've found the real DB Cooper," Cook said smiling as he took out a photo copy of the newspaper story from a file.

But while the legend of DB Cooper continues to grow, the FBI isn't interesting in fuelling more talk about the case, including commenting on Cook's suspicions.

FBI public affairs specialist Ayn Sandalo Dietrich said media coverage of the intriguing case seems to generate "considerable" new interest, which isn't proportional to the resources they have on the case.

"This is an open investigation, but it's not an active one," she said. "We, long ago, did all the necessary searches, collected all the evidence that needed to be collected and interviewed all the witnesses."

Because the case is open, if credible tips come in to the FBI, they'll investigate, Dietrich said, adding she understands the curiosity around the case.

The FBI said earlier this year that it had a promising lead on a suspect. In August, DNA tests on a necktie failed to link Lynn Doyle Cooper to the hijacking.

Cook, who is writing on book on his investigation, said he has spoken to FBI investigators over the years about his theories and said they've been receptive to listening to him and Greg Gossett said he has also been interviewed by investigators.

"When he died, I was looking through some of his pictures and I saw this picture that it dawned in my head that that is exactly what the FBI sketch looked like," said Greg Gossett.

"I took the picture, I looked up the sketch online, I put them side-by-side and I got chills up my spine."

Gossett said he isn't obsessed about the safety deposit box in Canada, the lost keys or the truth of his father's secret identity.

He said he's long ago decided his father is the notorious hijacker, a belief based on a vivid childhood memory.

"This (the hijacking) happened at Thanksgiving of 1971. I was four years old at the time because I'm 44 now. Thirty days later was Christmas Eve. It's the first Christmas Eve that I really remember," Gossett said.

"My dad never had money. He never had a dime. It evaporated in his hand. For him to have $20 would be unbelieveable. So he shows up at Christmas Eve and he has this weird kind of sense about him. I remember this even at four years old. And he says I want to show you something. And he starts pulling out bundles and bundles of cash. I had never seen really any kind of money, let alone this was just handfuls and bricks of cash."

Gossett said as a boy, he didn't know what to make of it. But it stood out and the puzzle pieces fell together for him after his conversation with his dad in his father's basement.

"I'm totally certain it was him."

ref. - http://m.ctv.ca/topstories/20111124/sle ... 11124.html

[jon]

'D.B.' Cooper's Canadian connection probed 40 years after hijacking
Investigators say comic book may have been blueprint for daring crime
By Randy Boswell, Postmedia News
November 25, 2011

Forty years after his daring flight into criminal history as the mysterious hijacker-parachutist "D.B." Cooper, the unidentified man who got away with a $200,000 ransom - or died trying - has led an FBI backed team of "citizen sleuths" to conclude that he may have been a military-trained, French-Canadian factory manager or chemical engineer, probably from outside of Quebec.

A potential Canadian connection to one of the FBI's most famous cold cases was first raised in 2009, when the U.S. agency revealed that Cooper appeared to have fashioned his identity and modus operandi from a 1960s-era, French-language comic book about a Royal Canadian Air Force test pilot and space traveller named Dan Cooper.

The hijacker - while popularly known as D.B. Cooper because of a news reporter's error after the crime took place - actually identified himself as "Dan Cooper" when he first boarded a passenger plane on Nov. 24, 1971 at the airport in Portland, Oregon.

On the cover of one issue of the Belgium-produced comic - sold in Europe and French Canada shortly before Cooper's hijacking of a Portland-to-Seattle flight - the Canadian superhero is shown parachuting. And that's what the man calling himself Cooper did four decades ago this week - during a rainstorm while flying somewhere above the dense forests of the Pacific Northwest - to escape justice after receiving his ransom payoff from U.S. authorities.

Now, the Cooper Research Team, headed by three civilian investigators who have had "special access" to FBI evidence files since 2009, is scheduled to discuss its probe of the case at a 40th anniversary D.B. Cooper symposium on Saturday in Portland, Ore.

Other "intriguing" details from the Dan Cooper comic, Abraczinskas said Thursday, include an episode involving a ransom delivered in a knapsack - again matching the real-life hijacking from 1971.

"It's hard to know if all these details are just super-coincidental or if the hijacker may have got a blueprint for his ideas from the comic," she added. "It's easy to get sucked into the D.B. Cooper case. Did he live? Did he die? Did he get away with the money? Did he lose it? I have had so much fun with this."

The team's forensic analysis of Cooper's tie, which the hijacker left on his seat before leaping from the aircraft with his cash, showed distinct traces of titanium - interpreted as apparent proof that he was employed at a metalworking plant, probably as a manager or chemical engineer, whose daily attire would have included a tie.

And in the researchers' overview of their two-year probe, now posted at the team's website, they point to both the French-language comic book and the hijacker's curious phrasing of his ransom demand - "negotiable American currency" - as strong suggestions of his non-U.S. background.

"The Dan Cooper comic was only published in French, making Cooper's unusual request very interesting," the team notes, highlighting the hijacker's apparent knowledge of the language but also - according to witnesses held hostage on the plane - his accent-free use of English.

"Since no American citizen would use those terms ["negotiable American currency"], it suggests that Cooper was not originally from this country," the researchers state.

And if he was from another country, they add, then "his lack of accent points to French Canada as one of the few places in the world where [a French speaker] could hail from and not have an accent."

They further note that "Franco-Manitobans, the Franco-Albertans, and possibly Franco-Ontarians" are most likely to have both a good command of French and no discernible accent when speaking English, since French Canadians living outside of Quebec "live in a predominantly anglophone environment."

Amateur sleuths, then, should "keep an eye out for a suspect from Canada, with military experience in airplanes," the team advises.

"He would have come to this country to work in or around titanium metal fabrication. He was a gentleman, well-dressed and smoked cigarettes," the researchers add. "Most notably, he probably lived a normal life and had one big problem that required about $200,000 in cash to solve."

ref. - http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Cooper ... story.html

[jon]

New clues in D B Cooper hijacking case after clip-on tie discovery
The FBI has a new lead in an infamous 1971 plane hijacking after traces of titanium were found on a clip-on tie left behind by the suspect.
By Nick Allen, Los Angeles
8:55PM GMT 25 Nov 2011

The clue emerged almost 40 years to the day after the mysterious hijacker known as D B Cooper jumped out of a Boeing 727 over Washington state wearing a business suit, a parachute and a pack with $200,000 in ransom money.

It remains one of America's most notorious unsolved crimes but a group of scientists, working at the invitation of the FBI, recently uncovered the titanium after putting Cooper's tie under an electron microscope.

They said the metal was rare in 1971 and believe its presence, in a pure form, points to the hijacker having worked in a titanium production facility or a chemical plant. The fact he wore a tie may point to him having been a manager, they said. Shortly before the hijacking Boeing had cancelled a project which involved production of titanium in Washington state.

On Nov 24, 1971, the night before Thanksgiving, the passenger known as D B Cooper boarded a Northwest Orient Airlines flight from Portland, Oregon to Seattle.

He handed a note to a flight attendant saying he had a bomb and demanded the money along with four parachutes. After landing at Seattle, where his demands were met, the plane took off again and he jumped into a freezing storm.

Tom Kaye, a scientist at University of Washington's Burke Museum, who led the new research, said: "One of the most notable particles that we've found, that had us the most excited, was titanium metal. Coming up with a profile that narrows him down to hundreds of people instead of millions we think is pretty significant." Earlier this year it was disclosed that a woman in Oklahoma had provided a tip to the FBI about her deceased uncle.

Marla Cooper said her uncle, Lynn Doyle Cooper, had arrived at a family home in Oregon with serious injuries and that she overheard him talking about the hijacking.

ref. - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... overy.html