“Sirs, I knew from the start that I wouldn’t be caught,” the letter begins.
Postmarked Dec. 11, 1971, it was signed, “D.B. Cooper,” the name the press had given to the unknown criminal who, less than a month before the missive landed at several newspaper offices, had audaciously taken over Northwest Orient Flight 305 out of Portland. The skyjacker parachuted from the Boeing 727 with $200,000 in ransom -- and disappeared. The mystery man quickly became a legend, the subject of folk songs, books and a hit Hollywood movie.
Now, more than 45 years after the crime, independent investigators believe they’ve caught D.B. Cooper. That is, they believe they’ve identified who he really is -- thanks to that taunting letter.
If only they could get the FBI interested.
The 40-member private investigative outfit concluded long ago that the famed skyjacker is former U.S. Army paratrooper Robert W. Rackstraw, a decorated Vietnam War veteran who’s now 74 and lives in the San Diego area. But the FBI, which investigated Rackstraw in the late ’70s, has taken little interest in the voluminous circumstantial evidence put forward by the group.
Documentary filmmaker Thomas J. Colbert, who leads the Cooper investigative team, is convinced the FBI refuses to pursue Rackstraw again at this late date because it would have to admit that a bunch of part-time, volunteer sleuths had cracked a case that the bureau couldn’t.
“It’s not that they’re concerned about a circumstantial case,” Colbert says. “This is obviously about embarrassment and shame.”
The FBI, for its part, offers a different assessment. After considering hundreds of suspects over four decades, it decided to officially close the unsolved D.B. Cooper case in July 2016 “because there isn’t anything new out there,” Special Agent in Charge Frank Montoya, Jr., said at the time.
Eighteen months later, there’s something new. Colbert believes a member of his team has broken a clever encrypted code from the skyjacker that’s embedded in that Dec. 11, 1971, letter.
The FBI still isn’t biting -- it isn’t even responding to Colbert anymore, or offering the press anything but public-relations boilerplate about being open to new hard evidence. So, Colbert says, “we’re moving ahead without them.”
Colbert is convinced he has the right man. The TV producer and former “Hard Copy” story editor has spent nearly a decade digging into Rackstraw’s past. He and his team of retired law-enforcement officers have interviewed their suspect’s family members, former colleagues, friends and military commanders. The portrait that’s emerged of Rackstraw is that of a conman and sociopath who’s talented, charismatic, violent -- and has a lot of possible links to the Northwest Orient skyjacking.
Colbert collected his evidence into a 2016 book, “The Last Master Outlaw.” He’s produced a History Channel documentary about his investigation, “D.B. Cooper: Case Closed?” and is working on another. (Rackstraw, who did not respond to phone calls for this article, has threatened to sue Colbert, but so far has not done so.) Colbert, with a laugh, admits he’s become obsessed with the Cooper case, continuing the investigation far longer than he ever planned. Some of his team’s work is available at DBCooper.com.
Veteran journalist Bruce Smith, author of “D.B. Cooper and the FBI: A Case Study of America’s Only Unsolved Skyjacking,” says Colbert’s reporting and research are impressive, but he worries that the TV producer became too focused on Rackstraw, leading him to “fit the facts” to his theory rather than following the evidence with an open mind.
Colbert’s case against Rackstraw, for example, is dependent on the skyjacker wearing a toupee and heavy makeup to make him look older, something that hasn’t been established. (Rackstraw was 28 in 1971; the well-known wanted posters of D.B. Cooper show a middle-aged man.) Tina Mucklow, the flight attendant who sat next to Cooper for hours during Flight 305, did not pick out Rackstraw from a series of mugshots some years later. Colbert insists the press-shy Mucklow suffers from memory loss related to post-traumatic stress.
But now Colbert has come upon perhaps the most interesting -- and most revealing -- piece of evidence yet: the Dec. 11, 1971, letter, which the FBI released last November after a Freedom of Information Act request by Colbert’s team.
In the month following the skyjacking, a handful of letters from “D.B. Cooper” were sent to various newspapers (including The Oregonian). The FBI’s investigators tended to view the notes as hoaxes, but the Dec. 11 letter -- which went to the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Seattle Times and the Washington Post -- was different.
Agents seized every copy. “They showed up at the (newspaper) offices and said, essentially, ‘Do your duty and hand them over,’” Colbert says. “And the newspapers did. It was a different time.”
This letter, noted one FBI internal case report from December 1971, “had the Bureau somewhat excited.”
The reason: the letter offered up details of the Northwest Airlines hijacking case that hadn’t made it into press reports, such as the fact that the FBI was not able to glean any useable fingerprints from the plane.
Agents carefully combed through the Dec. 11 letter: the writer’s claims that he wore a toupee and “putty makeup” and “left no fingerprints,” as well as the admission of feeling “hate, turmoil, hunger and more hate.” (Colbert says this “hate” was Rackstraw’s anger at being booted from the military for lying and other transgressions.)
Then there are the seemingly random strings of numbers and letters at the bottom of the page. The bureau’s investigators didn’t know what to make of them. In a Dec. 15, 1971, internal case memo, the FBI laboratory wrote of one of the sequences: “The significance of the number ‘717171634*’, appearing next to the copy count in the lower left corner on the face of the letter, remains unknown.”
It has remained unknown for 46 years -- until, quite possibly, a month ago.
Rick Sherwood, a relatively new member of Colbert’s team, has made sense of it and the other odd number/letter combinations in the letter.
Sherwood served in the Army Security Agency, the military’s elite signals-intelligence outfit, during the Vietnam War. He describes the training as “the equivalent of two years of college in 16 weeks. It was tough.”
Rackstraw briefly served as a chopper pilot in the ASA at the same time Sherwood was with the unit, though Sherwood says he didn’t know him.
After the FBI released the Dec. 11, 1971, letter last November, Sherwood began studying the possible cyphers in it, using his ASA code-breaking training to search for links to Rackstraw. It took him about two weeks to figure out the code, with the initial lightbulb moment coming when he simply added all the numbers up.
Surfacing out of what appears to be a mishmash of unrelated numbers and letters were Rackstraw’s Vietnam military units: the 371st Radio Research Unit and the 11th General Support Company, as well as the Army Security Agency.
It wasn’t a sophisticated code, but Sherwood wasn’t surprised that the FBI couldn’t crack it in the early 1970s, “because it would have made no sense to them. For the FBI to do it, they’d have to know a lot about the individual. I was trying to connect the numbers and letters to him.”
Could Sherwood have accidentally created this solution to the code because he was trying to find a connection to Rackstraw?
“It’s not impossible,” Sherwood says. “But what are the odds that these digits would add up to this? Astronomical. A million to one. Rackstraw didn’t think anyone would be able to break it.”
(Sherwood walked The Oregonian through the code-breaking process he used, with the understanding that the details wouldn’t be included in this article, since they’re a key part of the second D.B. Cooper documentary Colbert is working on.)
Colbert considers the Dec. 11, 1971, letter the cherry on top of his years-long investigation, and he’s not alone. Western Illinois University criminal-science professor Jack Schafer, a psychologist and former FBI agent, found Sherwood’s code-breaking work to be first-rate.
“Since these correlate with identifiers in Rackstraw’s (Army) life, I’m convinced this letter was written by D.B. Cooper,” he told Colbert in an email. “This is your strongest piece of evidence linking him to the hijacker.”
Rackstraw himself, it should be pointed out, often has refused to rule out that he’s the legendary skyjacker. He boasted back in the late 1970s that, given his skill set, he should be on the FBI’s list of suspects. “I wouldn’t discount myself, or a person like myself,” he said. When a reporter asked him point-blank if he was D.B. Cooper, he responded:
“Could have been. Could have been. I can’t commit myself on something like that.”
All these years later he’s still playing the tease.
“They say that I’m him,” Rackstraw told a California reporter last fall. “If you want to believe it, believe it.”
Tom Colbert is betting that viewers of his in-the-works documentary will believe it. Since the FBI doesn’t appear to have any interest in relaunching its D.B. Cooper investigation, Colbert is going to rely on the court of public opinion rather than a court of law to provide some sense of justice in the case.
His quarry, it turns out, apparently wants to do the same. As a result, Rackstraw’s and Colbert’s versions of events actually might end up aligning.
Rackstraw said last year that he was cooperating with film producers, who he refused to name but who it seems are only interested in his story if it includes him jumping out of a Northwest Orient commercial airliner in November 1971. Said Rackstraw:
“They’re paying me to tell the story they want to hear.”
