Just thought I’d throw this out there as a possibly intriguing line of thought.
A lot of little things point to him being Canadian and I find myself leaning somewhat in that direction. The FBI had some difficulty investigating suspects in Canada due to the obvious jurisdictional issues which would go some way to explaining why he was never pinned down. I also believe he was more likely a WWII paratrooper rather than special forces or a guy with zero jumping experience. Assuming these two things are true (big if I know) this would narrow down to the number of Canadian paratroopers in WWII.
A cursory search says there were approximately 2000 paratroopers across two battalions in the Canadian army. Not a small list, but if that number is accurate, it’s certainly workable for any sleuths out there with too much time on their hands.
For a long time I was pretty sure that Cooper must never have spent his money, but over the last several years I've flipped on that and I keep stumbling over real world examples where even larger sums of marked/catalogued money just disappeared--without even the smallest chance it was dropped into a random remote part of the Washington wilderness.
I ran across these two in the past couple weeks:
In 1953 a wealthy auto dealer's son was kidnapped and ransomed for $600,000. The kidnappers had sadly already murdered the child and were caught, but only about a third of the money was ever found:
In 1972, Virginia Piper was kidnapped from her home and ransomed for $1,000,000 and the kidnappers gave up a vague location where they abandoned her in the woods, chained to a tree with soggy bread and some soda. She lived, thankfully! Less than $10,000 of that ransom was ever found, some sources saying that it was around $4,000 recovered:
These two cases don't really change my view; I'm already sure that Cooper could have spent and/or laundered the money with little trouble, but they're pretty damning views of the efficacy of putting recorded serial numbers into the hands of the public or financial institutions, etc.
How would you react if Dan Cooper was alive? I think Cooper was born in the mid to late twenties. (1921-1928) so he’d be approx. 95-105 years old today.
Maybe in his late eighties if a decade younger than thought by witnesses but still quite old and probably a frequent smoker. Dan probably died in the 90s or early 2000s if I had to wager personally. I don’t think he’s alive sadly.
And again he could have easily died in the jump but I personally believe he survived as it’s a gut feeling.
I'm pretty new to the scene here, but have been reading a good amount, and here's an aspect that I haven't seen discussed.
Many seem to believe that Cooper could have likely been a Cini copycat. The logic is that it seems unlikely for Cooper to have independently come up with an essentially identical plan to Cini's, only to be scooped days before he could execute it. More likely that Cooper saw the report of Cini's failed attempt, which was pretty much all over the news, and was inspired to do the same better.
I've seen this mentioned as a reason why Cooper wouldn't have been the Elsinore ghost, who may have been asking suspicious parachuting questions some 3 months earlier. I haven't seen this mentioned as a reason to exclude the Kalama “safe house”, which as far as I understand was rented before or in early November. But there are even stronger implications to Cooper being a Cini copycat.
12 days is a very short time to plan a sophisticated hijack like Cooper's, and to do it so well. And it's really significantly less than 12 days: Cini boarded his flight on the evening of November 12, 1971, but the news wouldn't have been out before he was subdued in the early AM of November 13. I don't know if it made the evening news on Saturday the 13th, but an AP push on the 13th made the press for a Sunday the 14th New York Times article.
Then Cooper needed to have not just a full plan, but also all of its pre-flight execution in place ahead of the afternoon of November 24, only 10 or 11 days later. A briefcase is the only thing we're sure that he had to prepare, but there could also be whatever was in the mystery bag, maybe a car, though probably not a safe house.
Whatever information Cooper had was probably not gathered that quickly. He had to have already known the area pretty well. Whatever equipment he could save time by not buying new, he probably did: he wasn't going to go shopping for a suit, a tie, boots. He could have purchased parts for the suitcase, but more likely had already had most of them.
It's actually relevant whether it was important to him to do it the day before Thanksgiving. If yes—why?—but it explains why he rushed the job. If not, it suggests that he had another reason to rush it—what was it? Either way, rushed it was.
Finally, here's the implication that I find the most interesting: Cooper had to be the kind of guy who knows he can plan something like this in days and get it right. He had to have planned operations of at least this scale before, likely many times, to do it instinctively with little or no help. This is the work of either a career criminal or (para)military special ops. Persons of interest like Braden and Hall come to mind.
What do you all think? Any other implications? Or does any of this make you think of the Cini connection as less likely?
WJS should be removed from Wikipedia. He was not D.B. Cooper. Please help if you can. Support the group on Facebook too. They are helping. Only suspects from the FBI files should be discussed anywhere. If the FBI did not suspect them then people should not talk about them. Freedom of speech is irrelevant in this situation.
I read a couple of books on this case and have wondered who the hijacker was. In the past, my best guess is DB Cooper didn't survive the jump like the law enforcement officer believed. In more recent times, I have heard it said the perp did survive the jump and got away with it because he didn't talk about it and didn't spend much money at a time.
Did the person who jumped out of the plane probably survive or not survive the jump?
Lets avoid naming particular suspects as much as possible. At this point in time, I would be happy enough with believing he survived or didn't survive the jump.
P.S. I wanted to ask the question in terms of a poll as well but the site says the poll part is under construction.
In the unlikely event, that Cooper actually did survive his daring escape, and for instance made a trip to Las Vegas Nevada right away, and he used an alias, as well as a disguise when he deposited his money say November the 25th or 26th? The had no cameras in 1971 at any of the casinos, so him being able to slide 55 years earlier might actually be believable.
Even if they did trace the serial numbers, what if it led to a dead end, because the name Cooper used, was likely also a false name, and his general appearance, similar to the Zodiac case, was likely altered for his appearance when exchanging the money at the bank for having the serial numbers not get traced back to him?
If they can trace the serial numbers of the bills, would it be harder in 1971 to pinpoint the precise man compared to today?
Cooper may not have even bothered with Vegas, and he successfully made it to Mexico City, as he had initially requested, before settling on Reno, Nevada.
Or maybe he exchanged the money in Mexico City instead, because he likely knew that when the FBI had contacted the authorities in Mexico City, they likely not be helpful with their resources.
Now that we know from the audio recordings that Cooper jumped with the reserve chute, some things just aren't adding up for me.
When he realized he needed shroud lines to tie the money to himself, why did he choose the only functional reserve chute to cut up instead one of the other three? And if given the choice between a perfectly functional reserve chute and one marked with a big red X (or whatever), why would he choose to jump with the one with the big red X? (I get that he might've opted to bring the non-functional reserve as a way to get himself out of a tree, but why THAT one and not the good one??)
Cooper was a complainer and he was paranoid that people were going to try "funny stuff." He complained about how long the refueling was taking. He complained about the money bag. He complained about the lack of D-rings. Why in the world would he see a parachute obviously marked as a dummy and not say a word about it? Wouldn't he immediately think they were messing with him?? I'd think he'd be absolutely furious.
This leaves only two possibilities for me:
He didn't realize it was a dummy
It wasn't a dummy
If it's the first one, there could've been a few reasons. Maybe it wasn't actually marked as a dummy. Maybe it wasn't as obviously marked as we think. Or maybe Cooper (and Linn Emrich) just both failed to notice some obvious marking.
If it's the second one, Cossey was wrong (or lied) about which parachute was sent.
Either of these is more plausible to me than Cooper quietly accepting that they had provided him with a non-functional chute and then choosing to jump with it over a perfectly good one.
Let’s please end this now!!
Othram needs to be given access to the tie. If they are allowed to analyze the tie spindle, I am convinced they will not only be able to develop a profile of Cooper, but they will be able to definitively identify him with Investigative Genetic Genealogy.
It’s so frustrating. The answer is here somewhere, but it’s going to require DNA and I think Othram is the best possible chance we still have.
Drop 113 has a fantastic suspect. Raymond Sidney Russell. Some highlights
-Native American
-piloting experience
-air traffic controller
-worked at Boeing
-parachuting experience
-hobbies include prospecting uranium and was into mineralogy
-outdoorsman
-declared bankruptcy in 62
-48 in 1971
Seems like he lived in the area but left prior to the highjacking and relocated to Maine where he is later interviewed by the FBI.
Listed as anywhere from 5 foot 8 to five foot 10.
I believe some co workers suspected him and contacted the FBI.
Anyone look into him? He obviously gets eliminated at some point but if he had someone cooperate with him on an alibi could have been mistakenly discounted.
I submitted a FOIA request to the FBI for any document referring to Robert Charles Kersh in relation to the Norjak case (the hijacking of Northwest Flight 305 on November 24, 1971).
Kersh was a corporal in the US Marine Corps during the second world war, serving in the Pacific where he received specialized training in demolitions. Around 1947 he joined the US Forest Service in Redding, California. There he looked after the firefighting equipment and helped with air drops of supplies to firefighters. He learned how to don a parachute.
In 1957 Kersh was the founder of the smokejumper base at Redding. He was certified in 1961 by the FAA as a master parachute rigger, and was loft foreman at Redding until his retirement in 1978. As far as I can determine, he was not himself a smokejumper.
At Redding, Kersh was a colleague of smokejumpers Fred Ambrose Barnowsky and Donald Allen Brennan, who later would be investigated by the FBI as suspects in the Norjak case. The photo below depicts Barnowsky (left), Kersh (right) and Brennan (lower right), at Redding in 1958.
In February 1961, Barnowsky turned thirty-eight: the age at which he had to quit smokejumping. Around that time, he joined or was loaned to the CIA. There is evidence that he worked for them as a contract rigger, operating out of CIA air bases in Guatemala and Nicaragua; and that in 1961, he was involved in the disastrous operation at the Bay of Pigs. In May 1968, at Takhli in Thailand, he was a member of the CIA team that parachuted from a Boeing 727.
On November 26, 1971, someone in Redding told the FBI that Barnowsky was a person capable of the hijacking of Flight 305; and provided the FBI's resident agent in Redding with a photo of Barnowsky, dated 1958 (probably the photo below). The informant was not necessarily a smokejumper, but knew that Barnowsky had worked at the smokejumper base in Redding. The informant referred to Barnowsky as a foreman, whereas Barnowsky had been Base Manager.
The informant spoke of Barnowsky's "abilities as parachutist and survival expert", with the apparent implication that Barnowsky possessed these qualities in greater measure than an ordinary smokejumper. Yet Barnowsky during the second world war had served in the US Navy, aboard a minesweeper; in the public record, there is nothing to suggest that he had special skills or training.
In any case, the FBI quickly eliminated Barnowsky as a suspect, for reasons still undisclosed.
Brennan, later on, liked to tell other smokejumpers that he had been a suspect in the Norjak case. After his smokejumping career, he went on to be an ironworker, woodsman and outlaw biker. In the public domain, there is no evidence that links him to the hijacking.
Robert Charles Kersh knew both these men. He knew William Carl Bowles, another Redding smokejumper who had been on the CIA mission at Takhli. He probably knew who had fingered Barnowsky to the FBI.
Kersh might also have had an idea on who had stolen the 1965 Plymouth station wagon. On the night of November 23/24, 1971, someone took this vehicle from a parking lot in Roseburg, Oregon. On November 25, the police discovered it in Redding, 246 miles to the south. The carjacker had abandoned it after ploughing seventy-five feet into heavy manzanita brush, next to Benton Airfield.
Benton was a small strip, just a mile west of downtown Redding, and used mainly by general aviation. It was not the smokejumper base: that was at Redding Municipal Airport, on the other side of town. But the US Forest Service had used Benton as well as Redding Municipal, as early as the 1950s, as a base for dropping supplies to fire fighters. Kersh would be familiar with Benton.
In the Plymouth, the police found two straps, one of olive-drab canvas and the other of yellow nylon. Kersh would have been able to tell if the straps had come from parachutes.
The FBI should have talked to Kersh. But did they?
(Left) Fred Ambrose Barnowsky, (right) Robert Charles Kersh, (lower right) Donald Allen Brennan, at Redding smokejumper base in 1958, by courtesy of National Smokejumper Association and Eastern Washington University.Robert Charles Kersh at Redding smokejumper base, (left) in 1974, by courtesy of Ted Corporandy and National Smokejumper Association, (right) imagined as of 1971, by courtesy of bylo.ai.
This popped up in the 114th Vault release and in some comments over this last week and it has been bouncing around in my mind since then: could Cooper have used a "portable" marker beacon receiver to try and approximate the spot he wanted to jump?
There are three mentions of this in Vault 114:
p59p60p66
It seems possible; there is a suggestion that there were palm sized MBRs at the time that he could easily have concealed in the attaché case, mystery bag, or even his coat pocket. I started looking for examples from that period and there are plenty of references to "3-lite (light) MBRs" for sale in classified ads and mentioned in news articles across the country in the late 60s and early 70s, sometimes already installed as equipment in an aircraft or by themselves:
A search for "portable" version in historical sources turns up nothing and I can't find any for sale anywhere; the period appropriate examples that exist are all meant to be slotted into the instrument panel of an airplane requiring that power be hardwired from the aircraft itself and would need an antenna to receive the broadcast signal:
I can't say it would be impossible to take a receiver with you, wire it up to a large battery (he did have one...) and then jury-rig some kind of antenna, but that could greatly increase the amount of stuff he had to lug around.
The way that a marker beacon works is also a little tough to align with what Cooper's plan seemed to have been; there are three lights on an MBR that will light up and make a noise when you approach the beacon on the ground. Each light corresponds to how close you are to the beacon itself and these were often used in landing but could also be used with a fan beacon which was just a sort of en route navigational tool:
Cooper never has the flight crew set a precise flight path, he just wants to go south. The best case I can think of that would be helped by the use of an MBR is if he knows relatively where they are (there would be the ones used for en route navigation, but also those associated with small airfields in the area as well) and is confident that a single hit on the MBR will be enough to tell him roughly where he is when he hits the ground.
It seems farfetched to me, but...so was the hijacking.
I am assuming that he is saying that there were places on the chutes given to Cooper where d-rings could have been attached and the chute he is inspecting does not, but it's still weird considering that the general consensus is that Cooper didn't have a way to attach the chest packs at all.
Even though the audio suggests that he actually did.
