Walter Reca confessed to two people before he died in 2014.

And Lisa Story and Carl Laurin -- Reca's niece and best friend, respectively -- have now come forward with what the Michigan native told them.

In short: Reca said he was D.B. Cooper.

That's the name, of course, that history has given to the unknown skyjacker who leapt from Northwest Orient Flight 305 on Thanksgiving Eve 1971 and disappeared into popular culture.

Story and Laurin appeared at a press conference in Grand Rapids, Mich., on Thursday to launch Laurin's new book, "D.B. Cooper & Me: A Criminal, a Spy, My Best Friend," published by the small press Principia Media.

"He was a daredevil," said Laurin, who was a member of the Michigan Parachute Club with Reca.

Laurin and Principia Media say they have evidence that supports Reca's claim, including documents that show how he spent much of the $200,000 the skyjacker received from authorities in exchange for releasing Flight 305's passengers. Laurin also has audio files of phone conversations in which, Laurin says, Reca provided details about the skyjacking before they were publicly known.

Principia Media insists it "spent several years conducting a private investigation with a linguistic forensic and interviewing dozens of individuals to confirm Carl and Lisa's story."

Former Michigan state police officer Joe Koenig, hired by Principia, said at the press conference that if Reca were still alive when this information became available, he'd surely be prosecuted.

Added Lisa Story: "Walter Reca was a really complex man who had many secrets."

Reca, a former paratrooper who also claimed to have worked as a spy for the U.S. government, is far from the first man to declare he was D.B. Cooper.

College instructor William Gossett confessed to being the skyjacker shortly before he died in 2003. A con artist named Duane Weber also gave a deathbed confession, in 1995. (Check out the long list of D.B. Cooper suspects.)

The FBI officially abandoned the Cooper case in 2016. The bureau, in a statement on Thursday, said claims about Walter Reca and others have "conveyed plausible theories" but not "the necessary proof of culpability beyond a reasonable doubt."

One of the foremost Cooper chasers, the late journalist Darrell Bob Houston, ultimately reached this conclusion about the skyjacker:

"He could be anybody -- because he was nobody."

-- Douglas Perry