Hoosier says he helped crack the code to identify skyjacker D.B. Cooper

Tim Evans | IndyStar

Show Caption Hide Caption Indiana man says he knows the identity of D. B. Cooper. Rick Sherwood, of Wheatfield, served in the Vietnam War with a man he says is D.B. Cooper, and he says he can prove it.

WHEATFIELD, Ind. — It was the incongruous string of numbers in a 1971 letter that first attracted Rick Sherwood.

717171684*

"The numbers," he explained, "just didn't belong."

And he couldn’t let it go.

So, for hour after hour last winter, Sherwood, 70, sat in his man cave trying to puzzle out a solution to one of America’s most enduring pop culture mysteries: Who was the brazen skyjacker that parachuted from a jet with $200,000 in 1971, the fabled outlaw known to the world as D.B. Cooper?

Sherwood believes he found the answer that has stumped the FBI for 47 years. He says it was hidden in the 1971 letter and another allegedly written by the hijacker in 1972.

The D.B. Cooper mystery: Everything you need to know about the hijacking, the money and the letters

Who is D.B. Cooper? Here are 11 possible suspects, including some who falsely confessed

The Army veteran who worked with codes during the Vietnam War says he reckoned it out in his cedar-lined room surrounded by an antique Rock-Ola jukebox, a leather sofa and a row of windows looking out on the pastures, trees and cornfields behind his home about 20 miles south of Valparaiso.

Now, he and Thomas J. Colbert, author of a 2016 book about the Cooper mystery called The Last Master Outlaw, are preparing to show how the code was cracked. Sherwood’s numeric calculations bolster Colbert's book, which identified the same former military pilot as the culprit: Robert Rackstraw. Colbert has copyrighted the code decryptions. More details will be revealed Wednesday.

Robert Rackstraw won't say he did it, won't say he didn't

Newspaper accounts from the 1970s reveal Rackstraw was among the potential suspects the FBI investigated, but the California man was apparently cleared in the 1980s.

Rackstraw is the obvious person to debunk Sherwood's finding. But in a seven-minute phone conversation with IndyStar, he continued the cat-and-mouse game he's played for more than 35 years. At times over that period, it’s been clear to other interviewers that Rackstraw relished the attention and notoriety that comes with being associated with Cooper.

Rackstraw was a highly decorated Vietnam veteran and pilot with parachute training. He left the Army in 1971, just months before the hijacking. In the years that followed his life included a series of ups and downs. He was accused, and acquitted, of killing his stepfather and later stole an airplane and faked a crash to escape an embezzlement trial. But he later earned a law degree and taught in the University of California system.

In the brief conversation with IndyStar, Rackstraw declined four direct requests to deny claims by Colbert and Sherwood that he is the hijacker known as Cooper.

"Don't get down to the bottom line," he groused shortly before hanging up after being asked why he wouldn't just say he isn't Cooper.

"That's a 40 million dollar question for Christ's sake."

And Sherwood, who has no law enforcement training, and had not used his knowledge of codes in decades, seems an unlikely person to have answered it.

Whether he's right or not remains to be seen.

The FBI, which identified and cleared more than 1,000 suspects, closed its investigation into America's only unsolved hijacking in 2016 and is not likely to take another look at Rackstraw.

When announcing the case was closed, the bureau said it appreciated "the immense number of tips provided by members of the public," but is now interested only in two pieces of evidence from citizen-sleuths attracted to the Cooper mystery: the parachutes used by Cooper or some of the ransom money.

An Army veteran from Indiana gets involved

Sherwood's dive into the D.B. Cooper case started with a phone call out of the blue in 2015. It came from Colbert. Sherwood was skeptical as he listened to the stranger who claimed to be an author and movie producer.

"He said, 'Are you Rick Sherwood?' And I said, 'Yeah, who’s calling?' He says, 'My name’s Tom Colbert. I’m investigating the D. B. Cooper case and blah, blah, blah,'" Sherwood recalled. "And I’m going, 'Oh yeah, right.' In fact, it was true."

Colbert had already zeroed in on Rackstraw as he was wrapping up work on his 2016 book. He enlisted Sherwood's help while looking for Vietnam vets who may have encountered Rackstraw in the service. Sherwood was among more than a dozen men from Rackstraw's unit that Colbert contacted to assist his "cold-case" team.

"He wanted to find somebody that was in the 371st and had dealt with Rackstraw," Sherwood said.

The Gary native wasn't any help with that.

Sherwood said he doesn't believe he ever met Rackstraw, but it's likely they communicated by radio. Rackstraw filled in briefly as a helicopter pilot with the mission Sherwood was assigned to from 1968 until 1970, when he concluded his 26-month tour of duty in Vietnam and returned to the states.

Like many Americans, Sherwood was aware of the daring 1971 hijacking.

"I knew they gave him some parachutes, and he got a bunch of money," Sherwood said. "That's all I knew."

But things changed after Sherwood took the call from Colbert. Even though he hadn't directly encountered Rackstraw, Sherwood and Colbert talked several times over the next few months. Those conversations led to Colbert mentioning Sherwood several times in his book, in passages describing the war-time conditions and the nature of the then-secret mission called Left Bank. During his enlistment, Sherwood said he worked in radio communications with pilots using encoded messages. The unit also attempted to capture and decipher encoded enemy messages.

Sherwood's contact with Colbert piqued his interest in the Cooper case, but it would be another two years before Sherwood stumbled onto an internet post about one of the letters the hijacker allegedly wrote after the crime. There was something about the letter's wording that perplexed Sherwood. And there was that nine-digit number and asterisk that didn't seem to fit.

He called Colbert and asked about the letter. He also asked Colbert if he knew what the number meant. Colbert said he didn't think anyone knew.

Sherwood wondered if the number could somehow be the key to a code. Suddenly, he found himself drawn even deeper into the enduring mystery that has spawned scores of books, movies and theories about the man behind the hijacking.

Sherwood goes 'overboard' trying to decode the letters

To family and others who know Sherwood well, its no surprise he would wind up neck-deep in the decades-old mystery. Sherwood admits he's always ready for a challenge, even if its only the crossword puzzle in the Sunday newspaper.

"I just kind of go overboard doing things," he said.

Stepping up to a challenge, in fact, has been a common theme in Sherwood's life. He enrolled in a difficult Army intelligence training program after a recruiter told him he didn't have what it took to do the work. After the war, he reinvented himself when the job he expected to hold for a lifetime disappeared in the steel industry downturn. When he couldn't find a U.S. flag after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, what did he do? He built a 30-by-20 flag out of scrap metal and 22,000 lights.

One thing he never expected, however, was a return to the work he'd done with codes in the Army.

"To be absolutely honest with you, I never thought I'd ever have to use Morse Code or any of the codes that I was trained on ever again," Sherwood said as he sat at one of two tables in the center of his man cave. He built the addition on the back of his home. It was supposed to be a deck, but morphed into a screened-in porch. And when his wife said she wanted windows? Well, Sherwood took up that challenge, too.

On the tables are neat stacks of papers and file folders. They include copies of the post-hijacking letters allegedly written by Cooper. There also are dozens of pages of handwritten notes Sherwood has made, along with numeric calculations that harken back to his days in the Army. There is also a Playboy magazine. Its from June 1970. The Playmate of the Year issue.

Sherwood said he spent hours over several weeks at the table last winter going over what's come to be known as "letter five." The typed letter from the FBI's Cooper file was released to Colbert last year through a Freedom of Information Act request. It has an FBI evidence stamp dated Dec.17, 1971.

Copies of the letter were sent to the Washington Post, New York Times, Seattle Times and Los Angeles Times. The tone is taunting. "I knew from the start that I wouldn't be caught," it begins.

But there was no explanation for the string of numbers — 717171684*. As Sherwood pored over the letter, he also wondered why all the newspaper names had been written out, except for the "Wash Post." And why had the writer marked the four copied sources with "ccccccc?"

Numbers and repeated words help crack the code

Aware of and hoping to confirm Colbert's focus on Rackstraw, Sherwood set to work looking for hidden message that would link the letter to Rackstraw. Colbert said he, too, was anxiously awaiting the results of Sherwood's sleuthing.

"I think it took me two weeks, just hour after hour," Sherwood said. "I was going through everything I could possibly think of."

Finally, he called Colbert back.

"I said 'I need at least another set of numbers so I can correlate one to the other,'" Sherwood said.

Colbert found a second set of numbers on a copy of the letter that had been sent to the Los Angeles Times. He passed it to Sherwood, but it didn't help.

Sherwood's wife, Cheryl, recalled heading to bed alone many of those nights as her husband stayed at his table covered with papers.

"He would spend hours and hours and hours out there ...," she said. "I kept telling him, I go, 'You keep running this heater, you're going to cost us a fortune.'"

Finally, Sherwood said, he gave up trying to use the two long strings of numbers to find some correlation to the alphabet. Instead he focused on the first number itself from the Washington Post letter. That's when, Sherwood said, he had his first "a-ha" moment.

Could the 717171 mean the 371st, the unit he and Rackstraw were both attached to briefly?

"When the 371st come up, I seen that, I'm going 'Yes, this is it. This is the beginning of breaking that code."

Using a simple letter counting system, Sherwood said he found other clues that pointed to Rackstraw. From the "ccccccc" he deciphered "Army Security Agency" and from "Wash Post" he found "Top Secret."

When he notified Colbert, the author was elated. He also had another challenge for Sherwood.

"You're not done yet, Rick," Sherwood recalled Colbert telling him. "I've got three or four other letters that have been out there all this time."

A hidden message: 'I am 1st LT Robert Rackstraw'

Colbert sent the other four letters and it didn't take nearly as long for Sherwood to find what he believed were hidden messages in each of them. He said all four letters included messages using slight variations on the code he'd used.

The old Playboy magazine also helped him. One of the Cooper letters was written with letters cut out from a copy of the magazine. But there were just too many letters, Sherwood determined, to make sense of.

A niece obtained a copy of the magazine from a friend and Sherwood saw the name of the centerfold. When he subtracted the letters from her name, he said, things started making more sense. Sherwood and Colbert said it appeared the hijacker was sending a message to accomplices who helped him escape after the hijacking.

But it wasn't until June that Sherwood said he found the mother lode in another letter the FBI released in May.

"I read it two or three times and got back on the phone and told Tom, 'This is Rackstraw.' I said, 'This is his M.O. This is how he writes. He's taunting. He's doing everything like he's done in these other letters.'"

Colbert's response was direct: "Can you break the code?"

Sherwood went back to work at his tables in the man cave.

"A couple weeks later," he said, "I had that one."

He had suspected the author had hidden his name in the final letter — and he believes he found it. Sherwood said he uncovered secret messages by keying in on repeated words and phrases, then applying his knowledge of codes.

First, he focused on a line that says "and please tell the lackey cops, D.B. Cooper is not my real name." Sherwood said it hides the coded message "I am 1st LT Robert Rackstraw."

Another line that includes the phrase "through good ole Unk" goes to the heart of the crime, Sherwood said. He contends it actually says "I want out of the system and saw a way by skyjacking a jet plane."

Sherwood admitted he could be wrong — finding what he wanted to because he was working from the assumption the letters were the work of Rackstraw. But he thinks there is just too much for it to be coincidence or wishful thinking gone awry.

Robert Rackstraw: From war hero to murder suspect

Colbert's book paints Rackstraw as disillusioned and vengeful after being forced out of the military for alleged misconduct. It also describes a man with the training, skills, moxie and motive to pull off the daring crime — and to survive a nighttime jump from the Boeing 727.

Rackstraw had a history of minor scrapes with the law as a young man, but things got serious when he was accused of the embezzling thousands of dollars in a check-kiting scam. Before his trial, newspaper accounts from the 1970s reveal, Rackstraw fled the U.S. for Iran.

When he was returned to the U.S. in early 1978, Rackstraw faced a new charge. He was accused of murdering his stepfather. It was during that time that two local investigators in Stockton, California, alerted the FBI to Rackstraw as a possible Cooper suspect.

Rackstraw was acquitted of the murder in the summer of 1978, but fled authorities again before an October hearing in the embezzlement case. Newspaper accounts say he rented a small airplane and claimed in a fake May Day radio transmission that he was crashing into Monterey Bay. He was taken back into custody in Southern California in January 1979.

A headline in the Reno Gazette on Feb. 9, 1979, said Rackstraw offered a "tongue-in-cheek denial" to claims he was Cooper during a jailhouse interview.

"You want me to say I'm not D.B. Cooper — okay, I'm not D.B. Cooper," Rackstraw told reporters for Gannett News Service. The story said "it is obvious that Robert Wesley Rackstraw delights in tantalizing reporters and authorities alike with another obscure hint in the 1971 skyjacking case ..." It added Rackstraw "clearly enjoyed his role as the newest focal point of speculation about the case."

Robert Rackstraw calls D.B. Cooper sleuths 'fake news'

In July 1979, Rackstraw was sentenced to two years in prison in the embezzlement case. A probation officer's report prior to the sentencing, the Stockton Record reported, "punctured (Rackstraw's) self-made image as a war hero."

While Rackstraw had received numerous medals and commendations, including a Silver Star for valor, a newspaper report revealed he "was not a Green Beret and that despite his claim of receiving five Purple Hearts, he actually had none and had never even been wounded in combat."

Rackstraw was released from prison in 1980. His most serious criminal allegations behind him, according to Colbert's book, Rackstraw went on to earn a law degree. In the ensuing years, he taught and worked at a boat shop.

Despite his refusal to directly deny that he is Cooper, Rackstraw told IndyStar that Colbert's claims are "fake news."

"It was a hurrah movement, I guess, a eureka movement for Colbert grasping at the last straws," he said of the recent announcement that Sherwood had cracked the mystery of Cooper's identity.

In a self-filed motion last year opposing Colbert's request for the FBI to release records from its Cooper files, Rackstraw described himself as a "Disabled Homeless Veteran." But he listed a return address in Coronado, California, a resort city in the San Diego Bay.

He also listed an email address that starts with "airbornebob." Only Rackstraw knows if that moniker is a reference to his military days nearly five decades earlier, a nod to his role as a one-time Cooper suspect — or something else.

Contact Tim Evans at 317-444-6204 or tim.evans@indystar.com. Follow him of Twitter: @starwatchtim