A four-hour documentary that aired on the History Channel this week suggests the infamous airplane hijacker known worldwide as D.B. Cooper may be living out a quiet retirement in a Banker’s Hill condominium.

The documentary is the work of Ventura County filmmaker Thomas J. Colbert, who says he spent five years with a team of 40 investigators to identify the enigmatic Cooper.

The film focuses on Robert W. Rackstraw, now 72, a former Army paratrooper.

Colbert said his team’s analysis of handwriting samples, DNA and other evidence does not rule out Rackstraw as the one who hijacked Flight 305 but it does not confirm him either. He said the possibility should be reviewed by authorities.


“This has been a scab on the FBI for many years, and I have friends there,” said Colbert, a former news and public-relations man who says he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the hunt. “I’m hoping the FBI opens up the case, but we will see.”

Someone using the name of Dan Cooper — later popularized as D.B. Cooper — bought a one-way Northwest Orient Airlines ticket from Portland to Seattle on Thanksgiving Eve 1971. He claimed to have a bomb, secured a $200,000 ransom and jumped out of the back of the plane and into the annals of American pop culture.

× The documentary makes the case that Cooper survived, a feat only possible for someone with the right training and experience.

FBI officials in the Seattle field office issued a statement to The San Diego Union-Tribune seven minutes after the documentary broadcast concluded.


The agency says the files on NORJAK — as the case is known — have been sent to Washington D.C. for storage and historical value. Nothing short of a break on physical evidence will bring further investigation.

“Every time the FBI assesses additional tips for the NORJAK case, investigative resources and manpower are diverted from programs that more urgently need attention,” the statement said. “Although the FBI will no longer actively investigate this case, should specific physical evidence emerge — related specifically to the parachutes or the money taken by the hijacker — individuals with those materials are asked to contact their local FBI field office.”

Rackstraw did not respond to messages left by The San Diego Union-Tribune on his phone and at his home. When Colbert’s investigators approached Rackstraw outside his 45-foot yacht “Poverty Sucks” at the Navy Yacht Club in Coronado, Rackstraw would only say the evidence was intriguing.

The filmmaker offered Rackstraw $20,000 for movie rights to his story. The former paratrooper mulled the idea for a few moments, twice asking to see the check Colbert wrote out and brought with him.


Then Rackstraw said, “The problem is, I don’t remember a lot of it.”

An uncle named Cooper

In the days immediately following the Northwest hijacking, letters signed “D.B. Cooper” were mailed to newspapers in Reno, Nev., Portland, Ore. and Vancouver, B.C.

Two of the notes — the first and last — were sent from within 50 miles of Valley Springs, a remote Northern California town where Rackstraw’s parents lived and where the Vietnam veteran stayed on and off throughout the 1970s.

The four letters, hand-scrawled in halting capital letters not unlike the passenger ticket filled out by Dan Cooper, were mailed over five days from hundreds of miles apart.


The circumstantial connections are among 90 pieces of evidence offered by the filmmakers.

In another example, the film references a 1960 family vacation to Phoenix, where Rackstraw as a teenager met John “Ed” Cooper, an uncle who was an avid skydiver with hundreds of jumps to his credit.

One working theory in the documentary is that Rackstraw became enamored of his skydiving relative on the Arizona vacation, which might explain why the hijacker chose the pseudonym Cooper when booking a flight from Portland to Seattle a decade-plus later.

Whoever D.B. Cooper was, he fought crushing wind and pounding rain the day he became a fugitive, as he made his way down the stairs at the tail end of the Boeing 727 two miles above the thick forests of southern Washington.


“I don’t have a grudge against your airline, miss,” the hijacker told a flight attendant before jumping, according to an FBI transcript. “I just have a grudge.”

With the ransom money tied to his body and a parachute across his back, the man wearing a black suit, trench coat and loafers leaped into the sub-zero night sky.

Experts and amateur sleuths alike have debated for decades whether Cooper survived the unprecedented jump and, if so, whether he made it out of the backwoods wilderness along the Washington-Oregon border.

The new documentary makes the case that Cooper survived, a feat only possible for someone with the right training and experience.


Rackstraw was a decorated Army paratrooper, trained in special forces and survival skills, who knew his way around the kinds of explosives Cooper used to threaten the airliner crew, according to the film.

The investigation by Colbert also chronicles other run-ins with the law by Rackstraw, suggesting he was capable of something like the skyjacking. According to Colbert and his team:

In 1978, he was convicted of check fraud, explosives charges and an unrelated airplane theft and was sentenced to two years in state prison.

Rackstraw received a two-year probation term in 1992 for damaging property he rented while building an illegal barn to house construction equipment

In 1999, the FAA suspended his commercial pilot license for providing false statements on an application and failing to report a drunk-driving conviction as required.

Artist sketches released by the FBI of a man calling himself D.B. Cooper, who vanished in 1971 with $200,000 in stolen cash after hijacking a commercial airliner over Oregon. (U.S. FBI/Handout via Reuters)

Another enticing piece of evidence laid out in the History Channel film is a photo identification of Rackstraw issued by the U.S. Army in 1970.


The black-and-white mug shot bears resemblance to a Cooper sketch released by the FBI in 1971, with the two faces sharing close-cropped black hair, a receding hairline and deep-set eyes.

‘I told everybody’

Rackstraw was named as a suspect in the hijacking by the FBI in the 1970s. Agents ruled him out in part because flight attendants on the plane said Cooper appeared to be 35 to 45 years old, according to the documentary, when Rackstraw was 28 at the time.

Rackstraw told reporters in 1979 that he was the infamous hijacker, then quickly recanted.

“I told everybody I was (Cooper),” Rackstraw told Colbert, before explaining the admission was a stunt.


The documentary dwells on connections Rackstraw had to colorful characters connected to the case over the years.

Filmmakers interviewed people in the Oregon communities of Corvallis and Astoria, where a charismatic grifter calling himself Baron Norman de Winter first appeared in the summer of 1971.

According to these witnesses, one of whom was elected mayor and another who became a priest for the Catholic Church, de Winter turned up in Astoria in July, weeks after Rackstraw was discharged from the Army.

De Winter told people he was a Swiss baron vacationing across the West Coast by way of a small plane he piloted himself. He quickly won their confidence with tales of royalty and a grand chalet, and promised to whisk many of them away on a European holiday come Christmas-time, townspeople told the filmmakers.


Colbert’s investigation uncovered up to nine witnesses who are convinced de Winter and Rackstraw are the same guy.

De Winter left Astoria and showed up in Corvallis a few weeks later, flying a small plane over the area by day and spinning tales of nobility and adventure with drinking buddies by night. He left without notice days before the hijacking, according to the film.

According to the team of retired investigators, there is near certainty that Cooper, Rackstraw and de Winter are somehow connected. They were never seen separately at the same time and they were independently confirmed to be in the same vicinity in the second half of 1971.

“It is statistically impossible for three master criminals to all be operating within 100 miles, let alone three that look alike, have the same flying skills and their arrivals and departures are synchronized like whack-a-mole,” the investigative report concludes.


Colbert plans a news conference in Los Angeles Wednesday to call for the FBI to reopen the case. The agency’s initial reaction does not bode well for his effort.

“In order to solve a case, the FBI must prove culpability beyond a reasonable doubt,” spokeswoman Ayn Dietrich-Williams said. “Unfortunately, none of the well-meaning tips reported have yielded the proof needed to resolve this investigation.”

Colbert copyrighted the investigation findings and is selling his e-book, “The Last Master Outlaw,” at dbcooper.com.

Some of the stolen $20 bills taken by a hijacker calling himself D.B Cooper and found in Oregon, U.S., by a young boy in 1980, are displayed in an undated FBI picture. (FBI/Handout via Reuters)