Chapter 14 THE CODED NOTES

Please, Mr. Postman—Is There a Letter to the Editor in Your Bag for Me?

In the months and years following the hijacking, at least six notes and letters were sent to various news outlets, primarily on the West Coast, claiming to be from the hijacker. Considerable energy has been applied to discerning hidden codes within these communications that might expose the identity of Dan Cooper. However, there has never been any conclusive proof the letters actually came from the hijacker, let alone that they contained hidden or encoded messages. Nonetheless, some of the code-breaking efforts have shown interesting results.

DB Cooper Hijacking Evidence Thanks for the Hospitality note sent to the Reno Gazette

Thanks for the Hospitality note sent to the Reno Gazette. (Reno Gazette, November 29, 1971)

**FIRST NOTE TO THE RENO GAZETTE, RENO, NEVADA (#1)**

A pasted-up note received on Monday, November 29, 1971, read:

ATTENTION: Thanks for the hospitality.

was in a rut.

D.B. Cooper

The letter was postmarked November 27, 1971, in Oakdale, California, a small town fifteen miles northeast of Modesto. The Modesto Bee confirmed that four of the eight words were cut from the Friday, November 26, 1971 issue of their paper.

**LETTER TO THE PROVINCE, VANCOUVER, BC, CANADA (#2)**

A handwritten note was received December 1, 1971, by the chief editor of The Province, a newspaper in Vancouver, BC, Canada. The note read:

Chief Editor,

The Province

The composite drawing on Page 3 as suspected by the FBI does not represent the truth.

I enjoyed the Grey Cup game. Am leaving Vancouver.

Thanks for your hospitality.

D.B. Cooper

The letter was postmarked in Vancouver, Canada, on November 30, 1971.

**SECOND NOTE TO THE RENO GAZETTE, RENO, NEVADA (#3)**

Another pasted-up note was received by the Reno Gazette on December 2, 1971. It read:

plan ahead for Retirement Income

D.B. Cooper

The note was postmarked in the Sacramento area on December 1, 1971.

**FIRST NOTE TO THE OREGONIAN, PORTLAND, OREGON (#4)**

The hand-printed note read:

I am right here in Portland! And the $200000 is for revolution.

D.B. Cooper

The note was postmarked on December 3, 1971.

**LETTER TO THE SEATTLE TIMES, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE NEW YORK TIMES, AND THE WASHINGTON POST (#5)**

(Typewritten.)

Sirs,

I knew from the start that I wouldn’t be caught.

I didn’t rob Northwest Orient because I thought it would be romantic, heroic or any of the other euphemisms that seem to attach themselves to situations of high risk.

I am no modern day Robin Hood. Unfortunately do have only 14 months to live.

My life has been one of hate, turmoil, hunger and more hate, this seemed to be the fastest and most profitable way to gain a few fast grains of peace of mind.

I don’t blame people for hating me for what I’ve done nor do I blame anybody for wanting me to be caught and punished, though this can never happen.

Here are some (not all) of the things working against the authorities:

I’m not a boasting man
I left no fingerprints
I wore a toupee
I wore putty make-up

They could add or subtract from the composite a hundred times and not come up with an accurate description; and we both know it.

I’ve come and gone on several airline flights already and am not holed up in some obscure backwoods town. Neither am I a psycho-pathic killer. As a matter of fact I’ve never even received a speeding ticket.

Thank you for your attention.

D.B. Cooper

ccccccc
Wash Post – 717171684*
New York Times –
Seattle Times –
Los Angeles Times – 7698QA2753

The typed letter received by the Seattle Times was postmarked on December 11, 1971, somewhere in the Seattle area.

**SECOND NOTE TO THE OREGONIAN, PORTLAND, OREGON (#6)**

The Oregonian received another typewritten letter purporting to be from D. B. Cooper.

March 28, 1972

The Portland Oregonian Newspaper

Portland, Oregon

Gentlemen:

This letter is to let you know I am not dead but really alive and just back from the Bahamas, so your silly troopers up there can stop looking for me. That is just how dumb this government is. I like your articles about me but you can stop them now. D.B. Cooper is not real.

I had to do something with the experiences Uncle taught me, so here I am, a very rich man. Uncle gave too much of it to world idiots and no work for me. I had to do it to relieve myself of frustration. I want out of the system and saw a way through good old Unk. Now you know. I am going around the world and they will never find me because I am smarter than the system’s lackey cops and lame duck leaders. Now it is Uncle’s turn to weep and pay one of it’s own some cash for a change. (And please tell the lackey cops D.B. Cooper is not my real name.)

Sincerely,

A Rich Man

The letter was postmarked in Jacksonville, Florida.

DECODING THE LETTERS

Over the years, countless attempts have been made to decode the letters and evaluate their contents. Were they really sent by the hijacker? If so, what clues did they contain to his identity? Unfortunately, there have never been satisfactory answers to these questions. The most recent and widely publicized is the effort by the Case Breakers.

DB Cooper Hijacking Evidence Bottom section of the letter to the Seattle Times with Sherwood’s interpretation

Bottom section of the letter to the Seattle Times with Sherwood’s interpretation. (Denise Huddle)

The Case Breakers received a tip that the hijacker was a former pilot for the Army Security Agency in Vietnam named Robert W. Rackstraw. Former government codebreaker Rick Sherwood (a member of the same unit as Rackstraw) used a mathematical method of assigning numerical values to letters, and using this method, he determined that “please tell the lackey cops” from the sixth letter has a numerical total of 269. He then determined that using the same values for the letters of “I’m Lt. Robert W. Rackstraw” also equals 269. Sherwood applied the same methodology to link other parts of the letters to various designations and inside information from their unit in Vietnam.

While some modern cryptographers applaud Sherwood’s work, one skeptic in the field complained that the method Sherwood used is not conclusive, is easily manipulated, and is highly subjective, pointing out that, using Sherwood’s method, “I am SpongeBob SquarePants” also equals 269.

Chapter 15

INVESTIGATOR’S COMMENTS

My favorite of the currently known suspects is Richard McCoy. First and foremost, McCoy demonstrated he could successfully exit a 727 through the ventral stairs and parachute safely to the ground and get back to civilization in one piece with his loot. Not only was he a highly accurate copycat, but he seemed to learn from Cooper’s previous experience, and I’m not sure how much of that learning could have been done from the information publicly available at the time.

McCoy brought his own notes with him and skipped the problems associated with dictating his demands to the flight attendant who just happened to have paper and a pen in her purse. He also brought warm jump clothes packed in a checked bag that he had the airlines deliver to the base of the airstairs. He threatened to remotely detonate a bomb after he jumped if he saw chase planes following the 727 as they had done during the Cooper hijacking, thus eliminating the risk of a chase plane breaking off after he jumped and pinpointing his landing spot. Perhaps most importantly, he chose a route that did not involve jumping into rocky terrain in a dense forest.

While McCoy was a masterful hijacker, he wasn’t so skilled in the getting-away-with-it component of the crime. He was arrested at 5:30 a.m. on Sunday, May 21, 1972, just forty hours after the hijacking. Held without bail, he was captured as a result of his wife’s concerns over her own involvement in the scheme that ultimately led to his sister-in-law calling his best friend, a state trooper, who then alerted the FBI.

If McCoy was Cooper, then one might wonder where his wife was during the planning and execution of the first hijacking and why he made the fatal error of involving her in the second crime. Furthermore, if you believe the letters to the press were actually written by the Cooper hijacker, then it is unlikely that McCoy was Cooper because he was in jail when many of the notes were written and mailed.

While Marla Cooper strikes me as a credible and honest person, her claim (or at the very least insinuation) that L. D. Cooper disappeared after the hijacking seems questionable to me. Ms. Cooper implies that this disappearance indicated a consciousness of guilt on her uncle’s part. Yet, Ms. Cooper even admits seeing L. D. herself twice during the year following the crime when the hijacker should have been the most vigilant about laying low. If I can find multiple past addresses and vital records for L. D. Cooper using nothing but my Ancestry.com subscription, I doubt he was actually hiding at all.

In the end, I believe that it is the metal particles from the tie that will ultimately solve the puzzle. While the DNA and fingerprints collected from the Cooper plane could have come from an infinite number of sources, the pure titanium didn’t come from inside the 727, and it strains credulity to believe it was contamination from touch transfer during the flight. If the Cooper hijacker purchased the tie at Goodwill, then the particles could be attributable to activities of the tie’s previous owner. But if the tie was originally purchased and worn only by the hijacker, then I believe the titanium-antimony alloy particles will eventually lead investigators to the perpetrator.

So who was D. B. Cooper? Maybe he was one of the countless suspects that the FBI ruled out…or maybe he was someone who never so much as blipped any law enforcement radar. While many said the hijacker could not have survived the jump, no body was ever found. Maybe his remains are just waiting for a hiker or hunter to discover them. Or maybe he hit the ground running and walked out of the woods and into the ether. None of the ransom money was ever reported in the banking system, and besides the $5,800 found by Brian Ingram, none of it was ever recovered. By now, over fifty years later, whoever he was, he’s probably gone to that big airport in the sky, so we may never know for sure who he was and what happened to him after the airstairs went bump in the night.

Meanwhile, I’ll be glued to Eric Ulis’s website for details about where the titanium-antimony alloy particles take him on one more man’s search for Dan Cooper.

INVESTIGATOR’S TIPS

After talking about Cooper’s hijacking, I thought this might be a good time to focus on a few tips for flying safe. Professor Ed Galea, a fire and evacuation expert and founding director of the Fire Safety Engineering Group at the University of Greenwich in London, conducts research on the topic. Professor Galea has some tips for surviving an air disaster:

Sit close to the exits as every second counts in the event of an emergency. He suggests being within five rows of the nearest exit. More distance from the exit equals less chance of survival after a crash.
Keep your shoes on in preparation for an escape. There may be dangerous debris on the plane’s floor during a crisis.
Recognize those seat belts aren’t exactly like the ones in your vehicle. Airplane seat belts release by lifting a lever, not depressing a button. It’s easy to revert to common muscle memory under extreme stress.
Before takeoff, count the number of seat rows from yours to the nearest exit in case the plane cabin fills up with smoke or the lights go out in the event of a crash.

Remember the “plus three, minus eight” rule: Close to 80 percent of all plane crashes occur during the first three minutes after takeoff and the last eight minutes before landing. Be extra vigilant during these times. Don’t sleep, keep your shoes on, and be on the lookout for trouble and ready to react.

QUIZ

Test your knowledge about the D. B. Cooper case.

D B Cooper, Where Are You? Quiz | U.S. History | 10 Questions (FunTrivia.com)

SNARKY HUMOR

I found this at EAA67.org. There are a bunch of funny announcements on their Jokes page.

This is a transcript of a Southwest flight attendant doing the preflight safety briefing. I think it’s a scream.

“In the event of a sudden loss of cabin pressure, masks will descend from the ceiling. Stop screaming, grab the mask, and pull it over your face. If you have a small child traveling with you, secure your mask before assisting with theirs. If you are traveling with more than one small child, pick your favorite.”

REFERENCES & COOL SITES

While the entire book will be presented free of charge in these blog posts, for an easier reading experience, you can obtain the ebook version of all of Part 3 – Who Was D.B. Cooper for free by clicking on the button below. You can also buy the entire anthology of Anthrax to Zodiac at Amazon.com.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FREE EBOOK OF PART 3 – WHO WAS D.B. COOPER?

GET THE ENTIRE ANTHOLOGY AT AMAZON.COM

PART 3 – WHO WAS D.B. COOPER? (Post #5/5)

Chapter 14

THE CODED NOTES

Please, Mr. Postman—Is There a Letter to the Editor in Your Bag for Me?

FIRST NOTE TO THE RENO GAZETTE, RENO, NEVADA (#1)

ATTENTION: Thanks for the hospitality.

was in a rut.

D.B. Cooper

LETTER TO THE PROVINCE, VANCOUVER, BC, CANADA (#2)

Chief Editor,

The Province

The composite drawing on Page 3 as suspected by the FBI does not represent the truth.

I enjoyed the Grey Cup game. Am leaving Vancouver.

Thanks for your hospitality.

D.B. Cooper

SECOND NOTE TO THE RENO GAZETTE, RENO, NEVADA (#3)

plan ahead for Retirement Income

D.B. Cooper

FIRST NOTE TO THE OREGONIAN, PORTLAND, OREGON (#4)

I am right here in Portland! And the $200000 is for revolution.

D.B. Cooper

LETTER TO THE SEATTLE TIMES, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE NEW YORK TIMES, AND THE WASHINGTON POST (#5)

Sirs,

I knew from the start that I wouldn’t be caught.

I didn’t rob Northwest Orient because I thought it would be romantic, heroic or any of the other euphemisms that seem to attach themselves to situations of high risk.

I am no modern day Robin Hood. Unfortunately do have only 14 months to live.

My life has been one of hate, turmoil, hunger and more hate, this seemed to be the fastest and most profitable way to gain a few fast grains of peace of mind.

I don’t blame people for hating me for what I’ve done nor do I blame anybody for wanting me to be caught and punished, though this can never happen.

Here are some (not all) of the things working against the authorities:

I’m not a boasting manI left no fingerprintsI wore a toupeeI wore putty make-up

They could add or subtract from the composite a hundred times and not come up with an accurate description; and we both know it.

I’ve come and gone on several airline flights already and am not holed up in some obscure backwoods town. Neither am I a psycho-pathic killer. As a matter of fact I’ve never even received a speeding ticket.

Thank you for your attention.

D.B. Cooper

cccccccWash Post – 717171684*New York Times –Seattle Times –Los Angeles Times – 7698QA2753

SECOND NOTE TO THE OREGONIAN, PORTLAND, OREGON (#6)

March 28, 1972

The Portland Oregonian Newspaper

Portland, Oregon

Gentlemen:

This letter is to let you know I am not dead but really alive and just back from the Bahamas, so your silly troopers up there can stop looking for me. That is just how dumb this government is. I like your articles about me but you can stop them now. D.B. Cooper is not real.

Sincerely,

A Rich Man

DECODING THE LETTERS

Chapter 15

INVESTIGATOR’S COMMENTS

INVESTIGATOR’S TIPS

QUIZ

SNARKY HUMOR

REFERENCES & COOL SITES

The Notes & Letters

The Ransom Money

The Tie

The Suspects

The Stairs & The Cooper Vane

History

General

Tips

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**FIRST NOTE TO THE RENO GAZETTE, RENO, NEVADA (#1)**

**LETTER TO THE PROVINCE, VANCOUVER, BC, CANADA (#2)**

**SECOND NOTE TO THE RENO GAZETTE, RENO, NEVADA (#3)**

**FIRST NOTE TO THE OREGONIAN, PORTLAND, OREGON (#4)**

**LETTER TO THE SEATTLE TIMES, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE NEW YORK TIMES, AND THE WASHINGTON POST (#5)**

I’m not a boasting man
I left no fingerprints
I wore a toupee
I wore putty make-up

ccccccc
Wash Post – 717171684*
New York Times –
Seattle Times –
Los Angeles Times – 7698QA2753

**SECOND NOTE TO THE OREGONIAN, PORTLAND, OREGON (#6)**