Chapter 12 (continued)
The Handwriting on the Wall
Unlike the Cooper hijacking, McCoy brought his own notes and didn’t have to rely on a flight attendant to provide the paper and a pen and take his dictation. McCoy also ordered that all of his notes and flight plans be returned (just as Cooper took his original note with him). But Ms. Surdham managed to keep one note handwritten by McCoy without him noticing. This note was subsequently turned over to the FBI and proved a critical piece of evidence in the investigation.
After Van Ieperen identified McCoy as a suspect, the FBI retrieved McCoy’s military record, and the handprinted skyjacker’s note that Ms. Surdham secreted away was quickly compared with writing found in McCoy’s personnel file. Experts declared that the note and the handwriting in McCoy’s official records were written by the same person.
Gotcha!
Death by a Thousand Clues
After the FBI had McCoy’s name and knew where to look, the evidence against him piled up like snow ahead of a plow blade. William Coggin positively identified a photo of McCoy as the hijacker. The FBI established that McCoy was an experienced skydiver. As a helicopter pilot, he had access to FAA flight plan forms. He had several pistols, and his past military service made it possible for him to have gotten hold of a hand grenade.
Following his arrest, investigators found a bag containing $499,970 inside his house. That pretty well cinched it. McCoy was convicted of the United hijacking and was sentenced to forty-five years in prison.
Because the gods of law enforcement have a sense of humor, when McCoy was finally arrested, authorities learned he was on his way to National Guard duty where he was to fly a helicopter as part of the search for the man who skyjacked United Flight 855.
The Shawshank Destruction
On August 10, 1974, Richard McCoy escaped from the federal prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Using dental paste from the prison’s medical facility, McCoy fashioned a fake gun. Lacking Andy Dufresne’s sense of finesse, McCoy and some other prisoners used the fake gun to commandeer a garbage truck, which McCoy then crashed through the gates of the prison. Even though McCoy’s escape was instantly detected, he managed to stay on the lam for three months.
But on November 9, 1974, the karmic boomerang struck with a vengeance when the cops who caught up with the fugitive were using real guns made of cold blue steel. McCoy was shot dead during an attempt to apprehend him in Virginia Beach.
Digging Up Dirt on the Bad Guys
Bernie Rhodes was the chief probation officer for the federal courts in Salt Lake City at the time of the McCoy trial. He was responsible for preparing the presentencing report (commonly called a PSR) for the judge’s use in sentencing McCoy. These reports are generally considered to be among the most thorough background investigations in all of law enforcement, rivaled only by those done for top-level security clearances, and the probation officers who prepare them are among the best background investigators in the country. In the legal system, federal probation officers are the investigative equivalent of a whole body scanner.
The Devil in Disguise—If He Quacks like D. B. Cooper and Hijacks like D. B. Cooper…
After turning McCoy’s life inside out in his investigation, Rhodes became convinced that McCoy was D. B. Cooper. Rhodes believed Cooper repeated his hijacking after having lost the money on the way down during the first attempt on the day before Thanksgiving of 1971. In the interview he gave for the HBO documentary The Mystery of D.B. Cooper, Rhodes pointed out that the FBI delivered the twenty-two pounds of twenty-dollar bills to Cooper in a plain canvas bag without handles for the express purpose of making it difficult to carry. Cooper apparently cut out the cords on one of the unused back parachutes to secure the money to his waist.
During Rhodes’s interview with McCoy, McCoy insisted he was at home with his family in Provo, Utah, for the Thanksgiving holidays. However, authorities knew that McCoy was in Las Vegas, Nevada, the day after the hijacking. Phone records allegedly placed McCoy in Las Vegas Thanksgiving night. Rhodes stated unequivocally that during an interview with McCoy, he found McCoy to be a dead ringer for the composite sketch of D. B. Cooper and had little if any doubt that Richard McCoy was D. B. Cooper.
LYNN DOYLE (L. D.) COOPER
L. D. and his four brothers were raised by their parents in a logging camp outside of Sisters, Oregon, run by the Brooks-Scanlon company. Friends from high school remembered the brothers as rambunctious, but hardworking. Shortly after graduating from high school, L. D. applied for work at Brooks-Scanlon, but he didn’t get the job and left the area.
Little Red Riding Hood and the Big, Bad Hijackers
Marla Wynn Cooper of Oklahoma City came forward in 2011 with her recollection of a story about her father Don Cooper’s brothers, Dewey and L. D. Cooper. Right before Thanksgiving of 1971, the family had gathered at her paternal grandmother’s house in Sisters. While on a family walk in the woods, eight-year-old Marla overheard her paternal uncles, L. D. and Dewey, talking secretively about some mysterious plan they were making. She saw them with what she took to be sophisticated, expensive walkie-talkies just before the men left her grandmother’s house, ostensibly to go turkey hunting.
Turkey Hunting at Ten Thousand Feet
When her uncles returned Thanksgiving Day (the day after the hijacking), L. D. was wearing a white T-shirt covered in blood. Despite being bruised and battered and barely able to walk, he refused medical help. He said his injuries were the result of a car accident. Before L. D. left her grandmother’s house, Marla overheard Dewey say to him, “We did it. Our money problems are over; we’ve hijacked an airplane.”
After her uncles departed, Marla’s father, Don Cooper, told her that his brothers had done something very bad and then swore her to secrecy about what she had seen, telling her it was a matter of life and death.
The Not-So-Invisible Man
Marla believes that L. D. and Dewey stayed with another uncle while L. D. recovered from his injuries. She saw her uncle L. D. twice in 1972, once midyear and then again at Thanksgiving, but she never saw him again after that. She regularly asked her family where her favorite uncle was, but no one would ever tell her, claiming they didn’t know. From her perspective as a child, L. D. Cooper just disappeared.
However, when investigative journalist Bruce A. Smith interviewed several other members of the Cooper family, he learned that L. D. had gotten married sometime after 1972 to a woman named Marcia, who consistently refused to be interviewed about her life with L. D.
In addition to a six-month marriage I found for L. D. in Oregon from 1955–1956, I have also found a record of a Lynn Doyle Cooper (a resident of Oklahoma) marrying a Marcia K. Focsko (a resident of Nebraska) on October 11, 1973, in Virginia City, Nevada. This marriage took place almost two years after the hijacking of Flight 305. If L. D. Cooper was trying to fly under law enforcement radar, he needed some work on his technique. Going into the Virginia City courthouse and putting his real name on a marriage license was about as stealthy as the flashing signs in Times Square.
Dewey Cooper’s widow, Janet Cooper, also told Smith that L. D. Cooper served as the best man at her wedding to Dewey Cooper in 1981, so apparently the brothers were still in touch. While Janet stated that the wedding was the first and only time she had met her brother-in-law in person, she said he called to offer her his condolences when Dewey died in 1985.
A Ramblin’ Man
An article in the Bend, Oregon Bulletin on August 6, 2011, reported that property records showed L. D living in Reno in the early 1970s and stated that at various other times, he was living in California, Iowa, and other parts of Oregon. In addition to the marriage record, which listed him as a resident of Oklahoma, I also found a record indicating he lived in Sparks, Nevada, at one time.
Shortly before her father died, Marla asked him if he thought his brother L. D. was still alive. He said he did, but surmised that L. D. was still in hiding. When Marla asked why in the world her uncle would have been hiding, her father said, “You know—they hijacked that plane.”
L. D. died April 3, 1999, and is buried in the Pilot Butte Cemetery in Bend, Oregon. His tombstone shows him to have been a seaman in the US Navy during the Korean War. According to an article in the Seattle Times on August 5, 2011, he was a engineering surveyor at the time of his death.
Not the Sharpest Axe in the Logging Camp
While Bud Keep, a high school friend of the Cooper brothers, admitted to seeing a certain resemblance between the D. B. Cooper sketches and the actual Cooper brothers, Doug Hockett, a former neighbor, said he “couldn’t imagine L. D. enough on the ball to rob a plane.” Meanwhile, Marla Cooper claims to have passed a polygraph test regarding her recollections about her uncles.
ROBERT RACKSTRAW—HERO TO ZERO?
FBI artist’s sketch of Dan Cooper. (FBI.gov) and Robert Rackstraw’s army ID photo (Wikipedia)
A team of retired FBI agents and other forensic experts calling themselves the Case Breakers conducted an in-depth investigation into the D. B. Cooper case. They even sued and successfully obtained documents from the FBI’s case file on the matter through the Freedom of Information Act. After years of investigation, they are convinced that Robert Rackstraw was D. B. Cooper.
Move Over, Rambo
Rackstraw was a Vietnam veteran with Special Forces experience. He attended the US Army Airborne School at Ft. Benning, Georgia, where he had parachute training. At Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, he trained at the Special Forces school with the Green Berets where he learned to fly planes and helicopters and perform HALO jumps. (HALO stands for high altitude, low opening.) These are commando drops where the parachutist jumps out of a plane at a very high altitude and free-falls, only opening their parachute at the last possible moment to avoid detection. In Vietnam, Rackstraw received two Distinguished Flying Crosses, Bronze and Silver Stars, and thirty-seven air medals.
An Officer and a Con Man
But, in spite of his exemplary service as a combat soldier, Rackstraw was forced to leave the military for falsifying his educational credentials and lying about his combat record and true army rank. His exit from the armed services came just five months before the hijacking.
Folsom Prison Blues
The same character flaws that derailed Rackstraw’s military career plagued him in his civilian life. He had a long criminal record that began when he was charged in the murder of his stepfather in Calaveras County, California. He was tried for the death of Philip Rackstraw, his mother’s third husband, but was acquitted at trial. In February 1978, Rackstraw was arrested in Iran, where he was working as a pilot for hire. He was deported to the US to face charges related to the possession of explosives.
While out on bail, Rackstraw tried to fake his own death by radioing a false mayday call that he was bailing out of a rented plane over Monterey Bay. He was subsequently arrested in Fullerton, California, and an additional charge of forging federal pilot certificates was added to the list. The plane he claimed to have ditched was found repainted and hidden in a hangar. He served a year in Folsom State Prison and was released in 1980.
He Wears the Rose of Youth upon Him
Rackstraw’s name came up in the original FBI investigation in 1978 when two Stockton, California detectives holding Rackstraw on state charges notified the FBI that he might be a Cooper suspect. The FBI didn’t consider him seriously because he was twenty-eight at the time and was considered too young to be D. B. Cooper, who witnesses placed in his forties.
What’s My Line?
According to the Stockton Record, Rackstraw admitted to the FBI to being in the Northwest area at the time of the hijacking. A Los Angeles news station arranged to have two interviews with Rackstraw while he was in jail in Stockton. According to the Case Breakers’ website for their book The Master Outlaw, in archived news video of the Stockton interviews, when the reporter asked, “Do you think it’s legit that you could be one of the [Cooper] suspects?” Rackstraw responded, “Oh yes, if I was an investigator, definitely so. I wouldn’t discount myself…or a person like myself.”
When a Courthouse News Service journalist interviewed Rackstraw in 2018 about the Case Breakers’ latest revelations and pressed him to confirm or deny that he was the mysterious skyjacker, the four-time convicted felon was unequivocal in his answer: “There’s no denial whatsoever, my dear.”
Rackstraw waffled more than a Rooty Tooty Fresh ’N Fruity breakfast when it came to whether or not he was D. B. Cooper. In some interviews, he danced within a hair’s breadth of admitting it. Other times, he issued cryptic semidenials. He remained a cipher until he died of a long-standing heart condition on July 9, 2019, at his home in the Bankers Hill section of San Diego.
To be continued…
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