[spapsinee]

Wow.... here's a blast from the past....

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/02/us/02dbcooper.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

Forty Years Later, a Tip With Potential in a Famous CaseBy KATHARINE Q. SEELYE and CHARLIE SAVAGE

SEATTLE — He smoked Raleigh cigarettes, wore a black clip-on tie and drank whiskey, and when zero hour came, he was one cool cat.
From Seat 18C on a Northwest Orient flight from Portland, Ore., to Seattle, he passed a note to the stewardess — this was 1971, pre-“flight attendant” era. She slipped it in her pocket, unread.

“Miss, you’d better look at that note,” the passenger calmly advised. “I have a bomb.” He opened his briefcase and showed her what could have been a bomb, nestled in a mass of wires.

With that, the man known as D. B. Cooper hijacked the plane, later parachuting out of it and into the unknown. His body was never found. Mr. Cooper became a folk hero, and the case remains the only unsolved hijacking in American history.

Now, 40 years later, comes what seems like a tantalizing new tip. The Federal Bureau of Investigation says it has a new suspect, one whose name has never surfaced in the ocean of tips that has washed in over four decades.

Fred Gutt, a special agent in the Seattle office of the F.B.I., told The New York Times on Monday that the suspect died 10 years ago. He said the tip came from a retired law enforcement officer who knew a witness who “had an association with” the suspect from long ago.

“After the suspect died, the witness was more comfortable sharing some secrets, if you will,” Mr. Gutt said. The tip, first reported by The Telegraph, the British newspaper, was deemed credible because it came from someone in law enforcement.

The new reports set off another round of speculation and conspiracy theories across the Internet. And the news media again besieged the tiny town of Ariel in southwest Washington, near where Mr. Cooper is believed to have landed. There, in so-called Cooper Country, the Ariel Store and tavern, an archive of Coopermania, has kept the story alive with an annual get-together that toasts Mr. Cooper as a hero.

“They still celebrate because somebody got something over on the government and nobody got hurt,” Jack Elliott, the son of the owner, said Monday.

It was in November 1971 that Mr. Cooper bought a $20 plane ticket from Portland to Seattle. (He used the name Dan Cooper, believed to be an alias, but a reporter heard it as D. B. Cooper, and that name has stuck.)

With bomb in hand, Mr. Cooper ordered the plane to land in Seattle, where he allowed the three dozen passengers to exit in exchange for four parachutes and $200,000. Then he and a skeleton crew took off again. He demanded the plane fly south, but not above 10,000 feet.
Somewhere over the Cascades in southwest Washington or northern Oregon, cockpit warning lights showed that the rear staircase had been opened. The pilot asked over the intercom: “Is everything O.K. back there?”

“No!” came the cry, as Mr. Cooper leapt from the stairway into the subzero darkness.

The F.B.I. has been chasing leads — nowhere — ever since. Its file measures 40 feet long. The bureau has catalogued more than 1,000 suspects, some supplied by psychics, some turned in by people suspicious of a family member, some coming in deathbed confessions.

Mr. Gutt said the bureau had other “active” leads but considered this one, which it received a year ago, more credible than most.

But he said the bureau had difficulty finding clear fingerprints from the dead suspect. He said that the F.B.I.’s lab in Quantico, Va., had tested a guitar strap from the suspect but the material did not yield good fingerprints, and that the F.B.I. was obtaining other items that belonged to the suspect to test them.

Everyone has seen these tips come and go before, and they are catalogued in a shelf-full of publications. Geoffrey Gray, a journalist who has contributed to The Times, has written the most recent book, “Skyjack,” to be published next week. (Mr. Gray proves how the legend endures — he is 32, not born when the escapade took place.)

Mr. Gray cautioned that the evidence from the night of the jump might be problematic. “The fingerprint samples that the F.B.I. has are compromised, they aren’t good enough to make an exact match,” he said in a phone interview from New York, adding that he had examined the files and conducted extensive interviews for his book. Some of those prints are only partial, he said.

“In Cooperland, one must proceed with extreme caution,” Mr. Gray said. “The case is so infamous and the mystery so powerful that these clues have a way of taking on a life of their own.”

One of the biggest mysteries is whether Mr. Cooper died when he jumped from the plane. When The Telegraph asked Ayn Sandolo Dietrich, a spokeswoman for the F.B.I. in Seattle, if he might still be alive, she replied, “Generally, the large majority of subjects we look into now are already deceased, based on the timing of this.”

Mr. Cooper’s possible death — either from the jump in 1971 or perhaps 10 years ago from natural causes — seems an anticlimactic turn of events that could mean the caper is never resolved.

That seems acceptable to Cindy Schultz, 56, a manager at the Merwin Dam in Ariel, who said Monday that she had watched the twists in the case since she was a schoolgirl. It would be an “awesome” feat if he survived the jump, she said, but if he has died she hopes the fuss will die with him.

“For those of us who have lived with it since it happened, it’s like, let the memory rest,” she said. “The guy got away with something.”
Reporting was contributed by Lee van der Voo in Ariel, Wash.