Post by ophion1031 on Jan 8, 2019 23:32:12 GMT -8
Since 1971 the FBI has processed over a thousand "serious suspects" along with assorted publicity seekers and deathbed confessors, most of whom have been definitively ruled out. Some notable examples:
Robert Rackstraw
Robert Wesley "Bob" Rackstraw Sr. is a former Army pilot and ex-convict who earned multiple awards for "gallant" chopper rescues during the Vietnam War. Between flights, he received his commanders' wrath for "conduct unbecoming an officer" – during unauthorized ground missions with the CIA and Green Berets; for prohibited parachute jumps; and for lying about attending two universities. Those fabrications ended Rackstraw's seven-year career on June 21, 1971. After being discharged, his sister said the 27-year-old veteran came home to California both "disillusioned" and "angry" – five months before the D.B. Cooper skyjacking.
In the 1970s he was a dead-beat dad, four-time felon, escape artist and state prison convict. It was during two fugitive runs in 1978 that the FBI Cooper task force first became aware of Rackstraw. Both getaways involved planes: one was a flight to Iran, the other a faking of his own death in a mayday crash over Monterey Bay. Local police alerted the FBI to his resemblance to Cooper composite sketches, his military skill sets, and criminal record (aircraft theft, possession of explosives, check kiting and bank fraud). Special agents eliminated him as a hijack suspect in 1979 after no direct evidence of his involvement could be found.
In the 1980s and 90s, Rackstraw became a respected University of California, Riverside, law instructor and arbitration expert with three degrees.
Kenneth Christiansen
In 2003 a Minnesota resident named Lyle Christiansen, after watching a television documentary about the Cooper hijacking, became convinced that his late brother Kenneth was D. B. Cooper. After repeated futile attempts to convince first the FBI, and then the author and film director Nora Ephron (who he hoped would make a movie about the case), he contacted a private investigator in New York. In 2010 the detective, Skipp Porteous, published a book postulating that Christiansen was indeed the hijacker. In early 2011 an episode of the History series Brad Meltzer's Decoded also summarized the circumstantial evidence linking Christiansen to the Cooper case.
Christiansen enlisted in the Army in 1944 and was trained as a paratrooper. The war had ended by the time he was deployed in 1945, but he made occasional training jumps while stationed in Japan with occupation forces in the late 1940s. After leaving the Army he joined Northwest Orient in 1954 as a mechanic in the South Pacific, and subsequently became a flight attendant, and then a purser, based in Seattle. Christiansen was 45 years old at the time of the hijacking, but he was shorter (5 ft. 8 in.), thinner (150 pounds), and lighter complected than eyewitness descriptions. Christiansen smoked (as did the hijacker), and displayed a particular fondness for bourbon (Cooper's preferred beverage). He was also left-handed. (Evidence photos of Cooper's black tie show the tie clip applied from the left side, suggesting a left-handed wearer.) Flight attendant Florence Schaffner told a reporter that photos of Christiansen fit her memory of the hijacker's appearance more closely than those of other suspects she had been shown. (Tina Mucklow, who had the most contact with Cooper, has never granted a press interview).
Christiansen reportedly purchased a house with cash a few months after the hijacking. While dying of cancer in 1994 he told Lyle, "There is something you should know, but I cannot tell you." Lyle said he never pressed his brother to explain. After Christiansen's death family members discovered gold coins and a valuable stamp collection, along with over $200,000 in bank accounts. They also found a folder of Northwest Orient news clippings which began about the time he was hired in the 1950s, and stopped just prior to the date of the hijacking, despite the fact that the hijacking was by far the most momentous news event in the airline's history. Christiansen continued to work part-time for the airline for many years after 1971, but apparently never clipped another Northwest news story.
Despite the publicity generated by Porteous's book and the 2011 television documentary, the FBI is standing by its position that Christiansen cannot be considered a prime suspect. They cite a poor match to eyewitness physical descriptions, a level of skydiving expertise above that predicted by their suspect profile, and an absence of direct incriminating evidence.
William Gossett
William Pratt Gossett was a Marine Corps, Army, and Army Air Force veteran who saw action in Korea and Vietnam. His military experience included advanced jump training and wilderness survival. After retiring from military service in 1973 he worked as an ROTC instructor, taught military law at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, and hosted a radio talk show in Salt Lake City which featured discussions about the paranormal.He died in 2003.
Gossett was widely known to be obsessed with the Cooper hijacking. He amassed a voluminous collection of Cooper-related news articles, and told one of his wives that he knew enough about the case to "write the epitaph for D.B. Cooper". Late in his life he reportedly told three of his sons, a retired Utah judge, and a friend in the Salt Lake City public defender's office that he had committed the hijacking. Photos of Gossett taken circa 1971 bear a close resemblance to the most widely circulated Cooper composite drawing.
According to Galen Cook, a lawyer who has collected information related to Gossett for years, Gossett once showed his sons a key to a Vancouver, British Columbia safe deposit box which, he claimed, contained the long-missing ransom money. Gossett's eldest son, Greg, said that his father, a compulsive gambler who was always "strapped for cash", showed him "wads of cash" just before Christmas 1971, weeks after the Cooper hijacking. He speculated that Gossett gambled the money away in Las Vegas.
In 1988 Gossett changed his name to "Wolfgang" and became a Catholic priest, which Cook and others interpreted as an effort to disguise his identity. Other circumstantial evidence includes testimony that Cook claims to have obtained from William Mitchell, a passenger on the hijacked aircraft, regarding a mysterious "physical detail" (which he will not divulge) common to the hijacker and Gossett. Cook also claims to have found "possible links" to Gossett in each of four letters signed by "D.B. Cooper" and mailed to three newspapers within days after the hijacking, although there is no evidence that the actual hijacker created or mailed any of the letters.
The FBI has no direct evidence implicating Gossett, and cannot even reliably place him in the Pacific Northwest at the time of the hijacking. "There is not one link to the D.B. Cooper case," said Special Agent Carr, "other than the statements [Gossett] made to someone."
Richard Floyd McCoy Jr.
McCoy was an Army veteran who served two tours of duty in Vietnam, first as a demolition expert, and later, with the Green Berets, as a helicopter pilot. After his military service he became a warrant officer in the Utah National Guard and an avid recreational skydiver, with aspirations, he said, of becoming a Utah State Trooper.
On April 7, 1972 McCoy staged the best-known of the so-called "copycat" hijackings. He boarded United Airlines' Flight 855 (a Boeing 727 with aft stairs) in Denver, and brandishing what later proved to be a paperweight resembling a hand grenade and an unloaded handgun, he demanded four parachutes and $500,000. After delivery of the money and parachutes at San Francisco International Airport, McCoy ordered the aircraft back into the sky and bailed out over Provo, Utah, leaving behind his handwritten hijacking instructions and his fingerprints on a magazine he had been reading. He was arrested on April 9 with the ransom cash in his possession, and after trial and conviction, received a 45-year sentence. Two years later he escaped from Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary with several accomplices by crashing a garbage truck through the main gate. Tracked down three months later in Virginia Beach, McCoy was killed in a shootout with FBI agents.
In their 1991 book, D.B. Cooper: The Real McCoy, parole officer Bernie Rhodes and former FBI agent Russell Calame asserted that they had identified McCoy as D.B. Cooper. They cited obvious similarities in the two hijackings, claims by McCoy's family that the tie and mother-of-pearl tie clip left on the plane belonged to McCoy, and McCoy's own refusal to admit or deny that he was Cooper. A principal proponent of their theory was the FBI agent who killed McCoy. "When I shot Richard McCoy," he said, "I shot D. B. Cooper at the same time."
While there is no reasonable doubt that McCoy committed the Denver hijacking, the FBI does not consider him a suspect in the Cooper case because of significant mismatches in his age (29) and description; a level of skydiving skill well above that thought to be possessed by the hijacker; and credible evidence that McCoy was in Las Vegas on the day of the Portland hijacking, and at home in Utah the day after, having Thanksgiving dinner with his family.
Duane Weber
Duane L. Weber was a World War II Army veteran who served time in at least six prisons from 1945 to 1968 for burglary and forgery. He was proposed as a suspect by his widow, based primarily on a deathbed confession: Three days before he died in 1995, Weber told his wife, "I am Dan Cooper." The name meant nothing to her, she said; but months later, a friend told her of its significance in the hijacking. She went to her local library to research D.B. Cooper, found Max Gunther's book, and discovered notations in the margins in her husband's handwriting.
She then recalled, in retrospect, that Weber once had a nightmare during which he talked in his sleep about jumping from a plane, leaving his fingerprints on the "aft stairs". He also reportedly told her that an old knee injury had been incurred by "jumping out of a plane". Like the hijacker, Weber drank bourbon and chain smoked. Other circumstantial evidence included a 1979 trip to Seattle and the Columbia River, during which Weber took a walk alone along the river bank in the Tina Bar area; four months later Brian Ingram made his ransom cash discovery in the same area.
The FBI eliminated Weber as an active suspect in July 1998 when his fingerprints did not match any of those processed in the hijacked plane, and no other direct evidence could be found to implicate him. Later, his DNA also failed to match the samples recovered from Cooper's tie, though the Bureau has since conceded that they cannot be certain that the organic material on the tie came from Cooper.
John List
John Emil List was an accountant and World War II and Korean War veteran who murdered his wife, three teenage children, and 85-year-old mother in Westfield, New Jersey fifteen days before the Cooper hijacking, withdrew $200,000 from his mother's bank account, and disappeared. He came to the attention of the Cooper task force due to the timing of his disappearance, multiple matches to the hijacker's description, and the reasoning that "a fugitive accused of mass murder has nothing to lose." After his capture in 1989, List admitted to murdering his family, but denied any involvement in the Cooper hijacking. While his name continues to crop up in Cooper articles and documentaries, no substantive evidence implicates him, and the FBI no longer considers him a suspect. He died in prison in 2008.
Barbara Dayton
Barbara Dayton, a recreational pilot and University of Washington librarian who was born Robert Dayton, served in the Merchant Marine in 1926 and then the Army during World War II. After discharge Dayton worked with explosives in the construction industry and aspired to a professional airline career, but could not obtain a commercial pilot's license.
Dayton underwent gender reassignment surgery in 1969 and changed her name to Barbara. She claimed to have staged the Cooper hijacking two years later, disguised as a man, in order to "get back" at the airline industry and the FAA, whose insurmountable rules and conditions had prevented her from becoming an airline pilot. She said she hid the ransom money in a cistern near her landing point in Woodburn, a suburban area south of Portland, Oregon. Eventually she recanted her entire story, ostensibly after learning that she could still be charged with the hijacking. The FBI has never commented publicly on Dayton, who died in 2002.
Ted Mayfield
Mayfield was an Army Special Forces veteran, pilot, competitive skydiver, and skydiving instructor who served time for negligent homicide after two of his students died when their parachutes failed to open. His criminal record also included armed robbery and transportation of stolen aircraft, and in 2010 he was sentenced to three years' probation for flying a single-engine plane, 26 years after permanent revocation of his pilot's license. He was suggested repeatedly as a suspect early in the investigation, according to FBI Agent Ralph Himmelsbach, who knew Mayfield from a prior dispute at a local airport. He was ruled out, based partly on the fact that he called Himmelsbach less than two hours after Flight 305 landed in Reno to volunteer advice on standard skydiving practices and possible landing zones.
In 2006 two amateur researchers named Daniel Dvorak and Matthew Myers proposed him as a suspect once again, attracting coverage from a Portland television station and the syndicated program Inside Edition. They asserted that they had assembled a convincing circumstantial case that would be detailed in a forthcoming book. Among other things, they theorized that Mayfield called Himmelsbach not to offer advice, but to establish an alibi; and they challenged Himmelsbach's conclusion that Mayfield could not possibly have found a phone in time to call the FBI less than four hours after jumping into the wilderness at night. Mayfield denied any involvement, and repeated a previous assertion that the FBI called him five times while the hijacking was still in progress to ask about skydiving techniques. (Himmelsbach said the FBI never called Mayfield.) Mayfield further charged that Dvorak and Myers asked him to play along with their theory, and "we'll all make a lot of money". (Dvorak and Myers called any inference of collusion a "blatant lie".)
Dvorak died in 2007, and the promised book was never published. The FBI offered no comment beyond Himmelsbach's original statement that Mayfield, who died in 2015, was ruled out as a suspect early on.
***Mayfield was killed in an aviation accident on August 28, 2015"
themountainnewswa.net/2015/08/30/db-cooper-suspect-ted-mayfield-killed-in-aviation-accident/
Jack Coffelt
Coffelt was a conman, ex-convict, and purported government informant who claimed to have been the chauffeur and confidante of Abraham Lincoln's last undisputed descendant, great-grandson Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith. In 1972 he began claiming he was D.B. Cooper, and attempted through an intermediary, a former cellmate named James Brown, to sell his story to a Hollywood production company. He said he landed near Mount Hood, about 50 miles (80 km) southeast of Ariel, injuring himself and losing the ransom money in the process. Photos of Coffelt bear a resemblance to the composite drawings, although he was in his mid-fifties in 1971. He was reportedly in Portland on the day of the hijacking, and sustained leg injuries around that time which were consistent with a skydiving mishap.
Coffelt's account was reviewed by the FBI, which concluded that it differed in significant details from information that had not been made public, and was therefore a fabrication. Brown, undeterred, continued peddling the story long after Coffelt died in 1975. Multiple media venues, including the television news program 60 Minutes, considered and rejected it. In a 2008 book about Lincoln's descendants, author Charles Lachman revisited Coffelt's tale although it had been discredited 36 years before.
Robert Richard Lepsy
Robert Richard Lepsy was a 33-year-old grocery store manager and married father of four from Grayling, Michigan, who disappeared in October 1969. His vehicle was found three days later at a local airport, and a man matching Lepsy's description was reportedly seen boarding a flight to Mexico. Authorities concluded that Lepsy had left voluntarily and closed their investigation.
Two years after the Cooper hijacking, family members noted that Lepsy's physical features resembled those in the Cooper composite drawings, and asserted that Cooper's clothing was described as very similar to Lepsy's grocery store uniform. Lepsy was declared legally dead in 1976. One of Lepsy's daughters submitted a DNA sample to the FBI in 2011, with unknown results. Although Lepsy was proposed as a Cooper suspect in a 2014 book, there is no record of public comment on him from the FBI.
Lynn Doyle Cooper
L.D. Cooper, a leather worker and Korean War veteran, was proposed as a suspect in July 2011 by his niece, Marla Cooper. As an 8-year-old, she recalled Cooper and another uncle planning something "very mischievous", involving the use of "expensive walkie-talkies", at her grandmother's house in Sisters, Oregon, 150 miles (240 km) south of Portland. The next day flight 305 was hijacked; and though the uncles ostensibly were turkey hunting, L.D. Cooper came home wearing a bloody shirt—the result, he said, of an auto accident. Later, she said, her parents came to believe that L.D. Cooper was the hijacker. She also recalled that her uncle, who died in 1999, was obsessed with the Canadian comic book hero Dan Cooper (see Theories and conjectures), and "had one of his comic books thumbtacked to his wall"—although he was not a skydiver or paratrooper.
In August New York magazine published an alternative witness sketch, reportedly based on a description by Flight 305 eyewitness Robert Gregory, depicting horn-rimmed sunglasses, a "russet"-colored suit jacket with wide lapels, and marcelled hair. The article notes that L.D. Cooper had wavy hair that looked marcelled (as did Duane Weber).
On August 3 the FBI announced that no fingerprints had been found on a guitar strap made by L.D. Cooper. One week later they added that his DNA did not match the partial DNA profile obtained from the hijacker's tie, but acknowledged, once again, that there is no certainty that the hijacker was the source of the organic material obtained from the tie. The Bureau has made no further public comment.
Robert Rackstraw
Robert Wesley "Bob" Rackstraw Sr. is a former Army pilot and ex-convict who earned multiple awards for "gallant" chopper rescues during the Vietnam War. Between flights, he received his commanders' wrath for "conduct unbecoming an officer" – during unauthorized ground missions with the CIA and Green Berets; for prohibited parachute jumps; and for lying about attending two universities. Those fabrications ended Rackstraw's seven-year career on June 21, 1971. After being discharged, his sister said the 27-year-old veteran came home to California both "disillusioned" and "angry" – five months before the D.B. Cooper skyjacking.
In the 1970s he was a dead-beat dad, four-time felon, escape artist and state prison convict. It was during two fugitive runs in 1978 that the FBI Cooper task force first became aware of Rackstraw. Both getaways involved planes: one was a flight to Iran, the other a faking of his own death in a mayday crash over Monterey Bay. Local police alerted the FBI to his resemblance to Cooper composite sketches, his military skill sets, and criminal record (aircraft theft, possession of explosives, check kiting and bank fraud). Special agents eliminated him as a hijack suspect in 1979 after no direct evidence of his involvement could be found.
In the 1980s and 90s, Rackstraw became a respected University of California, Riverside, law instructor and arbitration expert with three degrees.
Kenneth Christiansen
In 2003 a Minnesota resident named Lyle Christiansen, after watching a television documentary about the Cooper hijacking, became convinced that his late brother Kenneth was D. B. Cooper. After repeated futile attempts to convince first the FBI, and then the author and film director Nora Ephron (who he hoped would make a movie about the case), he contacted a private investigator in New York. In 2010 the detective, Skipp Porteous, published a book postulating that Christiansen was indeed the hijacker. In early 2011 an episode of the History series Brad Meltzer's Decoded also summarized the circumstantial evidence linking Christiansen to the Cooper case.
Christiansen enlisted in the Army in 1944 and was trained as a paratrooper. The war had ended by the time he was deployed in 1945, but he made occasional training jumps while stationed in Japan with occupation forces in the late 1940s. After leaving the Army he joined Northwest Orient in 1954 as a mechanic in the South Pacific, and subsequently became a flight attendant, and then a purser, based in Seattle. Christiansen was 45 years old at the time of the hijacking, but he was shorter (5 ft. 8 in.), thinner (150 pounds), and lighter complected than eyewitness descriptions. Christiansen smoked (as did the hijacker), and displayed a particular fondness for bourbon (Cooper's preferred beverage). He was also left-handed. (Evidence photos of Cooper's black tie show the tie clip applied from the left side, suggesting a left-handed wearer.) Flight attendant Florence Schaffner told a reporter that photos of Christiansen fit her memory of the hijacker's appearance more closely than those of other suspects she had been shown. (Tina Mucklow, who had the most contact with Cooper, has never granted a press interview).
Christiansen reportedly purchased a house with cash a few months after the hijacking. While dying of cancer in 1994 he told Lyle, "There is something you should know, but I cannot tell you." Lyle said he never pressed his brother to explain. After Christiansen's death family members discovered gold coins and a valuable stamp collection, along with over $200,000 in bank accounts. They also found a folder of Northwest Orient news clippings which began about the time he was hired in the 1950s, and stopped just prior to the date of the hijacking, despite the fact that the hijacking was by far the most momentous news event in the airline's history. Christiansen continued to work part-time for the airline for many years after 1971, but apparently never clipped another Northwest news story.
Despite the publicity generated by Porteous's book and the 2011 television documentary, the FBI is standing by its position that Christiansen cannot be considered a prime suspect. They cite a poor match to eyewitness physical descriptions, a level of skydiving expertise above that predicted by their suspect profile, and an absence of direct incriminating evidence.
William Gossett
William Pratt Gossett was a Marine Corps, Army, and Army Air Force veteran who saw action in Korea and Vietnam. His military experience included advanced jump training and wilderness survival. After retiring from military service in 1973 he worked as an ROTC instructor, taught military law at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, and hosted a radio talk show in Salt Lake City which featured discussions about the paranormal.He died in 2003.
Gossett was widely known to be obsessed with the Cooper hijacking. He amassed a voluminous collection of Cooper-related news articles, and told one of his wives that he knew enough about the case to "write the epitaph for D.B. Cooper". Late in his life he reportedly told three of his sons, a retired Utah judge, and a friend in the Salt Lake City public defender's office that he had committed the hijacking. Photos of Gossett taken circa 1971 bear a close resemblance to the most widely circulated Cooper composite drawing.
According to Galen Cook, a lawyer who has collected information related to Gossett for years, Gossett once showed his sons a key to a Vancouver, British Columbia safe deposit box which, he claimed, contained the long-missing ransom money. Gossett's eldest son, Greg, said that his father, a compulsive gambler who was always "strapped for cash", showed him "wads of cash" just before Christmas 1971, weeks after the Cooper hijacking. He speculated that Gossett gambled the money away in Las Vegas.
In 1988 Gossett changed his name to "Wolfgang" and became a Catholic priest, which Cook and others interpreted as an effort to disguise his identity. Other circumstantial evidence includes testimony that Cook claims to have obtained from William Mitchell, a passenger on the hijacked aircraft, regarding a mysterious "physical detail" (which he will not divulge) common to the hijacker and Gossett. Cook also claims to have found "possible links" to Gossett in each of four letters signed by "D.B. Cooper" and mailed to three newspapers within days after the hijacking, although there is no evidence that the actual hijacker created or mailed any of the letters.
The FBI has no direct evidence implicating Gossett, and cannot even reliably place him in the Pacific Northwest at the time of the hijacking. "There is not one link to the D.B. Cooper case," said Special Agent Carr, "other than the statements [Gossett] made to someone."
Richard Floyd McCoy Jr.
McCoy was an Army veteran who served two tours of duty in Vietnam, first as a demolition expert, and later, with the Green Berets, as a helicopter pilot. After his military service he became a warrant officer in the Utah National Guard and an avid recreational skydiver, with aspirations, he said, of becoming a Utah State Trooper.
On April 7, 1972 McCoy staged the best-known of the so-called "copycat" hijackings. He boarded United Airlines' Flight 855 (a Boeing 727 with aft stairs) in Denver, and brandishing what later proved to be a paperweight resembling a hand grenade and an unloaded handgun, he demanded four parachutes and $500,000. After delivery of the money and parachutes at San Francisco International Airport, McCoy ordered the aircraft back into the sky and bailed out over Provo, Utah, leaving behind his handwritten hijacking instructions and his fingerprints on a magazine he had been reading. He was arrested on April 9 with the ransom cash in his possession, and after trial and conviction, received a 45-year sentence. Two years later he escaped from Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary with several accomplices by crashing a garbage truck through the main gate. Tracked down three months later in Virginia Beach, McCoy was killed in a shootout with FBI agents.
In their 1991 book, D.B. Cooper: The Real McCoy, parole officer Bernie Rhodes and former FBI agent Russell Calame asserted that they had identified McCoy as D.B. Cooper. They cited obvious similarities in the two hijackings, claims by McCoy's family that the tie and mother-of-pearl tie clip left on the plane belonged to McCoy, and McCoy's own refusal to admit or deny that he was Cooper. A principal proponent of their theory was the FBI agent who killed McCoy. "When I shot Richard McCoy," he said, "I shot D. B. Cooper at the same time."
While there is no reasonable doubt that McCoy committed the Denver hijacking, the FBI does not consider him a suspect in the Cooper case because of significant mismatches in his age (29) and description; a level of skydiving skill well above that thought to be possessed by the hijacker; and credible evidence that McCoy was in Las Vegas on the day of the Portland hijacking, and at home in Utah the day after, having Thanksgiving dinner with his family.
Duane Weber
Duane L. Weber was a World War II Army veteran who served time in at least six prisons from 1945 to 1968 for burglary and forgery. He was proposed as a suspect by his widow, based primarily on a deathbed confession: Three days before he died in 1995, Weber told his wife, "I am Dan Cooper." The name meant nothing to her, she said; but months later, a friend told her of its significance in the hijacking. She went to her local library to research D.B. Cooper, found Max Gunther's book, and discovered notations in the margins in her husband's handwriting.
She then recalled, in retrospect, that Weber once had a nightmare during which he talked in his sleep about jumping from a plane, leaving his fingerprints on the "aft stairs". He also reportedly told her that an old knee injury had been incurred by "jumping out of a plane". Like the hijacker, Weber drank bourbon and chain smoked. Other circumstantial evidence included a 1979 trip to Seattle and the Columbia River, during which Weber took a walk alone along the river bank in the Tina Bar area; four months later Brian Ingram made his ransom cash discovery in the same area.
The FBI eliminated Weber as an active suspect in July 1998 when his fingerprints did not match any of those processed in the hijacked plane, and no other direct evidence could be found to implicate him. Later, his DNA also failed to match the samples recovered from Cooper's tie, though the Bureau has since conceded that they cannot be certain that the organic material on the tie came from Cooper.
John List
John Emil List was an accountant and World War II and Korean War veteran who murdered his wife, three teenage children, and 85-year-old mother in Westfield, New Jersey fifteen days before the Cooper hijacking, withdrew $200,000 from his mother's bank account, and disappeared. He came to the attention of the Cooper task force due to the timing of his disappearance, multiple matches to the hijacker's description, and the reasoning that "a fugitive accused of mass murder has nothing to lose." After his capture in 1989, List admitted to murdering his family, but denied any involvement in the Cooper hijacking. While his name continues to crop up in Cooper articles and documentaries, no substantive evidence implicates him, and the FBI no longer considers him a suspect. He died in prison in 2008.
Barbara Dayton
Barbara Dayton, a recreational pilot and University of Washington librarian who was born Robert Dayton, served in the Merchant Marine in 1926 and then the Army during World War II. After discharge Dayton worked with explosives in the construction industry and aspired to a professional airline career, but could not obtain a commercial pilot's license.
Dayton underwent gender reassignment surgery in 1969 and changed her name to Barbara. She claimed to have staged the Cooper hijacking two years later, disguised as a man, in order to "get back" at the airline industry and the FAA, whose insurmountable rules and conditions had prevented her from becoming an airline pilot. She said she hid the ransom money in a cistern near her landing point in Woodburn, a suburban area south of Portland, Oregon. Eventually she recanted her entire story, ostensibly after learning that she could still be charged with the hijacking. The FBI has never commented publicly on Dayton, who died in 2002.
Ted Mayfield
Mayfield was an Army Special Forces veteran, pilot, competitive skydiver, and skydiving instructor who served time for negligent homicide after two of his students died when their parachutes failed to open. His criminal record also included armed robbery and transportation of stolen aircraft, and in 2010 he was sentenced to three years' probation for flying a single-engine plane, 26 years after permanent revocation of his pilot's license. He was suggested repeatedly as a suspect early in the investigation, according to FBI Agent Ralph Himmelsbach, who knew Mayfield from a prior dispute at a local airport. He was ruled out, based partly on the fact that he called Himmelsbach less than two hours after Flight 305 landed in Reno to volunteer advice on standard skydiving practices and possible landing zones.
In 2006 two amateur researchers named Daniel Dvorak and Matthew Myers proposed him as a suspect once again, attracting coverage from a Portland television station and the syndicated program Inside Edition. They asserted that they had assembled a convincing circumstantial case that would be detailed in a forthcoming book. Among other things, they theorized that Mayfield called Himmelsbach not to offer advice, but to establish an alibi; and they challenged Himmelsbach's conclusion that Mayfield could not possibly have found a phone in time to call the FBI less than four hours after jumping into the wilderness at night. Mayfield denied any involvement, and repeated a previous assertion that the FBI called him five times while the hijacking was still in progress to ask about skydiving techniques. (Himmelsbach said the FBI never called Mayfield.) Mayfield further charged that Dvorak and Myers asked him to play along with their theory, and "we'll all make a lot of money". (Dvorak and Myers called any inference of collusion a "blatant lie".)
Dvorak died in 2007, and the promised book was never published. The FBI offered no comment beyond Himmelsbach's original statement that Mayfield, who died in 2015, was ruled out as a suspect early on.
***Mayfield was killed in an aviation accident on August 28, 2015"
themountainnewswa.net/2015/08/30/db-cooper-suspect-ted-mayfield-killed-in-aviation-accident/
Jack Coffelt
Coffelt was a conman, ex-convict, and purported government informant who claimed to have been the chauffeur and confidante of Abraham Lincoln's last undisputed descendant, great-grandson Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith. In 1972 he began claiming he was D.B. Cooper, and attempted through an intermediary, a former cellmate named James Brown, to sell his story to a Hollywood production company. He said he landed near Mount Hood, about 50 miles (80 km) southeast of Ariel, injuring himself and losing the ransom money in the process. Photos of Coffelt bear a resemblance to the composite drawings, although he was in his mid-fifties in 1971. He was reportedly in Portland on the day of the hijacking, and sustained leg injuries around that time which were consistent with a skydiving mishap.
Coffelt's account was reviewed by the FBI, which concluded that it differed in significant details from information that had not been made public, and was therefore a fabrication. Brown, undeterred, continued peddling the story long after Coffelt died in 1975. Multiple media venues, including the television news program 60 Minutes, considered and rejected it. In a 2008 book about Lincoln's descendants, author Charles Lachman revisited Coffelt's tale although it had been discredited 36 years before.
Robert Richard Lepsy
Robert Richard Lepsy was a 33-year-old grocery store manager and married father of four from Grayling, Michigan, who disappeared in October 1969. His vehicle was found three days later at a local airport, and a man matching Lepsy's description was reportedly seen boarding a flight to Mexico. Authorities concluded that Lepsy had left voluntarily and closed their investigation.
Two years after the Cooper hijacking, family members noted that Lepsy's physical features resembled those in the Cooper composite drawings, and asserted that Cooper's clothing was described as very similar to Lepsy's grocery store uniform. Lepsy was declared legally dead in 1976. One of Lepsy's daughters submitted a DNA sample to the FBI in 2011, with unknown results. Although Lepsy was proposed as a Cooper suspect in a 2014 book, there is no record of public comment on him from the FBI.
Lynn Doyle Cooper
L.D. Cooper, a leather worker and Korean War veteran, was proposed as a suspect in July 2011 by his niece, Marla Cooper. As an 8-year-old, she recalled Cooper and another uncle planning something "very mischievous", involving the use of "expensive walkie-talkies", at her grandmother's house in Sisters, Oregon, 150 miles (240 km) south of Portland. The next day flight 305 was hijacked; and though the uncles ostensibly were turkey hunting, L.D. Cooper came home wearing a bloody shirt—the result, he said, of an auto accident. Later, she said, her parents came to believe that L.D. Cooper was the hijacker. She also recalled that her uncle, who died in 1999, was obsessed with the Canadian comic book hero Dan Cooper (see Theories and conjectures), and "had one of his comic books thumbtacked to his wall"—although he was not a skydiver or paratrooper.
In August New York magazine published an alternative witness sketch, reportedly based on a description by Flight 305 eyewitness Robert Gregory, depicting horn-rimmed sunglasses, a "russet"-colored suit jacket with wide lapels, and marcelled hair. The article notes that L.D. Cooper had wavy hair that looked marcelled (as did Duane Weber).
On August 3 the FBI announced that no fingerprints had been found on a guitar strap made by L.D. Cooper. One week later they added that his DNA did not match the partial DNA profile obtained from the hijacker's tie, but acknowledged, once again, that there is no certainty that the hijacker was the source of the organic material obtained from the tie. The Bureau has made no further public comment.