Whether or not any of the cash was spent means very little. Since we know that some of it was found in the jump zone many years later, a different part of it may have been found and spent by anyone.
We’ve pretty well established that zero has been spent in the US aboveground economy.
Which provides circumstantial evidence that “Cooper” was killed in the attempt.
Had much been spent, we’d not know whether it was “Cooper” or someone else who found the loot.
Just checked and the average life of a $20 bill in ciculation is 5.1 years.
If a non-trivial amount of the ransom entered circulation, then Cooper had no say as to what happened to it afterwards, regardless of location in the world. Some of that money would have become too worn to be accepted in general within a few years. The only way a bank can get reimbursed for such bills is to ship it to the Feds who verify it (including checking serial numbers), destroy it and send a check back to the bank.
You are not likely to have a situation where some poor schmuck goes “Well, this one’s shot.” and tosses it into the trash. It’s money. People like to get something for it.
There isn’t a magic line between aboveground and underground economies. Stuff moves back and forth all the time. Again, Cooper (or whoever might find the money) has no say in this activity.
It’s been 45 years folk. That’s almost 9 times the average lifetime of the bills. They never got picked up by the Feds, therefore they never entered circulation to any useful extent.
Bumping this again with new info from the likely crackpot who made the documentary referenced in the OP. He obtained a letter from the FBI through a FOI request that in his mind proves D.B. Cooper was/is Robert Rackstraw, who is still alive. Evidently this letter was received a month after Cooper jumped, and unlike other letters received at the same time, the FBI had reason to believe it might be authentic. The basis of this seems to be that it included info not released publicly, including that no fingerprints were found on the plane.
The maker of the “Case Closed” documentary is eating it up because the letter supports his theory that the hijacker had a wig and makeup to make him look older. And more importantly, he says he has a decrypted a code in the letter that points to Rackstraw: it has the numbers for Rackstraw’s Vietnam military units. The Oregonian was not allowed to publish the details of the code because it will be part of the guy’s next documentary, but they supposedly confirmed the analysis.
It still seems like an extreme stretch to me. Guessing that the FBI didn’t have fingerprints doesn’t seem like a guess that only the hijacker was capable of. And this guy is single-mindedly focused on Rackstraw, so he could be fitting his data to match the conclusion.
If they have the guy’s tie, I’m surprised they haven’t done a DNA analysis to try to find relatives. There must have been some DNA left on it.
“Now enhance that image.”
I read a book about the case a while back. My memory is fuzzy, but IIRC, some independent analysts tried to get DNA from the tie, but the sample was poor quality. I don’t think they were able to do much with it.
And turn him around so we can see if he’s going bald in the back.
So he thinks that D.B. wrote the FBI an “I got away, suckers!” letter, with a coded message that would deliberately give himself away? Is his alphabet soup giving him clues, too?
Seems like a promising lead to me. Someone needs to identify that those numbers are old military codes. That’s pretty irrefutable if proven true. That would tie Rackstraw to the letter and be a big step towards unmasking DB Cooper.
I am skeptical because it seems very unlikely anybody could have survived the parachute jump. Cooper wasn’t dressed properly for the weather.
Why would such a code be put into this letter? Was this guy The Riddler?
It seems to me that if this dude had such a strong compulsion that he put clues as to who he was in this letter, then why weren’t there further coded missives when no one caught on the first time? Such a strong compulsion isn’t something you can just turn on and off.
I’m just a bit suspicious of dramatic revelations that cannot be fully explained because they’re tied to promoting someone’s documentary (or book, or movie).
Now if he announced he was going to break into a sealed vault during the show to find the key documents, then I’d be convinced.
It seems to have been 17 days between the hi-jacking and the postmark date of the letter. I’m wondering how widely it was known by then that the guy was called “Dan” rather than “D.B.”. The letter was signed D.B.
Sorry, but the whole thing sounds gibberish. Suspects generally do not send letters to the media; they generally do not send in “secret codes”. I realise there have been a few well known cases where letters and secret codes have played a part but usually they do not. The author of the letter doesn’t appear to be particularly knowledgeable about the crime. In cases such as this it’s best to assume 99% of such letters are hoaxes. It would have to be particularly accurate information in such a letter to make me believe the author was the culprit.
I think Cooper probably died in the jump. If so, he is/was identifiable. This leads me to suspect he was either Canadian(I believe Dan Cooper comes from a Canadian comic) or had went far off the radar in normal society in the years before his famous crime. How enthused were Canadian LE in investigating a crime committed in the U.S?
I’m totally with you on this. The guy loses his credibility with his self-aggrandizement and single focus on Rackstraw. It’s unfortunate, because I really want it to be true that Cooper survived and he’s a enigmatic guy who did it all for the fun of it.
This reminds me of Jim Garrison’s methods tying Lee Harvey Oswald’s address book notes to Jack Ruby’s phone number and to the (published) phone number of the CIA.
If you go through any complex set of data, you can find coincidences, especially if you’re willing to be flexible in interpreting them.
The discovery of some of the money still in the woods is pretty strong confirmation that the hijacker did not make it out of there. Whoever it was had to have disappeared just before then.
And I think almost all of us want Cooper to be a Joker-level genius who thought everything through perfectly and pulled off a brilliant but understandable crime-of-the-century. Even if it was just stealing, the thought of one guy being able to defeat and escape from the whole government is a thought of hope and possibility.
But the almost-certain sad reality is that he was just a guy either desperate or stupid enough to try something very dangerous that he didn’t really understand, and it killed him.
But who? Despite an intensely publicized manhunt, nobody reported a family member or co-worker or friend or anyone else they knew missing who couldn’t be crossed off the list. Nobody. He somehow managed to live a completely isolated existence. How can you even do that?
Even if the code thing turns out to be convincing, doesn’t that just link Rackstraw to a letter that is likely to be a hoax letter? One of many hoax letters sent during that period. I don’t find the detail that the letter knew that D.B. Cooper (not Dan) didn’t leave any fingerprints very telling.
Are there any other cases where a crime was solved by such a complicated clue hidden by the perpetrator-outside of comic books and action/adventure movies, that is?