Just to refresh, a man going by the name of Dan Cooper (the “D.B.” Cooper moniker was born out of a media miscommunication) hijacked Northwest Orient flight 305 bound for Seattle. Once in flight he handed a note to flight attendant Florence Schaffner claiming to have a bomb. Cooper then demanded $200,000.00 in $20 notes and parachutes. He also instructed that a fuel truck be ready when they landed in Seattle.

Once his demands were met, he allowed the plane to land in an isolated part of the airport and in essence exchanged the 36 other passengers for the money and parachutes. While refueling he instructed the flight crew as to how he wanted them to fly the plane after take off. Once in the air the plane leveled off at 10,000 feet at a slow 100 knots. Cooper then herded everyone into the cockpit and instructed them to stay there. Moments later he opened the aft door and jumped out. It was later determined that he would have likely come down in the area of Mount St Helens a few miles southeast of Ariel Washington.

More detailed wiki here

Over the years there have been numerous theories and leads regarding that famous Boeing 727 hijacking on Thanksgiving eve, 1971.

Some theories were very logical and I for one was convinced D.B. Cooper was in reality Korea and Viet Nam veteran William Pratt Gossett. Gossett was well trained to pull off such a caper and was always broke or in gambling trouble. His son Greg claims that Gossett showed him a large amount of money just before Christmas 1971.

I’m sure you all have been seeing little news bites over the past few days about the FBI getting a good lead and we’ve all been wondering about it. Seems the details were missing which is typical of FBI disclosure.

Then on Thursday the story broke and the cat was out of the box or bag or whatever. Apparently a relative of our mystery man has come forward to claim the D.B. Cooper is actually Lynn Doyle Cooper, her uncle.

Marla Wynn Cooper, 48, of Oklahoma City is so sure that D.B. is her uncle that she finally decided to go to authorities…..40 years later. Marla tells the FBI that uncle Lynn who liked to go by the name L.D. Cooper planned the hijacking with his brother Dewey at a family gathering at her grandmothers house in Oregon.

A woman claiming to be the niece of the mysterious skyjacker dubbed D.B. Cooper, who bailed out of a jetliner 40 years ago with $200,000 in ransom, says she recalls her uncle plotting the sensational caper at a family gathering in 1971.

Marla Wynn Cooper, 48, of Oklahoma City, said on Wednesday that she was the person who furnished investigators new clues to a previously unknown suspect, sparking a renewed probe of a case the FBI counts as the only unsolved hijacking in U.S. aviation history.

The woman told Reuters she gave the FBI a leather guitar strap made by her uncle, now dead for over a decade, along with a photo of him with the same strap, to be examined for fingerprints that might match those from the plane.

“They were never going to close this case without someone knowing the truth,” she said, adding she underwent a polygraph test administered by the FBI to assess her credibility.

The FBI has acknowledged that a leather guitar strap was submitted as evidence in the case, but to no avail.

“The material wasn’t suitable for extracting fingerprints from, so we’re in the process of obtaining other times that may provide a better source of comparison prints,” Fred Gutt, a special FBI agent based in Seattle, said on Wednesday.

He declined again to reveal the person who came forward with the latest information, saying, “We do not identify witnesses in an investigation.” The FBI said earlier this week its latest lead came from someone “close” to the new suspect.

But Marla Cooper said she is certain that her uncle, Lynn Doyle Cooper, who went by the name L.D. Cooper, was the man who seized a Seattle-bound Northwest Orient Airlines flight in November 1971 by claiming to have a bomb. He vanished when he jumped from the rear of the plane in mid-air with a parachute and $200,000 in cash, which he had ransomed from the airline in exchange for the release of the 36 other passengers.

The plane was flying at about 10,000 feet at night through a storm over wooded, rugged terrain in the Pacific Northwest, and the hijacker was presumed by many to have perished.

The sensational Thanksgiving eve caper triggered a massive manhunt, and the FBI went on to consider over 800 suspects in the first five years after the crime.

The only trace from his getaway was a crumbling batch of $20 bills matching the ransom money’s serial numbers, unearthed by a boy from a sandbar along the Columbia River in 1980.

CHILDHOOD MEMORIES

Marla Cooper, a sales executive for a coffee company, said she decided to come forward as a matter of civic duty after piecing together vague childhood memories that were reinforced by comments her parents made to her in more recent years.

In an interview at a downtown Oklahoma City restaurant, she recalled seeing L.D. Cooper engrossed in suspicious behavior with another uncle, Dewey Cooper, during a holiday gathering at her grandmother’s house in Oregon before Thanksgiving 1971.

She said the two men, both brothers of her father, appeared to be secretly planning something as they experimented with sophisticated walkie-talkies, then left the family gathering for what they said was a turkey hunt.

They returned Thanksgiving Day with her uncle bloodied and bruised, claiming he had been in an automobile accident.

“I looked in the car … for a turkey, and what I see instead is my uncle injured,” she said. “I started to cry and said, ‘What happened?’ They told me they’d been in a car wreck, and I said, ‘The car is fine. What were you driving?’ My uncle Dewey said, ‘Marla, shut up. Go get your dad.”

Later while eavesdropping, Cooper said, she overheard her Uncle Dewey say, “‘Our money problems are over. We just have to go back and get the money. L.D. hijacked the airplane.'”

Four decades later Marla Cooper says she is the only person alive who witnessed these interactions and remembers her father “admonished me to never talk about any of this.”

She said her uncle served in the Korean War, though he was not a paratrooper, and she believes he suffered post-traumatic stress disorder, drank heavily and took a lot of medication.

“My uncle was a bit of a lost soul,” she said, recounting that he usually wore black clothes but was her favorite of her father’s four brothers.

She also recalled he was obsessed with a Canadian cartoon skydiving hero named Dan Cooper and even kept a Dan Cooper comic book tacked to a wall.

According to the FBI, the man in the dark business suit who hijacked Northwest flight 305 called himself Dan Cooper when he purchased a one-way ticket in Portland, Oregon, but the moniker D.B. Cooper originated from media reports and stuck.

Marla Cooper said she last saw her uncle L.D. around Christmas 1972, just over a year after the hijacking, and that he died in 1999.

She said she has started writing a memoir about her account and has been contacted by numerous UK literary agents.

(Writing and additional reporting by Steve Gorman; Editing by Greg McCune and Cynthia Johnston)

Source: Yahoo News

I’m don’t know about anyone else but isn’t it a little strange that Marla’s parents never came forward? I mean if they knew and it seemed they did if we go by Marla’s account, then by not going to authorities they could have been charged with a crime. In fact, for all we know, Marla’s own father may have been complicit all along. Was she waiting until she thought her father would be in the clear?

This could be it people! The mystery of D.B. Cooper may have finally been solved…..Of course there will be no breath holding on my part.