Mark Zaid, a D.C. attorney with the Team, accused the FBI of “dropping the ball.” So does author and documentarian Thomas Colbert. They and the committed 40 investigators, whom they say include more than a dozen retired FBI agents, insist that Robert W. Rackstraw Sr. of San Diego, a Vietnam vet, is the skyjacker.
They even released a 2013 ambush interview they did with him in San Diego, in which he never actually denied he was D.B. Cooper.
It was November of 1971 when a man that actually wrote his name “Dan Cooper” boarded a Northwest Orient jet in Portland, Oregon, hijacked the plane for $200,000 ransom (a million in today’s money), and parachuted out of the plane into woods over Washington state, never to be seen again.
In 1980, $5,800 of the money was found by a family along a river in Washington state.
Members of the Team, on Thursday, stated that family has been connected to Rackstraw through old crime partners — even more proof that he’s Cooper.