— Is a San Diego man the real D.B. Cooper skyjacker from 45 years ago? Members of a group calling itself the Cold Case Team say they are so certain he is that, on Thursday they filed suit at the U.S. District Court in D.C. to compel the FBI to make public all of its archived files on the Cooper case.
Last July, the FBI announced it was declaring the case unsolved and shutting it down.
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.
