DB Cooper Where Are You? is an investigative documentary series about the infamous sky hijacking case dating back to 1971, released on Netflix on 13 July. It is directed by Marina Zenovich and produced by Fullwell 73 production in association with PMZ pictures. There are 4 episodes in total with a runtime of about 39-45 minutes respectively.
The synopsis of the series reads – In 1971, a skyjacker parachutes off a plane with a bag of stolen cash amounting to $200,000 and gets away with it. Decades later, his identity remains a compelling mystery. It shows the development of the case through the last 50 years and how they were met with many suspects that identified as DB Cooper but turned about to be a hoax.
Some of the theories/suspects that were mentioned in the series are discussed below in detail.
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Suspect Number 1: Dick Briggs
When author Tom Colbert started his research on the case, the first Cooper story/lead he heard was about a man named Dick Briggs. A man named Ron Carlson contacted Colbert and told him what he heard at a party in Oregon in 1978. A drug supplier had claimed to be DB Cooper and predicted that money from the Cooper case was about to be discovered by a family at the party.
Five days later, the family vacationing outside Vancouver, Washington, found $6000 floating in the Columbia River. The serial numbers of the $6000 matched the money Cooper were given as ransom nine years earlier. A theory formed from that, Cooper wanted the money found so investigators would think he had drowned after the jump and the money had washed up down the river.
But when Colbert began investigating the money story in 2011, he found that Briggs didn’t match Cooper’s profile. He was just a bluffer who liked to party and never went to Vietnam or trained as a pilot. And soon after he died in a car accident in the same year when the money was found. While investigating Briggs’ friend actually caught Colbert’s eye.
Suspect Number 2: Robert Rackstraw
Robert Rackstraw was the friend that got Tom interested while fact-checking Briggs’s story. Robert was a former Army pilot and ex-convict who earned multiple awards for gallant chopper rescues during the Vietnam War. He led a pretty insane and adventurous life. After dropping out of high school, he became a US Army paratrooper and explosives expert but was kicked out of it for misconduct in 1970.
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He had also lied about his qualifications and had forged his credentials. Later he was even charged with and ultimately acquitted of murdering his stepfather. His sister in a later interview believed that he could have actually killed his father but he claimed to be handicapped in court and thus released from all the charges.
In 1978, he was charged with and convicted of stealing a plane and forging checks. He then spent roughly two years in prison. During this period FBI suspected him to be the hijacker but couldn’t prove anything. However, until his death in 2019, Colbert believed him to be the real culprit and spent a decade trying to prove it.
Suspect Number 3: Dan Cooper
It is believed that the mysterious man never said or told that his name was DB Cooper, on his boarding form the name written was actually Dan Cooper. Due to sloppy reporting, the name changed from Dan to DB and also because the reporters thought that the latter was more impactful.
And in popular culture, Dan Cooper is a French comic book hero, who flew aeroplanes and jumped out of them with his conical parachute. The culprit was believed to be a Canadian man from the Air Force, who was inspired by the character and used it as his alias. In fact, in the series, it was said that the creator of the comic, Albert Weinberg got to know from his sources that the skyjacker was part of the Royal French Canadian Air Force.
Now whether it is completely true or not, it is definitely a possibility that the man could be a foreigner as he asked for American money from the air hostess. If he were an American, he would have simply said money. Well, don’t know if this is too far-fetched, but the theories are endless about the many identities of the mysterious man and after 50 decades only theories and suspicions are left.
DB Cooper Where Are You? is streaming on Netflix.
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