In 1971, a man hijacked an airplane,
strapped on a parachute and made away with $200,000. He was never
caught. Now a Florida woman says she knows who he really was: Duane
Weber, right, her late husband.
By ROBIN MITCHELL
© St. Petersburg Times, published August 1, 2000
On the night before Thanksgiving 1971, a man wearing a business suit,
loafers and a parachute plunged from a Northwest Orient Airlines 727,
vanishing into a black sky, freezing rain and infamy.
Skyjacker D.B. Cooper was toting $200,000 in used $20 bills when he
vanished.
Up in Pace, a Florida panhandle town just north of Pensacola, real
estate agent Jo Weber says she knows what happened to Cooper.
She landed him.
But Weber says she didn't know the man to whom she was married 17 years
was the folk anti-hero Cooper until 1995, when her dying husband
motioned her closer to his deathbed.
"I've got a secret to tell you," said Duane Weber.
"I'm Dan Cooper."
The FBI and just about everyone else has been looking for D.B. Cooper.
It's the only unsolved skyjacking in the United States.
Only $5,880 of the loot ever turned up, found in 1980 by a boy playing
on the banks of the Columbia River in southwestern Washington state.
The man who bought a ticket -- seat 18F in coach -- for that flight on
Nov. 24. 1971, used the name Dan Cooper. A police officer erroneously
called him "D.B. Cooper" and that name stuck, going onto a movie title,
ballad and not a few taverns.
Jo and Duane met in the lounge at the Atlanta airport Holiday Inn six
years after the skyjacking. It was her birthday. He bought her a bottle
of champagne and wrapped a $100 bill around it. They married the
following year in Colorado, where he was an insurance agent.
Jo Weber said the clues were there, but she failed then to recognize
them. There was a Northwest Seattle-Tacoma ticket she found among tax
papers in 1994, then never saw again; and a bank bag she found in a
cooler in his truck that resembled the bag that held the money.
He explained an old knee injury just before his last trip to the
hospital, saying it happened when he jumped out of a plane. He had a
nightmare about leaving his fingerprints on a plane. Weber even confided
to her you that could make a box of flares look like a bomb -- Cooper
had said he had a bomb.
In 1979, the couple went to Seattle, "a sentimental journey," Duane told
Jo Weber, with a visit to the Columbia River.
Retired FBI agent Ralph Himmelsbach of Woodburn, Ore., who was in charge
of the investigation through 1980, said Jo Weber's story is persuasive.
A forensic reconstructionist who has worked with the FBI also said the
similarities between composite drawings of the skyjacker and
contemporary photos of Duane Weber are a close match.
Other evidence includes Duane Weber's familiarity with the area where
Cooper bailed out, his Army service and a criminal record that included
serving time in a prison near Seattle.
Himmelsbach said the deathbed admission is the most compelling factor.
The FBI, which keeps 60 volumes of interviews and other documents on the
case, still checks out tips.
The FBI investigated her story and concluded in 1998 there was
insufficient evidence to make a determination.
"I've been going on for years, breaking a brick loose here and a brick
loose there," Jo Weber said of her own investigation of D.B. Cooper.
"I've been fighting one hell of a battle, uphill and downhill, with the
FBI."
Her goal is to come face-to-face with the flight attendant Tina Mucklow
Larson, thought now to be a nun, and ask her privately if Duane Weber is
the same man.
"I will never reveal whether he was the same man," she said. "I just
want to know.
"I believe my husband was D.B. Cooper."
"We worked for 17 years as a team," she said of her husband.
When a progressive kidney disease forced him to slow down, they moved to
Pace in 1988 to the house where she lives today.
Remember D.B Cooper? Does this story sound true to you?
by IronGland 5 Replies latest jw friends
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IronGland
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IronGland
btt
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confusedjw
Come on man. I just got over believing that some old duffers in NY were Christ's only true brothers on earth and Jehovah's Holy Channel on Earth who in turn were concerned if someone wearing a beard could handle microphones or not.
So the D.B. Cooper thing sound more than believable to me!
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Double Edge
Wow, facinating. I remember it well... it was a huge story back then. Such an unsolved mystery. A few years ago some of the authorities came to the conclusion that D.B. Cooper died during the jump. Sounds very plausable. Thanks.
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dorothy
What a sweet love story.
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TresHappy
I remember as a child being fascinated about DB Cooper. Such an amazing story. I remember when I was a teenager, there was a great TV show called "In Search Of". It was hosted by Leonard Nimoy and he would look into unsolved mysteries, like Amelia Earhart. He did an episode on Cooper and concluded he probably perished in the jump. That was before that little boy found some of the money in the riverbed...