Posts by IronGland

5

Remember D.B Cooper? Does this story sound true to you?

by IronGland in

jw
friends

in 1971, a man hijacked an airplane,.

strapped on a parachute and made away with $200,000.

caught.

Remember D.B Cooper? Does this story sound true to you?

by IronGland in

jw
friends

in 1971, a man hijacked an airplane,.

strapped on a parachute and made away with $200,000.

caught.

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.

1

Question for DanTheMan

by IronGland in

jw
friends

are you the same dantheman that posts at sdmb forums or lz forums?

IronGland

Are you the same DanTheMan that posts at SDMB forums or LZ forums?

21

Terror Expert says new attack coming-what do you think?

by IronGland in

jw
friends

"all of the warnings we have today indicate that a major strike ?

something more horrible than anything we've seen before ?

is all but inevitable," said yossef bodansky, former director of the u.s. congressional task force on terrorism and unconventional warfare, in an interview yesterday with the jerusalem post.

IronGland

I seriously doubt that any "reputable terrorist organization"* would EVER use WMD in a first-strike. Doing so would cause them to loose public support in the Islamic states and no terrorist organization can function without support from the local population.

Bodansky claims that an attack has been held off till now due to a debate in the Islamic world over the morality of a WMD attack. Al-Qaida has now been given the go ahead by the clerics to use nukes. He also believes they have obtained a Soviet warhead from one of the former republics of the USSR, so it wouldn't be a small crude bomb.

21

Terror Expert says new attack coming-what do you think?

by IronGland in

jw
friends

"all of the warnings we have today indicate that a major strike ?

something more horrible than anything we've seen before ?

is all but inevitable," said yossef bodansky, former director of the u.s. congressional task force on terrorism and unconventional warfare, in an interview yesterday with the jerusalem post.

IronGland

"All of the warnings we have today indicate that a major strike ? something more horrible than anything we've seen before ? is all but inevitable," said Yossef Bodansky, former director of the U.S. Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, in an interview yesterday with the Jerusalem Post.

Bodansky said "the primary option" for the next al-Qaida attack on American soil would be to employ weapons of mass destruction.

"I do not have a crystal ball, but this is what all the available evidence tells us; e will have a bang," Bodansky told the Post, adding al-Qaida is "tying up the knots" for an attack.

Bodansky, author of "Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America," and "The Secret History of the Iraq War," said the jihadist movement is gaining strength as Osama bin Laden's call to arms draws an increasing number of recruits throughout the Muslim world.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Bodansky said, the number of people trained and willing to die has more than doubled to an estimated 500,000 to 750,000. Intelligences estimates say another 10 million are willing toactively support them while another 50 million would provide financial support.

Bodansky was in Israel for the second annual Jerusalem Summit, an international gathering of conservative thinkers, the Post said.

Al-Qaida has not carried out a second major attack, Bodansky explained, because the first one sufficiently sent the message to the Islamic world that the U.S. could be penetrated, and a second attack necessarily would have to be more grandiose.

Now, however, the re-election of President Bush has set the stage for a massive attack with non-conventional weapons, Bodansky believes.

There has been a debate between bin Laden allies and some Islamic leaders over the propriety of such a large-scale attack on U.S. citizens, he told the Jerusalem paper. But, according to bin Laden's mindset, that has been resolved by the American electorate backing Bush and thus "choosing" to be enemies of Islam.

Though some debate and doubt may linger, the planning for an attack is finished, Bodansky believes.

"They got the kosher stamp from the Islamic world to use nuclear weapons," he said.

Bin Laden's theme has shifted since 9-11, Bodanksy said. Previously, perpetual confrontation and jihad against the U.S. was seen as the only way to protect Islam. Now, the emphasis is on punishing American society.

"Just as the West was challenging the quintessence of Islam by means of the globalization era, there was a parallel need by Islamic extremists to strike at ? and hurt ? the core of American society, this time with weapons of mass destruction," Bodansky said.

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