Douglas Perry / oregonlive.com (TNS)
A phone tipster who would insist on remaining anonymous reached a special agent in the FBI’s Little Rock office in the summer of 1972.
The caller, the resulting investigative report stated, said a man there “with a propensity for overspending” was D.B. Cooper. “Suspect described as white male American, five ft ten, one seventy-five, light complexion, light hair, heavy cigarette smoker, jolly attitude.”
Needless to say, he’d have good reason to be jolly if he had parachuted out of a Boeing 727 in the dead of night with $200,000 in ransom and lived to not tell about it. But the FBI ultimately decided the suspect, whose name is redacted in the official report, wasn’t their man.
The memo comes from the declassified D.B. Cooper case files Part 113, released on Jan. 6. That’s 391 more pages from the FBI investigation into the Nov. 24, 1971, hijacking of Northwest Orient Flight 305 out of Portland.
Somewhere over southwest Washington on that Thanksgiving Eve almost 55 years ago, the skyjacker — known as D.B. Cooper but whose actual identity remains unknown — jumped out of the plane with the ransom money. He has never been found.
It’s the only unsolved skyjacking in U.S. history.
The case, officially called NORJAK, has produced dozens of publicly identified suspects over the decades, with two of the more intriguing possibilities – Robert Rackstraw and Sheridan Peterson – dying in the past five years.
But even as suspects increasingly take leave of this mortal coil, the investigation goes on, especially among hobbyists.
This latest release, primarily comprising summaries of interviews with suspects and informants (known within the FBI as 302 reports), has many Cooper case fans excited.
“What a cast of characters,” one member of a D.B. Cooper Facebook group wrote this week. “Surely the FBI couldn’t spend a lot of time on every one of these guys.”
Responded another: “Absolutely zero doubt, the real Cooper is in the 302s.”
Still another: “Scariest thing is there are so many halfway decent suspects.”
Alas, as is usually the case with publicly released law-enforcement files, the best bits often appear to be hidden behind redactions.
The release includes a report from a Dallas FBI agent in 1972 who said a confidential informant known for providing reliable information had recently met with a “hoodlum” who had knowledge of the skyjacking.
“Source described [redacted] as a dangerous man who carries a [redacted] and would not hesitate to use it. Source stated he is the only [redacted] told concerning NORJAK and felt if any direct approach was made to the suspect by Bureau Agents, [redacted] would know source had informed. Source, who had displayed no fear in the past, was convinced [redacted] would kill him if [redacted] suspected source was informer.”
The files do not indicate that the FBI ever interviewed or seriously investigated the “hoodlum” about the D.B. Cooper case.
Agents did look into a Renton, Washington, man named William Franklin Crane after his girlfriend dropped a dime on him for showing up late from work on the night of the skyjacking.
Crane, a former paratrooper, came home late again two days later, this time with a friend named Wayne, the report states. The source of the info said the two men had mud all over their shoes and brought Wayne’s luggage into the house but, mysteriously, left his attaché case in the trunk of the car.
“The next morning CRANE advised [redacted] that he had sold his private aircraft to WAYNE, (and) CRANE went on to state that WAYNE would be leaving the Seattle area that morning and would fly the plane to Oklahoma City where he was an instructor at a flying club.”
The tipster said Crane, who died in 2003, “began acting more nervous than usual” after Wayne left. “He became easily irritated and grew very short of temper. This condition lasted until the [redacted] finally separated a few months later.”
A later FBI report states of a Renton-area suspect, possibly Crane: “Evidently [redacted] is the object of substantial inquiry among some hoodlum elements that are endeavoring to establish whether he actually is the skyjacker of the airline as he looks somewhat like the sketch and if so to rip off the $200,000 or what remains of it.”
After more than five decades of news reports, books, TV documentaries and movies about the case, as well as thousands of pages of government investigative files released in recent years, D.B. Cooper aficionados know intimately many of the suspects the FBI zeroed in on.
But as the periodic case-file releases show, the list of potential D.B. Coopers is almost endless. In 1976, five years after the skyjacking, the FBI publicly boasted of having checked out and cleared 850 suspects.
Which is one reason some NORJAK followers were enthused to find a compelling name in the Part 113 release they had never heard before: Raymond Sidney Russell.
The late Russell, 48 and living in Maine at the time of the skyjacking, had served in the Air Force, worked as an inspector at a Boeing assembly plant and flew for a Seattle-based cargo carrier later bought by FedEx. He’d also been an air-traffic controller in Seattle.
An FBI agent interviewed Russell in the fall of 1972 and noted in his report that the suspect, based on his Pacific Northwest aviation experience, had a theory about the skyjacking. Russell said there was a fan marker — a radio beacon — that “gives out a light and audio signal which is 75 megacycles located near Woodburn, Washington, and he speculated that the person who did this skyjacking could have used this fan marker as a point to parachute out of the hijacked aircraft.”
The FBI agent added that Russell “denied ever being involved in the skyjacking” and could prove he was on the East Coast when it occurred.
But a later 302 report has a pilot who knew Russell saying Russell had “dropped out of sight at the same period that the D.B. Cooper hijacking took place” and that the unnamed pilot and the pilot’s Seattle colleagues had speculated that Russell “may have been D.B. Cooper.”
Another source called Russell “adventuresome, well-educated and extremely cool. From details he has heard of hijacking, [source] is even more convinced Russell could have committed this crime.”
In 1976, according to an FBI memo, still another source called an FBI special agent and said he had more carefully studied “the photograph of D.B. Cooper” — presumably the well-known sketch of the skyjacker — “and, comparing the composite with RUSSELL, he said, ‘That’s him.’”
The discovery of Russell in the newly released files created a stir in D.B. Cooper groups online, with one Reddit poster this week declaring Russell “a fantastic suspect.”
Others, however, pooh-poohed the idea that Russell could be Cooper, noting that at some point the FBI cleared him and that a trusted FBI informant in the files described him as “very law-abiding.”
The doubters insist Russell was too short to be D.B. Cooper, note that he had a scar on his face (no one on Northwest Orient Flight 305 said anything about the hijacker having a facial scar) and had a pretty solid alibi.
“How is he any better than most of the other 999 suspects?” a Redditor asked. “There’s a lot of good ones. I think Cooper may be buried somewhere in the files. But not this guy.”
The FBI’s latest document dump shows how much leg work agents had to put in, in an era before the internet and cellphones, to track down basic information about a suspect — and how relatively easy it was back then for people to disappear. The reports are full of notes about agents looking through phone directories in city after city, checking in with local police departments, searching credit-bureau files in person, painstakingly cross-referencing business-license records across departments and years, running down flight manifests. Often all for naught.
Eric Ulis, an independent investigator who has probed the D.B. Cooper skyjacking for more than a decade, told The Oregonian/OregonLive he didn’t see any promising suspects in the latest release because none of them, in his view, adequately account for the key piece of evidence in the case: the unusual microscopic particles found on the clip-on tie Cooper wore and left behind on the plane.
The microscopic particles – including rare-earth metals – suggest the skyjacker worked for a plane-building company, as Russell did years before Flight 305 was hijacked, or an electronics plant.
“People very easily discard the tie evidence (the only physical evidence we have) when they become enamored with someone who checks some box in their minds,” Ulis said in an email.
Ulis said he now believes the skyjacker worked at the Albany Research Center in Oregon and so is researching former employees of the facility.
Meanwhile, other D.B. Cooper case fans continue to scour Part 113 of the declassified FBI files.
Said an online commenter after reading a series of posts that went back and forth about Russell and other D.B. Cooper suspects: “I hate this case. lol.”
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