Shownotes Transcript
Due to the nature of this story, listener discretion is advised. This episode includes discussions of threats of violence and flight hijacking. Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen. It's December 1971. Yee-Ree Tensel, a country club manager from West Covina, California, sat at the bar in the Sacramento International Airport. He sipped his cocktail and eavesdropped on the other travelers seated near him
It seemed like everybody was talking about D.B. Cooper, the man who jumped out of a passenger airplane mid-flight with $200,000 in cash. As Yeary tried to pick up more details, he noticed again the two men in gray suits who sat in his periphery. They'd been watching him for some time now. He tried not to look. His eyes had met theirs one too many times, but he couldn't help himself. When he glanced over again,
They were approaching. They asked to see Yi-Ri's identification and scrutinized the card he handed them for a few quiet seconds. Then the plainclothes agents asked him to come with them for questioning, but Yi-Ri had no idea why.
In the airport security office, they searched him and found $800 cash and a military service ID card. The agents escorted him to another room where they interrogated him for three hours. At the end of it, they accused Yiri Tensyl of being D.B. Cooper. But he couldn't be. He had an alibi for the day of the hijacking, so they let him go.
Over the course of the FBI's decades-long investigation, over a thousand men like Yee-Ree were questioned. All of them pleaded innocent. All of them were set free. But chances are, one of them was lying.
Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. You can find us here every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at TheConspiracyPod, and we would love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. This week, we're taking a look at three of the FBI's most likely suspects. We'll explore the possibility of an FBI cover-up
and see if a few modern-day sleuths actually solved the mysterious case of D.B. Cooper. Stay with us. This episode is brought to you by Buzz Balls. Every time I see these guys in the store, I have to smile. They are hilarious and so cute. My favorite flavor is Watermelon Smash. Thanks to Buzz Balls, you can get delicious cocktails in these cute, ready-to-drink ball cans. They're made with real fruit juices and creams, plus they're kosher-certified,
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On November 24th, 1971, around 2:00 PM, a man calling himself Dan Cooper boarded a Seattle-bound Boeing 727 carrying what looked like a bomb in his briefcase. After the plane took off, he handed a flight attendant a note. The note demanded a ransom of $200,000 and four parachutes. It also explained that upon their arrival at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport,
the plane needed to be refueled. Seattle was not his intended destination. At 5:40 p.m., Flight 305 landed at SeaTac. Using a flight attendant as a go-between, the FBI met Cooper's demands: a bag of $200,000 in $20 bills and four parachutes from a skydiving school. All the passengers were set free, except for a handful of members of the flight crew.
Cooper's next demands were to fly to Mexico City, or any place in Mexico, non-stop, gear down, flaps up, don't go over 10,000 feet, all cabin lights out, do not land again in the United States for fuel or any other reason. By 7:45 PM, Flight 305 was headed to Mexico.
At 8:05, a cockpit warning light came on indicating that the rear staircase had been fully extended. A few minutes later, the captain felt the back of the plane dip. The staircase momentarily snapped shut before dropping open again. With that, Dan Cooper was gone. Afterward, the FBI cobbled together a profile for the man
Based on descriptions provided by flight attendants, they knew he was a white male in his 40s with brown hair and brown eyes. Given his escape tactic, skydiving, they suspected he had professional training, likely in the military. That belief was reinforced by the fact that he specified his parachute should not be from the Air Force.
It implied that the hijacker knew Air Force parachutes opened automatically, while standard skydiving parachutes allow for more control. The jumper pulls the ripcord whenever they're ready. There were a number of other clues. During the flight, Cooper pointed out the city of Tacoma and McCord Air Force Base, suggesting a familiarity with the locations of military bases.
Cooper gave the pilots specific instructions for the altitude and speed at which they should travel. Perhaps he was a pilot. And compellingly, Cooper's hijacking occurred quite close to other airline hijackings that matched his M.O. On April 7th, 1972, five months after Cooper disappeared, a man hijacked a plane for ransom using an explosive.
He bought a one-way ticket from Denver to Los Angeles. His appearance was altered with a toupee and tan makeup. He boarded the plane and took a seat in the back row. In his hand, a grenade. In his waistband, a gun. Once settled and airborne, he handed a flight attendant a note that demanded $500,000 in cash and four parachutes.
When they stopped in San Francisco so the passengers could be released, a go-between was used to transfer the money and the parachutes on board. All the passengers were set free, except for a handful of members of the flight crew. Sounding familiar? When the plane was in the air again, the hijacker lowered the rear stairway, strapped on a parachute, tied the bag of cash to his body, and jumped.
The hijacking was nearly identical, but this time, the hijacker left behind a critical piece of evidence, the ransom note he'd written. Before the FBI could look into it, they received an anonymous call. The tipster told them about a conversation he'd had with a friend, and the topic turned to hijacking a plane. The friend's name was Richard McCoy.
An investigation started immediately. They discovered that McCoy was a 29-year-old former Green Beret. He'd served two tours in Vietnam. He was a pilot, parachutist, and an expert in demolitions. The FBI contacted the Army and requested any handwriting samples they had on file. It was a match.
Two days after the second hijacking, the FBI arrived at Richard McCoy's house in Provo, Utah. He was about to leave for the day to report to the National Guard. He was flying one of the helicopters involved in the search for the hijacker. After his arrest, officials searched his home and found $499,970, plus a parachute harness hidden in a closet.
Immediately, investigators started celebrating. They thought they had him. They thought they found D.B. Cooper.
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Five months after D.B. Cooper famously hijacked a plane, Richard McCoy, a decorated Army veteran, carried out nearly the same scheme. But unlike Cooper, McCoy got caught. He was confirmed as the man who hijacked a plane on April 7, 1972 and quickly arrested. Afterward, the FBI investigated whether or not Richard McCoy could have also been D.B. Cooper.
McCoy had the military training and expertise, which included an affinity for skydiving, to pull off both hijackings. When they showed McCoy's sister-in-law and mother-in-law a picture of the black clip-on tie Cooper left behind on Flight 305, they recognized it as something similar to what McCoy would wear. Investigating his whereabouts around the time of the hijacking turned up some compelling clues.
The night before Cooper's hijacking, McCoy filled up his car at a gas station in Cedar City, several hours south of his home in Utah, on his way to Las Vegas. Someone later placed a collect call to McCoy's home from Vegas' Tropicana Hotel. McCoy could have driven from Cedar City to Las Vegas. He then could have flown to Portland, Oregon, where D.B. Cooper boarded Flight 305.
The timeline is plausible, but his age didn't fit the profile. A smooth-faced 29-year-old, almost anyone would be hard-pressed to mistake him for being in Cooper's apparent mid-40s. But given an anonymous note they received that stated Cooper might have put putty on his face to disguise himself, they looked over the discrepancy.
However, there were other inconsistencies besides McCoy's age. His eyes were blue, while witnesses told the FBI that Cooper's were brown. And while McCoy never explained the charges for gas or the collect call from the hotel, he did provide an alibi for the afternoon of Cooper's hijacking. He said he spent Thanksgiving at home with his wife. He'd even helped her prepare the turkey for dinner.
She corroborated his story. The FBI chose not to press further. They knew McCoy would be serving a 45-year sentence for the hijacking that he actually carried out. What they didn't know was that he didn't intend to serve the whole sentence. Just four months after his arrest, McCoy and three of his fellow inmates at the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania,
fashioned prop guns out of dental supplies, stole a garbage truck, and plowed through the front gates of the prison, escaping, if only for a moment, to freedom. Three months after that, the FBI located McCoy in Virginia. He returned home to find three agents waiting for him in his living room. He pulled a pistol on them, but was immediately gunned down by the agents.
Richard McCoy died at the scene and he took any secrets he might have had with him. Still, the FBI continued their investigation long past McCoy's death. After all, McCoy could have been a copycat. And believe it or not, hijacking a plane wasn't all that uncommon. They even had a term for it: skyjacking. It was a very different time for air travel.
Passengers weren't required to show photo ID, let alone have their bags examined or walk through metal detectors. From 1961 to 1972 in the United States, there were 159 skyjackings. It happened so frequently, it was seen as a delay in your normal travel plans. A nuisance. Skyjacking was even satirized on television and in print today.
A frequent destination for skyjackers was Cuba. In fact, two out of three demanded the pilot land the plane in the communist country in an extreme circumvention of diplomatic sanctions between the US and Cuba. Some skyjackers were seeking sanctuary,
Some were driven by ideology and took the plane in political protest, and others took the passengers, crew, and aircraft hostage for monetary gain. Though rare, there were injuries and fatalities during this period too. The only reason the media sensationalized D.B. Cooper's hijacking was because, by the standards of skyjacking, it was unusual. He hadn't promoted radical beliefs. He wasn't violent.
Nobody was harmed. In fact, the other passengers had no idea anything had happened until they stepped off the plane and were greeted by a slew of FBI agents. Then, holding hostage the bare minimum number of crew members needed to fly the plane, D.B. Cooper returned to the air with $200,000 of the federal government's money and was never seen again.
Which is why, similar to gangsters like John Dillinger, the public considered D.B. Cooper a Robin Hood figure. More than anything, the FBI wanted to end that narrative by finding the man responsible. And because of the popularity of the case, the FBI received calls from people who claimed to know D.B. Cooper's real identity for decades.
In the early 2000s, the FBI received a letter from a man named Lyle Christensen. After watching an episode of Unsolved Mysteries about the Cooper skyjacking, he was convinced his brother, Kenneth, was responsible. Kenneth Christensen had enlisted in the Army at 18 in the spring of 1944 and joined the paratroopers during basic training.
As a member of the 11th Airborne Division, Kenneth was trained to land in difficult terrain, like the jungles of the South Pacific. But by the time the Army shipped him overseas, World War II was over, and he was assigned to work as a mail clerk on a base in Japan. For fun, he jumped out of planes. Upon his return home, he started working at Northwest Orient Airlines.
the same airline Cooper would go on to hijack. And in November 1971, Kenneth was a flight attendant in his mid-40s. 44 to be exact. For Lyle, the circumstantial evidence against his brother was piling up. Kenneth had the skills and knowledge required to pull off the crime. Like Cooper, he chain-smoked cigarettes. And the black tie left behind on Flight 305...
looked remarkably similar to the one that was a part of Kenneth's uniform. Less than a year after the hijacking, Kenneth purchased a house on Bonnery Lake, about an hour south of Seattle, not far from where Cooper was suspected to have landed. Most damning of all, no one, including his brother, could vouch for Kenneth's whereabouts on the day of the hijacking.
According to some sources, after Kenneth's death in 1994, his family found a box of newspaper clippings about Northwest Orient Airlines. They dated from the 1950s to just before the hijacking in November 1971. After that, Kenneth stopped clipping, despite the fact that the media's coverage of the airline only became more extensive thanks to D.B. Cooper.
But Kenneth was never considered a primary suspect by the FBI. They were convinced it couldn't have been an inside job. In 2007, journalist Jeffrey Gray took it upon himself to investigate Lyle's claims about his brother. After getting Lyle's full story, Gray approached the former lead detective on the case, Ralph Himmelsbach, to get his thoughts.
Himmelsbach admitted they'd never considered that Cooper might have worked for Northwest Orient Airlines. But in reference to flight attendants, he told the journalist, Grace slid a picture of Kenneth across the table to Himmelsbach.
The agent studied it carefully but shook his head no. It couldn't be him. Cooper was between 5'10 and 6 feet tall and weighed around 180 pounds. Kenneth was 5'8 and 150 pounds at the time of the hijacking. Cooper had a full head of hair and Kenneth was balding. Kenneth's eyes were hazel, not brown. Not to mention he had no criminal past. But while Kenneth had no prior record...
There were plenty of criminals that fit Cooper's profile. For one, Robert Rackstraw. In his life, Rackstraw had many criminal titles: grifter, con artist, check forger, thief, alleged murderer. Apparently, he was highly intelligent, easily bored, and always looking for a big score.
In 1963, cops arrested him for using a fake ID. About an hour later, after dozing off while smoking, he set fire to the mattress in his cell. The next year, Rackstraw joined the army. According to him, it was the "in thing" to do. That, and he wanted to follow in his veteran stepfather's footsteps.
But in his application, the high school dropout lied and said he'd attended college. At the time, no one noticed. And the military seemed to have a positive influence on Rackstraw. He started to turn his life around. He got married and had three children. All the while, the army provided him with the high-octane lifestyle he craved, without needing to resort to crime.
His superiors taught him how to execute high-altitude parachute jumps, and they gave him an eight-week course on explosives. He thrived. By November 1969, Rackstraw had been promoted to sergeant, and with four months of advanced flight training under his belt, he shipped off to Vietnam.
Rackstraw first worked as a mechanic, fixing battered helicopters, but he then trained to become a pilot, flying unauthorized missions to find and destroy enemy tunnels. In Vietnam, Rackstraw came into contact with the CIA. He allegedly befriended an agent who he helped perform off-the-record missions.
Then, in June 1971, Rackstraw's name came up in an investigation into an unrelated crime. As a result, authorities started to uncover the deception of his past. First, they found out that he lied about his college education. But then, they found evidence he'd lied about his rank in the military and the medals he'd been awarded. An infraction worthy of dismissal.
So, after seven years of service, Rackstraw was forced to resign for conduct unbecoming an officer. He then went to stay at his parents' home in Valley Springs, California. There, Rackstraw planned for his future, whether or not he knew how explosive it would be. Hey Fidelity, how can I remember to invest every month?
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In 1971, the Army forced Sergeant Robert Rackstraw to resign. He had lied about his credentials, rank, and accolades. He then moved to his parents' house in the remote region of Valley Springs, California. From there, Rackstraw operated a number of businesses, many of which were scams.
For instance, in the mid-70s, he ran a print shop that he used to create fraudulent checks. He cashed them to the tune of $75,000. Anticipating a potential run-in with the law, Rackstraw fled to Iran, where he began working for a helicopter company. But the FBI was hot on his trail. They informed Rackstraw's employer of his crimes, and he was fired.
By that time, the State Department had canceled his passport, which forced him to return to the States. Once his plane arrived in New York in February 1978, he was arrested for several felonies, including the suspected murder of his stepfather. As Rackstraw sat in a cell, police noticed that he bore a striking resemblance to the D.B. Cooper composite,
He had the right height and build, the same color hair and eyes. When pressed by authorities, Rackstraw admitted to being in the Washington area at the time of the hijacking. During an interview with Pete Noyes of NBC, Rackstraw was asked if he should be considered a suspect. He replied, quote,
Oh yes, if I was an investigator, definitely so. I wouldn't discount myself, or a person like myself. In fact, except for his age, no one could find anything to suggest that Rackstraw wasn't D.B. Cooper. At the time of the hijacking, he was 28. The year after his arrest, the FBI announced that Rackstraw was no longer considered a primary suspect. Their reasoning?
a lack of evidence, his age, and the sheer volume of other suspects that required their attention. Rackstraw was acquitted of murdering his stepfather, but was later convicted of grand theft and check fraud after he crashed a rented plane in an attempt to fake his own death. For those crimes, he served a little under two years before his release in 1980.
After that, as far as we can tell, Rackstraw led a rather quiet life. He earned a college degree, then several post-grad law degrees. In the years following his time in the army and his arrest, he'd make the occasional offhand remark to his friends about how he was the real D.B. Cooper, but he'd always follow it up with a, just kidding. But in 2011, one citizen sleuth became convinced that
that he wasn't. Tom Colbert owned a business that solicited true stories from the public, often turning them into films and TV series. Most days, the tips he got were bizarre. Sometimes they were interesting, but few really grabbed his attention. Then, one day a caller mentioned a large sum of money that had once been found along the Columbia River in Tina Bar, Washington.
The tipster was referring to the $5,800 that an eight-year-old found buried on a beach in early 1980. The money belonged to D.B. Cooper. It was one of the few clues the FBI found after the hijacking. Colbert was fascinated by the story and began to dig deeper, eventually finding himself looking at the FBI's long list of suspects. He took a particular interest in Robert Rackstraw.
He even sent some photos of Rackstraw to an expert to compare with a composite sketch of Cooper. After comparing them, the expert believed there were nine points that matched up, including the brown eyes, short mouth, and the location of the ears. The more Colbert investigated, the more convinced he became that Rackstraw was Cooper.
He learned about his tour in Vietnam and his parachuting, demolition, and pilot training. He noted Rackstraw's trouble with the law and desire to escape it, and his movements around the date of the hijacking. Piece after piece seemed to fall into place for Colbert. Finally, he reached out to the FBI. Colbert offered agents the opportunity to work with him on his investigation. He believed he was really onto something.
The agents politely declined. So Colbert teamed up with a group of investigators to write a book about the case, eventually creating a two-episode documentary series for the History Channel and then a four-episode series for Netflix. And all during their investigation, Rackstraw was still alive. Colbert desperately wanted an interview with him.
In 2013, after receiving no response to any of their communications, the documentary crew decided to surprise a then 70-year-old Rackstraw. They showed up to his boat shop to confront him face-to-face. What followed was a bit of a disaster. It was an ambush. An argument broke out. The long-awaited confrontation ended with Rackstraw admitting nothing.
But by 2016, the documentary team had amassed enough evidence that they decided to present it to the FBI. They submitted DNA samples, hidden codes from letters allegedly written by Cooper, and testimony from a few of Rackstraw's former conspirators. Colbert was confident he'd be told he solved the hijacking case. A few months later, the FBI did respond.
They told Colbert there was no longer any active investigation into the identity of D.B. Cooper. They'd only reopen the case if he could find key evidence, the missing parachute, or money that matched the serial numbers on record. That's it. So Colbert accused the FBI of a cover-up.
He theorized that they wanted to bury information regarding Rackstra's illicit involvement with the CIA in Vietnam. Given the information Colbert could find, he could only imagine the information he couldn't. He then sued the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act to reopen the case. And as a result, a federal judge ordered the FBI to release their files on the hijacking.
Colbert and his team pored over thousands of pages, allegedly finding more evidence that supported his conclusion. But they weren't able to prove it without a doubt. Colbert's findings have yet to persuade federal authorities, who have flatly refused to make comments of any kind on the citizen sleuth. And while Colbert still believes that Rackstraw is the real D.B. Cooper, he won't be getting his confession.
Robert Rackstraw died in 2019 at the age of 75. There are no longer any living suspects. Today, the hijacking of Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 remains the only unsolved case of air piracy in the United States. And whether or not it will ever be possible to solve it remains itself a mystery.
The three men we've discussed are only a few of the hundreds that the FBI and the public considered viable suspects, but they are among the most compelling. Given the evidence, the most likely candidate seems to be Robert Rackstraw. He does look remarkably like the composite sketch. That said, it isn't hard to find a white man in his mid-40s with brown hair and brown eyes.
But it is much harder to find one with military, explosives, and pilot training who was in Washington at the time and had a criminal record. Not to mention, Rackstraw's devil-may-care attitude may have led him to think strolling onto a plane with a bomb in his bag and stealing 200 grand and the hearts of a nation would be quite the feather in his cap. But just as in 1971...
There is no evidence. And we don't know what happened to the money. Minus the cash found in Tina Bar, there may be $194,200 waiting to be found. It might have been buried somewhere in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest under mounds of dirt and volcanic ash. Perhaps it's stored away somewhere secret, in pristine condition, waiting for someone to claim it.
Or maybe Cooper didn't survive the jump. His remains might have long since been reclaimed by the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest. 50 years on, there would be little left of the hijacker or the money. Cooper's biggest scam might have been convincing everyone he had a plan all along. You could say he took much more than $200,000. He stole years of money, time, and energy from law enforcement.
from victims of copycat skyjackings, from everyone who has ever wondered who was D.B. Cooper and cared enough to jump after him down the rabbit hole.
Thank you for listening to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at TheConspiracyPod. And we would love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts.
For more information on D.B. Cooper, among the many sources we used, we found Skyjack, The Hunt for D.B. Cooper by Jeffrey Gray, and The Last Master Outlaw by Thomas Colbert and Tom Solosi, extremely helpful to our research. Until next time, remember, the truth isn't always the best story, and the official story isn't always the truth.
This episode was written by Teresa Watson with writing assistance by Maggie Edmire. Fact-checked by Claire Cronin, researched by Brian Petras, and sound designed by Kelly Geary. Our head of programming is Julian Boisreau. Our head of production is Nick Johnson, and Spencer Howard is our post-production supervisor. I'm your host, Carter Roy.
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