Speaker 1: You're listening to the Mind Over Murder podcast.
Speaker 2: My name is Bill Thomas. I'm a writer, consulting, producer,
and now podcaster. I am now trying to use my
experience as the brother of a murder victim to help
other victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book
on the unsolved Colonial Parkway murders and I'm the co
administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together with
Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 3: My name is Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 4: I'm a writer, a researcher, a teacher, and a victim's advocate,
as well as the social media manager and co administrator
for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my partner
in crime, Bill Thomas.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Mind Ever Murderer. I'm Kristin Dilly and I'm
Bill Thomas. We're back with the second episode of our
deep dive into the dB Cooper skyjacking case from nineteen
seventy one. We still do not have answers as to
who DeBie Cooper actually is and what what happened to
him when he parachuted into the night on November twenty fourth,
nineteen seventy one. But what do we have a lot
of suspects, and we're going to continue our rundown of
those suspects here in just a couple of seconds.
Speaker 2: Before we start. I have to congratulate you for referring
to this as a deep dive, because I'm sure all
puns were intended regarding the sky jacker Dan dB Hooper.
Speaker 3: All puns were absolutely as intended.
Speaker 2: Yes, exactly. I love all the suspects. My favorite is
the first one we mentioned last time, Richard Floyd McCoy junior.
He's my favorite by a wide margin. On of these
other people, including the next one we're going to talk about.
I'm really skeptical a lot of people just seem to
be making these claims like, oh, I was Dan Cooper,
I was DBE Hooper, and there's nothing really to back
it up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this next one I think is particularly funny, largely
because of the coda at the end of it. So
this we discussed four suspects last time after we went
over the basics of the case, and if you have
not had a chance to listen to that first episode,
please do go back and listen to it, otherwise you're
missing a lot of context here. Suspect five on the
list is a guy named William Pratt Gossett. The proof
offered for William Pratt Gossipt's other life as d B.
Cooper comes from his son Greg. Greg claimed that on
his twenty first birthday, his father, Salt Lake City talk
radio host William Pratt Gossett, showed him two safety deposit
box keys and claimed that inside was the money from
the skyjacking, which he had committed as Dan Cooper. Greg's
older brother, Kirk, had also heard the story of.
Speaker 2: The D B.
Speaker 3: Cooper case and the money. He also backed up the
claims and said that his father quote had the type
of temperament to do something like this end quote. That
is all that is offered in this particular instance, which
led the FBI to state unequivocally, there is not enough
evidence in this story to prove that William Pratt Gossett
was involved in the skyjacking. In fact, FBI Special Agent
Larry Carr said it best when he said, quote, there
is not one link to the D. B. Cooper case
other than the statements gossip made to someone. End quote.
Speaker 2: This is FBI Special Agent Larry Carr speaking, and basically,
this is FBI speak for this guy, William Pratt gossip
is full of beans because this is a thin file,
to put it mildly.
Speaker 3: My favorite that's sort of the cream on top of
the whole entire cake, is this little piece of information
that I found. Michael Natale, who did a wonderful job
writing down all of the ins and outs of this
case for Popular Mechanics, noted at the end of his
section on William Pratt gossip quote. It's been more than
fifteen years since that ABC News story, and it does
not appear anyone has bothered to check that alleged safety
deposit box.
Speaker 2: That's a bit of a disc don't you think you could.
Speaker 3: Have just opened the thing and figured out if Skyjack
money was in there?
Speaker 2: Yeah, and there's nothing else to prove that gossip was involved.
And I love the fact that he's a talk radio
host who certainly knew how to talk and spin a yarn.
This doesn't wash for me at all.
Speaker 3: I left one bit of information out of that talk
radio host thing, just because I wondered if it might
strain credibility a bit, But the sort of the whole
thing does. He was a talk radio host with an
interest in paranormal Oh why did I know that.
Speaker 2: I knew you were going to say the occult, paranor
paranormal range things. Oh, come on, this one, Eh, doesn't work.
Suspect number five, William Pratt gossip, don't bother, don't bother.
Speaker 3: Suspect number six Walter R. RecA. This one is interesting
because he is a former paratrooper.
Speaker 2: Yeah, now he's got at least some of the skill set.
Speaker 3: The other reason that people seem to think he might
actually be dB Cooper was because he didn't only confess
to it, like he came out and said I was
dB Cooper, but he also specifically described how he pulled
off the hijacking, and that was given in an audio
taped confession to his friend Carl Lauren, who went on
to write the book D B. Cooper and Me A Criminal,
A Spy, my best friend. It's an evocative book title.
Speaker 2: It is a good title.
Speaker 3: Lauren claimed he had additional evidence beyond the audio recording.
There nobody really said what that was beyond documents. The
Oregon Live reported that Lauren possessed documents detailing how he
allegedly used a large portion of Recca's two hundred thousand
dollars heist money.
Speaker 2: I'm not convinced, but the fact that RecA was a
former paratrooper is interesting to start with.
Speaker 3: The refutation offered on this one is interesting. It's in
the realm of reasonable doubt. While Reca's confession is detailed,
there are also major discrepancies. Recca claimed that he landed
in clay Alam, Washington, where he went to a roadside
diner and asked a dump truck driver to give his
friend directions to the diner over the phone. The problem
is that clay Allam is over one hundred and fifty
miles from dB Cooper's presumed landing area given the aircraft's
position during his jump, so that's a little bit of
an issue. It was also noted that Recca did not
match the sketched composite of Cooper. There is a lot
of reasonable doubt. Even though the confession is rather detailed.
Speaker 2: It's not real clear here. Now obviously this is fifty
four years ago. It sounds like mister Reckham may be
dead by this point, and particularly the way Karl Lauren
refers to him. This one, I think is a bit
of a stretch. The detailed confession, though, is something I
really liked. The inconsistency seems to be where he claimed
he landed, which is one hundred and fifty miles off course.
Speaker 3: Suspect seven, Robert Rastraw, This one's interesting, Like I don't
think he is good for it, and he actually doesn't
think he is either. We'll get to that in a second,
but I like the backstory here behind it. Number one,
Robert Rackstraw is a pilot, all right, So we've got
one skill set pilot in Vietnam that Robert Rackstraw had
been on law enforcement's radar for reasons other than the
dB Cooper case since nineteen seventy seven. Writing bad checks
was one of them, to the tune of seventy five
thousand dollars. He was under suspicion of murdering his own stepfather,
a crime for which he was acquitted later, and then
just I don't know reasons, Robert Rackstraw cemented his own
bad boy rap by faking his own death and crashing
a plane into Monterey Bay.
Speaker 2: Now let me just stop you here. Who among us
hasn't wanted to fake our own death and crash into
Monterey Bay? Seriously?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I can't. I can think that there were probably
better ways of going off the grid and faking your
own death. But he went with let's crash into Monterey Bay.
This he did it with style.
Speaker 2: YEP. I also feel this might be the right time
to confess that in my next life, I'm coming back
as a sea Otter and I'm going to be living
in the Monterey Bay, eating abaloni and enjoying the company
of attractive young what shall we say, otter babes.
Speaker 3: There you go. You really gave that a lot of thought,
didn't you.
Speaker 2: I did. Yeah, this is my next life. I've got
it all mapped out.
Speaker 3: I hope that's taken into account. Then when you win
this one and start thinking about next one, I hope
you get a choice.
Speaker 2: I hope so too. I'm going to try to be
better behaved in the latter part of my life here
so that I can select the Otter option next time around.
Speaker 3: And that means you're going to stop antagonizing the bureau.
Speaker 2: No, I'm on the side of righteousness on that one.
Speaker 3: There we go. Oxtra did claim to people that he
was dB Cooper, even going so far as to say
to author and investigator Tom Colbert, Yeah, I've claimed that
I was dB Cooper. Tom Colbert really strongly believed in
Robert Restraw's guilt. In fact, he built a case against
Restraw using the FBI's own dB Cooper files, which he
got them to release by sending in a Foyer request.
Good for him and his own research. Interesting, Yes, so
Tom Colbert was like positive, this guy's Robert Restraw. The refutation, though,
against Rextraw, is Restraw himself. After Tom Colbert looked really
closely at him and even included him on his History
Channel documentary series d B Cooper Case closed, Rastraw found
the surge in interest in him because of the surgeon
interest in dB Cooper wasn't something that he wanted.
Speaker 2: This is yet another potential suspect who suddenly seems to
regret putting out this claim. I'm dB Cooper, I was
Dan Cooper, I stole this money, I hijacked this plane.
This is an open case, and the FBI was still
very committed to arresting Dan Cooper if they could find
him and prove that a particular individual was responsible for
this hijacking. It suddenly occurs to these folks that this
might not be smart move.
Speaker 3: Robert Rostraw said, it's a lot of expletive to people
magazine following the airing of the show dB Cooper Case closed.
He also said that the notoriety of that series cost
him his job.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no kidding.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So Robert Rostraw passed away in twenty nineteen, and
he firmly denied any involvement in the dB Cooper Case
until the end of his life.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this one didn't fly for me either.
Speaker 3: So this one is interesting, this final suspect here, and
again I gave the I gave the caveat last episode
that I had not had a chance to cover all
of the suspects, even most of them, and probably not
some people's favorites, But this is what I had time for.
But this one I thought was interesting. So this new
suspect newer is a guy by the name of Vince Peterson.
So the newest suspect in the dB Cooper Case comes
to us from amateur sleep. Eric ellis, star of History's
Greatest Mysteries. He stated that he formed his new hypothesis
on the identity of the Skyjacker when he looked at
a decade old scientific report on Cooper's tie, which, as
I said last episode, he pulled off with a flourish
and left behind on the plane before he jumped.
Speaker 2: I love that flare for drama.
Speaker 3: Yes, I'm going to quote here from a People magazine article.
The tie contained quote one hundred thousand particles containing part
stainless steel and part titanium end quote. Ullis tracked that
smidge of detail from a decade old scientific report on
the Cooper case and used US patent information to trace
particle fragments from the tie to Crucible Steel of Pennsylvania quote,
headquartered in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, a significant subcontractor all
throughout the nineteen sixties. It supplied the lion's share of
titanium and stainless steel for Boeing's aircraft, Ellis said of
the metal fabric shop. So remember it was a Boeing
seven to twenty StepN that Cooper skyjacked. Right. So Vince
Peterson died in two thousand and two, So obviously this
is somebody who cannot currently offer refutation as to their
innocence or guilt. The FBI does have the neck tie,
and Ellis has allegedly stated, and this was what I
was a little fuzzy on this. He stated that he
was going to sue the FBI to get access to
the tie. But I looked through as much reporting as
I could find, and I couldn't find whether or not
he had actually followed through with a lawsuit, or whether
he had just said I'm going to sue to get
the tie essentially, So for refutation I said, There's been
no refutation of the suspect, at least not that I
was able to find in my time researching. There hasn't
been any testing of its truth or veracity either. Popular
Mechanics covered articles on the break in the case in
twenty twenty three and twenty twenty four. During that reporting,
Eric Ellis mentioned a number of times that he was
choosing to sue the FBI to get access to the tie.
But the only information that I could find on that
process is a quote from an article in twenty twenty
three by Tim Neukom, who says quote Ellis believes the FBI,
along with not providing DNA results in over twenty years
and ending any work on the case in twenty sixteen,
may have not known about the metal and the clip
on tie due to conversations he had with investigators after
the fact he asked to personally analyze the tie. The
FBI has granted access to private parties in the past,
but was denied, so he's taking his fight to the
next level, hopeful he'll find DNA that can prove his
theories that gives us the ability to take dB Cooper's
DNA and reverse engineer this and identify his family, nephew's nieces,
and people of that nature. Alis says, there have been
no updates that I could find about the attempt to
get the tie from the FBI, any further testing or
anything else about DNA left on the plane. The sixty
four thousand dollars question of our any of these people
dB Cooper is still the sixty four thousand dollars question.
Speaker 2: Putting this particular suspect aside, it would be interesting to
see if the use of investigative genetic genealogy might prove
to be able to identify DNA that might have been
left on the tie, and then, of course, working backwards,
we might be able to identify him through a family connection.
So that's an interesting idea. I don't necessarily think that
this would prove it was Vince Peterson, although it could,
but I think this is an interesting possibility. I'd love
to see them test the tie and see if they
can extract any working DNA profiles from it.
Speaker 3: No, I agree, and again I do want to just
off for the caveat here. There's so much out there
about dB Cooper. I wish that I had time to
watch the History's Greatest Mysteries episodes, all of the documentaries
and everything out there on dB Cooper. It is entirely
possible that there are new pieces of information out there
related to the Cooper case that I was not able
to provide for this reporting. So if anybody does have
that information about the testing, the tie, any of these suspects,
and stuff that we don't know, please provide it. We
would love to know more and we'd love to be
able to continue reporting. So if anybody knows stuff, let
us know. We would love to continue reporting.
Speaker 2: You're listening to Mind over Murder. We'll be right back
after this word from our sponsors, We're back here at
mindover Murder. And for older listeners, if you're ready to
confess that you are Dan Cooper, we'd love to have
you on as a guest here on Mind over Murder.
They'd be getting up there though. Let's see if he
was thirty ish, which might be on the young side.
Speaker 3: They said he was in his forties, or at least
they thought he was in his forties.
Speaker 2: We hope you're still out there feeling healthy and maybe
a little bit confessional. We'd love to have you on
Mind over Murder.
Speaker 3: There is so much about the dB Cooper case that
is fascinating, and so our last section of the pod
today is talking about this enduring popularity of dB Cooper.
Why are we still interested in this guy? So author
Jeffrey Gray explained the long lasting mythos of dB Cooper.
I liked this quote from him quote, it almost became
a Thanksgiving ritual for people over the years, Let's go
in the woods and see if we can find D. B.
Cooper's money. And it wasn't only Laman in the woods.
It was treasure hunters, amateur sluice reporters, just people curious
to see if buried treasure was out there or Cooper's
body was hanging from a branch en.
Speaker 2: A terrible image, this poor guy in a sling, his parachute,
all tangled in a tree.
Speaker 3: For true crime reporters, investigators and sluice like himself discovering
dB Cooper's real identities tantamount to discovering the real identity
of Jack the Ripper and the Zodiac. When Jeffrey Gray
was in conversation with Guy Raz of NPR, Gray said,
this is a huge case. To close the deal on
dB Cooper is tantamount of finding the last Dutchman mine
in reporter Land Raz added, this is the holy grail.
This is the holy grail for crime reporters, and Gray said,
it's better.
Speaker 2: Than that, ugh, and why do we think that is? Is?
Speaker 3: Michael Matale, for his reporting in Popular Mechanics, interviewed podcasters
Sean and Carrie McCabe, who hosts the podcast Ain't It Scary?
With Sean and Carrie what an It's adorable. It rhymes
it's adorable. They talked a little bit about deb Cooper's popularity,
and so these are quotes from these these podcasters, Sean
and Kerry McCabe. Sean said, first, like all of the
best true crime stories, it's because there's no clear answer.
We don't know who the guy was. We likely never
will know for sure, and that leaves room for everyone
to bring their own opinions and their own investigator hat
and speculate without any fear of ever really being proven wrong.
I think there's something to that.
Speaker 2: I think there is two and I love this next
quote from Carrie McCabe.
Speaker 3: Carrie suggests that it's also the nature of Cooper's crime
that keeps people coming back to it. Quote dB, Cooper
was a cool figure. He didn't hurt anybody, aside from
maybe himself in his crime. He didn't use aggressive physical force.
I think that makes him an object of fascination that
people can be more openly interested in than say, a
serial killer. Being interested in true crime often comes with
a lot of caveats. Oh, I don't like Jeffrey Dahmer.
I just like learning about his pathology, etc. But with
Cooper's relatively victimless crime, you don't have to feel creepy
if you're interested.
Speaker 2: This is something you and I were talking about a
little bit off air, which is we know that a
lot of people are fascinated by serial killers and other
offenders like that, and I do understand it to some extent.
This is a situation with Cooper where as I mentioned
last time on the podcast, he's almost a mythical folk
hero because he didn't hurt anyone and he stole two
hundred thousand dollars from the man, but there was no
violence as far as we know. And he yes, he
threatened that he had an explosive device with him in
his bag, but that could have easily been a bag
of road flares and some wires for all we know.
And so on some level, debe Cooper takes on this
almost mythical reputation. But I think one of the reasons
why people find him so fascinating is he's not really
characterized as a bad guy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, exactly, it is. It's one of those fun,
entertaining bits of speculation that you can spend all day
talking about, or just a few minutes talking about, but
your conversation is going to be fun and lighthearted. It's
the same way that you can spend a while talking
about aliens or the Lucknus Monster, or where Amelia Earhart
actually landed what actually happened to her, And it's an
interesting thought experiment, but it's we're probably never going to know,
and that's okay.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's funny that you mentioned Amelia Earhart. That's a topic,
by the way, that if Pam and I are watching
TV and we happen to see some program, often new
about Amelia Airhart. I can pretty much guarantee we'll watch
it because we find that to be a fascinating case
as well, and there's always lots of potential rabbit holes
you can go down in the Ameliar Airhart case. By
the way, there's also a tie in both examples. I'm
very interested in flying, and planes and aviation hold a
lot of interest for me, and I'm a bit of
a history buff as well, So a case like BB
Cooper can really just grab on in a in positive way, because,
like I said, he's not seen as this dark evil figure.
He's a guy who managed to outsmart everybody and apparently
jumped out of a plane and may have even survived.
Next week, we'll be continuing our conversation about dB Cooper
with a very interesting guest. Kristen reached out to Darren Shaefer,
who is the proprietor of something called the Cooper Vortex,
which is some of the most interesting available information about
dB Cooper. We'll talk to Darren Schaefer about the ongoing
mythos of dB Cooper, why he's still so fascinating to
so many people, and where the investigation might go. That'll
run next Monday and just a reminder. The format on
mindover Murder is that we have a new episode every Monday,
which we hope you enjoy, and then every Thursday we
run one of our classic episodes. So if you're only
interested in brand new content here at mindover Murder, that's
every Monday. And if you are interested in going back
and listening to earlier episodes which you may or may
not have heard, those are also available on Thursdays. Either way,
we hope you'll join us every week here on mindover Murder.
Speaker 3: So I want to end with an excellent quote here
from Jeffrey Gray. He was talking to NPR's Guy Rows
on All Things Considered, and Guy was asking him about
his own trip down the dB Cooper rabbit hole and
trying to discover dB Cooper's identity, and he said, what
I ran into with something called the Cooper Curse, and
the Cooper Curse is something that affects all Cooper hunters
the closer they get to unmasking the hijacker's identity, and
it's hard not to get obsessed with it because we
just don't know. There was somebody who boarded that plane
that night. So the fact that we don't know then
not knowing continues to gnaw at me. There is, though
a difference between the dB Cooper myth that we want
to believe in, but there's also the real story of
Dan Cooper, and what I was able to find is
that it's a totally different story. In my opinion, I
believe the actual hijacker was somebody who was not a hero,
who was a loser, who was alone, or who was depressed.
He was after, in his last gasp, trying to make
something of his life, the ability to achieve one fine
thing end quote. I think it is an interesting way
to look at it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't see it that way at all. I
don't see Dan Cooper as a loser. I think it's
a fascinating story. I do get why some of our
suspects that we've gone over in these last two episodes
have sometimes wanted to confess that they are Dan Cooper.
I don't see him as a loser at all. He
pulled off an amazing stunt, and if he survived, I
don't know. It still holds a tremendous amount of interest
for me, and I have a hard time looking at
him in a negative light. Obviously, what he did was
wrong and criminal, and he put a bunch of people
at risk and stole two hundred thousand dollars that didn't
belong to him. I'd still be interested in interviewing him.
And if Dan, if you're out there, we'd love to
have you come and talk to us onlind Over Murder.
Speaker 3: You got it, So who was dB Cooper? The world
may never know, but we want to know your theories,
so please leave your theories in the comments. And yeah,
if you happen to know someone who you think was
dB Cooper, let us know your story. We'd love to
be able to tell it. And speaking of Crime Con,
we do have Crime Con. We are back again on
Creator's Row. We may have some other things in the
work too, but right now we've just been confirmed for
Creator's Row, so that is going to be September five, six,
and seven in Denver, Beautiful, Denver, Colorado. We do have
a discount code or coupon code for anybody who is
looking to buy their tickets for Crime Con. So if
you would like ten percent off your ticket for Crime
Con Denver, use the coupon code mind Over Murder All
one word, which you get ten percent off your tickets.
Speaker 2: Where'd you get that great code? It's just so clear.
Speaker 3: It's so wonderful. It was given to me as a
gift by our wonderful friends at crime Con. The best
part about using that code, though, folks, is that it
does help us get some some discounts on our lodging
and airfare and various things like that. Crime Con is
very expensive, and we are happy to be there. Anything
that can kind of help mitigate that. We definitely appreciate
mind Over Murder for ten percent off your tickets. If
you are planning on going, please use our coupon code
because that does help us out a little bit. We
are looking forward to seeing you in Denver, and hopefully
we will have some more news about other potential happenings
in Denver before September rolls around.
Speaker 2: Hey, weren't some of these dB Cooper suspects from Denver?
We should be looking into that while we're there.
Speaker 3: I agree that is going to do it for this
episode of Mind Over Murder. Thank you so much for listening.
We'll see you next time.
Speaker 1: Mind Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and
Another Dog Productions.
Speaker 2: Our executive producers are Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley.
Speaker 1: Our logo art is by Pamela Arnois.
Speaker 2: Our theme music is by Kevin McLoud.
Speaker 1: Mind Over Murder is distributed in partnership with Coral Space Media.
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Speaker 1: You can also follow our page on the Colonial Parkway
Murders on Facebook.
Speaker 2: And finally, you can follow Bill Thomas on Twitter at
Bill Thomas. Five six.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to mind Over Murder.