The Search for D.B. Cooper (Lemmino) - Reaction

welcome back everybody to another reaction well we put it up for a vote over on patreon and the overwhelming choice for next reaction is what you're gonna see today this is back to lumino and i know that no matter how i say it somebody's gonna say that's not what it is it sounds like let me know i know i know i know i know i know i know thank you you don't have to comment uh let me know the search for db cooper uh this is my third one of his reactions uh or one of his videos i'm doing a reaction to i previously did jack the ripper and the lost colony of roanoke which are both subjects that i know something about especially jack the ripper but to a lesser degree roanoke coming into this one pretty much blind i mean i've seen some documentaries about db cooper but for the most part i'm here to learn like the rest of us i'm just here because he does phenomenal work on his documentaries some of the best stuff you will see on youtube and so maybe for some of you this is your first introduction to his channel links in the description to the original content definitely check him out i'm telling you been studying jack the ripper for 30 years i've seen pretty much every documentary read every major book you can find on the subject his series on youtube might be the best treatment of jack the ripper i've ever seen anywhere he's that good so highly recommend all of his stuff the research is good the presentation's phenomenal let's dive into the search for db cooper just let me know [Music] [Music] a daring parachute escape from a flying 727 somewhere between research was made of the plane immediately we don't know who he was where he came from or where he went i expect that we'll keep looking until we find him or find out what happened see even just that right there is such a cool intro and i don't know what he uses to do his animation that's way above my pay grade as far as doing that kind of cool stuff but just i don't know just something about the way he presents this stuff that makes it so interesting to watch [Music] in the afternoon of november 24th 1971 a middle-aged man carrying a briefcase walked into portland international airport and purchased a one-way ticket to seattle washington [Music] the man identified himself as dan cooper and along with 36 other passengers and a crew of six he soon boarded northwest airlines flight 305 once aboard cooper made himself comfortable in the middle of the last row of seats on the right side of the cabin he ordered a drink and had a smoke because this was the 70s not only that but think about this this is a flight from portland to seattle this is a like a tiny tiny short flight in the 1970s anyway um you know today you'd probably be on like a plane that had four seats across if that for a flight like that when i fly from pittsburgh to new york it's four seats it's two on each side uh this is a six seats across kind of plane here uh this is a big plane of course you're having cigarettes and you know you don't have the the ids that you have now you don't have all the security that you have today so you have to keep that in mind when we're watching this is that we can't think of this the way we would think of something like this happening today because everything is different with air travel than it was in the 1970s once the flight was cleared for departure cooper turned around and handed an envelope to flight attendant florence schaffner inside the envelope was a note featuring a handwritten message stating he had a bomb schaffner reluctantly sat down beside him and glimpsed what appeared to be eight sticks of dynamite inside his briefcase cooper's demands were quite simple he wanted again same thing here you'd think well how on earth did the guy get on the plane with a briefcase like that well you know even before 2001 uh the world was different as far as travel goes today we have the body scanners uh you know we have everything goes through metal you know not just metal detectors goes through the x-ray machines and all that stuff it wasn't like that then this kind of thing could happen the 200 000 dollars in cash and four parachutes he also demanded a fuel truck to stand ready to refuel the aircraft once they landed in seattle should they fail to comply with his demands he threatened to quote do the job once the flight was airborne shaftner went to inform the cockpit crew while another flight attendant by the name of tina muklow remained by cooper's side by using a telephone in the rear of the cabin muklow acted as an intermediary between cooper and the rest of the flight crew for the remainder of the hijacking for the next hour and a half flight 305 maintained a holding pattern near seattle while local and federal authorities scramble to procure the ransom as well as the four parachutes tenth and again here it doesn't seem like there was any consideration to not giving in to the demands you know today we would say you don't negotiate with terrorists why because if you negotiate with a terrorist then 10 more terrorists just like them come out of the woodwork and say hey he got what he wanted this is an effective strategy for getting what i want so that's why you don't negotiate with people in this situation but in the 70s they're like all right we'll do it whatever different time man different time 1000 20 bills were collected from a local bank while the owner of a nearby skydiving school supplied the shoots at 5 45 pm more than two hours past its scheduled arrival flight 305 finally touched down in seattle by this point it was well after sunset and the aircraft was brought to a remote section of the tarmac once the flight came to a stop both the ransom and the parachutes were handed over to muklow who then brought them back aboard in exchange cooper permitted two of the flight attendants as well as all the passengers to disembark many of whom had not yet realized the flight had been hijacked that's that's kind of impressive when you think about it that all of this happened including circling for an hour and a half while they got the ransom demands together and most of the people on board didn't even have a clue what was going on so that's that's uh kudos to the flight crew for keeping that all very quiet with the ransom paid and only four crew members remaining on board cooper told muklow to inform the captain that he wanted to fly to mexico city [Music] they were to fly with the landing gear down the flaps at 15 degrees and below 10 000 feet did the plane even have the range to go to mexico city with the gear down and the flaps down like that because i would think that would create a lot of drag and drop the uh or raise the fuel consumption and this if this is a plane that's flying short routes like that i would think it didn't have the range for that they'd probably have to stop somewhere the lights in the cabin were to be switched off and the aft stairway which opens from the underbelly of the fuselage was to remain extended two of cooper's demands could not be satisfied first of all the flight configuration he'd requested would not allow for a non-stop flight to mexico city so i figured as such koopa proposed a refueling stop in phoenix yuma or sacramento before they all agreed on reno nevada second of all it was not possible to depart with a ventral staircase extended cooper agreed to retract the stairs on the condition that mukla remained by his side and taught him how to extend them was the plane was airborne parked for nearly two hours due to complications with refuelling flight 305 was back in the air by 7 36 pm less than five minutes after takeoff cooper told muklow to head for the cockpit and that from this point onwards he was not to be disturbed the last time she saw cooper he was standing in the middle of the aisle as if though he was preparing to jump muklow joined the rest of the crew locked the cockpit door behind her and some three hours later flight 305 safely landed in reno once the flight came to a stop the crew carefully ventured into the rear of the cabin but there was no sign of cooper nor the bomb the aft stairway had been extended mid-flight and was slightly damaged upon landing it seemed there was only one explanation for the hijacker's absence at some point between seattle and reno cooper had strapped on a parachute walked down the stairs and leaped into the dark of night now it baffles me that they flew for three hours without like even so much as checking to see if the guy was still there i don't know there's something really weird about that that they didn't like i don't get curious look i mean did the guy threaten them and say i'm gonna blow the thing up if you don't stay locked in there until we land i don't know that that's kind of weird to me [Music] as soon as it became clear that cooper was no longer on board dozens of fbi agents converged upon the aircraft only to discover a disappointing amount of physical evidence a black clip-on tie eight cigarette butts and two of the four parachutes were all that cooper left behind now the cigarette butts i don't know if they still have those today but assuming they do now granted it's been 40 years so maybe there's not anything left but it's at least conceivable they could get some dna off of those evidently he'd brought the ransom and briefcase along with him in interviews conducted on the night of the hijacking cooper was described by the crew and passengers as a white male with brown eyes and dark hair he appeared to be in his mid-40s and wore a dark trench coat a dark suit a white shirt a black tie and dark shoes soon after boarding he'd also donned a pair of sunglasses now you might look at that and think man anywhere from five nine to six foot anywhere from 35 to 50 anywhere from 150 to 190 the reality is eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable think about this in your own life there are times that you remember something and you're sure that's the way it was and then you find out it wasn't that way at all and you've believed it for years because you think you remember it that way when it wasn't that at all and this can happen even in the immediate aftermath of an event like this think about it if you were asked to go back and remember someone you saw uh a day or two earlier even a couple hours earlier how good is your memory even in a situation like this where you might have interacted with that person and in a situation like this where there was a uh issue of uh hijacking you're still not going to be a hundred percent sure and you've seen people who look 50 that are 35 and who look 35 that are 50. it's all a guess based on this description the fbi produced the first of several composite sketches before they could mount a search however the fbi had to figure out when cooper abandoned the ship but that was easier said than done none of the four crew members witnessed cooper jumping from the plane nor did the pilots of two fighter jets which escorted the flight between seattle and reno which is not all too surprising given it was the middle of the night although the flight crew did report something odd the last communication with a hijacker occurred at approximately eight to five pm when the crew used the intercom to offer assistance which cooper declined within the next 10 minutes the crew experienced what they described as an oscillation or vibration of the aircraft at the time the crew suspected it might have been produced by cooper's jump and a subsequent recreation of the hijacking supported that conclusion makes sense okay so that took care of the when but what about the where while cooper was very explicit about the flight's configuration and destination he never specified any kind of route in fact cooper grew so impatient with a slow refueling in seattle that he dismissed the captain's request to file a flight plan and simply told him to quote get the show on the road as such the captain chose to fly along an airway known as victor 23 without any input from cooper but so i don't i'm not an expert by any means on these but planes fly on basically air highways okay they don't just you know if you're flying from new york to la they don't just fly a straight line from new york to la there are like lanes that they have and if you ever look at certain flights you'll see there are particular flight paths that they take kind of a weird quirk for example when flying from new york to pittsburgh i've noticed that my flights don't go right from new york to pittsburgh they actually go like way up north almost up to like erie pennsylvania and then down to pittsburgh i don't know why they do it that way because it takes a lot more time but there's a reason they have these flight paths and they go like from point a to point b to point c to point d to f to get to where they're going and so this is one of those highways by using victor 23 as a guide authorities estimated the most probable location of the flight at the approximated time of the jump was about 40 kilometers north of portland and so at the break of dawn the fbi mounted an impressive search operation using helicopters airplanes and ground troops the problem was even if the estimated bailout point was accurate cooper's eventual landing or drop zone was far more difficult to pinpoint the loosely defined search area covered a vast stretch of mountainous wilderness occluded by a dense forest so and so you're eliminating the possibility especially at night that there were any eye witnesses on the ground who saw the guy coming down so but it also eliminates the possibility of a smooth landing i mean you're jumping at night uh into a wilderness like this there's a good chance the guy didn't even survive the jump but you'd think they would have found something by now it was truly like finding a needle in a haystack apart from the difficult terrain the search was further complicated by low temperatures and inclement weather which persisted for days despite their best efforts authorities never managed to find a single trace of cooper nor the items he brought along with him having made little to no progress by early december the fbi turned their attention to the two hundred thousand dollar ransom the money had been collected from the seattle first national bank which maintained a ransom package of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars just for such an occasion because they just have money sitting around this is for any time there might be a ransom i had no idea that was a thing that banks did i wonder if they still do as of this the serial numbers of the ten thousand twenty dollar banknotes given to cooper had been documented in advance a complete list of which were quickly made available to financial institutions government agencies and the general public to make it as difficult as possible for cooper to spend his money northwest airlines and several newspapers even began to offer rewards to anyone who could find a note with a matching serial number in spite of these efforts no one ever did that is until nearly a decade later in early 1980 a young boy named brian ingram was building a campfire on a small beach in southern washington as he was digging into the sand ingram discovered three bundles of cash totaling five thousand eight hundred and eighty dollars having heard about the infamous skyjacking ingram's parents brought the severely degraded bundles to the fbi the notes were promptly inspected and sure enough the serial numbers matched those of the ransom [Music] once the excitement subsided however the money managed to raise far more questions than it answered the most significant of which was how how did the money end up so far away from the drop zone looking at this map it might be tempting to think that cooper simply dropped some of the money which then fell into the lewis river the bundles could have been carried further downstream by the columbia river before finally being washed ashore at tinabar which is the name of the beach tina muklow tinabar coincidence yeah coincidence anyway the problem with this idea is that the columbia river flows in the opposite direction this has led some including members of the fbi to re-evaluate initial drop zone assessment for instance if the drop zone was much further southeast close to a river called the washougal river it is conceivable albeit improbable that the money floated all the way down to tinabarr might be that none of this is the case maybe the guy just buried it there so he could go back and get it later alternatively the bundles may have simply landed on the beach if the flight path was further to the west even so natural explanations struggle to explain how three independent potentially free-falling and or free-floating bundles of cash ended up at the exact same place on the same beach to complicate matters sediment from the riverbed was excavated and dumped onto tinabar as part of a dredging operation in 1974. and according to one analysis the money was discovered above this layer of sediment if true that would mean the money came to rest at tinabar sometime after 1974. or it was in the bottom of the river and got dumped there but a re-examination of that analysis found that what was believed to be a layer of deposited sediment might actually been a perfectly natural layer of clay not only that but the sediment was clearly dumped some distance away from where the money was discovered furthermore when ingram discovered the bundles the rubber bands which held them together were still intact this is significant because experiments conducted in 2009 revealed that this brand of rubber bands could not withstand exposure to open air or water for more than a year so unless the bundles were somehow protected from the elements they must have become buried at tinabar within a year of the hijacking the most probable explanation therefore seems to be that cooper or someone else deliberately buried the money did cooper survive and bury the money himself did someone else bury the money of the stumbling upon cooper's remains if there is an explanation which does not require human intervention it's managed to elude investigators for decades suffice it to say this is a mystery within a mystery since ingram's discovery in 1980 both tinabar and the grounds around the bashugal river have been subjected to numerous searches but to date there's been no sign of cooper nor the rest of the money so this whole db cooper thing has become kind of like the uh the treasure of oak island you know it's one of those mythical things that everybody thinks they're going to be the one to solve the mystery everybody goes there thinking they're going to be the one to find something people come up with new theories and you know it's it's just one of those mysteries like jack the ripper that just spawns endless debate and endless speculation [Music] from the very beginning it was assumed by many that cooper did not survive his daring escape it would not make for a very thrilling conclusion to this story but that's the thing about stories they're usually far more exciting than reality while there is no hard evidence for nor against cooper's survival the assumption that he fell to his death is not without merit when cooper leaped into the darkness flight 305 was plowing through a frigid rainstorm at roughly knots 10 000 feet above southern washington the wind was so violent that it ripped out the placard from the aft stairway which was later recovered in 1978 almost directly below the estimated flight path to say that cooper was not dressed for the occasion it would be an understatement the ground beneath him meanwhile was obscured by multiple layers of clouds which likely means that cooper jumped without knowing his precise location even if he could see the ground and had a specific drop zone in mind the parachute he selected was non-steerable meaning he would not have been able to steer his descent towards a specific landing spot thus precluding any potential coordination with an accomplice stationed on the ground while cooper expressed some familiarity with parachutes his actual competence level is up for debate it's widely believed that cooper demanded two pairs of parachutes two primary and two reserve to make the authorities believe that he intended to take a hostage that is precisely what happened as the fbi contemplated but eventually decided against sabotaging the shoots as they did not want to risk the life of an innocent civilian but in their haste to obtain that's really smart and i hadn't thought about the idea that they would sabotage the shoots so that the guy would end up dying uh really fascinating and that part never occurred to me before in them they unintentionally provided cooper with a non-functional dummy shoot intended for training purposes this mishap seems to have gone unnoticed by cooper because that dummy shoot was one of the two missing from the plane not only that but cooper chose the older and technically inferior parachute out of the two primary shoots provided so in both cases it seems like cooper made the worst possible choice but there are other ways to interpret this information for instance it's possible that cooper used the dummy shoot not as a reserve but as a means to secure the bag of money in fact that is precisely what cooper tried to do with a functional reserve shoot first he tried to place the money in the chute's canopy before removing some of the suspension lines and wrap them around the bag perhaps he used the dummy shoot for a similar purpose and cooper's decision to use the older primary shoot is not necessarily an indication of inexperience it could also be a sign of familiarity because the shoot he left behind was a civilian luxury shoot while the one he used was a military shoot the argument is that cooper might have been trained as say a paratrooper and chose the older military shoot because that's the one with which he was most familiar and there is at least one other reason to suspect that cooper had a military background while the flight was in a holding pattern near seattle cooper mentioned that the mccord air force base was only 20 minutes away from the seattle tacoma airport at the time that was an accurate assessment and might suggest a military background apart from the potential military connections cooper may even have had links to the central intelligence agency you see the type of aircraft which cooper chose to hijack a boeing 727 was also used by the cia to covertly drop agents and supplies during the vietnam war that all seems like going a little off the deep end but i i suppose i see where they're coming from with that i don't know i just i feel like sometimes we make too much of an assumption too much of a stretch a task for which the boeing 727 was uniquely qualified due to its distinctive aft stairway so it's fairly safe to assume that cooper chose to hijack a boeing 727 specifically because it provided a relatively safe means of escape yeah but there's a lot of reasons why he could have known that without necessarily having a cia connection whether he learned of this from the cia or came to that conclusion independently is another question however the fact that cooper chose to hijack a flight operated by northwest airlines was apparently random chance when tina muklow asked cooper about his motives he responded it's not because i have a grudge towards your airline it's just because i have a grudge he further clarified that flight 3-5 just happened to be in the right place at the right time even so it's clear that cooper came prepared he seemed to know a great deal about aircraft and aviation he appeared to be familiar with the local terrain he maintained a low profile to avoid a panic he covered his eyes with a pair of glasses to conceal his identity he left very little evidence behind and he demanded four parachutes to force the assumption that he was taken hostage he was even cunning enough to reclaim the note which he'd initially given to florence schaffner apart from the name he wrote on his plane ticket there are no other samples of cooper's handwriting [Music] but for all his planning and cunning it seems cooper did not give enough thought to his eventual escape not only did he fail to specify a route but he was forced to make a last-minute destination change from mexico city to reno it may be that he just in saying mexico city didn't really care what the destination was because he was planning on jumping out anyway he just basically wanted him to kind of go that way you know um and just maybe mention mexico city because it was the largest city in that direction i don't know it could mean nothing at all he could have demanded more appropriate parachuting equipment like a pair of boots a helmet or jumpsuit he could even have specified the ransom to be delivered in larger denominations to make it lighter and less cumbersome to carry presuming he did survive the fall and made it safely to the ground he may then about to make his way through a dense partially snow-covered forest in nothing but loafers and a trench coat in late november yeah i get the distinct impression that cooper's escape was much more of a leap of faith than a carefully executed jump on the other hand authorities never received a missing persons report matching the description of cooper in the wake of the hijacking this might suggest that cooper did survive and that he swiftly and quietly resumed his normal routine furthermore other hijackers have performed similar stunts and many of them did survive even if they were quickly apprehended finally the simplest explanation for how three bundles of cash ended up at tinabar is human intervention at the end of the day most of this is based on nothing but supposition without any concrete evidence of cooper's demise it leaves the door wide open to the far more exciting proposition that he did in fact survive my gut tells me he probably did at least survive the fall now maybe he broke his leg or something happened i mean because i would think that if the man had not survived something would have been found in the last 40 years you know something would have turned up if not remains because animals could have carried off remains some remnants of you know his backpack his shoot the money beyond what we saw there's just too much for me to think that he didn't survive by the time the press got wind of the hijacking the fbi had already begun to investigate a few potential suspects among them was a man in portland with initials db and surname cooper this cooper was quickly eliminated as a suspect but due to a mix-up by the press the name dan cooper was confused for db cooper and the rest is history while dan cooper is most likely a pseudonym there is a comic book series of the same name the comic is written in french and centers around a canadian pilot named dan cooper while the comic was not translated into english nor sold in the united states before 1971 it was available in canada which has a large french-speaking population given that american and canadian accents can be difficult to distinguish it's possible that cooper who was described as having no discernible accent was a bilingual canadian and not only that you're not far from canada there although you're not near the french canadian part french canada's east it's uh quebec that area and this is western canada but maybe this might even be supported by something that cooper might have said you see when the captain relayed cooper's demands to air traffic control he used the phrase negotiable american currency it seems doubtful that an american citizen would specify american currency so perhaps cooper was not american the problem is we don't know if this is a direct quote from cooper or paraphrasing by the captain see this is the problem with all of this is it it might have been he could have said this might have gone down this way he might have been five nine he might have been six feet tall he might have been 35 he might have been 50. there's just so many variables that make it almost impossible to nail this thing down for instance notes taken by the crew during the hijacking merely contained the phrase negotiable currency while testimony is provided by the crew after the hijacking include phrases like two hundred thousand dollars in cash and circulated a us currency so cooper might have been canadian and he might have taken his name from the dan cooper comics just as he might have been american and might have taken his name from something or someone else nearly half a century has gone by since the hijacking took place and in that time thousands of suspects have been questioned and investigated it would obviously be impossible to cover all of them here but let's take a look at some of the people that at some point or another have been suspected of being db cooper robert rackstraw first became a suspect in 1978 and on the surface he seems like a solid candidate he was a decorated army paratrooper and helicopter pilot he had experience with explosives he had an extensive criminal record he had an uncle named john cooper who was an avid skydiver he was expelled from the army only months before the hijacking which might suggest a motive after all the hijacker did say he had a grudge all fair statements the bomb part i don't think knowing how to make a bomb matters because we don't know for sure that it was a bomb it could have just been some road flares tied together that was enough to scare somebody into thinking it was a bomb when confronted by journalists and private investigators rackstraw would neither confirm nor outright deny that he was db cooper instead he'd say things like i could have been or i would not discount myself on the other hand rackstraw had light colored eyes which cooper did not more significantly rackstraw was only 28 years of age at the time of the hijacking this is well outside the range of ages reported by the crew and passengers most of whom believed cooper was in his mid-40s kenneth christensen first became a suspect in 2003 when his brother noticed certain parallels between him and cooper christensen had briefly served as a paratrooper in world war ii and since 1953 he'd worked for northwest airlines as both a mechanic and a flight attendant yeah see i that would make sense to me if there was something specific about that airline but he went out of his way to say there wasn't then again maybe he's just throwing people off the scent he was 45 years old at the time of the hijacking he was left-handed which cooper might have been for instance cooper used his left hand to interact with his briefcase and the clip-on tie he left on board was affixed with a tie clasp applied from the left shortly before he died in 1994 christensen had supposedly told his brother there is something you should know but i cannot tell you after his passing his family discovered over two hundred thousand dollars in his bank accounts to top it all off florence schaffner stated that photographs of christensen bore a strong resemblance to cooper on the other hand christiansen did not match the physical description of cooper he was both shorter and lighter while schaffner did see a strong resemblance she remarked that cooper had more hair and that is supported by the composite sketches and there was nothing suspicious about the large sums of money which he'd simply earned by selling land richard what we're gonna see is that there are reasons for and against every one of these people so none of it gets us any closer when you first became a suspect in 1972 when he hijacked a boeing 727 and his nose completely different though the last guy had the exact nose um yeah the eyes maybe a little bit the eyebrows are different the hair kind of works yeah i'm not buying the physical resemblance why the aft stairway much like d.b cooper because of the significant overlap between the two hijackings some believe they must have been committed by the same person mccoy used a fake name he used a fake hand grenade to threaten the crew he used handwritten notes to issue his demands both mccoy and cooper used the phrase no funny stuff as a warning to the crew mccoy demanded 500 000 dollars in cash and four parachutes mccoy also it could just be that he was inspired by cooper to do this that he saw that in the news thought it was a great idea thought he could pull off the same thing and then did it bail out the back of the plane once they passed over his home town in the state of utah apart from the similar modus operandi mccoy had also served in the vietnam war as a demolitions expert and a helicopter pilot mccoy did actually survive the fall and managed to evade authorities for two full days before he was apprehended and sentenced to 45 years in prison before his death in 1974 mccoy refused to confirm or deny that he was db cooper on the other hand mccoy was an avid recreational skydiver and even came prepared with a skydiving helmet and jumpsuit he gave very specific instructions about the flight path in addition to the fake hand grenade mccoy also used an unloaded handgun to threaten the crew yeah but you know all of that could could potentially now i'm not saying i buy that he's dan cooper but uh all of that just could be a progression right i mean lessons that were learned from the first one where he corrected and did better the next time so the fact that those things don't match up could just be a learning process he failed to retrieve one of the notes he'd given to a flight attendant he was only 29 years of age at the time of the hijacking and all three flight attendants were quite certain that mccoy was not cooper while there are meaningful parallels between these two cases mccoy might simply have been a copycat who'd read about db cooper in the yeah see if the if the flight attendants from the dan cooper case said this guy wasn't him i mean and that's close enough to it it's not him news dwayne weber first became a suspect in 1995 when shortly before his death he supposedly told his wife i've got a secret to tell you i am dan cooper yeah but see ears like that you would remember i would think that would stand following his deathbed confession webber's widow recalled a number of fascinating details she claims they found a bank bag resembling the one used in the hijacking she claims weber had sustained a knee injury after jumping out of a plane weber supposedly had a nightmare but leaving his fingerprints on the aft stairs and a year before the money was discovered at tinabar weber had allegedly paid a quick visit to the same location in addition weber was a world war ii veteran he had an extensive criminal record he matched the physical description and he was 47 years old in 1971. on the other hand webber's fingerprints did not match any of the prints collected from flight 305 although to be fair there's no way to know if any of those prints actually belong to cooper furthermore weber's dna did not match a dna sample collected from the tie clasp but once again there's no way to know if the dna on the tie clasp actually came from the hijacker and not someone else what's so frustrating is that the fbi likely had a much better source of dna at one point if you recall eight cigarette butts were collected from the scene and there's a good chance they were also used with cooper's dna the problem is that evidence was lost at some point and has not turned up since see that if they still had it could be matched against like ancestry dna 23 and me and get relatives and you could nail this case down william smith first became a suspect in 2018 smith served in the navy during world war ii and likely had some experience with parachuting he was 43 years old at the time of the hijacking he had dark brown eyes he matched the physical description he shared a certain likeness with the composite sketches especially this speculative sketch of an older db cooper a student named ira daniel cooper who was killed in world war ii attended the same high school as smith smith worked as a yard master for a railroad company for most of his life but in 1970 the company filed for bankruptcy as a consequence smith lost his pension which might suggest a motive triggering he could for instance a lot of these cases where things where people do these things that you know people that are law-abiding citizens who don't otherwise have any criminal history or do anything crazy some event happens that triggers them and sends them in this direction so that could be your triggering event there i've developed a grudge towards the airline industry for their role in bringing about the downfall of the rail transportation industry it's further speculated that smith could have used his knowledge of railroad networks to hop on a train and escape undetected on the other hand smith spent his entire life in the northeastern united states given that the hijacking occurred on the other side of the country and was committed by someone who at least appeared to be familiar with a local terrain smith is not the most ideal candidate however the fact that smith worked as a yard master is interesting you see the tie that cooper left behind was recently examined using an electron microscope which uncovered various metallic particles some of these particles especially pure titanium were quite rare in 1971. this might suggest that cooper worked as a manager at some sort of chemical or metallurgical facility or possibly a railyard interesting [Music] if nothing else i hope this limited selection of suspects illustrates just how difficult it is to be certain when you have so little evidence to work with these five individuals look nothing alike yet any one of them could be db cooper uh if i were gonna be placing my bets i'd make this my number one suspect and this my number two suspect the other three i'm just not buying especially not this guy here no chance him maybe now the nose was real different it wasn't him either um yeah i would say one of these two but chances are it's probably none of them was cooper really in his mid 40s or did he simply look old for his age did cooper really serve in the military which one of these sketches most closely resemble cooper in 2016 the fbi had to admit defeat and officially close down the case unless someone stumbles upon cooper's remains or manages to track down the rest of the money it seems there is little hope of resolution i can't believe they lost did cooper survive i have no idea but as long as that possibility cannot be dismissed the legend of d.b cooper will no doubt persist once again fantastic work by lemino uh on putting this together all of his stuff's great that i've seen so far let me know your thoughts who do you think it is is there another suspect that wasn't mentioned do you think it's one of those five that he did mention is there something else that you know about the case that you would add to what was mentioned here use the comment section below fascinating stuff link in the description if you want to check out the original content or check out his other stuff it's all really really good i'll throw up a couple of links to my other reactions i did to his jack the ripper video which i think i did as a three-part series and then his uh video on the lost colony of roanoke check those out thanks for watching

Channel: Vlogging Through History

Views: 263,733

Keywords: db cooper, florence schaffner, lemmino reaction, d.b. cooper, d b cooper, kenneth christiansen, robert rackstraw, boeing 727, lemmino db cooper, db cooper reaction, reaction channel, reacting to the search for db cooper, the search for db cooper reaction

Id: WKxuzPsi4og

Length: 41min 52sec (2512 seconds)

Published: Fri May 06 2022