Investigators: We've Solved Notorious 'DB Cooper' Skyjack

Crack investigators believe they have finally unmasked the mysterious skyjacker known as "DB Cooper" some 47 years after his notorious crime.

Tom Colbert, who led a team of ace gumshoes, says the man who hijacked a Boeing 727 at Seattle-Tacoma airport in 1971 and parachuted midair into the Pacific Northwest with $200,000 in cash is believed to be a Vietnam War pilot and black ops CIA agent named Robert W. Rackstraw.

Colbert said Thursday that newly-uncovered evidence points to the FBI stonewalling the case for years because of Rackshaw's government ties, preventing it from being solved, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports.

According to Colbert, secret coding in five different notes supposedly written by "Cooper" ties him to Rackstraw, a Vietnam War pilot in the 1st Cavalry Division, and shows he had a covert history with the CIA.

Colbert, who revealed his findings outside the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington D.C., said the coding in one note reading, "IF CATCH I AM CIA… RWR' refers to Rackstraw's initials and the fact he expected leniency if he was ever caught.

"The new decryptions include a dare to agents, directives to apparent partners, and a startling claim that is followed by Rackstraw's own initials: If captured, he expects a get-out-of-jail card from a federal spy agency," Colbert said.

The Post-Intelligencer said it had a brief conversation with Rackstraw who told the newspaper it should verify Colbert's claims, "but "didn't issue a denial, or comment further" on the investigation.

The case centered on a man calling himself Dan Cooper, who hijacked a Boeing 727 over the Northwest between Portland and Seattle on Nov. 24, 1971. He extorted $200,000 in ransom money and jumped out the back of the plane wearing a business suit and a parachute.

FBI investigators said that Cooper likely did not survive the dangerous jump, but no body was ever discovered. And despite an exhaustive manhunt, Cooper was never found, although some of the cash he took was discovered through matching serial numbers in 1980.

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