D.B. Cooper is the American criminal mind known for skyjacking a jetliner and getting away with it. His fate after parachuting from a Boeing 727 and his true identity have remained one of the great unsolved mysteries.
But during a recent news conference held at the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel, his best friend and author of a new book claims to reveal the Michigan man’s identity and confessions.
Thanksgiving Eve 1971 a man by the name of Dan Cooper boarded a Northwest Airlines flight in Portland, Oregon headed for Seattle, Washington. D.B. Cooper hijacked the flight. On the ground in Seattle he made a demand in exchange for the 36 passengers as described by CBS News reporter, Bill Curtis.
“Left aboard four crewmembers and the hijacker dressed in a business suit demanding $200,000 dollars and carrying a plain briefcase which he told the crew held explosives. With the full ransom collected from Seattle banks and four parachutes aboard the plane headed for Reno. It took three-and-a-half hours, slow for a jet, but the hijacker had given detailed flight instructions. The rear stairwell was open all the way. It arrived at Reno in shreds.”
“This is a hijack and I’ve got explosives.” That’s the voice of Walter Reca, the man identified as the hijacker in the memoir, D.B. Cooper & Me: A Criminal, A Spy, My Best Friend.
The best friend is Carl Laurin who spoke with Reca most days and recorded more than three hours of their conversations.
Laurin asked, “When you hijacked the airplane and they were flying from Seattle-Tacoma, now you’re going to jump, you ordered them to have the gear down?"
"Right, the wheels down slowed the aircraft down right there and the flaps right there is when we’re jumping right there. You get the flaps right there and cut power. There’s drag right there so I’m not going to be hit.”
Laurin at the Grand Rapids news conference explained, “My best friend Walter was a daredevil.”
Laurin was the founding member of the Michigan Parachute Club. Reca made jumps with Laurin.
“He always wanted to be in the C.I.A. and I always got the feeling that when he jumped with our team, the Michigan Parachute Team, it was a means of survival, not really for the thrills. He was looking for something far beyond that. We didn’t know it at the time. He hated being poor. He often said he’d better be dead than poor. That was his mantra…In 2000 I told Walt I suspected him of being D.B. Cooper. He would not say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ right away but over the next eight years Walt and I had many phone calls, thousands. Meeting and mailed documents back-and-forth to slowly unravel the story of the hijacking and his life afterwards.”
Walter Reca’s niece, Lisa Story, shared her uncle confessed the hijacking before he died in 2014.
In 2016 the FBI posted on its website this message: The FBI has redirected resources allocated to the D.B. Cooper case to focus on other investigative priorities.
Perhaps those resources will redirected once more in 2018.
Patrick Center, WGVU News.