There aren’t many cold cases that could still captivate a nation after half a century.
[00:07]But then again, D.B. Cooper has always been one of a kind. A daring criminal who sky jacked a domestic flight in 1971. He grabbed hundreds of thousands of dollars in ransom before parachuting into the realm of legend.
[00:22]Despite a massive FBI manhunt, Cooper’s whereabouts and identity are a hotly debated mystery and it remains the only unsolved skyjacking in American history, perhaps the perfect crime.
[00:36]So, OK, let’s start where the FBI started.
[00:42]The primary witness to the skyjacking is the flight attendant who sat next to D.B. Cooper. Tina.
[00:50]That’s Tina Mucklow. Right. And she and the FBI thought to come up with a sketch and this was the first sketch.
[00:58]OK. However, over the next year, a lot of other people came forward, like, passengers.
[01:04]And so they came up with a different composite sketch. Are they accurate?
[01:11]Is eyewitness testimony for composite sketches really valuable? I never found it to be all that valuable.
[01:20]So much depends on the eyewitnesses ability to recall an image.
[01:26]Right. So what about you, Joe? Who do you think D.B. Cooper is? I know who D.B. Cooper is. It’s this young man.
[01:36]Walter Reca. Correct. This is D.B. Cooper?
[01:39]He’s the one. OK. Sell me. Who is Walter Reca? Walter Reca was a paratrooper. He was in the Air Force reserves sea and rescue squad.
[01:52]And I go to my parachute expert here.
[01:54]This guy knew how to jump? He was a US Air Force Reserve Pararescue jumper. They’re called PJs. He absolutely had the skills. They know everything. They know night jumps, water jumps, combat rescue. I’ve been jumping for 53 years.
[02:06]I don’t have a hundredth of the skills that Reca had.
[02:10]OK. So he knew how to jump? And he’s D.B. Cooper because of his confession, which was very detailed. After he jumped from the 727, Reca is said to have landed in the town of Cle Elum, Washington.
[02:25]But don’t take my word for it.
[02:27]Here’s an excerpt of Walter Reca’s confession recorded by a close friend of his shortly before his death in 2014. WALTER RECA: I hit the tree first. The only [BLEEP] dead tree in the forest, and I happened to get to it.
[02:40]I mean, my leg broke because I could feel it swelling up.
[02:45]Just gathered it all up right there and left it there with those broken trees, threw a few branches on top of it. And I could see in the distance right there, traffic. Took the raincoat off, put the money in the raincoat like a bundle.
[02:59]What do you think?
[03:00]Could it be Reca? The place where he landed is over 100 miles from where this aircraft was flying. It is also true that there is no actual record of where that plane flew. Right. There was a record.
[03:12]They didn’t preserve it.
[03:13]They didn’t preserve it. This raises another question. If you’re going to make up a story about being D.B. Cooper, why place yourself 100 miles from there? If there’s something very puzzling about the Reca case, I can’t figure it out.
[03:26]I agree with Joe.
[03:28]Walter Reca landed in Cle Elum Washington the night in question and was soaken to the skin by the rain. You buy that? I buy that, absolutely. So there’s two guys jumping out of airplanes wearing business suits the night before Thanksgiving in 1971.
[03:46]That’s impossible.
[03:47]I’d rather have you say it [BLEEP] never happened. There was no guy walking down the road. But if you’re telling me that there was a guy in a business suit on that night walking down the road, then how could he not be D.B. Cooper? I think the Walter Reca story opens up a huge story.
[04:04]And the story is what the hell was Walter Reca doing in Cle Elum that night?
[04:10]This is a relatively new suspect, landed in an unsearched area. And hopefully with your help, we’ll find some evidence to seal this case.
[04:20]The next morning, I leave Cle Elum with something nagging at me about Joe’s suspect.
[04:29]All right, Joe is all in on Walt Reca and in some ways why wouldn’t he be, you know?
[04:34]It’s hard to imagine a more compelling story than the one we just heard, but something is bothering me. We’re pretty far from Cooper’s accepted jump zone. The FBI established Cooper’s likely flight path as being a highway in the sky known as Victor-23.
[04:51]Cle Elum is way outside of that, a fact that casts some real doubt on Reca as a likely suspect.
[04:58]But the Cooper verse is full of doubts, including some that I am just beginning to have now. When you think about all these D.B. Cooper suspects, not just Walt Reca, but all of them, they all have something in common.
[05:09]They’re all guys that got away with the crime. But what if the FBI was right?
[05:15]What if the most obvious answer here is the right one? What if Cooper died during the jump? To try and determine the likelihood of Cooper’s survival, I drive out of the mountains, while on a runway near flight path V-23, another vehicle begins its own journey, which brings us to Andy Farrington, age 41, jumps 26,000 and counting, current altitude, about 10,000 feet.
[05:44]Oh, and he’s wearing a C-9 parachute, the same likely used by D.B. Cooper.
[05:50]Andy’s task for today is simple. Get to the ground in one piece and tell me if in his professional opinion, D.B. Cooper could have survived his final leap into the sky.
[06:00]I’m waiting in Andy’s drop zone with his father Jeff, who is himself a professional skydiving instructor.
[06:09]OK, Andy, how you looking up there?
[06:16]ANDY FARRINGTON: Looking way better than a November day. I’m about 10 seconds out. Just to be clear, Andy is about to jump out of a plane wearing an antique.
[06:26]Let’s hope it still does its job. OK, Andy, you are good to jump.
[06:31]Repeat, you are good to jump. [MUSIC PLAYING] Here goes.
[06:42]To test the long-held FBI theory that D.B. Cooper died making his legendary parachute jump, I’ve enlisted professional skydiver Andy Farrington to make a similar dive using the exact same equipment as Cooper.
[06:59]So far, so good.
[07:00]That parachute’s not really steerable, right? JEFF FARRINGTON: Oh, that one’s not at all. [MUSIC PLAYING] Andy we are in the drop zone waiting for you. A gust of wind in almost any direction and Andy could find himself sailing into the trees, which may tell us what we want to know about Cooper, but probably wouldn’t be so fun for Andy.
[07:21][MUSIC PLAYING] He’s down.
[07:35]Hey.
[07:40]How are you, man? ANDY FARRINGTON: Oh, not bad, not bad. Well, you know how to make an entrance. I’ll give you that.
[07:48]Great job. This is the C-9, right? ANDY FARRINGTON: Yep. This is the chute that we think Cooper probably jumped in.
[07:54]I mean, it looks like it’s a fair vintage. ANDY FARRINGTON: It’s definitely way older than I am. Umm, yeah.
[08:00]When did they start making these things? ANDY FARRINGTON: About 1964. So why was this chute so attractive as a military chute? JEFF FARRINGTON: Reliability.
[08:08]Right. JEFF FARRINGTON: 100%, got the job done. So reliable, but not very maneuverable? JEFF FARRINGTON: That’s correct.
[08:15]OK, Jeff, how many jumps have you done in in a round chute? JEFF FARRINGTON: Probably 600. Would you jump out of a plane into a lightning storm for $200,000 then, the equivalent of a $1,000,000 today?
[08:27]JEFF FARRINGTON: Well, certainly my financial position is way different now than it was back then and– In 1971, you would have thought about it?
[08:34]JEFF FARRINGTON: I would have thought about it. Right, right. All right, could Cooper have survived the jump wearing this chute? ANDY FARRINGTON: Yeah, he could have, yeah.
[08:41]Because this chute will open at up to what speed, would you say? ANDY FARRINGTON: 275 knots or 315 miles per hour. Got it.
[08:49]And we know that the 727, at that time, was flying kind of low and a little slower. It was doing just under 200, so technically, that could work?
[08:59]ANDY FARRINGTON: Yes, but I think the deck was so stacked against his favor.
[09:03]He jumped out into November. Yep. ANDY FARRINGTON: Cold, rainy, windy. And Cooper was jumping into, most likely, wilderness. ANDY FARRINGTON: Trees and rivers.
[09:14]JEFF FARRINGTON: Yep. Cooper jumped wearing nothing but a parachute and a suit.
[09:19]Freezing to death would be a real possibility. Wind shear could have collapsed his chute in the storm or he could have landed in the water. So do you think he could have survived the jump?
[09:31]JEFF FARRINGTON: The jump part, I do.
[09:32]I wouldn’t want to land in a river. I wouldn’t want to land in a lake. My first choice would probably be landing in a tree. Really? JEFF FARRINGTON: It’s reasonably soft. Well, awesome jump.
[09:44]It was a real treat to see that.
[09:46]ANDY FARRINGTON: Right on. – Nice work, man. ANDY FARRINGTON: Perfect. Thank you so much you. Appreciate it. So did Cooper survive? To say that he did, seems possible, but I wouldn’t say it’s overwhelmingly likely. It feels like I and every other D.B. Detective have been chasing a ghost.
