D.B.Cooper - Suspects

In 1971, mass-murderer John List was considered a suspect in the Cooper hijacking, which occurred only fifteen days after he had killed his family in Westfield, New Jersey. List's age, facial features, and build were similar to those described for the mysterious skyjacker. FBI agent Ralph Himmelsbach stated that List was a "viable suspect" in the case. Cooper parachuted from the hijacked airliner with $200,000, the same amount List had used up from his mother's bank account in the days before the killing. After his capture and imprisonment in 1989, List strenuously denied being Cooper, and the FBI no longer considered him a suspect. List died in prison custody on March 21, 2008

 Five months later, Richard McCoy, a former Sunday-school teacher from Utah and a Vietnam helicopter pilot, jumped out of a plane over Utah with a $500,000 ransom. He was snatched by the FBI a few days later with $499,970 in a cardboard box. McCoy told the Feds he wasn’t Cooper, but they didn’t believe him. He was sentenced to 45 years in prison. Then he escaped, using a fake gun made from plaster of Paris stolen from dental supplies, and led a crew of convicts through the prison gates with a garbage truck. When the Feds found him again, there was a shoot-out. McCoy was killed

The next major suspect was Duane Weber. Just before he died in 1995, Weber’s wife claims, he told her, “I’m Dan Cooper.”  She became suspicious and began checking into his background. Weber had served in the Army during World War II and had later served time in a prison near the Portland airport. Weber recalled that her husband had once had a nightmare where he talked in his sleep about jumping from a plane and said something about leaving his fingerprints on the aft stairs. Jo recalled that shortly before Duane's death, he had revealed to her that an old knee injury of his had been incurred by "jumping out of a plane." The FBI compared Weber's prints with those processed from the hijacked plane and found no matches. In October 2007, the FBI stated that a partial DNA sample taken from the tie that Cooper had left on the plane did not belong to Weber.

The October 29, 2007 issue of New York magazine stated that Kenneth P. Christiansen had been identified as a suspect by Sherlock Investigations. The article noted that Christiansen is a former army paratrooper, a former airline employee, had settled in Washington near the site of the hijacking, was familiar with the local terrain, had purchased property with cash a year after the hijacking, drank bourbon and smoked (as did Cooper during the flight) and resembled the eyewitness sketches of Cooper. However, the FBI ruled out Christiansen because his complexion, height, weight and eye color did not match the descriptions given by the passengers or the crew of Flight 305