four parachutes, Cooper released
the passengers and all but four of the
crew. He demanded to be flown on to
Mexico City, but first he had one final
instruction: He was to be left alone in
the cabin.
As the plane took off at about
7:40 p.m., the four-person crew hud-
dled in the cockpit. Per Cooper, the
plane flew below 10,000 feet at a
speed slower than 200 knots—too low
and slow for military jets to follow
closely. Just 20 minutes later, a warn-
ing light flashed, indi-
cating that the rear
door had been opened
and its staircase de-
ployed. When the
plane landed in Reno,
Nevada, for refueling,
the cabin was empty.
Cooper had taken his
knapsack and parachuted off into the
night. Not a single witness saw him
jump. He was never seen again. The
ransom money, identifiable through
serial numbers, was never used.
Did Cooper plummet to his death?
Did he survive only to somehow lose
the knapsack? Or had the money
been merely an afterthought, more
of a means of spinning a story for the
newspapers—and for history?
The FBI spent the next nine years
trying to find the answers. Then, in
1980, a boy camping in rural Wash-
ington discovered three wads of cash
along the banks of the Columbia
River, which the FBI later identifiedas a portion of the ransom. But the
trail remained cold until 2018, when
a man named Carl Laurin presented
the FBI with an audiotape of his de-
ceased friend Walter Reca confess-
ing to being D. B. Cooper. Around
the same time, a documentary film-
maker named Thomas Colbert was
building a case that Cooper was ac-
tually 74-year-old Robert Rackstraw.
Rackstraw, a former Special Forces
paratrooper with 22 different aliases,
had been a person of interest early
on, but he was cleared
in 1979. Colbert based
his claim in part on a
letter Cooper allegedly
sent to the Washing-
ton Post that included
the number 717171.
In Vietnam, Rack-
straw was in the 371st
regiment—or three 71s.
Neither of those stories was
enough to convince the FBI, which
is why the case of D. B. Cooper re-
mains the only unsolved skyjacking
in the history of American aviation.sudden extinction
The New World’s
Lost Colony
In March 1590, John White finally
left England on a rescue mission to
Roanoke Colony, the first permanent
English settlement in North America.
White was Roanoke’s governor, but
he had been away gathering food andThe only hint of
Roanoke’s fate: the
word CROATOAN
carved on a post.68 april 2019
Reader’s Digest