THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 68 SEPTEMBER 4, 2019
For several days
in May 2013, the
Hollywood sting
operation surveilled
the grandfather at
the condominium he sometimes
shared with his ex-wife in the
tony San Diego district of Bankers
Hill. A $30,000-a-week private
security group, armed because
they deemed their subject a
hostile threat, watched his move-
ments aboard the 45-foot cruiser
Poverty Sucks, docked nearby.
They tracked him at his boat shop,
Coronado Precision Marine. And
they followed him to his local P.O.
box. When they felt confident that
they’d clocked his routine, they
Long before the current true-crime boom, a 1971 unsolved
skyjacking by the man known as D.B. Cooper captivated
America. TV newsman Tom Colbert’s quest to solve the
mystery (and sell his story to Hollywood) led him down a
rabbit hole. The question is: How deep would he go?
By
GaRY BAUm
Illustration by
nAZARIO GRAZIAnO
↑ An FBI sketch of D.B. Cooper. The bureau had processed 1,000 suspects in the case by 1979, when Robert Rackstraw toyed with the idea of his being the skyjacker in a TV interview.sent in Tom Colbert, the veteran
newsman who’d hired them. He
wore a wire and a hidden camera
in his glasses.
They’d opted for an ambush.
Colbert had grown convinced that
this old U.S. Army soldier with
a distinctive criminal record,
Robert W. Rackstraw, was in fact
D.B. Cooper, who in 1971 skyjacked
a Boeing 727 and then — with
$200,000 in ransom money —
parachuted from the plane into
the Pacific Northwest night and
enduring American myth.
At the boat shop, Colbert got
straight to it, rolling out a chart
the size of a table, which drew
links between Rackstraw andthe ransom. “Why are you in the
middle of this, Bob?” Colbert said,
before switching gears to a sales
pitch, offering a pair of $10,000
cashier’s checks made out in
Rackstraw’s name if he’d sign
over his story rights for a planned
documentary and accompany-
ing book. Colbert, a figure with a
long history in Hollywood’s true
stories business, explained that
he already had enough material
for his project to make it viable,
but he’d much prefer Rackstraw’s
participation. There’d be further
paydays when the movie and
book were released. The catch: “I
wanted him to come clean,” says
Colbert. “Several attorneys toldme the most he was going to get
was two to three years. I told him
he might get time served and
probation. He’d wear an ank le
bracelet and never have to buy a
beer again the rest of his life.”
Rackstraw wouldn’t commit.
So Colbert later emailed with a
harder sell, advising that if he
didn’t get on board, he and every-
one who knows him would be
hounded forever. But if Rackstraw
gave in, Colbert would “work to
keep your neighborhood media-
free and peaceful. Sign away and
I’ll make it all happen.”
Instead, Rackstraw turned
his attorney on Colbert. This
exchange would be the only direct
contact between the symbiotic
pair. But their spiraling feud over
Rackstraw’s alleged identity, and
the possible fame and fortune to
be gotten in the telling, would
persist for another six years. Only
Rackstraw’s passing in July — of
a heart condition, at 75 — would
change their deadlocked calculus.T
he ballad of Rackstraw and
Colbert is a lesson in the
lures and dangers of chas-
ing the truth while also
chasing a Hollywood deal.
Decades before today’s true-
crime boom and the neo-vigilan-
tism of The Jinx and Serial, there
was D.B. Cooper. The mystery —
who was he and what happened
to him? — has been a pop culture
obsession ever since. It’s been ref-
erenced in song lyrics (everyone
from Kid Rock to MF Doom) and
been the subject of feature films
— Treat Williams played Cooper
and Robert Duvall an insurance
investigator chasing him in 1981’s
crime thriller The Pursuit of D.B.
Cooper; a camping trip in search
of the Cooper cash was at the
center of 2004’s Without a Paddle.
Kyle MacLachlan’s protagonist
in Pacific Northwest drama Tw i n
Peaks is perhaps not coinciden-
tally named Dale Bartholomew
Cooper, and during Mad Men the
theory that Don Draper had been
the skyjacker became so noisy
that showrunner Matthew Weiner
had to debunk it.
The skyjacking occurred
Nov. 24, 1971. Once in the air, a
man wearing dark sunglasses
who’d purchased a ticket at
Portland’s airport under the