2019-09-04 The Hollywood Reporter

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 70 SEPTEMBER 4, 2019

Photographed by Michele Thomas

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“everything is above board.”

His pipeline yielded dozens of

discoveries, which were turned

into feature films such as 1996’s

Fly Away Home and 2012’s The

Vo w. Chasing stranger-than-

fiction tales of American life is

deeply ingrained in his own life:

He met his wife, Dawna, then a

country-western singer, after she

solved her mother’s murder by

finding evidence that identified

her father as the culprit. That

story was dramatized by CBS in

1997 as Deep Family Secrets.

Colbert entered the

Coopersphere in 2011, when a

source tipped him off that some

cash discovered near an Oregon

riverbank in 1980 was planted

there in a scheme by the skyjacker

to mislead authorities. Colbert

pursued the lead to Rackstraw,

at that point living in San Diego.

Rackstraw fit the established

FBI profile as well as any Cooper

contender. It wasn’t just that his

old pictures looked reasonably

like the sketch. While a soldier,

he’d trained in demolition and

parachuting, so he’d know how

to make a bomb and jump out of

a plane. He also had a potential

motive, having at the time of the

skyjacking only recently been

kicked out of the Army for lying

about finishing high school. Most

tantalizing, the FBI had looked

closely at him in the 1970s, when

he’d had a series of run-ins with

the law. At one point, he was

charged with the murder of his

stepfather — and acquitted. By

1979, while held on charges of

check-kiting, possession of explo-

sives and, of all things, theft of a

small plane, he was asked in a TV

interview about the rumor that

he was Cooper. “Could have been,”

he wryly responded, “could have

been.” This verbal footsie had

been his M.O. ever since.

Rackstraw spent the next

several decades living a quiet

life, although Colbert claims his

inquiry found that, privately,

he would brag to family mem-

bers and friends that he was

Cooper. Rackstraw’s attorney

has explained that if his client

1

3

provided clients (news programs,

talent agencies, studios) with

leads on developable true-life

stories. “There are these people

called story brokers,” CBS News

president Susan Zirinsky once

observed of such middlemen,

when she was executive producer

of 48 Hours. “I have found some

dealings with some of the brokers

to be grotesque.” Yet with Colbert,

she emphasized at the time,

alias Dan Cooper — later misre-
ported as D.B. Cooper — told a
flight attendant he had a bomb.
He demanded that the ransom
money and four parachutes be
delivered to him when the plane
landed in Seattle.
The passengers were exchanged
for the ransom. After refuel-
ing, Cooper signaled a course for
Mexico at the minimum possible
speed, opened the aft door and
plunged into the wilderness. (The
plane then landed safely in Reno.)
Nearly half a century on,
Cooper remains a mystery. Only
Amelia Earhart and Jimmy Hoffa
rival his hold on the public imagi-
nation. And as with those others,
a cottage industry of sleuths has
arisen around the case. Call it
the Coopersphere.
At its center is 62-year-old
Colbert, who claims to have spent
$250,000 in his search to unmask
the criminal, initially expect-
ing he’d make his money back in
a few years on book and movie
deals. An affable, exuberant
personality — Tom Arnold comes
to mind — who now resides in
Ventura County, Colbert is a
colorful, old-school newsroom
specimen. He worked as a field
producer and researcher along-
side then up-and-comers Paula
Zahn, Ann Curry and Lester Holt
at KCBS. (Another colleague from
the period, Connie Chung, says
she is unsurprised by Colbert’s
Cooper hunt, given his “inde-
fatigable curiosity to uncover the
truth.”)
After a sour follow-up stint
heading up research for syndi-
cated tabloid show Hard Copy,
Colbert started a service that