Woman claims her uncle was legendary hijacker D.B. Cooper
Aug 3, 2011, 8:45 AM | Updated: Oct 10, 2012, 7:28 am
Marla Cooper holds a photograph of her late uncle Lynn Doyle Cooper during an interview in Oklahoma City, Wednesday, Aug. 3, 2011. Cooper said she believes that her late uncle Lynn Doyle Cooper was the man who hijacked a plane in 1971 and parachuted away with $200,000 ransom into a rainy night over the Pacific Northwest. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)
(AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)
The FBI is looking at a promising new lead in the unsolved D.B. Cooper hijacking case from 1971. Now, a woman thinks her uncle was the legendary D.B. Cooper.
It was 1971 and 8-year-old Marla Cooper was visiting her grandmother’s house in Sisters, Oregon when her uncle showed up.
“My uncle L.D. was wearing a white t-shirt and he was bloody and bruised and a mess and I was horrified. I began to cry and asked them what happened and they told me they’d been in a car accident,” said Cooper. She tells ABC News she later overheard her uncle admit to her father and another uncle a shocking crime.
“I was spying on them from around the back of my grandmother’s house and I heard my uncle say ‘We did it, our money problems are over, We’ve hijacked an airplane.’ “They told my dad they wanted him to help them go back into the woods and find the money,” recalled Cooper.
The now 48-year-old woman said her father refused to help search for any money. We now know that some of the ransom money handed to the man who hijacked a flight from Portland to Seattle washed up along the Columbia River nine years later. The rest has never surfaced.
Cooper said she was told Lynn Doyle, or L.D. Cooper died in 1999.
Over the years, Cooper said her parents made comments confirming their suspicions about L.D. Cooper’s link to the infamous case.
“My father made a comment about his long lost brother, my uncle L.D. His remark to me was: ‘Don’t you remember, he hijacked that airplane.’ My mother made a similar comment and she had always suspected that my uncle L.D. was the real D.B. Cooper,” said Cooper.
She told ABC News she didn’t come forward sooner because she wanted to make sure her memories were real memories. Her father’s comment was in 1995 and her mother’s comments were made just two years ago.
Cooper claims that she’s the only one who knows what happened 40 years ago.
Cooper says she’s given the FBI a guitar strap and a photo for testing. The FBI has fingerprints and a partial DNA sample from the items the hijacker left in the Northwest Orient 727.
The FBI won’t confirm it, but it appears Marla Cooper’s tip has sparked this latest flurry of news about the 40-year old unsolved crime in which a mysterious man parachuted from the back of a jet over southwest Washington with 200-thousand dollars in ransom money.
