AVIATION

9 JULY 2019: SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

Robert Rackstraw, 75, the lead suspect in the D.B. Cooper hijacking case, passed away. On 24 November 1971, a man known only as D.B. Cooper hijacked a Northwest Orient Airlines flight from Portland to Seattle. Cooper parachuted off the plane with $200,000 ransom money and was never found. Rackstraw was a paratrooper and a Vietnam veteran, who was later discovered to have falsified his college records, army rank and medals and was forced to resign from the military. Rackstraw faked his own death to avoid criminal convictions for grand theft and passing bad cheques but was later found and sentenced to prison for two years. The FBI cleared Rackstraw as suspect in 1979 and the D.B. Cooper case was closed in 2016.

Leave a Reply