William J. Smith as a suspect
I thought I'd post my recent overview of William J Smith since I know I was a bit confused a year or two ago in the discussions of who was Smith, Dan LeClair, Dan E Clair, etc.
William J. Smith, my overview, June 2020
Another suspect to appear recently is William Smith, advocated by an individual who is known to me but chooses to call himself “Anonymous” in public because of his status as an active-duty US Army “data” analyst. This fellow has nothing to do with the “Anonymous” who penned a highly controversial op-ed piece in the New York Times in 2018 claiming that he was a senior White House official who was keeping President Donald Trump from doing anything really stupid.
Nevertheless, our Anonymous caught the Cooper bug in 2015 or so when he read Max Gunther’s book, DB Cooper – What Really Happened. The book is a tantalizing smorgasbord of Cooper clues and speculations, topped off by Gunther’s claims that the “facts” of the case were supplied in 1972 by a fellow calling himself Dan LeClair, who introduced himself as the real DB Cooper.
However, LeClair broke off communications with Gunther soon after. Nevertheless, Gunter, who was a professional journalist and fiction author, was contacted ten years later by a woman named “Clara.” She said she was the widow of Dan LeClair, and continued telling Gunther the family’s DB Cooper story.
Clara told Gunther that she was living in a cabin in LZ-A in November 1971 and had discovered DB Cooper hiding on her property, nursing a sprained ankle. She says she took care of Cooper and soon fell in love with him. Together, they laundered the money in Atlantic City casinos, eventually settling into a comfortable middle-class life in suburban New York.
When Gunther’s DBC book was published in 1985, it was given a fair amount of credibility based upon his reputation. FBI agent Ralph Himmelsbach acknowledged that he was aware of the book, but he told reporters that he thought most of Gunther’s book was “filler.” Subsequently, DB Cooper – What Really Happened was considered to be pure fiction by the current era by most DB Cooper aficionados.
But Anonymous wondered if any of it was true. He linked Gunther’s DBC character, “Dan LeClair” to the actual DB Cooper suspect Dan E. Clair, who was a skydiver in the summer of 1971 at the famous Elsinore Skydiving Center in California, renown as the site of alleged CIA recruiting and a favored locale for many DBC suspects.
When I spoke with Anonymous in 2017, we discussed the value of contacting Max Gunther’s children and learning if they had any of their father’s notes on his Cooper book. Unfortunately, Anonymous didn’t feel comfortable with that task and supposedly enlisted the help of another DB Cooper researcher and author, Marty Andrade. In addition, Doug Perry of the Oregonian also attempted to contact the children of Gunther in support of his reporting on the findings of Anonymous. However, no one was able to establish communication with any of Gunther’s descendants.
Digging deeper though, Anonymous came to the conclusion that Dan LeClair, or Dan E. Clair was not DB Cooper. Rather, Anonymous felt that the real DB Cooper was William J Smith, a life-long friend of Dan Clair. Anonymous feels that Smith used his friend’s identity to mask his communications with Max Gunther, and not only does Anonymous believe Smith is DB Cooper, Anonymous delivered his findings on Smith to the FBI in 2018.
Anonymous bases his claims on a personality profile of Smith, who besides being a gentleman, gained extensive aviation experience in WWII as a combat air crewman and reconnaissance photographer for the Navy. In addition, Smith is a dead-ringer for Composite sketch “B,” including the smirk. Further, Smith was 43 years-old in 1971, and had dark brown eyes and an olive complexion.
Key to Anonymous’ hypothesis is the fact that Clair and Smith worked together for years, especially as “yarders’ for the Penn Central Railroad, which is where Smith might have picked up the strange particles found on Cooper’s tie. Anonymous also feels that Smith’s railroad connections provided him with a superb means of escape after the skyjacking, as railroad tracks are ubiquitous across the United States. Also, riding the rails to freedom would be an absolutely sublime getaway, a notion held by many other Cooper researchers.
Lastly, Anonymous felt the downturn of the railroad industry in the 1960s and 1970s triggered a “grudge” and was the plausible motivation for DBC to hijack an aircraft.
But direct links to Flight 305, PDX, and Portland are thin. Other than an uncanny resemblance to the sketches and intriguing speculations on motive and getaways, most researchers do not consider William J Smith to be a strong candidate for DB Cooper.
