I haven't posted for a couple years and some may recall I had a suspect. I kept some of the information tight, but I'll start letting the cat out of the bag and I'm thinking of following it through per a conversation I had with Bruce.
Here's are the basic facts around my suspect that fit with the DB Cooper profile:
- Male Canadian of appropriate age that lived in the PNW after the hijacking.
- He was a mechanical engineer that worked on the SR71 (titanium link). Maybe he went to Boeing after, I haven't looked into that...
- He was a super meticulous person and a perfectionist.
- He seemed to move back to Canada at some point in the 70's (from what I can tell) and took time off from work for a period of time to build a house (that's strange for somebody that worked on high technology at the time).
- And here's the kicker.... last name? Cooper. Middle name starting with a 'D'. I have a legal document showing this.
I met the suspects son and chatted with him about all sorts of things and he mentioned his dad was an engineer (like myself) and that they lived in North California while he was working with jets. I immediately threw out the question if his dad worked on the Blackbird because my hobby as a kid was studying military aircraft and I knew it was based there. His jaw dropped that I was able to deduce that and we talked about the work his dad had done. The family came back to Canada and the father build a house (perfectly) on a property and I was looking to relocate the house to a property I owned. I had questions around it's construction and so the son offered to introduce me to his father who was living at an old age home. The family was happy that the home might be saved and reused elsewhere. When he made the offer to speak with his dad, he turned very serious and said don't mention a word of our conversation about the Blackbird and his work history.
I still have the son's phone number and I haven't pursued this because I was of a mixed mind about turning somebody in that was helpful to me. But, at this point his father is now at an old age and may very well have passed, so looking into it now has less consequence. At the time, I made a decision to shelve it all for about 5 years and here we are.
When you put all the facts together, I think it's a compelling suspect. The number of people that worked with titanium at the time was very small and the number of Canadian's even smaller (let's say 10% of that small number). And reduce that number again by accounting for PNW geography... the letters from Vancouver after the hijacking suggest Cooper was in Vancouver and familiar with Seattle/Portland. His profession (aircraft engineer) fits with the tie and his work on the Blackbird with an aeronautical connection. The last name and middle initial of D might not be a coincidence... a Canadian aircraft engineer with the last name Cooper was probably well aware of the comic book character given their similarities so I could imagine somebody in that circumstance adopting that as a personal nickname.
