Les Jones

True Crime > Sunday Morning Mystery: New D.B. Cooper Suspect

New York magazine is promoting a new suspect in the 1971 hijacking in which D.B. Cooper parachuted out of a 727 with his ransom. Lyle Christiansen thinks his brother Kenneth was the famed hijacker. He claims to have seen Cooper's composite sketch on the TV show "Unsolved Mysteries" and noticed the resemblance.

Kenneth Christiansen was a paratrooper in WWII, worked as a purser for the airline whose plane was hijacked, and lived in the area of Washington state where the crime happened. The sole surviving airline employee from that flight says Kenneth's photo is a match for the man she spoke to on the airplane 36 years ago.

The article is here. The nymag.com Web site has some of the most annoying Flash ads you'll ever see. You may want to disable Flash before following that link.

Despite the breathless tone of the article the case against Christiansen seems thin. Former FBI lead investigator Ralph Himmelsbach notes that the height and weight don't seem like a good match, and the eye color is wrong. In any famous criminal case there are lots of suspects who seem like good matches, but who ultimately don't fit. Zodiac killer sleuths call it "Zynchronicity." Another possible suspect was named a month ago, as seen in this YouTube video.

In other words, he could be D.B. Cooper, but he probably isn't. None of the serial numbers in the ransom money turned up in circulation (though some were found in the drop area), which suggests Cooper might not have survived the parachute drop in sub-zero weather, or died in the woods. If he did live, he certainly didn't use the money to pay cash for a house or take friends out to restaurants, as Lyle claimed his brother did. If he had done so with the ransom money the serial numbers would have turned up by now.

It's worth mentioning that Lyle Christiansen has a financial motivation in implicating his brother. He came forth with his claims in the context of pitching a movie. There's nothing new under the sun - there are at least two cases where people claimed that their own father killed JFK and tried to land a book or movie deal. As with the new D.B. Cooper suspect the accused were dead when the claim was made. Kenneth Christiansen died in 1994.

Bonus! - The Dog That Solved the JFK Assassination:

A guy is driving around the backwoods of Tennessee and he sees a sign in front of a broken down house: “Talking Dog For Sale.”

He rings the bell and the owner appears and tells him the dog is in the backyard. The guy goes into the backyard and sees a nice looking Labrador retriever.

“You talk?” he asks.

“Yep,” the Lab replies.

After the guy recovers from the shock of hearing a talking dog, he says, “So, what’s your story?”

The Lab looks up and says, “Well, I discovered that I could talk when I was pretty young. I wanted to help the government, so I told the CIA. They asked me if I was interested in solving the Kennedy assassination. I asked if it was Jack or Bobby. They said Jack. The CIA doesn’t really care who killed Bobby. Go figure.”

“Anyway, in no time at all they had me jetting all over the country and all over the world, sitting in rooms with CIA and KGB spies, anti-Castro Cubans, pro-Castro Cubans, all kinds of mafia types and even Castro himself, because no one figured a dog would be eavesdropping. Unlike the Warren Commission’s relatively short investigation, they had me doing this for, oh, I would say, almost three years. I uncovered some pretty amazing stuff. It’s all classified and I’m not at liberty to disclose any of it, but thanks to Congress passing the Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, all the information will be coming forth in the year 2017.”

“But I gotta tell ya, all that jetting around and investigating stuff really tired me out, and I knew I wasn’t getting any younger so I decided to settle down. I signed up for a job at the airport to do some undercover security, wandering near suspicious characters and listening in.”

“I uncovered lots of stuff doing that and I was awarded a batch of medals. Eventually I got married, had a mess of puppies, and now I’m just retired.”

The guy is amazed. He goes back in and asks the owner what he wants for the dog.

“Ten dollars,” the man says.

“Ten dollars? This dog is amazing! Why on earth are you selling him so cheap?”

“Because he’s a damned liar. He never did any of that stuff. All he knows about the Kennedy assassination is what he’s read in books.”