BONUS: The D B Cooper Vortex (Part 3)

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to the Mind Over Murder podcast.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
My name is Bill Thomas. I'm a writer, consulting, producer,
and now podcaster. I am now trying to use my
experience as the brother of a murder victim to help
other victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book
on the unsolved Colonial Parkway murders and I'm the co
administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together with
Kristin Dilly.

Speaker 3 (00:26):
My name is Kristin Dilly.

Speaker 4 (00:27):
I'm a writer, a researcher, a teacher, and a victim's advocate,
as well as the social media manager and co administrator
for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my partner
in crime, Bill Thomas.

Speaker 3 (00:42):
Welcome to Mind Ever Murder.

Speaker 2 (00:43):
I'm Kristin Dilly and I'm Bill Thomas.

Speaker 5 (00:46):
We're joined today by Darren Schaefer here to talk about
the podcast, the Cooper Vortex and school us on everything
dB Gooper.

Speaker 3 (00:54):
Darren, Welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 6 (00:56):
Thank you so much for having me on. I'm excited
to be here.

Speaker 5 (01:00):
We're so happy to have you because we know that
in our two episodes on dB Cooper, we did not
even begin to scratch the surface of everything that there
is to know in the I guess we'll call it
the dB Cooper space, or we'll use your term for
the dB Cooper Vortex. Start by telling us a little
bit about yourself and your podcast.

Speaker 6 (01:19):
My name is Darren Schaeffer. I just I fell into
what is called the Cooper vortex probably about ten eleven
years ago now at this point in time, and then
somewhere along that line, I started my own podcast, The
Cooper Vortex, creatively named and just it's something that I
can't escape. The term the Cooper vortex was coined by

(01:42):
Mark Meltzer because once you fall into this vortex, you
cannot escape. And boy, is that true?

Speaker 5 (01:49):
Do you actually first hear about the dB Cooper case.
I first heard about it.

Speaker 6 (01:54):
I grew up in Woodland, Washington, which is like the
closest town to where his drop zone was believed to
have been at that point in time. And I first
heard about it on Unsolved Mysteries, like watching a rerun
of that probably on some like after school thing with
my sister. And then it was like, hey, in this
guy at the Portland International Airport and we're like Portland,

(02:15):
that's over, that's right over there that's close to us,
and then in Seattle it's oh Seattle, that's right over
here too, and then jumped out near Ariel, Washington, so
we know where that is. That's two towns over. This
is so crazy. This is right in our backyard, and
then just grown up there. It's a local story, something
I had a passing interest in until I really got
sucked in.

Speaker 2 (02:36):
So how old were you at this point, Darren, when
you first saw the unsolved mysteries and started talking to
your sister about the case.

Speaker 6 (02:44):
I would have been like ten years old talking with
my sister about the case.

Speaker 1 (02:49):
Not so much.

Speaker 6 (02:49):
It was more just wow, this crazy thing happened, like
basically in our backyard. That's so crazy, and it's unsolved.
I wonder what happened.

Speaker 5 (02:57):
We chatted off air for a little bit the first
time that we talked, and you said something really interesting.
You said that you aren't a true crime fan, which
is a little hard for me to understand, but that's okay.
It's not for everybody. What differentiates the dB Cooper case
from other true crime cases? What draws you to it

(03:19):
and makes it interesting?

Speaker 6 (03:21):
I think most true crime is some sort of a
personal story. This happened to this person they weren't expecting it,
or this person did this to this other person. The
dB Cooper case, I think is a lot different because
at its basis it's a heist, so it's more along
the lines of bank robbery or a train robbery. In

(03:44):
this case is an airplane robbery more than what would
be a sort of typical true crime story. And all
of everyone's saying this in this doc on Netflix is
so good. I'll check it out, But I'm not really
a true crime fan because it personally it makes me angry.
I'm like, I'm gonna round up a posse and we're

(04:04):
gonna go get this guy. And that's not what I'm
looking for. When I want to be entertained, it's more, Oh,
I want I want to laugh or I want to
be educated more than I don't want to get angry
about something that happened to someone or something someone else did.

Speaker 2 (04:19):
One of the things that you mentioned to us was
that there's a big difference in the demographics for your podcast,
The Cooper Vortex, and the average true crime podcast, if
there is such a thing. What are some of those
differences in terms of the audience.

Speaker 6 (04:37):
Along this podcasting journey that I've had. I've met some
other people with some shows, and I found it really
interesting that most of the people in the true crime
space would say my audience is about seventy five percent female,
And when I first gotten in the dB Cooper case,
I would say it was ninety five percent men, And

(04:58):
with some other media in my podcast, I would say
that's changed a little bit, but I would still say
that it's probably eighty percent men at this point in time.

Speaker 2 (05:08):
Well, then the first question becomes, why do you think
that is.

Speaker 6 (05:12):
It's a question that I ask on my show to
almost every guest because it's very odd. It's not just
oh yeah, my show's fifty to fifty when most lean female. No,
my show is completely the opposite. Having talked to many
different guests about it, I think it boils down to
a few factors. One is the type of case that

(05:34):
this is, like I said, a heist, and then the
other is the style of the case and the means
and by which he did it. And so I think
the audience for this, just by the fact that it's
a heist would lean more towards men. But then the
way Cooper did it using an airplane and jumping out
of the airplane. This case really appeals to pilots, it

(05:56):
really appeals to skydivers, it really appeals to people who
are in the military and formerly military, as well as
aviation fans. And now the vast majority of all the
groups I just mentioned skew way heavily male. So I
think all of those things really contribute to the fact
that if you go to Cooper Kahn, if you get

(06:18):
on forums or a MySpace group, that's the reason that
it's going to be mostly dudes in there.

Speaker 5 (06:25):
Okay, before we stray away from Cooper Kahn, tell us
about Cooper KHN.

Speaker 3 (06:30):
Please.

Speaker 6 (06:31):
Cooper Kahn's been going on for a while. There were
a couple early versions. Jeffrey Grace held the first one
in Gosh, I want to say that was two thousand
and twelve of twenty eleven, don't quote me exactly on that.
And then Eric Youulss picked up the torch, and I
think the first one he did was twenty eighteen, and

(06:53):
then twenty twenty and twenty twenty one. I believe there
were no Cooper KHN for obvious reasons.

Speaker 2 (07:00):
And are these typically held in the Pacific Northwest?

Speaker 6 (07:04):
Yeah, either in Portland or Seattle.

Speaker 5 (07:07):
So is it like a one or two day convention
or like, how does this work when we talk about
crime con which is what we're most familiar with, I imagine
it's very different from Cooper KHN.

Speaker 3 (07:18):
So can you tell us a little bit about it?
Who could you see guesting there?

Speaker 6 (07:22):
Yeah? Con it's very interesting because there's two different aspects
to it. There's a very collegiate presentation and hey, here's
this evidence, and here's my analysis of this evidence. And
here's this speaker that's going to come on and tell
us about this angle or about their expertise in titanium
for example, or some obscure aspect of the case. And

(07:45):
then there's the getting together and drinking and just talking
about Cooper and the community and the hangout aspect of it.
It's just a great time if you're super into this case.
There's going to be a bunch of authors from the
books you've read, people you have seen on documentaries or
on podcasts, for on YouTube channels speak and talk and

(08:07):
then you just hang out with them and ask him questions. Hey,
I know you covered this, but what do you really
think about it?

Speaker 5 (08:14):
Is there a dB Cooper lookalike contest or anything. There's
no role playing at crime conton, so thankfully we've been
spared that. But I'm just curious do people show up
in the gray suit?

Speaker 6 (08:24):
And there was dB Cooper Days, which was held at
the Aerial Store. I think it was the Friday after
Thanksgiving every year and that went on for gosh, thirty
five years or something like that until the Aerial Store
closed down. And that was just a party that was

(08:46):
like a Hey, we think dB Cooper landed in our
backyard and we're going to throw this party in his honor,
and if he wants to show up, that's cool. And
they did have a dB Cooper lookalike contest, but Cooper
cause it's more like informative and educational in the main
event than a looklike contest sort of thing, although there

(09:08):
have been people that have shown up in dB Cooper GARB.

Speaker 5 (09:13):
What was the impetus for you to start your podcast
on dB Cooper? Was it just that you needed to
fill a void that wasn't there.

Speaker 6 (09:22):
Absolutely, And a lot of things happened at the exact
same time. So I really got heavy into this and
my wife bought me Jeffrey Gray's book Skyjack in probably
twenty thirteen or twenty fourteen. It had been out for
a while, and I was like cool, And then it
set on my bookshelf for a while. I was traveling
for work. I brought that to read and read that

(09:45):
book and I was like, dang, there is so much
more to this case than I was aware of, and
it goes so much deeper, and there's so much crazy
stuff going on here. And that book sort of references
he's working with this private investigator, Skip Portius, and a
certain point in the book, Skip says, Hey, I'm not
going to work with you anymore. I'm going to write
my own book about this. And so I thought, this

(10:07):
book is a few years old, maybe that's out, and
it was It's Into the Blast by Skip Portius and
Robert Blevins. So I ordered that book. I read that
book and I was like, Okay, it's Kenny Christiansen case closed.
I know who dbe Cooper was Into the Blast mentions
an online forum, the drop Zone, which is now skydiveforum

(10:29):
dot com. I believe I got on there and there
was a group of people on there just argue a
NonStop about dB Cooper. But one thing that they did
was completely tear apart all of the work that Skip
Portius Robert Blevins had done on Kenny Christensen. And looking
at that, I was like, Okay, if it's not Kenny Christensen,
then who is it? And then that led me to

(10:50):
Bruce Smith's book dB Cooper and the FBI, which had
just came out. Fantastic, phenomenal book. I can't recommend it enough.
Third edition is out and now I believe. Then I
started a job where I worked completely alone. So I
was listening to talk radio and podcasts for forty to
sixty hours a week. And this is twenty fifteen ish,

(11:12):
and so I got on Apple Podcasts and I was like,
I've already ran out of all the shows I want
to listen to. What else should I find? So I
was like, I'm into this dB Cooper thing right now.
So I typed dB Cooper into the search bar, and
at that point in time, there were about twenty different
shows that had done one episode on dB Cooper. So

(11:34):
I just started burning through them. I found it frustrating
because I was so deep into it by this point
in time that covering the case for twenty minutes and
then going over five suspects, and then at the end
we think it's this guy. By the end of those
I was fast forwarding them going over the hijacket because
I was like, I don't want to hear that. Let
me just hear what their theories and conjecture on the

(11:56):
case are. And then I was listening to this podcast
called Mormonism, which is just about the history of Mormonism
in the United States.

Speaker 2 (12:05):
I was gonna say, and what's the connection.

Speaker 6 (12:08):
The connection is listening to that show. His show became
successful enough that it was something he did as a hobby,
like driving an interstate battery truck. To he quit his
job and was just doing this podcast. I thought to myself,
what I really want to hear is long form interviews
with the authors of these books and the people arguing online.

(12:31):
And if this guy can make a real podcast about
Mormon history, then I can make the podcast that I
want to listen to. So I decided I'll give this
a shot. But I'm not known in this community at all.
I don't even have a screen name on the website.
So I decided I'm going to reach out to five
people that I won on the show, and if two

(12:52):
of those five agree to be on my show that
doesn't exist, then I'll create it. And so I reached
out to five people and all five of them said yes,
I'd love to be on the show.

Speaker 7 (13:01):
Even though the show didn't even exist. At that point,
the show didn't exist. So I googled what equipment I
would need to start a podcast, and then loaded up
my car and I did all five of those interviews
in person, driving across the Pacific Northwest.

Speaker 2 (13:17):
Oh interesting, What made you decide to do the podcast interviews?
When you launched the Cooper Vortex in person?

Speaker 6 (13:26):
Two different podcasters it would be Tim Ferriss and Joe Rogan,
and both of them by then had discussed how much
better an interview is in person than remotely, and at
that time, zoom wasn't where it is today. Basically all
my interviews pre twenty twenty I traveled to do those

(13:47):
interviews in person.

Speaker 2 (13:49):
Wow.

Speaker 5 (13:50):
I actually really loved that idea, and it had to
have been fascinating to be able to get out there
meet people, get a feel for their energy. It probably
puts the use a little bit too, that they're able
to talk with you see you in person.

Speaker 3 (14:05):
That sounds really neat. I would love to be able
to do that.

Speaker 2 (14:08):
What's interesting too is that and Kristin and I we
may have forgotten this ourselves when we started Mind Over Murder.
This is just before COVID. Now, I know there's a
big joke about how many podcasts got started as a
result of the pandemic. We actually started just before the pandemic.

(14:29):
Our original intention was to have more face to face interviews.
And I had moved back from Los Angeles to Connecticut,
which at least put me closer to Virginia, where Christen's based,
and particularly with the Colonial Parkway murders one of our
key cases, that's a Virginia case as well. But we
didn't end up going down that road, if you will,

(14:53):
because we did end up being increasingly dependent on doing
interviews via the computer. And and so even today now
for everybody's benefit, we're on zoom and I can see Kristin,
and I can see Darren, and they can see me.
We don't use the visual component of what we record.

(15:13):
But it's very interesting that you chose to go and
meet with these people face to face, and interestingly, so
many of them are in the Pacific Northwest.

Speaker 6 (15:23):
Yeah, and I was living in Boise Idaho at the time,
so not that far. I think my farthest one was
like eight hours, although I did drive from Boise to
Great Falls, Montana, which is like eleven hours to interview
John Cameron.

Speaker 5 (15:38):
So you got some nice travel time in there too.
Let's go ahead and get into the suspect aspect of
the case before we talk about the community around dB Cooper.
It seems to me, and again please correct me if
I'm wrong, because I'm not an expert, it seems to
me like the dB Cooper suspects seem to fall into
two categories, the likely category and the unlikely category. Who

(16:00):
is your favorite unlikely suspect? They probably aren't D. B. Cooper,
but you like their backstory.

Speaker 6 (16:06):
There's going to be two of them. My favorite by
far is Barb Dayton, the transgender suspect of Washington State.
That was one of my first five interviews I did.
I interviewed the Foremans, who wrote the book about her D. B.
Cooper death by natural Causes. I hadn't read that book
when I had reached out to him, and my first impression,

(16:30):
not knowing the Foremans and not truly knowing that story, was,
oh my gosh, this is going to be some woke
couple from Seattle just trying to sling this book to
fit a Pacific Northwest narrative with this D. B. Cooper
story from the Pacific Northwest also, And then I read
the book and the book's very sweet.

Speaker 3 (16:52):
They are.

Speaker 6 (16:54):
Truly just great friends of hers that met at Dunfield
just became lifelong friends. I went to the Foreman's house
to do that interview and I knocked on their door.
They let me in and they were the nicest people ever.
It was like hanging out with my aunt and uncle
that I hadn't seen in a long time. We stopped

(17:16):
the interview halfway through because that one's three and a
half hours or something like that, and I was like, hey,
I need to break for a minute. Let's go get
lunch and then we can finish the second half of this.
And they took me out to lunch. He showed me
as playing, he showed me his car collection.

Speaker 2 (17:30):
Wow. Very cool.

Speaker 6 (17:31):
Actually, just the greatest people in that story is truly amazing.
There's also been some work done recently. There's this infamous
book on the dB Cooper case called dB Cooper What
Really Happened? By Max Gunther and that came out in
nineteen eighty five. I believe and Max Gunther is a
serious journalist. He writes this book is non fiction where

(17:55):
he is communicating with the widow of Dbie Cooper, who
tells him the story of what happened, and she remains anonymous.
So I don't know for sure if Max Gunther even
knew who she was. It's possible Max Gunther made this
whole thing up in nineteen eighty five, being a serious
journalist presenting this as nonfiction even though the whole thing's

(18:18):
a joke, would be that could ruin your career and
potentially end it. Martin Andrade did some forensic linguistics I forgot.
Stylometry is the term for that, where there are some
letters from Clara to Max Gunther in that book, and
he compared it to the writings of Barb Dayton and

(18:38):
got an incredible match. And what that more than likely
means is that Barb Dayton communicated with Max Gunther to
tell the story.

Speaker 2 (18:48):
Under a pseudonym, or did he give her the pseudonym.

Speaker 6 (18:53):
That I'm not one hundred percent shirt certain of. I
believe Clara chose the name Clara because she also wrote
a letter Max Himmelsbach, not Max Simmelsbach, Ralph Himmelsbach, and
to sell this Dbie Cooper story also and in that
letter she uses the name Clara, so it would have
been the name she gave to Max Gunther. But I

(19:13):
don't think that this proves that Barb Dayton is dB Cooper.
But I think it proves that Barb Dayton has always
had an obsession with this case, okay, And she was
lonely at a certain point in time and could envision
herself both as D. B. Cooper and as now a
woman who fell in love with dB Cooper.

Speaker 2 (19:35):
Was Barb Dayton? Had she passed by this point? Is
she still with us? Or is she gone?

Speaker 6 (19:41):
Barb Dayton died in the early two thousands, I believe
if you read the book by the Foremans, D B.
Cooper Death by natural causes born Robert Dayton. Robert Dayton
was truly a badass and lived this wildlife. He was
a merchant marine and he's captured like in the Philippines
as a prisoner of war, and then they needed crew

(20:02):
for a ship, and so he just like raised his
hand like hey, I could do. This was in a
motorcycle gang, just an all around tough guy, and then
always had this thing where it's like I was born
in the wrong body because the first person in Washington
State I believe to have ginger reassignment surgery got it

(20:22):
done in Baltimore and then living his life as gender
assignment surgery in nineteen sixty nine, by.

Speaker 2 (20:29):
The way, Yeah, long time ago, right, yeah. Yes.

Speaker 6 (20:33):
And so now she's living a life as a woman,
sad and lonely and working as a librarian for the
Seattle Public Library. She wants to prove to herself that
she's still like this tough, no nonsense person and not
just this meek librarian. So she pulls off the dB
Cooper hijacking, ditches the money in a cistern and would

(20:54):
burn Oregon, and goes back to her job as a librarian,
fulfilled that she proved to herself that she's still tough
old Robert Dayton as well as today being Barbara Dayton.

Speaker 3 (21:07):
I like that. That's an interesting story.

Speaker 6 (21:09):
Yeah, And she confessed to the Foremans. Ron Foreman told
me that he believed all along that Barb was Clara
in the Max Gunther book, which is very interesting because
the Max Gunther book is quite controversial. There's a lot
of stuff in there. There's details that we didn't learn
until the FBI files came out that are like, wow,
that was right on the nose, And then there's a

(21:30):
lot of details that don't make sense that could be filler.
Did Max Gunther make that up to fill in the
gaps of the story or did Clara truly not know
and give information that was wrong.

Speaker 2 (21:44):
You're listening to Mind over Murder. We'll be right back
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Speaker 5 (21:58):
You said you also had another favorite unlikely suspect.

Speaker 3 (22:01):
Who is that?

Speaker 6 (22:02):
That would be Wolfgang Gossip. Wolfgang Gossip. He's a veteran,
he's a survivalist. His son Greg told me he would
go on these camping trips alone where his family would
drop him off and then pick him up a week later,
like fifty sixty miles a different direction with no gear
or anything like that. He confessed to both of his

(22:23):
sons on their twenty first birthday of being dB Cooper.
He also confessed to two different lawyers in two different states.
There have been a handful of books in the works
about him that never seemed to get finished real mysterious figure.
I wasn't really sure how I felt on him until

(22:44):
I interviewed Greg Gossett, another one I traveled to. He
was just outside Salt Lake. He was very skeptical of me,
probably because he's been contacted by other dB Cooper researchers.
So he wanted to have dinner with me before we
did the interview, which I really didn't want to do
because I didn't want to go over the same things
and then my questions would be fake. During that dinner,

(23:05):
it was very clear to me that he just wanted
to know do I have an agenda? As am I
trying to pitch his father as Cooper? Or am I
trying to pitch his father as not being Cooper, which
neither was the case. I just wanted to hear Greg's story.
In Greg's thoughts on his father being involved in the
Stevie Cooper myth.

Speaker 2 (23:23):
Do you feel like for people that are connected to
the case that they must run into people that are
either skeptics or cranks or difficult people with a strong agenda?
Is that kind of what he was trying to filter
out by having dinner with you the night before?

Speaker 4 (23:40):
Oh?

Speaker 6 (23:40):
Yeah, absolutely, And you guys briefly spoke about Vince Peterson
in your last episode. Eric, you listed this like press conference. Hey,
it's Vince Peterson. I connected him via these tai particles.
I had his daughter on my show, Julie. She's adamant
that her father is not Dbe Cooper and very upset

(24:00):
by the fact that here's this group, here's this community
that just named her father as being involved in criminality
and pulling off this crime when he was the kind
of guy who was never involved in anything like that,
wouldn't have done this. There's just no evidence for it.
She thinks it's absolutely ridiculous. I love that episode I did.

(24:21):
It's one of my favorite I've wanted. I've had relatives
of people who believe their uncle, their father, their grandfather
was Cooper. But I've always wanted to have someone on
whose family member has been accused and doesn't believe it.
And so I was very excited to do that episode.
It was hard to get her on because of course
she's jaded to this community. Yeah, and so I had

(24:43):
to earn her trust and look, this, I just want
to hear from you. Also, I don't believe your father
was Vince Peterson. So that definitely helps. But I just
want to hear what you have to say about this,
what you think of Hey, your father is accused of this,
because now you google his name and the first thing
that comes up as DBE Cooper.

Speaker 2 (25:01):
It has to be really frustrating for her because she
firmly believes that he is not dB Cooper, and yet
she has to now deal with this.

Speaker 6 (25:11):
And she had to look up what dB Cooper was
when her father was accused of this crime.

Speaker 5 (25:17):
Okay, so who then is your favorite likely suspects? Like
you've examined all of the evidence, you know it way
better than the two of us. Do Who do you
think is most likely dB Cooper?

Speaker 6 (25:29):
If you want a JFK connection.

Speaker 2 (25:32):
Yeah, let's do it.

Speaker 6 (25:34):
Laurence skip Hall is a very interesting suspect. Obviously, I
can't put him on the plane because if we could
put any of these suspects on the plane, then it's
game over. We're done. He was like this Cuban freedom fighter.
They then got involved with this Cuban casino magnet and
goes by all these aliases. Has the skill set to

(25:56):
both plan and execute this sort of crime. There's some loose,
goosey air America ties there as well. He seems to
be likely to be involved in the JFK assassination. He
was testified in one of the hearings about that. But
one of the things I like about him more than
anything else that doesn't really prove he's Cooper, But it's
so interesting is if you look at the description of Cooper,

(26:18):
the official FBI one, they list possible Mexican or Native
American history or ancestry with an olive or swarthy complexion.
And if you pulled up a screenshot of fifty dB
Cooper Suspects, it's a lot of pasty white faces on there.
And Laurence skip Hall, in some of his freedom fighting endeavors,

(26:41):
went by the alias Lorenzo Pacia. I think it was
Lorenzo Yea, I'm prettyure it's Lorenzo Pasia. If I told
you my name was Lorenzo Pacia, you'd be like, no,
you don't look like that name fits.

Speaker 2 (26:54):
You, like Lorenzo.

Speaker 6 (26:57):
Just the fact that he could go by this like
Cuban alias and get away with it. He is obviously
has some sort of Latin influence in there as well.
The other suspect that's been around a little bit longer. Oh,
and let me plug. Where was Skip? By John Limbach
is a really good book on Lauren skip Hall. He

(27:19):
goes by Lauren Hall or Skip Hall. So that's why
I'm saying both first names. But the other suspect that's
been around a while that just seems to get more
and more fascinating is Ted Braiden. Ted Braden is a
mac v SAG, a special Forces dude from Vietnam. He
goes a wall during Vietnam. He's captured working as a

(27:41):
mercenary in the Congo. He then gets taken to Fort Dix,
where I spoke to one of the prison guards there
and he said, when he encountered Ted Braden was in
his cell at Fort Dix for desertion, and he was
in his cell in full uniform with a belt buckle,
shine shoes, smoking a wood tipped cigar, and watching a

(28:02):
television And he said, Darren, I'm only giving you all
those details because everything I just mentioned was strictly not allowed.
And he said, when I saw that, I knew right
away that there's something going on about this guy that's
above my pay grade. And when it came time for
him to be tried for his crimes. He was released
because there was quote not enough staff to fill the

(28:25):
courtroom that day.

Speaker 2 (28:27):
It just seemed crazy, like how did this happen?

Speaker 6 (28:32):
Yeah, And I know a lot of people in the
dB Cooper community that have access to a lot of
resources to look up people in history, more so than
the average person on Google. And if you look in
Ted Braden's history, there is truly nothing there as if
he never existed. And my friend Drew Beeson has this
great book on him called Soldier of Fortune. I'm sorry,

(28:52):
Paratrooper of Fortune. The story of Ted Braden. One of
my favorite facts about him is he's seventy two years old,
gets pulled over for drunk driving. He's driving a car
with no registration and no plates. He has no identification
on him and refuse to identify himself to the police officer.

Speaker 2 (29:13):
He sounds a Reacher on television that character.

Speaker 6 (29:17):
Yes, and a lot of the macv SAG guys from
that time period, some of which I've spoken to, and
Drew Beeson many more, unanimously they say, oh, that dB
Cooper thing, that's Ted Braden. One hundred percent, that's Ted Braden.
And it's not, even though some guys thought it was Ted,
but uh, we don't really think so, or maybe it's
this other guy. They unanimously believe that it's Ted Braden.

(29:41):
He's by far the most qualified to pull off this skyjacking.
And one of the things about the skyjacking that's so interesting,
especially compared to the six copycats, is the entire time
dB Cooper is calm, cool and collected. It takes a
different person to be pulling off something like this and
remaining completely calm, someone who has maybe seen some stuff

(30:04):
and done some stuff. This isn't their first rodeo, and
this isn't in any way the most dangerous thing they've done,
and that would definitely be Ted Brayden.

Speaker 5 (30:13):
We had in our two episodes, Bill and I, again
not having done the full breadth of research that you've done,
advocated for Richard Floyd McCoy, and you had set off
air that you wanted to utterly destroy Richard Floyd McCoy.

Speaker 3 (30:25):
So please go.

Speaker 5 (30:26):
Ahead and tell us why we are wrong on Richard
Floyd McCoy.

Speaker 6 (30:30):
There are a few suspects that, for whatever reason, they
just get picked up and continuously reran. Robert Rockstraw is.

Speaker 3 (30:38):
One of those.

Speaker 6 (30:38):
Yeah, a lot of media attention. And I'm very forgiving
of this because when I came into the case, I
would have told you, oh, it's Kenny Christensen, for sure,
it's Kenny Christensen, and then I continued to read and
do more. Richard Floyd McCoy has been a suspect since
April seventh, I think, nineteen seventy two. He committed a
copycat skyjacking six months after Cooper. There are many things

(31:03):
he did in a very similar way. There are also
a couple things where he'd improved on Cooper's plan. He
gave much more specific flight instructions. For example, he lands
just a few miles from his home, but his execution
is completely sloppy. He hilariously leaves his hijacking notes in

(31:25):
the airport, and so when he's on the plane, they
call out, hey, did somebody leave him in ela envelope
in the airport and it's full of his hijacking notes?
Is hijacking? He's a complete mess. He makes it obvious
that there's something going on with him before his hijacking starts,
so the pilots were going to land somewhere else before

(31:47):
his hijacking even begins. He drew a lot of attention
to himself. He was all over the place. He was
angry and flustered, not in any way similar to Cooper.
The stewardesses were immediately shown pictures of McCoy. Hey, look
at this guy, he just committed a similar hijacking. This

(32:09):
is six months later. All of the stewardesses said, that
is definitely not him. He's twenty nine at the time.
Cooper is given the age of mid to late forties.
Tina Mucklow is twenty two years old sitting right next
to him. Do you think a twenty two year old
is going to mistake someone a few years older than
her for someone that could be her father? Definitely not.

(32:31):
McCoy has big ears that prominently stick out. He has
blue eyes. Cooper is believed to have brown eyes. McCoy
has a South Carolina accent and a little bit of
a speech impediment, like a slight lisp. The FBI thoroughly
ruled out McCoy in seventy two, and whatever you think

(32:52):
of the FBI and whatever job they did, I want
to make this point. The FBI had him in custody,
so if there were any evidence that they could have
used to pin the nor Jack hijacking. dB Cooper's on
him as well. They would have tried that. They didn't
do any of that. The dB Cooper files are out,

(33:14):
you can read them. They thoroughly ruled out McCoy. There
are witnesses that say McCoy was home the morning of Thanksgiving.
So if he's jumping out north of Portland, southwest Washington
the night before Thanksgiving, getting to his home in Utah
by the morning, theoretically it's possible, but would be extremely difficult. Also,

(33:36):
dB Cooper smoked seven cigarettes in four hours. McCoy was
a non smoker. If you believe you can use smoking
cigarettes as a disguise, I would challenge you to smoke
seven cigarettes in four hours as a non smoker and
see how that works out for you.

Speaker 2 (33:53):
One of the things we laughed about was just there's
so much about the Cooper cases of a time. It
was fifty years ago. We were discussing the fact that
back then you could smoke on aircraft.

Speaker 6 (34:05):
Here's my favorite detail about this hijacking and one of
the reasons, and we can get into the dB Cooper's
a full care versus a criminal. But he's sitting in
the back of that plane drinking a bourbon and soda
with sunglasses on, and he's got a beautiful young stewardess
sitting next to him and she lights his cigarettes for him.

Speaker 2 (34:28):
It seems like a James Bond movie. Yes.

Speaker 5 (34:32):
One of the things that I thought was very interesting
is the parallels that people have drawn between D. B.
Cooper and the Roger Thornhill character from the nineteen fifty
nine Hitchcock film north By Northwest. And he definitely kind
of struck me as Yeah, Roger Thornhill, what one hundred
percent have done that? And just because I'm a film
buffer a film teacher, I just like that little particular

(34:54):
element there. I definitely see where Richard Floyd McCoy's is
definitely not the correct suspect. Because you mentioned the FBI,
I do want to ask your thoughts about the FBI
and their work on the case.

Speaker 3 (35:08):
They did give up their investigation. Do you feel like
they gave up too easily?

Speaker 5 (35:13):
Did they do everything they could to solve the case,
or should they have kept doggedly on.

Speaker 6 (35:18):
I have a couple different schools of thought on this.
I think that the FBI did everything they could to
get this case solved, and I've spoken to several agents
that have worked on this case. I had Larry Carr
on my show. All of those guys wanted to be
the one to solve the case. To purp walk dB Cooper.
The FBI is an organization. I think they made a

(35:40):
couple of small mistakes on this and some of them
aren't even really all their fault. So Cooper, like I said,
smoked seven cigarettes. That's some of the evidence recovered from
the flight. You can see in the FBI files, an
FBI file where they send the cigarette butts to a lab. Hey,
check the cigarette butts, see if you can pull any

(36:02):
prints off it. If you can't, then throw them in
the garbage. Because they didn't know in nineteen seventy one, Hey, fifteen,
twenty twenty five years from now, we will exactly be
able to figure out who this guy is thanks to
these cigarette butts. It was probably just more than likely. Hey,
we don't want these these smolly cigarette butts in the

(36:24):
evidence locker forever, because they're obviously of no doubt. The
other weird one is the hair slide. They pulled one
piece of hair off of his seat that they believed
could have been his This is where I'm like, this
is crazy sloppy work. Because if I have my dB
Cooper hair slide and Bill, you have a suspect and
you have a piece of his hair, I would say, hey, Bill,

(36:45):
send me your hair sample. I'll compare it to my slide.
That's not what they did. What they did is they
would send it to other offices. Okay, here's the dB
Cooper hair slide. It's in the mail, and in the
process of doing that time and time again, somewhere in
the mix that hairslide is now lost.

Speaker 2 (37:01):
Don't get me started with the FBI and the Parkway murders.
That's a whole nother discussion.

Speaker 6 (37:07):
But the case isn't actually closed. They publicly suspended the
investigation in twenty sixteen, and I think there are a
couple different reasons for that. First of all, by publicly
doing that, they're going to slow down this barrage of
people saying, Hey, look at this information I found, check
out my theory, I solve the case. What do you

(37:29):
think of this? Hey, my neighbor bought a new corvette
in seventy two, isn't that suspicious? And then the real
reason is just resources. By twenty sixteen, this case is
forty five years old. They haven't really gotten anywhere. So
how much more time and money are we going to
invest in this?

Speaker 2 (37:48):
Do you feel that the are the files truly open?
Can you see everything they have on dB Cooper.

Speaker 6 (37:57):
The files have been in the process of being released
for quite some time. We're towards the end, so the
files that are coming out now are later years. As
far as reactions, there isn't much because most people involved
in this case have passed away, and also all these
super sluts in the community are able to figure out

(38:17):
what is likely in the reactions, both based on number
of characters and who likely would be in that So
the files are quite extensive. But the files are what
the FBI calls three O two's right, and a three
oh two is a case agent's notes. So one three
to two, for example, can be a field agent taking

(38:38):
a call from a guy, and this is a real file. Hey,
I was watching Matt Locke the other night and there
was a guy in the jury. He sure looked like
the dB Cooper sketch. It was on Tuesday at eleven pm.
You guys should watch that episode and check it out.
And that that's an LBI three to two that's not
going anywhere. They're not going to investigate. But because it

(39:01):
was in the process of this active investigation, a case
agent has to make a note on it. Wow, there's
a lot of good information in there, a lot of
things we learned, suspects that we thought were legit, that
the FBI had cleared time and time again, suspects that
have been gone over multiple times, leads they've chased. Just

(39:23):
to show you how far this case has gone. And
like I said, it's they're not any further today than
they really were November twenty fifth, nineteen seventy one. There's
a file from like nineteen seventy six where they're reaching
out to a bunch of case agents and different field
offices and to paraphrase it, basically says, Okay, five years
have gone by and we haven't gotten anywhere. So we're

(39:45):
going to have this meeting in San Francisco and we
want all of you to bring fresh ideas on where
to take this case next. And that was just five
years after the fact. We're coming up on fifty four
years this year and five years in they feel like
they'd gone anywhere.

Speaker 2 (40:02):
Join us again next time as we continue our conversation
with Darren Schaefer of the Cooper Vortex podcast. A fascinating
conversation into dB Cooper suspects and where the case might
go from here.

Speaker 3 (40:17):
That is going to do it for this episode of
mind Over Murder. Thank you so much for listening. We'll
see you next time.

Speaker 1 (40:33):
Mind Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and
Another Dog Productions.

Speaker 2 (40:39):
Our executive producers are Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley.

Speaker 1 (40:42):
Our logo art is by Pamela Arnois.

Speaker 2 (40:45):
Our theme music is by Kevin McLoud.

Speaker 1 (40:48):
Mind Over Murder is distributed in partnership with crawl Space Media.

Speaker 2 (40:53):
You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

Speaker 1 (40:56):
You can also follow our page on the Colonial Parkway
Murders on facebok.

Speaker 2 (41:00):
Buck and finally, you can follow Bill Thomas on Twitter
at Bill Thomas five six.

Speaker 1 (41:05):
Thank you for listening to mind Over Murder.

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