Has the Mystery of Skyjacker D.B. Cooper Finally Been Solved? A TV Newsman's Obsessive Quest

by Gary Baum September 05, 2019, 5:00am PDT

Long before the current true-crime television boom, a 1971 unsolved plane hijacking captivated America. Tom Colbert's journey to track down Cooper (and sell his story to Hollywood) led him to an elaborate theory of collusion involving the FBI and CIA.

For several days in May 2013, the Hollywood sting operation surveilled the grandfather at the condominium he sometimes shared with his ex-wife in the tony San Diego district of Bankers Hill. A $30,000-a-week private security group, armed because they deemed their subject a hostile threat, watched his movements aboard the 45-foot cruiser Poverty Sucks, docked nearby. They tracked him at his boat shop, Coronado Precision Marine. And they followed him to his local P.O. box. When they felt confident that they'd clocked his routine, they sent in Tom Colbert, the veteran newsman who'd hired them. He wore a wire and a hidden camera in his glasses.

They'd opted for an ambush after their target, a decorated Vietnam veteran whose extensive training included psy ops, didn't bite on Colbert's original cover plan: to lure him with the offer of consultant work on a fictitious TV show about a group of mercenaries, in the vein of The A-Team or The Expendables. "I'd thought, 'Why don't we try to do our own Argo?'" he recalls. Colbert had grown convinced that this old U.S. Army soldier with a distinctive criminal record, Robert W. Rackstraw, was in fact D.B. Cooper, who in 1971 skyjacked a Boeing 727 and then — with $200,000 in ransom money — parachuted from the plane into the Pacific Northwest night and enduring American myth.

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