'I Investigated the D.B. Cooper Case, the Netflix Documentary Got Things Wrong'

People are fascinated by D.B. Cooper because he stuck it to the man—and got away with it. The man hijacked a plane in November 1971, demanded $200,000 and then parachuted from the aircraft and was never found. It became folklore. People wrote songs about it, there are movies about it—and, as of July 2022, a new Netflix documentary.

I watched the documentary and I thought they muddied the waters with some of the people they featured. Most of the guys that got all the airtime were distractors whose suspect had already been disproven 40 years ago. I felt particularly annoyed because I am part of the team of more than 40 professional law enforcement officers, military intelligence folk, forensic experts and public servants, who worked on this case solidly for 10 years.

We worked on facts, not hunches. We reviewed thousands of pages of case notes from the FBI, which we requested through the Freedom of Information Act.

The group formed in 2010, but I joined in September 2016 when I was 65 years old. I was partially retired but still doing a little consulting and coaching high school baseball. Most of our team was retired, so we had time to follow leads.

I found out about the group when a friend of mine—who had been a well-respected senior executive in the government—referred me to the group leader, Tom Colbert, and said I should be on the team to help with the cyber investigation. My background was in investigating cyber crime, including 10 years as the Chief of Computer Crime Investigations and Digital Forensics for the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations.

The team wanted me to infiltrate the D.B. Cooper online chat-rooms, where people shared information and theories about different suspects. They had monitored these forums and noticed four users who seemed to know information that only our team had, and had not disclosed. The team felt that this was our prime suspect, former Army Special Ops pilot Robert Rackstraw, out on the website, feeding his ego, and putting information out to see what everybody knew.

To find out whether these users were Rackstraw, I put a team together and we went out undercover, creating separate online personas. We joined the site for over a month and then tried to draw these four people to us. Sure enough, they started conversations with us.

We shared a document with them—a link analysis chart of all of the evidence connected to Rackstraw—and monitored the IP address of the users who clicked on it. From that, we narrowed it down to their ZIP code, but not to an individual person. Without law enforcement powers of subpoenas and search warrants, we couldn't get any closer, so we couldn't definitively say it was Rackstraw or somebody working with him. It was frustrating.

While that was happening, I also ran a catfishing operation. An electrician down in Mississippi had messaged Rackstraw on Facebook, pretending to be a 53-year-old nurse from Alabama. The guy shared their text conversations with me. Rackstraw had led him to believe that he was D.B. Cooper but he wouldn't openly admit it, so we didn't have definitive evidence.

I helped with other investigative work, and getting access to new evidence was exciting. The FBI said that Rackstraw hadn't become a suspect in the D.B. Cooper case until seven years after the incident but we found memos to and from J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, talking about Rackstraw as a probable suspect from the beginning.

Our team also uncovered physical evidence. A couple of pilots in Washington heard that three now-deceased members of their aero club had helped D.B. Cooper. The old-timer who told them described the general area where they had apparently buried the parachute. Some of our team went out there to help with the dig and, after four or five days, they found what appeared to be a decades-old parachute strap.

I was confounded as to why the FBI wouldn't reopen the case. The evidence that our team had produced against Rackstraw was circumstantial but, compared to any other suspect, it was so overwhelming that I just didn't understand why you wouldn't prosecute that case.

I had 42 years of investigative experience, so I followed leads to try to understand why. I read that Rackstraw used to brag about working for the CIA in Iran-Contra, so I approached one of my senior intel sources, who had retired from his job in Intelligence.

Within a day, he came back to me and said, "I want you to listen very carefully to what I say. I asked my source at the CIA and the answer was, 'We cannot confirm.' Words matter."

Like I said in the Netflix documentary, it's usually "cannot confirm or deny." If the CIA says "we cannot confirm", that tends to be code for, yes, he was working for the CIA.

I believe that D.B. Cooper cut a deal with the Department of Justice. I believe they said, "We won't prosecute you, we need your special operations and flying experience with Iran-Contra, so if you do that with the CIA, we'll forget about it."

Tom and I attended a press conference in front of the FBI headquarters in 2018 where he declared the case closed. We believed we had solved the case of D.B. Cooper, that it was Rackstraw, and we listed our reasons. I said I thought the FBI wasn't pursuing the case because they were either ignorant, arrogant or complicit—and I think it was a combination of all three.

As an investigator, you want the bad guy to go to jail. This was what motivated me throughout my five-year involvement in the investigation. I believe in right and wrong and I believe that people should be held accountable. D.B. Cooper might be a hero to some, but you still shouldn't do what he did: taking a bomb on a plane, putting all those people at risk.

When you're in the government, things are difficult because you have a lack of resources, you're overwhelmed. Your case load is huge and a lot of times you pick the low-hanging fruit and move on. But when you have a case that's been opened for 45 years and nobody has solved it, there's no urgency to it. With Tom's team, everyone was working for free—and we worked to get the truth.

We're still being sent FBI files today. It's such a big case that they can only review and send out 100 or 200 pages a month. We still haven't got the whole file.

I now consider the case closed. Our team has moved on to new cases—such as the Zodiac Killer, the Jimmy Hoffa disappearance, and the Atlanta child murders of 1979–1981. We have some new folks on the team, and, although I don't spend as much time investigating anymore, they sometimes call me for advice.

In all of these new cases, as with the D.B. Cooper case, it's about finding the truth and getting closure. Holding people accountable for what they did.

Jim Christy is a retired special agent who specialized in cyber crime investigation and digital forensics. He is now the Cyber Team Lead for The Case Breakers: Cold Case Team, which previously investigated D.B. Cooper and is now focused on other unsolved crimes. He is on Twitter @Jimchristyusdfc

All views expressed in this article are the author's own.

As told to Katie Russell.