NEW CLUE:An Oregon woman says her uncle was 1971 skyjacker D.B. Cooper (FBI sketch, above). (
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An Oregon woman emerged yesterday, claiming her dead uncle was the fugitive known as D.B. Cooper, the elusive mystery man behind the nation’s only unsolved airline hijacking.
Marla Cooper said it was her uncle, Lynn Doyle Cooper, who held passengers and crew hostage for a $200,000 ransom 40 years ago, and escaped after a daring Pacific Northwest parachute jump, never to be seen again.
Cooper said she was staying at her grandmother’s home — not far from where the hijacker jumped on Nov. 24, 1971 — when her bloody, bruised uncle came in, claiming to have been in a car accident.
Years later, she became convinced he was injured crashing to the earth. She said her uncle died in 1999.
“I’m certain he was my uncle, Lynn Doyle Cooper, who we called L.D. Cooper,” she told ABC News. “I heard my uncle say, ‘We did it, our money problems are over. We hijacked an airplane.’ ”
Cooper said she heard two of her uncles conspiring about the caper the night before the hijacking.
The next day, Northwest Orient Flight 305 from Portland to Seattle was hijacked.
Despite all the hoopla, Marla Cooper said there was no money. Authorities surmised that the hijacker lost much of it to gravity during his escape.
Cooper said the brothers wanted to go out looking for the loot, but her father refused because the FBI was out searching for the hijacker and the cash.
Marla Cooper eventually contacted the FBI and provided her uncle’s photo and a guitar strap to compare fingerprints to partial prints collected after the hijacking.
DNA tests have so far been inconclusive, officials said.
“Her story is infuriatingly vague,” said Geoffrey Gray, the author of “Skyjack: The Hunt for D.B. Cooper,” which will be released next week. “I want to believe her . . . but what she’s offering is not good enough.”