Jack Sheehan names names as the FBI tries to solve the mystery of D.B. Cooper

By Jack Sheehan

Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2008 | 2 a.m.

I was intrigued last month when the FBI announced it was reopening the investigation into the hijacking of a Northwest Airlines 727 jet in November 1971.

Special Agent Larry Carr in Seattle is leading the investigation of the legendary and oft-romanticized D.B. Cooper skyjacking in hope of solving one of the most intriguing mysteries of the past century. Stories have been circulating recently on the Internet and across AP wires suggesting that anyone with information about the crime should come forward.

Well, I’m coming forward today, but first I’d like to know, in the interests of my young children’s college educations, how much the reward is. I mean, I’m a self-employed writer with mouths to feed, so how ’bout it?

• • •

Who kidnapped Charles Lindbergh’s baby? What happened to Amelia Earhart? Where is Jimmy Hoffa buried? Did Lee Harvey Oswald really kill JFK? Who killed the Hollywood starlet known as the Black Dahlia? Did Marilyn Monroe die by her own hand, or was she killed? Who was the mystery lover in Carly Simon’s hit song “You’re So Vain”? And who was the man mythologized as D.B. Cooper, and did he really get off scot-free with most of the $200,000 in $20 bills he parachuted with into the stormy night somewhere between Seattle and Reno?

Those unsolved mysteries have generated countless books and movies and provided fodder for thousands of hours of TV for insomniacs, who never tire of revisiting these questions.

When former FBI agent and government official Mark Felt revealed himself in 2005 to be the man called “Deep Throat,” whose insider information kept Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein hot on the trail of the Watergate burglary story and led to the demise of Richard Nixon’s presidency, the airwaves ate up the story for a solid two weeks, but then quickly lost interest.

Because the riddle had been solved, all the air went out of the story in the blink of an eye. That’s because it’s more fun for the American public to keep guessing and providing plausible answers to these mysteries than it is to actually be provided the solution.

Carly Simon has refused to divulge her vain lover -- be it Warren Beatty or Mick Jagger or Cat Stevens -- for more than 30 years. She teases interrogators with unhelpful clues such as “His name has both an A and an E in it.” And she says, “If I name him, people will quit asking me about it, and that wouldn’t be any fun.”

Knowing the answer is a quick fix. Pondering the unknown is a lifetime addiction.

• • •

To do my American duty, and perhaps add to the fun of chasing down a mystery that more than likely will never be solved, I give this name to FBI agent Larry Carr: Bryant “Jack” Coffelt. That’s who I believe to be the real D.B. Cooper.

Here’s why I think Coffelt is their man:

In the early 1980s a handsome young writer in his mid-30s named Byron Brown -- a “separated at birth” clone of actor Dennis Quaid -- approached me with what he said was definitive proof that a man he knew, a former prison buddy of his father’s named Jack Coffelt, was indeed the hijacker. Brown didn’t just present a hunch; he provided me with more than 200 pages of careful research he had compiled over the previous eight years. After dissecting Brown’s findings for several weeks and grilling him repeatedly in an attempt to shoot holes in his findings, I eventually became convinced that his conclusions were valid.

We condensed his book-length findings into a 12,000-word, two-part article that ran in October and November 1983 in a magazine I edited called Las Vegan. Subsequently, the Associated Press interviewed Brown and me and ran an international wire story on Brown’s findings, which opened the media floodgates.

Over the ensuing several weeks, Brown and I must have done 30 to 50 newspaper, TV and radio interviews from coast to coast. We were even screened by producers of the popular “Phil Donahue Show,” wondering whether we’d be willing to fly to Chicago for an appearance. But as the days passed our information got so much media exposure that Donahue eventually thought our story had “gone stale.”

I was included in all these interviews as the editor who bought the story and was willing to stand behind its conclusions, but of course Brown was the one who had to answer all the difficult questions. Brown never once buckled on his findings, was never shown to be careless or unprofessional in his reporting, and made believers of nearly all who interrogated him.

Though I’d need all the pages of today’s Sun to include every piece of Brown’s compelling evidence, here are a few of the morsels he presented in his articles:

• In 1974, Brown and his father made a trip with Coffelt to the skyjacker’s likely landing spot in the Northwest to look for the backpack with money that Coffelt claimed had been blown from his shoulder grip when he left the aircraft. A beacon light, parts of an old Jeep and residue of parachute cord, all of which Coffelt had described to Brown, were found in the exact locations he had pinpointed on a map before their expedition.

• Northwest Airlines stewardess Florence Schaffner, who was handed the ransom note from D.B. Cooper and spent most of the flight seated next to him, had rejected dozens of photos and composite drawings of potential suspects that had been presented to her by the FBI. But when Brown tracked down Schaffner in Hawaii years later and showed her Coffelt’s photos, she gasped and said, “Oh my God! Where did you get those? I never thought I would see that face again! It’s him! My God, it’s him!”

• Seattle attorney George LeBissoniere, who sat three seats from Cooper on that fateful night, also positively identified him as the skyjacker from those photos. LeBissoniere then added a curious comment. “I identified those same pictures for the FBI six weeks after the skyjacking,” he said.

It was known that Coffelt had been a government informant on several high-profile cases in the years before 1971, and some speculate that, to avoid compromising the work he did for the CIA, his identity as the man known as D.B. Cooper has been kept hidden by the government.

So there you have it. Jack Coffelt is your boy. Send my reward money care of the Las Vegas Sun.

And while I’m debunking, I’ll give you 5-1 odds that Warren Beatty is the subject of Simon’s hit song. (The only other person who knows for certain is TV producer Dick Ebersol, who bought exclusive rights to the information at a Martha’s Vineyard charity auction in 2003. But he had to sign a confidentiality agreement, so he’s not talking.)