D. B. Cooper is a media epithet used to refer to an unidentified man who hijacked a Boeing 727 aircraft in United States airspace between Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, on the afternoon of November 24, 1971. He extorted $200,000 in ransom and parachuted to an uncertain fate over southwestern Washington. The man purchased his airline ticket using the alias Dan Cooper but, because of a news miscommunication, became known in popular lore as D. B. Cooper.
John Edgar Hoover was an American law enforcement administrator who served as the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the United States. He was appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation – the FBI's predecessor – in 1924 and was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935, where he remained director for another 37 years until his death in 1972 at the age of 77. Hoover has been credited with building the FBI into a larger crime-fighting agency than it was at its inception and with instituting a number of modernizations to police technology, such as a centralized fingerprint file and forensic laboratories. Hoover is also credited with establishing and expanding a national blacklist, referred to as the FBI Index or Index List, renamed in 2001 as the Terrorist Screening Database which the FBI still compiles and manages.
Khalid Muhammad Abdallah al-Mihdhar was a Saudi Arabian hijacker. He was one of the five hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, which was flown into the Pentagon as part of the September 11 attacks.
John Emil List was an American murderer and long-time fugitive. On November 9, 1971, List killed his wife, mother, and three children at their home in Westfield, New Jersey, and then disappeared; he had planned the murders so meticulously that nearly a month passed before anyone suspected that anything was amiss.
Richard Allensworth Jewell was an American security guard and law enforcement officer who alerted police during the Centennial Olympic Park bombing at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia. He discovered a backpack containing three pipe bombs on the park grounds and helped evacuate the area before the bomb exploded, saving many people from injury or death. For months afterwards he was suspected of planting the bomb, leading to adverse publicity that "came to symbolize the excesses of law enforcement and the news media."
PENTTBOM is the codename for the Federal Bureau of Investigation's probe into the September 11 attacks of 2001, the largest criminal inquiry in the FBI's history. Its name stands for "Pentagon/Twin Towers Bombing Investigation". The investigation was launched on September 11, 2001, and involved 4,000 special agents and 3,000 professional employees.
Alexander Michel Odeh (April 4, 1944 – October 11, 1985) was a Palestinian activist who was assassinated in a bombing as he opened the door of his office at 1905 East 17th Street, Santa Ana, California. Odeh was west-coast regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC).
Ariel is an unincorporated community in Cowlitz County, Washington. Ariel is located 11 miles (18 km) northeast of the city of Woodland along Washington State Route 503, situated north of the Lewis River and on the northwest bank of Lake Merwin. The Ariel community is part of the Woodland School District, a K-12 school district of about 2,200 students.
Mark S. Zaid is an American attorney, based in Washington, D.C., with a practice focused on national security law, freedom of speech constitutional claims, and government accountability.
Richard Floyd McCoy Jr. was an American aircraft hijacker. McCoy hijacked a United Airlines passenger jet for ransom in 1972. Due to a similar modus operandi, law enforcement officials named McCoy as a suspect for the still-unidentified "D. B. Cooper", who committed his unsolved crime four-and-a-half months before McCoy.
D. B. Cooper is a media epithet used to describe an unidentified man who hijacked a Boeing 727 on November 24, 1971, extorted a US$200,000 ransom, and parachuted to an unknown fate. He was never seen again, and only $5,880 of the ransom money has been found. The incident continues to influence popular culture, and has inspired references in books, film, and music.
The 2001 anthrax attacks, also known as Amerithrax, occurred in the United States over the course of several weeks beginning on September 18, 2001, one week after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to several news media offices and to Democratic Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, killing five people and infecting 17 others. According to the FBI, the ensuing investigation became "one of the largest and most complex in the history of law enforcement".
At around 9:30 pm on September 11, 2001, George Tenet, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) told the president and U.S. senior officials inside the bunker underneath the White House that the CIA's Counterterrorism Center had determined that Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda were behind the September 11 attacks. Two weeks after 9/11, the Federal Bureau of Investigation connected the hijackers to al-Qaeda, a militant Salafist Islamist multi-national organization. In a number of video, audio, interview and printed statements, senior members of al-Qaeda have also asserted responsibility for organizing the September 11 attacks.
George Edward Wright is a Portuguese citizen of American origin, known for taking part in the hijacking of Delta Air Lines Flight 841. Originally arrested and convicted for murder in 1962 and sentenced to up to 30 years in prison, George Wright escaped from prison in 1970 and hijacked a Delta Air Lines flight in 1972 with a number of accomplices.
Dan Cooper is a Franco-Belgian comics series about a fictional Canadian military flying ace and rocketship pilot.
Rackstraw is a surname. Notable people with the surname include:
Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 710 was a Boeing 737-200 flight from Sacramento, California, to Burbank, California with a stop in San Francisco that was hijacked by Dimitr Alexiev and Michael Azmanoff, two Bulgarian immigrants, on July 5, 1972, shortly after take-off from Sacramento Airport. The hijackers demanded $800,000, two parachutes and to be taken to the Soviet Union. The plane landed at the San Francisco Airport, then took off after 20 minutes and spent the next hour circling while the hijackers waited for the airline to accept their demands. The hijacking ended on the runway at San Francisco International Airport when four agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation stormed the plane killing both hijackers. Passenger E. H. Stanley Carter, a sixty-six-year-old retired railroad conductor from Montreal, was also killed; passengers Leo R. Gormley, a recently retired railroad conductor of Los Angeles and actor Victor Sen Yung were wounded and survived. These are the first passengers killed or wounded in a hijacking in the United States. The hijackers were identified as 28-year-old Dimitr Alexiev of Hayward, California, and 28-year-old Michael Dimitrov Azmanoff, of unknown residence.
The alleged Saudi role in the September 11 attacks is the belief that the Saudi Arabian government was connected to the September 11 attacks, an allegation that the government of Saudi Arabia has regularly denied. The 2004 Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States "found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded [Al Qaeda]" to conspire in the attacks, or that it funded the attackers even though the "report identifies Saudi Arabia as the primary source of al-Qaeda funding". Although 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens, the Saudi government had broad immunity from September 11 tragedy lawsuits in the United States before a U.S. District Court for the SDNY judge allowed a suit against the government in March 2018.
Thomas J. Colbert is an American consultant, writer, producer and former media executive. He is the co-author of The Last Master Outlaw, a book that documents his five-year cold case investigation of D. B. Cooper suspect Robert Rackstraw. The book became the subject of a documentary on the History Channel which Colbert exec-produced. He currently operates TJC Consulting, a consulting firm in Los Angeles. Prior to his work as a consultant, he was a story researcher for CBS and Paramount Pictures and founder of media service Industry R&D.
