6A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, JANUARY 5, 2018
Rick Sherwood
Rick Sherwood during the Vietnam War. Robert Rackstraw briefly served under him.
Sleuth: Colbert preparing
documentary that will reveal
the code-breaking process
Continued from Page 1A
the night, roughly 50 miles
from Astoria, never to be
found but instantly a figure of
fandom and folklore.
In 2016, the FBI, insisting
“there isn’t anything new out
there,” officially closed the
case, which remains the only
unsolved skyjacking in U.S.
history.
Colbert’s evidence tying
Rackstraw to Cooper has
been strong but circum-
stantial — until his FOIA
request compelled the FBI to
release a trove of documents
that included an unpub-
lished Dec. 11, 1971, letter
the agency believes Cooper
himself typed and sent to the
Washington Post.
Cooper had also mailed
copies of the letter to the
Seattle Times, Los Angeles
Times and New York Times,
but the FBI confiscated them
before the newspapers could
print them.
Though the letters were
almost identical — assert-
ing that Cooper “knew from
the start that I wouldn’t be
caught” — each copy came
with a unique set of numbers
and alphabetical letters at the
bottom that looked like neg-
ligible gibberish.
After the letter’s release,
a member of Colbert’s team,
Rick Sherwood — an Army
Security Agency veteran
who joined the investiga-
tion because Rackstraw tem-
porarily flew under him in
Vietnam — realized some-
thing: The string of non-
sense looked an awful lot
like Army “code-speak” used
during the Vietnam War to
pinpoint the enemy.
‘Rackstraw wrote it’
With the code from the
Post letter, and a recovered
code from the Los Ange-
les Times, Sherwood man-
aged to decipher Cooper’s
seemingly random char-
acters — and they point to
the three specialized mili-
tary units (two of them top
secret at the time) Rackstraw
served in during the war: the
Army Security Agency, the
371st Radio Research Unit
and the 11th General Support
Company.
“I immediately real-
ized the team’s prime Coo-
per suspect was connected
to all three of these hidden
groups,” Sherwood said in an
email to The Daily Astorian.
Colbert said there’s only
one man who served in all
three of these units: Rack-
straw. “And that’s the smok-
ing gun.”
“The FBI thought this was
Cooper’s letter, and we can
prove Rackstraw wrote it,”
he said.
The steps Sherwood took
to decrypt the message were
divulged off the record,
but Colbert and Sherwood
walked The Daily Astorian
through them.
“I’m not really surprised
that the FBI didn’t break
it, because you really gotta
know the person, in a sense,
that made the code because
he did his own encryption,”
Sherwood said, “so I did
things that would relate to
him, and it actually broke out
that way.”
Sherwood never thought
he would use his Army code
knowledge again after leav-
ing the military, “but in this
particular case, it worked out
pretty good,” he said.
One of Rackstraw’s Viet-
nam commanders work-
ing with Colbert had hast-
ily inducted Rackstraw into
the world of top-secret mil-
itary units after a group of
soldiers died in action, but
later booted him out for lying
about his qualifications for
top-secret clearance.
The team posits that Rack-
straw’s “coded dispatch was
directed at a very small audi-
ence: the three veterans that,
according to FBI documents
and witnesses, helped him
escape the jump drop zone
by small plane,” Colbert said
in a release.
Norman de Winter
A year and a half ago,
Colbert’s search for Cooper’s
identity — a task that has
involved a 40-member “cold
case team” with 13 retired
FBI agents — became the
subject of a two-part History
documentary, “D.B. Cooper:
Case Closed?”
The program featured
North Coast residents who
recounted a peculiar epi-
sode that took place in Asto-
ria not long before Cooper’s
high-flying stunt.
A young charmer who
called himself “Norman de
Winter” and claimed to be
a well-heeled Swiss baron
arrived in town. Over a cou-
ple of months, he bonded
with townsfolk, took their
money, exploited their hospi-
tality, offered to fly a group
to his château in Switzerland
for the holidays — and van-
ished. Former Astoria Mayor
Willis Van Dusen reckoned
the con artist had scammed
about 200 people. Accord-
ing to Colbert’s research, de
Winter resurfaced a short
time later in Corvallis, before
the hijacking.
Local de Winter acquain-
Thomas Colbert
The letter sent to the Washington Post, and cc’d to other prominent publications, with a
unique code at the bottom.
tances received letters from
him after his disappearance,
around the same time letters
began showing up by another
disappearing act: Dan Coo-
per (misreported as “D.B.”
Cooper).
Though de Winter wit-
nesses said in the History
documentary that a contem-
poraneous photo of Rack-
straw resembles de Winter,
no photo of the “baron” has
turned up. If Rackstraw is
Cooper, that doesn’t mean
either man is de Winter.
However, Colbert points
to an observation made
by Senior Investigator Jon
Campbell of the South Caro-
lina Law Enforcement Divi-
sion: The odds of Rack-
straw, de Winter and Cooper
— three master criminals
with aviation backgrounds
— all falling within the
same geographic area, all
looking alike, and all seem-
ing to appear when the oth-
ers disappear is “statistically
impossible.”
If Rackstraw is de Winter,
a commenter speculated, the
pseudonym may be a sly ref-
erence to Dick Winters, the
hero of the World War II Nor-
mandy invasion who para-
chuted into France on D-Day.
(Normandy + Winters = Nor-
man de Winter).
Cooper scholars and
the History program — in
which the FBI announced
the agency would reopen the
case only with evidence like
the money or the parachute
in hand — cast doubt on the
Rackstraw hypothesis.
For the show’s finale, Tina
Mucklow, a flight attendant
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Done with D.B.
The
Daily
Astorian
called Rackstraw, 74, for a
response. Asked about Col-
bert’s claim that he can prove
Rackstraw typed the Dec. 11
letter, Rackstraw said: “Get
him to swear that everything
he said is true under the pen-
alty of perjury.” Then he
hung up.
Rackstraw has repeatedly
denied that he is D.B. Coo-
per, though he has insinuated
in interviews over the years
that he very well could be.
He has dismissed and criti-
cized Colbert’s work but has
yet to file a lawsuit.
Having pursued Cooper
since 2011, Colbert is satis-
fied with the outcome of his
search and is preparing to
move on to other projects.
The co-author of 2016’s
“The Last Master Outlaw,”
Colbert feels he has reason-
ably established his case and
plans to write a new chap-
ter covering this potentially
game-changing
develop-
ment. He is also preparing a
documentary that will reveal
the code-breaking process.
Unless Rackstraw or
someone else confesses to the
crime — an event of endur-
ing mystery and fascination
— Colbert said he will no
longer be giving Cooper-re-
lated breaking news updates.
“I don’t see anything else
to do (with D.B. Cooper),”
he said. “We’re, in essence,
done.”
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Cooper held hostage, said,
after looking at young Rack-
straw’s mugshot, that he isn’t
the man she met that fateful
night.
Colbert and others have
said that Mucklow’s trauma
may have affected her mem-
ory. The new Cooper let-
ter also mentions that the
hijacker wore a toupee and
putty makeup — a descrip-
tion consistent with that
given by a fellow passenger.
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