Woman says uncle is D.B. Cooper suspect

August 4, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

Seattle Times

SEATTLE

The “credible suspect” the FBI is investigating in the D.B. Cooper skyjacking case is a man named Lynn Doyle Cooper, who reportedly died in 1999.

ABC News first revealed the name Wednesday in an interview with Cooper’s niece, Marla Cooper, who said she is cooperating with the FBI.

Steve Dean, the assistant special agent in charge of the criminal division of the Seattle FBI office, confirmed Wednesday that Marla Cooper had contacted the bureau and turned over items to assist in the investigation.

Cooper, citing childhood memories, told ABC News she is convinced her uncle was the man who hijacked a Seattle-bound jet on Thanksgiving Eve 1971 and parachuted over Southwest Washington with $200,000 in cash.

“I’m certain he was my uncle, Lynn Doyle Cooper, who we called L.D. Cooper,” she told ABC News.

Although some investigators concluded the skyjacker died in the jump, a body never was found in what remains America’s only unsolved hijacking.

The FBI said earlier this week that it was investigating “a promising lead” in the case but would identify a possible suspect only as a man who died more than 10 years ago.

Cooper, whose hometown wasn’t revealed, told ABC News that she is working on a book about her uncle but said that wasn’t her primary motivation for coming forward.

She said that she was 8 years old at the time of the fabled skyjacking.

Cooper said she recalled her uncle and a second uncle planning something suspicious at her grandmother’s house in Sisters, Ore.

“My two uncles, who I only saw at holiday time, were planning something very mischievous,” Cooper told ABC News. “I was watching them using some very expensive walkie-talkies that they had purchased. They left to supposedly go turkey hunting, and Thanksgiving morning I was waiting for them to return.”

After Northwest Orient Flight 305 was hijacked, L.D. Cooper came home claiming to have been in a car accident, Cooper told ABC News.

“My uncle L.D. was wearing a white T-shirt, and he was bloody and bruised and a mess, and I was horrified. I began to cry. My other uncle, who was with L.D., said, ‘Marla, just shut up and go get your dad,’” she said.

She said she is convinced the car accident was a ruse and that her uncle was injured in a parachute jump.