The HBO documentary The Mystery of DB Cooper discusses the possibility that LD Cooper was the mysterious man who hijacked an airplane and held its passengers for ransom before a daring mid-flight escape by parachute. However, there are many details regarding LD Cooper which the film ignores, ranging from the role his brother Dewey allegedly played as his accomplice to the physical evidence that seems to eliminate LD Cooper as a suspect.
In The Mystery of DB Cooper, LD Cooper's niece Marla Cooper claimed that her family was gathered at her grandmother's house in Oregon around Thanksgiving 1971, when she was 8 years old. In the days leading up to Thanksgiving, Marla Cooper recalled her uncles LD Cooper and Dewey Cooper planning something while walking in the woods, which they jokingly referred to as a turkey hunt when she asked them what they were up to. Early Thanksgiving morning, the two arrived at their mother's house, with LD Cooper unable to walk and wearing a blood-soaked T-shirt. It was then that Dewey Cooper apparently declared, "Well we did it. We hijacked the airplane." Marla Cooper claims her father swore her to secrecy over the incident and she largely forgot about it, apart from wondering why her uncle LD stopped coming to family gatherings after December 1972, which was the last time she saw him.
The timeline of Marla Cooper's accounting does line up with the 1971 Thanksgiving Eve skyjacking, perpetrated by a man identified as both Dan Cooper and DB Cooper. However, while The Mystery of DB Cooper allows Marla Cooper to discuss her belief that her uncle was the legendary sky pirate, it skims the surface of the case and doesn't discuss the details of LD Cooper's life, or the role his family might have played in helping plan the crime or concealing it afterward. The documentary also does not discuss Marla Cooper's credibility as a witness beyond noting that she passed a polygraph exam regarding her belief that LD Cooper and DB Cooper were the same man.
The Case Against Marla Cooper
Of the four suspects profiled in The Mystery of DB Cooper, the story of LD Cooper is given the least amount of screen time. Roughly six minutes of the 87-minute documentary is devoted to Marla Cooper and her recollections of her uncle LD, including home movies and archival news footage of Marla Cooper from when she first went public with her story in 2011. This is probably because, apart from Marla Cooper's testimony, there is little evidence that LD Cooper was DB Cooper.
By Marla Cooper's own account in The Mystery of DB Cooper, she did not know anything about her uncle's apparent secret until her father told her that her uncle was DB Cooper at Christmas 1995, shortly before his death one month later. The incident "unlocked a secret box" inside Marla's mind, and she began to remember more and more as she began quizzing other family members regarding her absent uncle. She also claimed her father called her several times before his death, saying that she knew what had happened and would remember.
While Marla Cooper's claims are compelling, many doubt the validity of childhood memories that reemerged as a result of prompting by a family member. Some have also commented that Marla Cooper seems more focused on the fame and fortune that came with being connected to the DB Cooper case than collaborating her story and aiding law enforcement officials and reporters investigating the case. According to investigative journalist Bruce A. Smith, Marla Cooper became increasingly uncooperative toward him when he attempted to contact other members of her family to confirm her stories. Marla Cooper also reportedly threatened to sue The Mountain News (which published Smith's reports) after Smith attempted to contact her ex-husband and adult sons.
What Role Did The Rest Of The Cooper Family Play?
Presuming that Marla Cooper's memories are accurate, the question of her family's involvement in DB Cooper's crime still remains. According to Marla Cooper's account, the heist was planned by her uncles LD Cooper and Dewey Cooper, with LD overseeing the actual hijacking. Marla also claimed that her uncles searched the woods trying to find DB Cooper's missing money, which LD apparently became separated from during his skydive. Marla also believes that LD and Dewey stayed at the home of a third uncle for several months, while LD was recovering from his injuries.
The Mystery of DB Cooper says surprisingly little about Dewey Cooper, despite the idea of DB Cooper having an accomplice being a major point of interest in the case that separates LD Cooper from the other suspects. One major piece of evidence the HBO documentary did not mention is that Dewey Cooper worked for Boeing for a few years in the late 1960s. However, there is no evidence that Dewey Cooper had ever done any work regarding the 727 jet or that he might have learned the specialized knowledge regarding the 727 that DB Cooper possessed. Despite this, Marla Cooper claims that her uncle Dewey and his children suddenly fled to British Columbia shortly after being questioned by the FBI regarding the crime.
LD Cooper Didn't Completely Disappear After Christmas 1972
Another one of the larger oversights in The Mystery of DB Cooper is that it does not discuss the life of LD Cooper beyond Marla Cooper's memories of a kindly man who loved hunting with his brothers. Marla Cooper says the last time she saw her uncle was at Christmas in 1972. The Mystery of DB Cooper makes it sound like LD Cooper vanished off the face of the Earth at that point and could still be on the run somewhere. However, LD Cooper was confirmed to have died in 1999, and there are accounts that suggest that other members of the Cooper Family kept in touch with LD Cooper over the two decades since he last saw Marla Cooper.
Most of these accounts came from interviews recorded by investigative journalist Bruce A. Smith, who reached out to several members of the Cooper family trying to learn more about LD after his niece came forward with her story. Smith learned that LD had gotten married sometime after 1972 to a woman named Marcia, who has denied all requests to be interviewed about her life with LD Cooper. According to Janet Cooper, who married Dewey Cooper in 1981, LD Cooper served as the best man at their wedding. It was the first and only time she had met her brother-in-law, though he apparently called to offer her his condolences when Dewey Cooper died of lung cancer in 1985.
Smith also interviewed Dale Miller, a self-styled pastor who ran a home for ex-felons in Eugene, Oregon. Miller befriended LD Cooper after his wife kicked him out of their home in Sparks, Nevada. Reportedly Cooper spent the last years of his life living in Miller's ministry, but said little about his past. Indeed, Miller had no idea that Cooper had grown up in the Pacific Northwest, and was unaware of his apparent connection to the DB Cooper case until over a decade after LD Cooper's death, when Marla Cooper reached out to him about her uncle's belongings.
The DNA and Fingerprint Evidence
Unlike many other true crime documentaries, the focus of The Mystery of DB Cooper is on witness narratives rather than physical evidence. This is largely because, in the case of DB Cooper, there is little physical evidence to analyze. There is also the problem, which the film briefly discusses, that most of the physical evidence has gone missing over the past five decades and can no longer be tested using modern DNA matching techniques.
Despite this, the FBI does have some fingerprints and DNA samples it believes belong to DB Cooper. These samples have been used to dismiss many of the most popular suspects in the DB Cooper case. This includes LD Cooper, whose DNA and fingerprints were retrieved from a guitar strap provided by Marla Cooper. This fact was not mentioned in The Mystery of DB Cooper, presumably because the FBI's admission that they are not certain the fingerprints and DNA samples they have on file belonged to DB Cooper make it impossible to prove anything one way or the other without a match.