MarkBennett

A bit off topic, but I highly recommend Irving's book on Hughes. It's available on Amazon. It's really good. If it hadn't been fake, it would have won a Pulitzer. It was well researched and enough of it was true that it fooled people who knew Hughes and his story well. They had gotten access to (stole actually) a book being written by one of his disgruntled senior managers and used information in it. However, you don't know which parts were true and which parts were made up. Some of the stories were rumors that only the real Hughes would have known all the details, and he made up details to fill it in. (Not unlike many with Cooper suspects they like). For example, there is a story of Hughes meeting Ernest Hemingway. It was an interesting interaction. But, since Hemingway was long dead by the time Irving wrote the book, I suspect that story was all fiction. Sorry for the aside.

I can't find the original document....I might have mistyped the number. My notes were (from Piece county site) 911190540 Statutory Warrantee Deed 11/19/1991 From Edwin and Mary Smith Originally dated October 3, 1961 signed by the Smiths East half of Northeast quarter of the Northeast quarter, Section 10, Township 19 North, Range 5, EWM Together with any and all mineral rights Kenny lived at 18406 Old Buckley Hwy This is the land Kenny bought in 1961, Document 821001 is still on the Pierce County site...that's when he sold the land for $300,000. I attached that and the file that describes the parcel. You might know if it's the one behind the Safeway. It's grown up so rapidly around that area. Kenny's old house has been torn down. The first time I drove by there it was out in the middle of nowhere. Hardly recognize it now. 821001.pdf 9209150606.pdf

The process based on what I saw was the Grimes got a $7500 assumable loan on the house that Kenny was able to take over. Not a big risk for the mortgage company if Kenny could cover the payment, and it was only for 50% of the value of the house. The Grimes then took a note for the rest of purchase price. They're in second position behind the mortgage company -- so again, nothing out of the ordinary. I wasn't able to find out the purchase price because of mortgage doesn't list the price. But, there was excise tax paid, so it's possible to figure out if that document can be found. But, that's going off on a tangent. Kenny was a smart investor who was able to buy a house putting up little or no money. He also bought some wooded land in 1961 that he sold for $300,000 in the early 90s. That transaction alone explains the value of his estate when he died. Let's say you still want to make the case for Kenny being Cooper. Fine. But, if he were, those facts seem to suggest no financial windfall and he lost all of the money on the way down. If Bernie had simply told you "Kenny couldn't have been Cooper. I was with him that weekend", you would have dropped this whole thing. And, think how different the last 12 years of your life would have been.:)

Robert - keep in mind this was all during the Boeing downturn and houses were difficult to sell. Although, I'd expect this transaction to be uncommon, it's not novel. You must know some real estate people. Ask them to walk through this with you.

I don't recall anyone insinuating Tina was senile on the History Channel show. If someone did, her appearance refuted that. She came off very well. And, you do know that Colbert's team left no longer believing him ON THE SHOW. Not later. The consensus at the end of show of EVERYONE EXCEPT Colbert was that Rackstraw was not Cooper. The History Channel show did not advocate for Rackstraw -- which is why I express my doubts that you watched it.

One of the frustrations in responding to you is so many things you say are easily refutable. If you look at the scene with Tina in the history channel, they DID show her other suspects. You can easily pick out a photo of LD Cooper. Can't identify the other photos, but it's pretty clear it wasn't just Rackstraw she saw photos of.

Robert, when you say things like this, I have to believe you did not watch the History Channel program on DB Cooper. Rackstraw was Tom Colbert's suspect. At the end of the show, the two investigators (Billy Jepsen and Tom Fuentes) said they did not believe Rackstraw was Cooper. The rest of Colbert's team left him -- not believing Rackstraw was Cooper. Tom Colbert was all alone advocating that. There really is no way to watch the program and reach that conclusion.

I suppose this is possible. Anything is possible. However, if you're DB Cooper this is the last thing you'd want to do. It's been five years. The case is cold. The case is open, but the FBI is not actively searching for clues. More likely waiting for information to come up and only assigning one agent to the case. Then, the money appears and all of a sudden more agents are assigned to the case, they're looking for clues. Now, the FBI might ask if anyone saw anyone dump anything into the river. Maybe somebody did. So, instead of being able to lay low, Cooper would have attracted a whole bunch of attention to himself. That's just not smart. Not to say it couldn't happen. Prisons are full of convicts who might have never been caught if they hadn't done something stupid.

FYI - since Kenny is a topic over here.....I was in Bonney Lake last weekend getting my oil changed, I thought I'd drive by Kenny's old house (the print shop). It has been torn down -- it's just a vacant lot now. As far as Kenny goes, the story is full of contradictions. Robert -- if we were to hypothesize that Kenny was Cooper, did he get away with the money? Given what we now know (he bought a house on a rural highway no bigger than a trailer for $15,000 and didn't put up any of his own money to buy it, and his entire net worth when he died is mostly explained by some wooded land he bought in 1962 and sold in 1991), if Kenny were Cooper, he didn't get away with the money. The only real financial largess was the $5000 loan to Bernie's sister....A plausible explanation for that was it was Bernie's money in the loan. Why would he tell his sister it was Kenny's? Anyone who's ever loaned money to a family knows the answer to that one --you're less likely to get it back. I know we've been down this road many times. We know where it leads.

I know I'm wasting my time responding to this, Robert, but the only conclusion I can come to is you did not watch the History Channel Cooper broadcast. The show did not advocate Rackstraw as D.B. Cooper. Quite the opposite. At the end, only Tom Colbert remained as believing that. Not only did Tom Fuentes and Billy Jepsen not believe it, the rest of Colbert's staff also bailed.

It makes it very difficult to give you the benefit of the doubt when you deny the obvious.

You can Google “10 dollars and other valuable consideration” and get several entries explaining it. However, Shutter explained it pretty well a few posts back.

Tom Colbert fell prey to confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. But, he’s hardly alone for those with favorite suspects in the Cooper case.

I don’t know why their offices were raided, but I do know Tom Colbert was not happy with the program.

Ok, this is confusing to me. Did we watch the same broadcast? The History Channel DB Cooper doc was two separate tracks. One was Tom Colbert’s research on Rackstraw. The second separate track was Jepsen and Fuentes researching the story. At the end, Colbert believed it was Rackstraw, Colbert and Jepsen did not. The documentary was not a vehicle to push Rackstraw as a candidate. I met Jepsen and Fuentes when they interviewed Vicki ( which was not included in the broadcast). They did not have any preconceived notions at all. In fact, they hadn’t done any research about the case in advance at all. But, it was not a pro-Rackstraw broadcast. If anything it was the opposite.

Parrothead Vol, Thanks for the post. Right after this happened I emailed Marla and asked her if they told her the last suspect was LD. She confirmed the FBI had told her that. (I also asked her what specifically about LD caught the FBI's attention and she didn't know). I feel like we've gone around and around this already. Robert has his own opinions and he's entitled to have them. I don't think you're going to change his mind no matter what you post.

I believe Marla's mother has passed away. I think Marla had some memories and tried to fill in the missing details, many of them quite implausible. I think Tom Fuentes said in the history channel documentary, If someone says A and B, and they make sense, and then they say C and C sounds nuts, does that mean A & B aren't true? The FBI didn't shut down the case until after they finished one last fingerprint test on LD Cooper, so there was some part of her story the FBI found plausible. I don't know what that is, and I don't think Marla even knows exactly what that is.

I don't think that's a good representation of the History Channel broadcast. The first part was Tom Colbert, his study, his suspect and his conclusion. Then, they added Jensen and Fuentes to review Colbert's evidence as well as the other suspects. In the end, Jensen and Fuentes did not believe Rackstraw was Cooper. I wouldn't call it a pro-Rackstraw program at all. I thought the program was excellent. I had hopes they'd release a DVD including material that didn't fit in the four hours.

Robert said earlier that Tina was shown Rackstraw's photo and six other people not related to the hijacking. I don't know where that came from. If someone can go to the broadcast, you can see L.D. Cooper's photo on the coffee table where Tina was. I didn't get a good view of the other photographs. If Tina recognized any of the photos, I think it would have been part of the broadcast.

.......... On a simpler point, one of the reasons I never believed the dismissal of the chute based on Cossey's 'It's silk, and the one I gave to Cooper was nylon...' Is because after December 7, 1941 silk production and importation virtually ceased in the United States for some years afterward. The chute is almost certainly not made of silk, and that explanation for dismissal appears in article after article about it. It simply doesn't make sense. There you go again. I'm no silk expert but this is just historically inaccurate. First, US production of silk has never been much of a success. That is why we had to import it from other countries, principally Japan. Second. The US ceasing import of Japanese silk did not mean that all of the stores of silk in the United States disappeared overnight. Actually what happened in 1941 is that the US government froze the imports and commandeered all existing US companies inventories of silk. The existing stock was mandated for government use only for things like parachutes, surgical sutures, electrical insulation. Processing silk for civilian use was prohibited. Over the next few years, as the supply dwindled, they had to come up with an alternative. This still did not mean that silk chutes totally disappeared as some companies used up their supply while others quickly re-tooled for the new material. According to export records, we were also still supplying some other countries with silk parachute cloth in the mid to late 40s. I have posted all of this before as well as documentation that showed that while limited, silk parachutes were still being manufactured in some mills in the mid 40s. But really - even if the chute was not silk and was a first generation nylon - in the pictures it did not look like rip-stop nylon - even to my untrained eye. If the chutes supplied to the hijacker were made of the material that was shown at the Washington historical exhibit that Sailsaw posted....then all the wishes in the world won't turn it into what has been photographed as the Amboy chute. There was some discussion from 2010 on this site for example this one http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=3947064#3947064 saying that "silk" parachute after the 1930s, weren't really silk anymore, but some material that looked like silk. If there were any issues of biodegradation or lack thereof, that could be why. I'm just posting what I read. I encourage anyone with more knowledge than me to comment.

The truth is that Kaye was quoted correctly. And not only that, but he had ongoing concerns about the Amboy chute. This is plain from his email, and just as plain at his website. I have already quoted both. I don't believe the date printed on the Amboy chute has anything to do with repacking. It's the Date of Manufacture. And a DOM that reads February 1946 means the chances are close to nil it is actually made of silk. Same stuff, same argument. Cossey said it was silk. And that's the reason he dismissed it. If he was wrong, then how can you trust his dismissal? If the Seattle FBI says it isn't Cooper's, but doesn't give a reason, just dismisses it...then why would they say it's evidence in an ongoing case five years later? I can't possibly be the only person who wonders about all that, and the fact that no container or harness were found with the chute. Which means someone disconnected them and took them elsewhere. And no one thinks any of these things are strange? Brother, some of you must be really gullible. While we're on that subject, I have some nice beachfront property about eighty miles NE of Reno you might be interested in. Cheap, too. Picture attached. But, the point I was making was that the stories from you and Shutter were not inconsistent. If you had read the thread from January 2014, you'll see that Kaye is quoted as saying they didn't think to ask about the chute when he was granted access to evidence because it had been dismissed. Carr was still the case agent at the time. Your quote from Tom asking about seeing the chute was obviously later because Eng was the case agent by then. I'll shorten my post because I see you've edited yours to remove the snarkiness. But, can you be surprised you get the responses you get when you lash out even at people who support your position?

This is a bit of deja vu.....We had this conversation in 2014 when Robert first received the email from Tom Kaye. Start here: http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=4588693#4588693 Basic gist is Tom didn't ask to see the chute when working with Carr because it didn't seem to have any relevance. Kaye asked Eng about it later, but he wasn't sure it was even in the Seattle office, so Kaye was not able to see it. Feel free to relive the conversation from days of yore.

I think they should submit the Cossey case to "Law and Order". That way, not only will they catch the killer, they can also put him on trial and convict him -- all within 60 minutes!

It's always shocking to me when politicians get up and deny things, even when they are video'd for all to see. What are they thinking? Robert, you continually call people untrustworthy and accuse them of making "stuff" up. Why do you do that? You know every post in this thread is saved and anyone could go back and look. But, ok, let's go to the "videotape".... http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=4527422#4527422

The actual details appear to be different. Kenny did not use the promissory note to leverage a mortgage with Seafirst. (That doesn't make much sense, anyway. If I borrow $7500 from someone else, how does that give me leverage to get a bank to lend me MORE money?) If you look at the attached document, you can see that mortgage was originated not by Kenny, but by the Grimes and it was assumed by Kenny. The more likely scenario is this. The Grimes wanted to sell their house. Kenny wanted to buy it. The Grimes were willing to finance half of the balance, but Kenny didn't have any money. I suspect this: 1) The Grimes took out a $7500 mortgage against the house. 2) The Grimes kept the $7500. 3) Kenny assumed the $7500 mortgage and gave the Grimes a note for the other $7500. The net result is Kenny was able to buy the house for $0 out of pocket. The Grimes ended up with $7500 at closing and the rest as Kenny paid off the note.