olemisscub

No, FOIA won’t allow for the release of unidentified prints.

The cig butts weren’t lost but we’re intentionally destroyed by the Vegas office for lacking evidentiary value. We have the FBI files confirming it. This likely occurred in Dec 71 once Vegas got the butts back from the crime lab.

That’s correct. Not a strong enough lead at the time to warrant a subject file.

I’m not sure if he was a “career criminal” but I wouldn’t be surprised if he was a prior felon. Definitely don’t think this was a singular crime. All of the hijackers of that era who weren’t suffering major mental trauma or battling mental illness of some sort were small time hoods like McNally or Melvin Fisher. As for Cini being the inspiration…hell yes. 100% in my mind. It seems highly, highly improbable that two guys would simultaneously be developing this totally novel idea. I imagine Cooper saw the Cini story and a light bulb went off in his head. He had some sort of prior knowledge or experience with a 727 and everything clicked for him.

Bank robberies don’t get nearly that amount of money. Bank robbers have to be very quick about it. They can usually only get what the tellers have. $200k in 71 was 1.4 million today. You’d never get that by running into a bank. For reference, McNally told me that he had been casing a Brinks truck route in Detroit at the time of the Cooper hijacking. When he saw the amount of money Cooper got then he shifted his focus to a hijacking.

Do bank robbers need specific motives other than the prospect of quick enrichment?

This document actually makes him a better suspect in my eyes. I have a hard (almost impossible) time taking any suspect seriously who doesn't have some sort of aviation experience, but he's otherwise a really good template for the type of individual who I'm thinking Cooper may have been. This guy clearly had mental issues and was in and out of psych wards, had a brother who worked for Boeing, was a total failure in life, had just experienced a major trauma with his wife committing suicide, and he fits the physical profile remarkably well. Recall that Tina said he was the closest match to Cooper she'd ever seen. And heck, that document shows that he had no problem using his real last name as part of an alias. But like I said, absent some aviation knowledge/experience, you aren't Cooper.

I'm not sure what it is, but one thing I'm getting increasingly pissed off about is the redactions. Take this one for example. Why would the estimated age of a STRANGER be redacted??

This is my doing. I really don't understand the FBI sometimes. I FOIA'd for those photos a few months ago, asking for high resolution scans of them. Now they show up totally out of place at the start of the Vault drop. So the FBI I guess thinks that putting those in there is going to placate me. No, this doesn't placate me, FBI. I asked for HIGH. RESOLUTION. SCANS. for a reason. And for what it's worth, Al Cooper was bald in those photos. That hair was lifted from the sketch and placed on his head. Also, he had a beard in the original mugshot too, which they removed in most of those. I currently have a FOIA going on with the Albuquerque PD for that photo. I figured I'd just go through them and it'd be faster. But that was a few months ago. Every few weeks they respond and say they'll be getting to me soon. So that's better than nothing I guess.

I sent that to Marla. She obviously wasn’t aware of it. She says that his eyes weren’t blue and thinks LD’s mom is covering for him. The mom also says she hasn’t seen LD since he absconded from the VA hospital in October but Marla says that LD was living with his mom at the time so that’s another thing that the mom is lying about.

WOW! Uncle LD was investigated in 71.

Just an embellishment. Only six passengers told the FBI they saw the hijacker: Mitchell, Gregory, Labissoniere, House, Spreckel, and Richard Simmons. Passengers who later claimed to have seen Cooper yet apparently did not: Finegold, Mike Cooper, and Jack Almstad.

Sorry to besmirch a passenger on the Cooper flight, but this is an embellishment on his part. We have his 302.

Nah they aren’t being clever like that. My understanding from Larry is that it’s just a matter of them not turning the paperwork in yet.

I have worked with Larry extensively on the book. Larry was indeed “technically” reassigned to the case in the event that money, parachute, or a body showed up. He joked that he was like the “Agent Emeritus” for the Cooper case. It is true that the case file isn’t officially closed, but that’s just a paperwork technicality according to Larry.

The tie is useless as far as I'm concerned. Far, far too contaminated over the years by various agents and others touching it. They shipped that thing in the regular US mail back and forth so many times to different FBI offices. The only two sources for legit DNA, at least in my opinion, are on the shroud lines and from the hair slide. The shroud lines on the cannibalized reserve canopy haven't been handled nearly as much over the past 50 years as the tie. When Cooper was cutting the shroud lines he no doubt had to grip the lines tight to be able to cut through them. He certainly would have left skin cells on there. I have a feeling that the hair slide is an "1A Miscellaneous Folder" in the Vegas office. Larry explained to me that FBI offices have these folders that are essentially for "lost and found" items of evidence.

PDX had one

Didn't they tell you that it was male DNA?

I'm nasty? Do you not know what emojis are used for? They are used to convey the tone of a post. You cannot tell tone over the written word. I'm clearly in a light hearted mood, thus the emoji. So there's no need to insult me. I try to be friendly with you and joke around with you but it just doesn't work. I really don't understand how you can watch my videos and think I'm some angry jerk. The only reason I post in this ghost town of a forum at all is because I value your insight with most things, but if you're going to just constantly assume that every post I make is done with a stick up my ass wanting to fight you, then there's really no point. I'm not even remotely being combative with you. I've never heard your voice. I don't know what your "energy" is. But you should know mine by now. So how you consistently mistake my tone so fundamentally is a mystery to me.

Could have just stopped there.

I don't need to take a breath. I'm calm as can be with you. How is Farrell's claim that Cooper was wearing his front chute any different than his claim that the matchbook was used to "convey notes."? Both are the ONLY times that such a claim is asserted in the entirety of the FBI Files.

That same report says Cooper was wearing the dummy chute. Fly, are you prepared to make this Cooper canon?

Good heavens!

I didn't forget about the FBI document. I concluded that we had moved past discussing that because it insinuates that the matchbook was carried to the cockpit, unless you think "convey notes" is some cute way for saying that he wrote a note and handed it to Tina. So I'm not ignoring it, I just thought we had moved past it. And my dude...this is silly. No evidence or reasonable argument to refute it? Aside from the fact that Tina herself never says ANYTHING at all about the matches being used to "convey notes". It's not mentioned in Tosaw either. I don't think you can hang your hat on a single statement written years later in an FBI report, especially when it is contradicted by Tina's own statements from that very night. If he had pulled out a pen and wrote something down on a matchbook and passed it to Tina, don't you think she'd have mentioned that? Of course she would have. He had no need to write anything in a matchbook. He just whispered instructions to her. This is not even mentioning how awkward it is to write a note in a matchbook sitting in an airplane seat while you are maintaining a pretext that you're going to detonate a bomb at any moment. I can't see it. There was no reason for Cooper to have done such a thing nor is there any evidence that he did so. Cooper whipping out a pen and handwriting something on the matchbook would have come up at some point in the files apart from appearing one time in a review document written years later. And just look at the similarity in Rat's 302 and Farrell's paragraph. Do you think Farrell wrote that long report from memory? Of course not. He had the 302's in front of him when he was writing it. Quite easy to see how you could morph Rat's statement into what Farrell ended up writing. And I think perhaps the biggest tell that Farrell is relying on Rat's 302 is that phrase "match cover." As I said, the only two times that phrase is found in the 40,000 pages we have so far is Rat's 302 and Farrell's report. Given that we know Farrell was almost certainly relying on the 302's when constructing his report, the mistake seems obvious.

Flo's writing. So why would he care?