martin walkerdine
Member
- Joined
- Jan 6, 2007
- Messages
- 142
- Reaction score
- 1
Investigator Claims Depoe Bay Man Was 'DB Cooper' 5/28/2008
Investigator Claims
Depoe Bay Man Was
Infamous D.B. Cooper!
By RICK BEASLEY
Of the Beacon
DEPOE BAY He was the soldier who became a skyjacker, the skyjacker who became a priest, and the priest who lived and died in Depoe Bay!
A fantastic yarn? Not according to Galen Cook, a Spokane, Wash. lawyer who is one of the nations leading authorities on D.B. Cooper, the famous air pirate who skyjacked a Northwest Orient Boeing 727 from Seattle to Portland on the night of Nov. 24, 1971 and disappeared into popular history when he bailed-out with $200,000 in ransom money.
In an exclusive interview with the Beacon, Cook revealed how he became convinced that former Depoe Bay mystery man Wolfgang Gossett was, in fact, the infamous skyjacker D.B. Cooper.
Galen Cook has been on the trail of D.B. Cooper since the 1980s and has interviewed hundreds of people close to the case, including eyewitnesses on the ill-fated flight, airplane crewmembers, aviation and parachuting experts, FBI agents and even other suspects. The trail seemed to go cold at every turn until a break in the case in late 2007, thanks to the national radio show Coast-to-Coast AM, the popular late-night program for 2.5 million insomniacs and other night people founded by Art Bell and hosted now by George Noory and on Saturday nights by Ian Punnett. Punnett was interviewing Cook when a caller Gossetts son, Greg, a corrections officer and one of five children said he believed his father was D.B. Cooper.
Family members have helped the police solve thousands of important crimes such as the Unabomber case, so Galen Cook took the tip seriously and began a six-month investigation that brought him on at least four occasions to Depoe Bay where he interviewed people who knew Wolf Gossett intimately. Among the people he spoke with were Depoe Bay resident C.J. Winter, Gossetts caretaker in the last years of his life, a Newport attorney who claimed to have known Gossetts dark secret and even the editor of the Depoe Bay Beacon, Rick Beasley, who knew Gossett as a friend and wrote his obituary on the day he died, Sept. 1, 2003.
Dozens of other people who knew Gossett including family members and ex-wives, people with whom he served in the military, co-workers in the court system and law enforcement officials who knew him as a private investigator cooperated and in many cases revealed their belief that Gossett carried an ominous secret that had something to do with the D.B. Cooper case. He often dropped hints about the skyjacking that some people took as merely a fascination for the topic.
He told his last wife, Elaine Hetschel, that he would write D.B. Coopers epitath, Cook said. There were others that said he always talked about D.B. Cooper. There was all this third-person narrative, but he never told the people closest to him, I did the job.
But Gossett did confess to at least two people, according to Cook. One is a retired Salt Lake City judge who was Gossetts boss and close friend when he worked in the Salt Lake City public defenders office.
Wolfgang and I were on very good terms, the judge recalled in his interview with Galen Cook. In 1977 he walked into my office and closed the door and said he thought he might be in some trouble, that he was involved in a hijacking in Portland and Seattle a few years ago and that he might have left prints behind. He said he was D.B. Cooper. I told him to keep his mouth shut and dont do anything stupid, and not to bring it up again.
The other person who claims to have known Gossetts secret is a retired Newport attorney who befriended Gossett and once took him on a mysterious trip to a Vancouver, B.C. bank where some of the ransom money may have been stashed in a lock box.
A lot of credible people in his past told me that Gossett could have been D.B. Cooper, Cook said. They believe he could have gotten away with it. He had the training, the motive and the opportunity, and the more I got into this case the more he started to become the most viable suspect ever. The circumstantial evidence is really strong. I feel weve got the right guy.
Cook spent time at the C.J. Winter home in Depoe Bay where he went through the belongings of Gossett and collected a bandana with a set of Airborne wings that Wolfgang wore at all times. The bandana contains hair strands that could provide conclusive DNA proof that Gossett was the hijacker. The only thing standing in the way is cooperation from the FBI, which claims to have a DNA sample from the clip-on tie that D.B. Cooper left aboard the airplane, as well as a partial print from a cocktail glass. The much-vaunted federal agency has been silent on the issue up to now, including a response to the full set of fingerprints provided to the G-men by Galen Cook. Cooks relationship with the FBI is a little rocky; he once sued the agency under the Freedom of Information Act.
Gossetts personal history is eye-popping and could be ripped from the pages of a spy novel. Galen Cooks research, documented by official records, revealed that he was born William Pratt Gossett in San Diego in 1930, the son of a Navy commander later stationed at Pearl Harbor. At the age of 11, Bill Gossett witnessed Japanese bombers attacking the base. In 1946 at age 16 Gossett joined the Army Air Force, then switched branches in 1954 to become a U.S. Marine. After 10 years in the Corps, he jumped to the U.S. Army, serving one tour in Korea and two tours in Vietnam, where he earned a Purple Heart for wounds and several awards for valor. Throughout his military career, he attended dozens of elite Armed Services schools where he learned military law, fluent French he did a tour at the U.S. embassy in France and became a skilled survivalist and combat parachutist with hundreds of high-altitude and night jumps. He finished his career as an ROTC instructor and retired from the Army at Ft. Lewis, Wash., in 1973, less than two years after the notorious skyjacking.
Gossett returned to Utah, where he had inaugurated the ROTC program at Weber State College, and became a private detective specializing in money fraud, cults and missing persons. His biggest moment came when he assisted the FBI in rescuing a woman from the Bhagwan Rajneeshs compound in Antelope, Ore. Among the documents Galen Cook found among Gossetts personal belongings at the Depoe Bay home of C.J. Winter was a letter of commendation from the FBI, which still has an investigator assigned to the D.B. Cooper case. Gossett also worked for the public defenders office in Salt Lake City, where he was well-known and respected by police and court officials including the police chief of Ogden, Utah, who said Gossett could eat bullets and call it a meal.
In another amazing twist to Gossetts life, he officially changed his name to Wolfgang and became a priest in the Old Catholic Church, SLC Diocese, in 1988 a move that answered, according to family members, a spiritual calling that hed always heard. Finally, in 1994, Gossett moved to Newport where he worked for attorney Dan Poling, a Depoe Bay resident who died several years ago. Gossett retired to Depoe Bay and became known as a man about town who had many friends, often won on the gaming machines at Gracies Sea Hag and spoke-out at City Council meetings.
What many people didnt know is that Gossett had a dark side, including four failed marriages, five children and money troubles from gambling. Cooks research places Gossett in Ogden, Utah, around the time of the skyjacking. He was an ROTC instructor making $15,000 per year, and newly separated from his wife. Galen Cook said that Gossett chose the date for the heist because he had a week off from his duties.
Opportunity, and a brilliant plan, was the key to the whole D.B. Cooper thing, Cook said. He didnt have to be at work or at home. He had the level of skills and ability to plan the entire thing with military precision, and to not only parachute from the plane but to survive.
According to Cook, Gossett took a flight from Ogden to San Francisco where he donned his Dan Cooper disguise. The name Dan was Gossetts inside joke. He had a brother, now deceased, named Danny. Growing up, he would always blame Danny whenever he got into trouble by declaring, Danny did it! The name Cooper appears to be randomly picked. Portland police mistakenly came up with the initials D.B. during their investigation, and the name stuck.
My research indicates that the reason he avoided detection on the night of the jump and the following days was because searchers were looking in the wrong state, Cook said. D.B. Cooper cleared the Columbia River and landed in Oregon, where he made his way back to the airport and returned to Utah. It took him three days, in and out.
Galen Cook has tied-up many of the loose threads of the case, such as the mystery over some of the ransom money that was discovered on a Columbia River bar in 1980. He also explains how D.B. Cooper selected the one parachute among the three brought to the aircraft that actually worked. But those details, and others, will have to simmer until the publication of his book. Cook left for Alaska on May 1, where he will sequester himself at his fathers home for three months to write the last chapter on the D.B. Cooper caper.
Its an incredible story, he said. The air pirate who became a priest and marries and buries people when hes not out helping the FBI solve criminal cases. And in later life he becomes civic-minded by attending City Council meetings in Depoe Bay and becomes a late-life jogger who runs around town wearing his military parachute badge on his headband to remind himself of who he really is. This story is going to be a blockbuster.
For more information on Galen Cook and his investigation, go to coasttocoastam.com. For more on D.B. Cooper, got to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._B._Cooper on the internet.
Investigator Claims Depoe Bay Man Was 'DB Cooper' 5/28/2008
Investigator Claims
Depoe Bay Man Was
Infamous D.B. Cooper!
Investigator Claims
Depoe Bay Man Was
Infamous D.B. Cooper!
By RICK BEASLEY
Of the Beacon
DEPOE BAY He was the soldier who became a skyjacker, the skyjacker who became a priest, and the priest who lived and died in Depoe Bay!
A fantastic yarn? Not according to Galen Cook, a Spokane, Wash. lawyer who is one of the nations leading authorities on D.B. Cooper, the famous air pirate who skyjacked a Northwest Orient Boeing 727 from Seattle to Portland on the night of Nov. 24, 1971 and disappeared into popular history when he bailed-out with $200,000 in ransom money.
In an exclusive interview with the Beacon, Cook revealed how he became convinced that former Depoe Bay mystery man Wolfgang Gossett was, in fact, the infamous skyjacker D.B. Cooper.
Galen Cook has been on the trail of D.B. Cooper since the 1980s and has interviewed hundreds of people close to the case, including eyewitnesses on the ill-fated flight, airplane crewmembers, aviation and parachuting experts, FBI agents and even other suspects. The trail seemed to go cold at every turn until a break in the case in late 2007, thanks to the national radio show Coast-to-Coast AM, the popular late-night program for 2.5 million insomniacs and other night people founded by Art Bell and hosted now by George Noory and on Saturday nights by Ian Punnett. Punnett was interviewing Cook when a caller Gossetts son, Greg, a corrections officer and one of five children said he believed his father was D.B. Cooper.
Family members have helped the police solve thousands of important crimes such as the Unabomber case, so Galen Cook took the tip seriously and began a six-month investigation that brought him on at least four occasions to Depoe Bay where he interviewed people who knew Wolf Gossett intimately. Among the people he spoke with were Depoe Bay resident C.J. Winter, Gossetts caretaker in the last years of his life, a Newport attorney who claimed to have known Gossetts dark secret and even the editor of the Depoe Bay Beacon, Rick Beasley, who knew Gossett as a friend and wrote his obituary on the day he died, Sept. 1, 2003.
Dozens of other people who knew Gossett including family members and ex-wives, people with whom he served in the military, co-workers in the court system and law enforcement officials who knew him as a private investigator cooperated and in many cases revealed their belief that Gossett carried an ominous secret that had something to do with the D.B. Cooper case. He often dropped hints about the skyjacking that some people took as merely a fascination for the topic.
He told his last wife, Elaine Hetschel, that he would write D.B. Coopers epitath, Cook said. There were others that said he always talked about D.B. Cooper. There was all this third-person narrative, but he never told the people closest to him, I did the job.
But Gossett did confess to at least two people, according to Cook. One is a retired Salt Lake City judge who was Gossetts boss and close friend when he worked in the Salt Lake City public defenders office.
Wolfgang and I were on very good terms, the judge recalled in his interview with Galen Cook. In 1977 he walked into my office and closed the door and said he thought he might be in some trouble, that he was involved in a hijacking in Portland and Seattle a few years ago and that he might have left prints behind. He said he was D.B. Cooper. I told him to keep his mouth shut and dont do anything stupid, and not to bring it up again.
The other person who claims to have known Gossetts secret is a retired Newport attorney who befriended Gossett and once took him on a mysterious trip to a Vancouver, B.C. bank where some of the ransom money may have been stashed in a lock box.
A lot of credible people in his past told me that Gossett could have been D.B. Cooper, Cook said. They believe he could have gotten away with it. He had the training, the motive and the opportunity, and the more I got into this case the more he started to become the most viable suspect ever. The circumstantial evidence is really strong. I feel weve got the right guy.
Cook spent time at the C.J. Winter home in Depoe Bay where he went through the belongings of Gossett and collected a bandana with a set of Airborne wings that Wolfgang wore at all times. The bandana contains hair strands that could provide conclusive DNA proof that Gossett was the hijacker. The only thing standing in the way is cooperation from the FBI, which claims to have a DNA sample from the clip-on tie that D.B. Cooper left aboard the airplane, as well as a partial print from a cocktail glass. The much-vaunted federal agency has been silent on the issue up to now, including a response to the full set of fingerprints provided to the G-men by Galen Cook. Cooks relationship with the FBI is a little rocky; he once sued the agency under the Freedom of Information Act.
Gossetts personal history is eye-popping and could be ripped from the pages of a spy novel. Galen Cooks research, documented by official records, revealed that he was born William Pratt Gossett in San Diego in 1930, the son of a Navy commander later stationed at Pearl Harbor. At the age of 11, Bill Gossett witnessed Japanese bombers attacking the base. In 1946 at age 16 Gossett joined the Army Air Force, then switched branches in 1954 to become a U.S. Marine. After 10 years in the Corps, he jumped to the U.S. Army, serving one tour in Korea and two tours in Vietnam, where he earned a Purple Heart for wounds and several awards for valor. Throughout his military career, he attended dozens of elite Armed Services schools where he learned military law, fluent French he did a tour at the U.S. embassy in France and became a skilled survivalist and combat parachutist with hundreds of high-altitude and night jumps. He finished his career as an ROTC instructor and retired from the Army at Ft. Lewis, Wash., in 1973, less than two years after the notorious skyjacking.
Gossett returned to Utah, where he had inaugurated the ROTC program at Weber State College, and became a private detective specializing in money fraud, cults and missing persons. His biggest moment came when he assisted the FBI in rescuing a woman from the Bhagwan Rajneeshs compound in Antelope, Ore. Among the documents Galen Cook found among Gossetts personal belongings at the Depoe Bay home of C.J. Winter was a letter of commendation from the FBI, which still has an investigator assigned to the D.B. Cooper case. Gossett also worked for the public defenders office in Salt Lake City, where he was well-known and respected by police and court officials including the police chief of Ogden, Utah, who said Gossett could eat bullets and call it a meal.
In another amazing twist to Gossetts life, he officially changed his name to Wolfgang and became a priest in the Old Catholic Church, SLC Diocese, in 1988 a move that answered, according to family members, a spiritual calling that hed always heard. Finally, in 1994, Gossett moved to Newport where he worked for attorney Dan Poling, a Depoe Bay resident who died several years ago. Gossett retired to Depoe Bay and became known as a man about town who had many friends, often won on the gaming machines at Gracies Sea Hag and spoke-out at City Council meetings.
What many people didnt know is that Gossett had a dark side, including four failed marriages, five children and money troubles from gambling. Cooks research places Gossett in Ogden, Utah, around the time of the skyjacking. He was an ROTC instructor making $15,000 per year, and newly separated from his wife. Galen Cook said that Gossett chose the date for the heist because he had a week off from his duties.
Opportunity, and a brilliant plan, was the key to the whole D.B. Cooper thing, Cook said. He didnt have to be at work or at home. He had the level of skills and ability to plan the entire thing with military precision, and to not only parachute from the plane but to survive.
According to Cook, Gossett took a flight from Ogden to San Francisco where he donned his Dan Cooper disguise. The name Dan was Gossetts inside joke. He had a brother, now deceased, named Danny. Growing up, he would always blame Danny whenever he got into trouble by declaring, Danny did it! The name Cooper appears to be randomly picked. Portland police mistakenly came up with the initials D.B. during their investigation, and the name stuck.
My research indicates that the reason he avoided detection on the night of the jump and the following days was because searchers were looking in the wrong state, Cook said. D.B. Cooper cleared the Columbia River and landed in Oregon, where he made his way back to the airport and returned to Utah. It took him three days, in and out.
Galen Cook has tied-up many of the loose threads of the case, such as the mystery over some of the ransom money that was discovered on a Columbia River bar in 1980. He also explains how D.B. Cooper selected the one parachute among the three brought to the aircraft that actually worked. But those details, and others, will have to simmer until the publication of his book. Cook left for Alaska on May 1, where he will sequester himself at his fathers home for three months to write the last chapter on the D.B. Cooper caper.
Its an incredible story, he said. The air pirate who became a priest and marries and buries people when hes not out helping the FBI solve criminal cases. And in later life he becomes civic-minded by attending City Council meetings in Depoe Bay and becomes a late-life jogger who runs around town wearing his military parachute badge on his headband to remind himself of who he really is. This story is going to be a blockbuster.
For more information on Galen Cook and his investigation, go to coasttocoastam.com. For more on D.B. Cooper, got to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._B._Cooper on the internet.
Investigator Claims Depoe Bay Man Was 'DB Cooper' 5/28/2008
Investigator Claims
Depoe Bay Man Was
Infamous D.B. Cooper!
