Nacho's Whoring Amazon Wishlist of Death
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FBI: 'Credible lead' surfaces in D.B. Cooper caseSEATTLE (AP) — The FBI says it has a "credible" lead in the D.B. Cooper case involving the 1971 hijacking of a passenger jet over Washington state and the suspect's legendary parachute escape.The fate and identity of the hijacker dubbed "D.B. Cooper" has remained a mystery in the 40 years since a man jumped from a Northwest Orient Airlines 727 flight with $200,000 in ransom.The recent tip provided to the FBI came from a law enforcement member who directed investigators to a person who might have helpful information on the suspect, FBI spokeswoman Ayn Sandalo Dietrich told The Seattle Times on Sunday. She called the new information the "most promising lead we have right now," but cautioned that investigators were not on the verge of breaking the case."With any lead our first step is to assess how credible it is," Sandalo Dietrich told the Seattle Post Intelligencer on Saturday. "Having this come through another law enforcement (agency), having looked it over when we got it - it seems pretty interesting."Dietrich says an item belonging to the man was sent to a lab in Quantico, Va., for forensic testing. She did not provide specifics about the item or the man's identity.Federal investigators have checked more than 1,000 leads since the suspect bailed out on Nov. 24, 1971, over the Pacific Northwest. The man who jumped gave his name as Dan Cooper and claimed shortly after takeoff in Portland, Ore., that he had a bomb, leading the flight crew to land the plane in Seattle, where passengers were exchanged for parachutes and ransom money.The flight then took off for Mexico with the suspect and flight crew on board before the man parachuted from the plane.The FBI's recent tip in the case was first reported by The Telegraph newspaper in London.
My uncle was D.B. Cooper, Oklahoma woman claims(CNN) -- It's an extraordinary claim -- one based on a 40-year-old memory -- but one the FBI has been using in an attempt to untangle the unsolved case of skyjacker D.B. Cooper.To Marla Cooper of Oklahoma, her uncle was D.B. Cooper -- except she knew him as Uncle L.D. She believes he died in 1999."I saw my uncle plotting a scheme," Cooper told CNN's Brooke Baldwin of what she said she remembers witnessing as an eight-year-old girl four decades ago.Cooper said she was with two uncles at her grandmother's house around Thanksgiving time."I was with them while they were plotting it. I didn't really know what was going on," Cooper said. "Afterwards on Thanksgiving Day, I saw them return and I heard them discussing what they had done with my father. I have very vivid memories of it."Her claim might be cause for healthy speculation, especially 40 years after the fact, but two sources close to the investigation have told CNN that Marla Cooper's tip led to the FBI reviving the case and for the past year the agency has been actively working the lead.On November 24, 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper -- the "D.B." apparently was a myth created by the press, according to the FBI -- hijacked Northwest Orient Flight 305 and succeeded in getting authorities to give him $200,000 and parachutes in return for letting passengers off the plane.The man then asked to be flown to Mexico City but jumped out of the back of the plane somewhere between Seattle, Washington, and Reno, Nevada. Authorities have never been able to prove whether the man survived or what his actual identity was.FBI working new lead in D.B. Cooper hijacking caseMarla Cooper says he did survive, but maybe, just barely."He and my other uncle came back very early on Thanksgiving morning and my Uncle L.D. was wounded," she said. "He had blood on his shirt. He was banged up. He was really in bad shape."She said the Korean War veteran later received treatment for his injuries at a VA hospital.It was then Cooper's father swore her to secrecy, she said."He explained that what my uncles had done could mean death and he said, 'Marla, you can never speak of this,'" according to Cooper, who said she last saw L.D. Cooper around Christmas 1972."He just vanished from the life that he had known before," she said, noting that her uncle missed her grandmother's funeral around 1975.The FBI hasn't directly commented on Marla Cooper's claims, but a spokesman for the agency did say this week that the tip the agency is investigating came to them through a retired law enforcement officer, who had a contact who thought he or she knew the skyjacker's identity but added the suspect was dead.Marla Cooper said she gave the FBI a guitar strap her uncle had given her mother. She said they couldn't find any of his fingerprints on it."Family members of the deceased have cooperated with us and given us access to items which belonged to the deceased," said Fred Gutt with the FBI's Seattle Field Office. The FBI's lab started looking for evidence that might prove the dead person was the man who skyjacked Flight 305. The FBI wanted to retrieve items with fingerprints belonging to the new suspect.Gutt said the FBI knows Cooper had handled certain papers, including his plane ticket, and touched plane seats, but many fingerprints were found on those items. Through the years, the FBI managed to identify some fingerprints but not all of them.Gutt would not discuss the suspect's identity, the evidence retrieved or what the lab results were. But, Gutt said, "so far there's not a lot that's inconsistent" with the suspect matching D.B. Cooper.Gutt added the FBI has not been able to prove the person is the mysterious skyjacker and the law enforcement agency still does not know for certain whether Cooper survived his leap out of the plane almost four decades ago during bad weather.Although the FBI has been looking into the new lead for a year, it was first revealed during an interview with The Telegraph of London in advance of the 40th anniversary of the unsolved case this November.One clue came in 1980, when a young boy found a rotting package full of $20 bills -- $5,800 in all -- that matched the serial numbers of the ransom money. The FBI returned most of the bills to the boy, named Brian Ingram, and Ingram has since auctioned some of them, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported."We've run down thousands of leads and considered all sorts of scenarios," the FBI said in 2007. "And amateur sleuths have put forward plenty of their own theories. Yet the case remains unsolved. Would we still like to get our man? Absolutely."The FBI appealed for help from the public, releasing pictures of Cooper's black J.C. Penney tie, which he removed before jumping and which later provided authorities with a DNA sample, along with some of the found money.The agency reminded the public that Cooper was no expert skydiver."We originally thought Cooper was an experienced jumper, perhaps even a paratrooper," said Special Agent Larry Carr in 2007. "We concluded after a few years this was simply not true. No experienced parachutist would have jumped in the pitch-black night, in the rain, with a 200-mile-an-hour wind in his face, wearing loafers and a trench coat. It was simply too risky. He also missed that his reserve chute was only for training and had been sewn shut -- something a skilled skydiver would have checked."Agents also believe Cooper had no help on the ground. If he had had an accomplice, he would have needed to coordinate closely with the flight crew and jump at just the right moment."But Cooper simply said, 'Fly to Mexico,' and he had no idea where he was when he jumped," authorities said. "There was also no visibility of the ground due to cloud cover at 5,000 feet."Two flight attendants who were in contact with Cooper gave nearly identical descriptions of him, as did those who encountered him on the ground. He was said to be between 5 foot 10 and 6 feet tall, weighing 170 to 180 pounds with brown eyes.Carr said in 2007 he believed it was unlikely Cooper survived the jump. "Diving into the wilderness without a plan, without the right equipment, in such terrible conditions, he probably never even got his chute open," he said.By the five-year anniversary of the hijacking, the FBI said it had considered more than 800 suspects and eliminated all but two dozen from consideration.Several high-profile suspects have been ruled out over the years.Duane Weber, who claimed on his deathbed to be Cooper, was eliminated by DNA testing, the FBI said.Another man, Kenneth Christiansen, did not match the physical description and was a skilled paratrooper.A third, Richard McCoy, who died in 1974, also did not match the description and was at home the day after the hijacking having Thanksgiving dinner with his family in Utah -- "an unlikely scenario unless he had help," the agency said.Gutt said while the FBI understands there is great public interest in this long-unsolved case "it's a fairly low-priority case for the FBI" as it pursues new investigations involving cases like missing children that have a current impact on public safety.Even so, Gutt said the FBI always follows up on any new tips on the case.On Sunday, another FBI spokeswoman, Ayn Sandalo Dietrich, told CNN the information on the new suspect is not expected to be "a big break in the investigation."CNN's Brooke Baldwin, Patrick Oppmann, Carol Cratty and Stephanie Gallman contributed to this report
Old text, new wrinkles: Did Butch Cassidy survive?CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — Did Butch Cassidy, the notorious Old West outlaw who most historians believe perished in a 1908 shootout in Bolivia, actually survive that battle and live to old age, peacefully and anonymously, in Washington state? And did he pen an autobiography detailing his exploits while cleverly casting the book as biography under another name?A rare books collector says he has obtained a manuscript with new evidence that may give credence to that theory. The 200-page manuscript, "Bandit Invincible: The Story of Butch Cassidy," which dates to 1934, is twice as long as a previously known but unpublished novella of the same title by William T. Phillips, a machinist who died in Spokane in 1937.Utah book collector Brent Ashworth and Montana author Larry Pointer say the text contains the best evidence yet — with details only Cassidy could have known — that "Bandit Invincible" was not biography but autobiography, and that Phillips himself was the legendary outlaw.Others aren't convinced."Total horse pucky," said Cassidy historian Dan Buck. "It doesn't bear a great deal of relationship to Butch Cassidy's real life, or Butch Cassidy's life as we know it."Historians more or less agree that Cassidy was born Robert LeRoy Parker in 1866 in Beaver, Utah, the oldest of 13 children in a Mormon family. He robbed his first bank in 1889 in Telluride, Colorado, and fell in with cattle rustlers who hid out at The Hole in the Wall, a refuge in northern Wyoming's Johnson County. He left the area before cattle barons hunted down cattle-rustling homesteaders in the 1892 Johnson County War.Cassidy then served a year and a half in Wyoming Territorial Prison in Laramie for possessing three stolen horses. But for most of the next 20 years, his Wild Bunch gang held up banks and trains across the West and in South America."Bandit Invincible's" author claims to have known Cassidy since boyhood and never met "a more courageous and kinder hearted man."He acknowledges changing people and place names. But some descriptions fit details of Cassidy's life too neatly to have come from anyone else, said Ashworth, owner of B. Ashworth's Rare Books and Collectibles in Provo.They include a judge's meeting with Cassidy in prison in February 1895. The judge offered to "let bygones be bygones" and to seek a Cassidy pardon from the governor. Cassidy refused to shake the judge's hand."I must tell you now that I will even my account with you, if it is the last act I ever do," Cassidy is quoted as saying by Philips.Wyoming's state archives contain an 1895 letter by the judge who sentenced Cassidy. The letter relates how Cassidy seemed to harbor "ill-will" and didn't accept the "friendly advances" of another judge, Jay Torrey, who had visited Cassidy in prison.Cassidy had sued Torrey's ranch two years earlier for taking eight of his cattle, Pointer said."What's really remarkable to me is that, who else cares?" Pointer said. "Who else would have remembered it in that kind of detail...about an offer of a handshake and refusing it in a prison in Wyoming in 1895?"Gov. William Richards pardoned Cassidy in 1896."Bandit Invincible" also describes how Ed Seeley, a rustler and prospector, told Cassidy's gang how to find a remote hideout in northern Wyoming's Bighorn Canyon. Pointer, who authored "In Search of Butch Cassidy," said he believes the Wild Bunch hid there more than at Hole in the Wall, which had become known to authorities."It had been used by (Seeley) one summer when he had been badly wanted by the sheriff's forces along in ninety-one. Unless one had a guide who knew the entire country, it was impossible to find the place," the manuscript says of the canyon hideout .Records show that a rustler named Edward H. Seeley was imprisoned at Wyoming Territorial Prison while Cassidy was there, Pointer said."That's just really exciting to me because this is really ephemeral stuff," he said. "No one who had not been there or done that would know that."Nobody except for some cowboy who rode the range in the late 1800s, knew Cassidy's friends and maybe even knew the outlaw himself, Buck suggested."There's a sort of commonsense reason why Phillips would have got some stuff right," Buck said. "They knew each other."In 1991, Buck and his wife, Anne Meadows, helped dig up a grave in San Vicente, Bolivia, said to contain the remains of Butch and his sidekick, Harry Longabaugh — the Sundance Kid. DNA testing revealed the bones weren't the outlaws, but Buck, a writer who lives in Washington, D.C., said his research shows the two more than likely died in a shootout with Bolivian cavalry in 1908.Stories abound of Sundance living long after his time in South America. But they're outnumbered by purported Cassidy sightings. A brother and sister of Cassidy's insisted he visited them at a family ranch near Circleville, Utah, in 1925."The majority of those who were there believed that, believed it was him that came back," said Bill Betenson, who recalled that his great-grandmother, Lula Parker Betenson, used to talk about the visit by a man she identified as her brother, Cassidy.The manuscript has an ending fit for Hollywood. Cornered by the Bolivian cavalry while holding up a pack train, Butch and Sundance make a stand. Sundance is killed. Butch escapes to Europe, has plastic surgery in Paris, and schemes to return to the U.S. and reunite with an old girlfriend from Wyoming.Most of the manuscript's accounts bear little resemblance to known Wild Bunch exploits. Pointer insists that Cassidy, as Phillips, was writing fiction. Phillips did offer the story to Sunset magazine without drawing interest.The earliest documentation of Phillips is his marriage to Gertrude Livesay in Adrian, Michigan, in 1908, three months after Cassidy's last known letter from Bolivia, according to Pointer. Buck insists they married several months before a documented Bolivian shootout that probably was the one in which Butch and Sundance were killed.In 1911, the couple moved to Spokane, where their closest friends said years later that Phillips let them in on a secret: He was the famous outlaw.In the 1930s, Phillips sold his interest in the foundering Phillips Manufacturing Company. He visited central Wyoming, where more than a few people in the Lander area, including one of Cassidy's old girlfriends, said it was Cassidy who spent the summer of 1934 camping out in the Wind River Range, telling tales about the Wild Bunch and digging holes in search of buried loot."All of these people were bamboozled by this faker from Spokane?" Pointer asked. "These weren't hayseed, duped ignorant people. These were pillars of our community. And if they said something, you had to better take it seriously."Phillips' adopted son, William R. Phillips, believed his stepfather was Butch Cassidy, said Pointer, who interviewed him in the 1970s. William R. Phillips has since died.In 1938, after her husband died of cancer, Gertrude Phillips told a Cassidy researcher that she and her husband had known Cassidy but that Phillips was not him. She did so only because she "didn't want the notoriety," Pointer said William R. Phillips told him.DNA testing is unlikely to determine that Phillips, who was cremated, was Cassidy.The many reports of later Wyoming sightings have convinced Carol Thiesse, director of the Fremont County Pioneer Museum in Lander."If Phillips wasn't, he certainly knew a heck of a lot about Butch," she said.
Body of infamous Aussie outlaw Ned Kelly foundThe headless remains of the infamous Australian outlaw Ned Kelly have finally been identified, officials said Thursday, solving a mystery dating back more than 130 years.Considered by some to be a cold-blooded killer, Kelly was also seen as a folk hero and symbol of Irish-Australian defiance against the British authorities.After murdering three policemen, he was captured in Victoria state in 1880 and hanged at Old Melbourne Gaol in November of the same year. But his body went missing after it was thrown into a mass grave.The bodies in the grave were transferred from the jail to Pentridge Prison in 1929 and then exhumed again in 2009. The investigation into Kelly began when a skull believed to be his -- and stolen in 1978 -- was rediscovered.Doctors and scientists at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine identified his body, found in a wooden axe box, after a DNA sample was taken from Melbourne teacher Leigh Olver, Kelly's sister Ellen's great-grandson."The wear and tear of the skeleton is a little bit more than would be expected for a 25-year-old today," said institute director Professor Stephen Cordner."But such was Ned's life, this is hardly surprising."However, tests found that the skull believed to be Kelly's was in fact not his.Victoria's Attorney-General Robert Clark said he was amazed by the work of the forensic scientists."This is an extraordinary achievement by our forensic team," he said."To think a group of scientists could identify the body of a man who was executed more than 130 years ago, moved and buried in a haphazard fashion among 33 other prisoners, most of whom are not identified, is amazing."Believed to have been born in 1854 or 1855, Kelly became an outlaw two years before he was hanged, taking on corrupt police and greedy land barons.He survived a shootout with police in 1878 that saw him, his brother Dan, and friends Joe Byrne and Steve Hart slapped with an 8,000-pound bounty -- the largest reward ever offered in the British Empire -- for anyone who found them, dead or alive.Over the next 18 months, the Kelly Gang held up country towns and robbed their banks, becoming folk heroes to the masses.In a final gunbattle at Glenrowan, three of the gang members died and Kelly, dressed in home-made plate metal armour and helmet, was wounded and arrested.Photos of his skeletal remains clearly show a bullet hole in one of his leg bones.Olver, who supplied the DNA, said he was relieved to finally have some closure."It's such a great relief to finally have this side of the story resolved," he told reporters, adding that he hoped a suitable resting place could be found for his colourful relative."A place of dignity, a place very appropriate. Where that is will be determined later," he said.Victoria Police, meanwhile, issued a statement saying that while Kelly's life was "one of Australia's most iconic cultural stories", people should remember he "murdered three police officers in the course of their duty".The exploits of Kelly and his gang have been the subject of numerous films and television series.Rolling Stone Mick Jagger played the lead role in the 1970 movie "Ned Kelly" while Heath Ledger starred as the bandit in a 2003 remake that also featured Orlando Bloom and Geoffrey Rush.He has also been the inspiration for many books, most notably Peter Carey's novel "True History of the Kelly Gang", which won the 2001 Booker Prize.
