Oregonian clipping 'Is suspect in killings D.B. Cooper?' on FD-350 mount re John E. List

(Indicate page, name of newspaper, city and state.) The Oregonian Portland, Oregon Date: June 30, 1989 Edition:

Title: NORJAK

Character: 164-41 or 80-715 Classification: Submitting Office:

Indexing:

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Is suspect in killings D.B. Cooper?

□ The FBI tries to determine whether a man arrested June 1 in Virginia is the Northwest's notorious hijacker

By ROBERTA ULRICH of The Oregonian staff

The FBI is investigating the possibility that a man recently arrested in the 1971 killing of his family is the elusive airline hijacker known as D.B. Cooper. The man, John E. List, vanished Nov. 9, 1971, the day authorities believe his mother, wife and three children were shot to death in the family's home at Westfield, N.J. That was just 15 days before Cooper hijacked a Northwest Airlines Boeing 727 at Portland International Airport and parachuted into the dark and subzero temperatures over Southwestern Washington with $200,000 in cash. No trace of Cooper was ever found, but about $6,000 in tattered, water-soaked $20 bills from the hijack ransom turned up along the Columbia River near Vancou-

ver, Wash., in 1980. The case remains the only unsolved hijacking in U.S. history.

List "is no more of a suspect than any of the other people who come up from time to time," John Eyer, assistant agent in charge of the FBI office in Seattle, said Thursday. "We are investigating to see if he is a viable suspect." Eyer acknowledged that List had been considered a possible suspect shortly after the hijacking because of the New Jersey killings and the fact that he had disappeared. "Our interest in him as a potential suspect has been rekindled" as a result of his arrest, Eyer said. However, Ralph Himmelsbach, the

retired FBI agent from Portland who sought Cooper from the night of the hijacking until he retired in 1980, said, "He definitely looks good to me. He fits the profile, the description. He's the kind of a guy with nothing to lose. ... He does bear a resemblance to the composite" drawing made of Cooper at the time of the hijacking. List was 46 at the time, and Cooper was described as "about 48." Himmelsbach, like nearly everyone else connected with the case, believes Cooper

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LIST, 1971 "COOPER," 1971 LIST, 1989

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164A -SE -81 -14 [guess: 161] - 41 - 1991 SEARCHED INDEXED SERIALIZED [guess: LED] 1989 FBI — PORTLAND FBI/DOJ

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b6 b7C

DB Cooper-43753

died in the snow-sprinkled woods when he landed or soon afterward. He lacked cold weather gear and was probably shoeless, investigators believe. "I still think it's most likely he perished," Himmelsbach said Thursday, "but you have to keep an open mind." He added, "I'd dearly love to see the case reach a conclusion, espe- cially one in which the guy is identified." That conclusion could be a long way off. Eyer said the FBI has not made an effort to interview List and will not until it has fur- ther investigated List's movements as a fugi- tive. The search for List, an accountant and insurance salesman, began Dec. 7, 1971, when neighbors noticed that lights that had been burning for a month in the Lists' 19- room Victorian mansion had started going out. They called police, who found the bod- ies of List's mother, Alma, 85; his wife, Helen, 45; and their three children, Patricia, 16, John Jr., 15, and Frederick, 13.

Please turn to COOPER, Page B4

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Cooper: 5 persons slain

Continued from Page B1 Police also found a .32-caliber revolver and 9mm pistol used in the shootings and a five-page confession addressed to the Rev. Eugene A. Rehwinkel, pastor of the Lutheran church where List sometimes taught Sunday school. No one had seen any members of the family since Nov. 9, 1971, when List called Westfield High School to say he was taking the children on an extended vacation. He also asked the post office to halt mail delivery. List's car was found a few days later at Kennedy International Air- port in New York. His name went on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list, but no trace of him was found until someone who saw details of the killings and List's photo May 21 on the television show, "America's Most Wanted," tipped the FBI to a man living in the Rich- mond, Va., suburb of Midlothian under the name Robert P. Clark. He was arrested June 1. Clark denied that he was List, but the FBI said he had been positively

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identified through his fingerprints. Police have determined that List- Clark moved to Colorado sometime during the year after he disapp- peared and lived in the Denver area most of the time he was a fugitive. The Northwest Airlines hijacking began on Thanksgiving Eve 1971 when a man who had given the name "Dan Cooper" handed a note to a flight attendant on Flight 305 from Portland to Seattle. He demanded $200,000 and two para- chutes and said he had a bomb. After the plane landed in Seattle, he got what he wanted. The pas- sengers left the plane and Cooper ordered the crew to fly to Reno, Nev. When it landed there, he was gone and investigators eventually deter- mined that he most likely had bailed out over the Washougal River watershed. That was the last real trace of the man, who became a legend as D.B. — rather than Dan — Cooper. The FBI, however, still gets tips that someone could be the shadowy hijacker, and an agent in the Seattle FBI office is still assigned to the case.

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DB Cooper-43754