Part 97, page 217

Transcript

The scan is the source; the transcript is machine-generated from it.

(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