The ace investigator who tied the legendary D.B. Cooper skyjacking case to Stockton last year says Cooper got away with the help of three until-now unknown partners.

The breakthrough in the legendary 1971 mystery also includes a remote wooded spot where Cooper may have buried his loot.

“We have the escape story confirmed,” said Tom Colbert, a Ventura crime-story producer who leads a 40-person cold case team. “We also have two crime partners involved in getting D.B. Cooper out of there.”

The third getaway partner is dead, Colbert said.

Colbert collaborated on a History Channel documentary last year and authored an award-winning book presenting a mountain of evidence that Cooper is a San Diego man named Robert W. Rackstraw.

Rackstraw, 73, whom Colbert describes as “Vietnam pilot, paratrooper, explosives expert, career criminal and sociopath,” was jailed once in Stockton.

He kited checks here. He stored a scary cache of explosives in a Stockton storage unit. His sister lived here. His parents lived in Valley Springs. He bought a house near them. He was acquitted in Calaveras County of killing his stepfather.

In other words, the master outlaw the FBI was hunting all over creation was right under the noses of local authorities — if Colbert is right.

Rackstraw denies everything.

“Everything” being the daredevil crime that still grips the public imagination.

In 1971 a man calling himself Dan Cooper, saying he had a bomb in his briefcase, hijacked a Northwest Orient flight en route from Portland to Seattle.

Cooper let his hostages off in Tacoma in exchange for $200,000 ($1.2 million in today’s money) and ordered the crew to take off.

High over rural Washington he parachuted with his loot into a stormy night and myth.

After years of investigation the FBI closed the unsolved case. Some opined Cooper perished in the jump.

When the documentary aired, Colbert was contacted by a Pacific Northwest couple (whose names and exact location are confidential, at their request).

The woman is a retired cop, the man, a contractor and amateur pilot. After they were married awhile, the man disclosed to his wife a story he was told years before by a member of his aviator’s club.

“Wally” told him Cooper recruited three accomplices, all veterans. One, a pilot, circled in the clouds in his Cessna above a remote country airstrip outside the village of La Center, Washington. The other two waited in a pickup truck.

When Cooper landed (within 1,300 feet of his target) the men in the truck blinked their lights, a signal for the Cessna to land, and they retrieved Cooper.

Bundling money and fake bomb in the parachute, they tossed it in the bed and pulled up to the plane. Cooper climbed into the Cessna with $50,000 and the fake bomb and took off.

The two men in the pickup drove up to a remote mountain logging road and buried the chute and $150,000. Colbert is confident Wally was one of the men. His research ID’d Wally and the other two accomplices. He withheld their names.

With Cooper aboard — this is all still according to what Wally told the husband — the Cessna followed rivers south to Vancouver Lake. There Cooper tossed out $50,000 and his fake bomb.

The idea was to fool the law into thinking Cooper had drowned. But the red herrings sank into the mud and disappeared, spoiling the ruse.

Cooper and his accomplice flew on to Oregon’s Scapoose Airstrip where they switched to another plane. Then they flew back to Portland, where the caper started, and parted ways.

Being a cop, the wife tried to tell the FBI this information. The FBI would not return her calls. So the couple contacted Colbert.

Colbert got a judge to order the FBI to release its Cooper files. The files reveal the FBI interviewed La Center area farmers who saw the pickup and plane. The G-men never revealed to the public that Cooper had getaway partners. But they knew.

Colbert believes Rackstraw flew to Valley Springs and stayed with his parents for a while. Busted in Stockton for the check scam, he made bail, rented an airplane and fled, faking a crash at sea before being recaptured.

That rekindled the FBI’s interest in Rackstraw as Cooper. Which is when the famous $5,800 turned up on the banks of the Columbia River — close to Vancouver Lake. Colbert believes the discovery was a redo of the attempt to fool the FBI into thinking Cooper had drowned.

And it worked.

The FBI adamantly refused Cooper tips for years. But Colbert’s new evidence they accepted. They have not formally announced a reopening of the case. But Colbert believes they will soon pay a visit to the two surviving getaway partners.

As for Rackstraw, “I think he’s going to be sweating bullets,” Colbert said.

Wally gave such a detailed description of the spot where the loot and parachute were buried that Colbert was able to ID the likely spot from old county maps. He and his team went there and dug. They found what appears to be an old parachute strap.
