SeventyWonderful

I found this on Ebay today. It's the Italian version of the Dan Cooper comic published in November 1970. I dig the art. There are several available on Ebay. Do a search for "Dan Cooper Albi Ardimento 1970" and they'll show up.

The word is convent. In Catholicism, women religious live in convents. Different groups, or orders, of nuns have different callings. The order of Discalced Carmelites prefer to use the term monastery to emphasize their life of quiet contemplation. They are cloistered away from the outside world. On the other hand the Sisters of Mercy live a life of service through teaching and medical care. They prefer to use the term sisters as they minister to the needs of the people in society and nuns are cloistered. Both groups however live in convents. More info here.

Back to Reca, I'm sure it's been said but it's obvious that Reca and Cooper had really different hair types. Reca has a head full of thick, straight hair. Cooper is described as having wavy hair with a slightly receding hairline. Passenger Robert Gregory goes so far as to compare his hair to Nixon's. It's possible that Cooper cut his hair short and slicked it back with brylcreem or something for the hijacking, which would make him look different in real life, but that's not going to make his hair thick and straight off the plane. Look at Ed Sullivan and Dave Brubeck in the clip below. Both have wavy hair with hairlines that recede more than Cooper's does in the composites, but still. Sullivan's hair is shorter and thinner with more brylcreem, and if his hair were thicker and longer it would look something like Brubeck's. Compare their hair to a picture of Reca and you'll see what I mean. https://youtu.be/f8ivFtfqnM8

I think Tina rose to the occasion beautifully. First and foremost, she did a wonderful job of making sure nobody got hurt. She managed to keep Cooper calm and the passengers as far away from him as possible while relaying messages, instructions, parachutes, and money. She went over and above and beyond keeping the situation under control when it really could have ended very badly. And while nobody was hurt, this was not a victimless crime. People have different ways of dealing with traumatic situations, and having to contend with a traumatic situation afterwards as part of the investigation can be painful. Tina's saying that she didn't get a good look at Cooper when the FBI repeatedly kept showing her photographs to identify, or composites to approve, would perhaps be a signal that this was a situation she was eager to move past. That was the point I was trying to make.

Very, very gently do I think that by claiming she didn't get a good look at Cooper, what Tina is really saying is that she doesn't want to deal with it any more. From what I'm remembering she also readily went along with whatever the FBI agent interviewing her said at any given time. I would imagine that's probably not too uncommon a reaction for crime victims to have, and the FBI would compensate by relying on the input from other witnesses.

Olemisscub: Thank you for the photoshop! :) It is very much appreciated and really helps visualize some of the differences between the two composites. You're right, he does look older and meaner in composite A with the composite B nose, and it helps to highlight that the cheekbones aren't quite so pronounced in composite A as they are in composite B. The underbite is also far more prominent in composite A than in composite B. What's interesting too, is comparing both composites to the later drawing that Florence helped Unsolved Mysteries produce. Allowing for artistic differences, the Unsolved Mysteries sketch keeps the droopy eyelids from composite A as well as adding the prominent cheekbones from composite B. It looks like it has the composite B nose, too, although the slightly receding hairline in the composites has morphed into the Lenny & Squiggy one seen in the Unsolved Mysteries sketch somehow. Overall, I think composite B probably is the most accurate one, even if it was produced over a year after the fact. All the witnesses were happy with that one, right?

Would you be willing to photoshop the nose from composite B onto the face of composite A for a comparison to the photos shown above? Of the two drawings, composite A does a better job of depicting the long thin face and high cheekbones. Save for the mosquito nose and the coloring, it seems to be an otherwise good likeness overall.

High school yearbook photo of Robert Harry Boles (1936-2007). He lived in Colorado and Texas, and was the only Robert Harry Boles I could find doing a quick search on Ancestry.com.

Thanks! I thought I had remembered something apocryphal about a scar on his hand, but couldn't remember where I had seen it mentioned.

Well that's just it. We don't know. He got away and gave very little up in the process. All we can do is speculate, which is part of the fun. When is the comic first mentioned in regards to the case?

(The opening sentence to my reply got cut off somehow here. It wasn't my intention to come across as being so brusque.)

True. On the other hand the comic wasn't well known in the US, if at all. The choice of name could have been his private joke.

I just didn't know until recently that there has been significant USAF presence in Canada because of NORAD, and wonder if that could provide a clue to the hijacker's identity. The discussions I read about the Dan Cooper comic centered around the hijacker either being French Canadian or having been stationed in Europe or maybe SE Asia. (The Western Air Defence Sector for the Continental U.S. NORAD Region is located at McChord for what it's worth. I know very very little about how NORAD works.) The pulp short story about the non-comic Dan Cooper is also very intriguing. I believe Olemisscub was able to tie a Washington State reference in with the story as well? The money certainly was the hijacker's main motivation, but I do feel that mass media helped keep whatever ideas he had percolating in his mind. After all this is a guy who hijacked a plane while traveling North by Northwest in the literal sense of the words.

I found an article online about comic book Dan Cooper here. The author visited CFB North Bay in 1966, which is the center of operations for NORAD in Canada. There are also USAF personnel stationed there and at other bases throughout Canada because of NORAD. I haven't seen that discussed much, but I wonder if the hijacker had been USAF stationed in Canada during the Cold War, or perhaps had ties to someone who had been.

I'm a cataloging librarian in real life. A large portion of my job is redescribing legacy records by cleaning up the mistakes that may have cropped up in them over the years. The basis for this type of work is to trust but verify the information in front of you. You trust that the person who worked on the record before you did their best but you check the information provided for accuracy. When you're presented with conflicting information that can't readily be resolved, you put a note on the record describing the situation and you keep going. This makes it easier for somebody coming along later with more resources at their disposal to work on it some more. Nothing about record keeping is worth getting upset over. It's record keeping. Inaccuracies are absolutely 1000% guaranteed to surface. Future generations might have a better perspective of the matter at hand or have better resources at their disposal; however, source material may be lost in the interim. Very smart people may make mistakes. It's frustrating sometimes but that's the nature of the beast. It comes with the territory. That's what makes the discussions interesting. That's what it sounds like with the report of Cooper's nicotine stained fingers. You've got thousands of pages of primary source material saying that he had no distinguishing features with no marks nor scars. Then you have the leading investigator saying he had nicotine stained fingers without much in the way of citations. He was there, we weren't. He may well have had access to information that hasn't been released to the public or hasn't been preserved. On the other side, he may have been mistaken. He didn't cite his assertion. His ghost writer may have been mistaken. He may have had a suspect in mind and was consciously or unconsciously tailoring his narrative to fit. He may have relied on a case summary with erroneous information. All this has been brought up in recent posts, right? Now looking at the rest of the evidence, I do question whether Cooper really did have nicotine stained fingers on his right hand for a couple of different reasons. If he really had stained fingers it either means that he smoked like A LOT and didn't wash his hands, or he smoked filterless cigarettes. He didn't do either on the plane. He smoked eight filtered cigarettes in five hours while sitting in a tense situation. That's less than a pack a day which really shouldn't be enough to stain his fingers to the degree described. It also seems no one was able to see much of his right hand. On the plane he kept his right hand hidden inside the briefcase for the most part. Tina sat on his left side. He smoked with his left hand. Florence may have seen his right hand some more but she doesn't mention that anywhere else either. Is the question of the nicotine stained fingers on his right hand part of a bigger discussion as to whether Cooper may be have been left handed (or ambidextrous)? It certainly seems possible that he could have been. He picked the right hand side of the aisle to sit. This would make his dominant (left) hand free closest to the aisle of the plane, which would be in a better position to fend off any potential threats (assuming the bomb is fake). He also kept his right hand inside of the briefcase in order to keep up appearances that he could detonate his bomb at any time. Again, assuming the bomb was fake, this would have been a ruse to create the illusion of control. He could use his non dominant (right) hand for that purpose while keeping his dominant (left) hand free. While keeping his right hand inside the briefcase (with the stained fingers supposedly) he smoked with his left hand, the one without the nicotine stained fingers. That further calls the report of the stained fingers on his right hand into question. The only left handed famous person I can think of who smoked is Paul McCartney. He's pictured smoking with his left hand half of the time. The other Beatles were right handed and are only occasionally pictured smoking with their right hands. Could he perhaps have had a burn mark instead from an earlier injury? Perhaps it tied in with with mixture of the particles on his tie...if such a scar existed in the first place. I've read somewhere online that he may have had a scar on one of his hands, but don't have the slightest idea if that's true or why it wasn't included in the FBI reports.

Wow. It seems like Our Mister Cooper was an absolute peach compared to what these people had to contend with. Yikes.

So "negotiable American currency" always struck me like something that Jack Webb would have said, but Dragnet was off the air by 1971. However, there was a short lived series called O'Hara: US Treasury that he produced during the fall of 1971. It starred David Janssen as an undercover ATF agent. So far none of the episodes that were on before the hijacking use "negotiable American currency" but the episode that aired on October 15 jumps out for other reasons. It's called Operation:Time-Fuse. In it Manson Family hippies send a fake bomb to a newspaper editor in an attempt to extort $200k. The bomb is inside a metal box with the dimensions of an attache case stolen from a construction site. The bomb is "open circuit" with a bright red battery. "This one is a dud. It wouldn't have exploded even if the wiring hadn't been cut...There's no way the electrical circuit could close. It looks like somebody is trying to scare you...Someone knew what they were doing. If this is a sample of their work it was first rate." The package it came in was untraceable. "We might get fingerprints of that but I doubt it." James Cagney tough guy dialogue from the bomber comes in over the phone. (Typing this out doesn't do it justice.) "Please listen carefully. You received my calling card. You understand what it means. Just listen. You get the message Fuzz. Don't miss a syllable. Two hundred thousand. Complete instrustions later. In the past I have asked to be heard, now I demand to be heard. Unless my demands are met a real bomb will explode." Hollywood hard boiled detective dialogue follows. "Top priority. I want you to play it cool. We don't need to start a panic. Questions? Hit the streets." Discussion from the ATF agent to the newspaper editor about whether he should pay the $200k. "You're a private citizen. That's a judgement call you're going to have to make for yourself...If you do decide to pay, the money will be under tight control, identifiable by listed serial numbers and never out of sight of Treasury agents." The editor agrees to "get the money and let [the Treasury Department] list the serial numbers" but is still undecided about paying. A composite is made of one of the suspects. Nobody can identify the suspect from the drawing. Discussion follows about the witnesses feeling the composite was an "accurate likeness...You can ask a dozen witnesses for a suspect's description, you get a dozen accurate likenesses, all different...even the officers responding to the bomb call couldn't make the picture." The description for another one of the male suspects was "medium build, about six feet, brown hair." Anyway, all this went on in the first 10 minutes. The rest of the show involves David Janssen going undercover to find scope out the Manson Family bombers and recover the stolen dynamite. The Family are threatening to detonate a real bomb if they don't get the $200k dropped off in a wide open crossroad by 3 pm. There's much discussion about whether the bomb they set if the newspaper editor doesn't pay up is real or just a bluff. So if Cooper were watching that would mean he lived near a CBS affiliate and without any kids at home on a Friday night. (The Partridge Family was on opposite on ABC.) His would be the target demographic for the show. The Dirty Dozen came on that night following the episode in question. Anyway, check it out and see what you think. James Doohan has a cameo. https://youtu.be/qyL76F3eAUY (As an aside, the Wikipedia entry for the show says that: "according to Brandon Tartikoff, when Fred Silverman was the head of programming at CBS and considering whether or not to renew O'Hara, he met with a representative of the Treasury Department, who told him, "There are those of us down in Washington who like the idea of a weekly prime-time showcase. So if the show gets cancelled, we're gonna do what we've gotta do." Silverman didn't take the Treasury representative seriously, but according to Tartikoff, after the show was cancelled, "about a dozen top CBS executives on both coasts had their income taxes audited the following year.")

Somebody on Reddit uploaded AI animations for Composite A and Composite B where you can kind of see what his profile looked like, at least as far as the drawings go.

It sounds like the FBI used the standard average adult male height at the time so as not overlook someone who would be an otherwise good candidate. One of the confusing things about this case is the sheer quantity of information available and how much of it is so contradictory in nature. That's why it's so helpful to go back to the source material and reexamine the available evidence. I've learned a lot by reading through all the commentary online, especially on this thread, over the past few months and didn't know that the stewardesses had to remove their shoes during the hijacking for example. This is why I was asking about the length of the tie. I know clip on ties weren't as long back then as they are now, but if the tie is on the longer side, then Cooper was probably not 5' 8". If Tina really is 5' 8" herself, then she would have a good idea of his height because she was sitting next to him. If she had to keep looking up at him while he was seated next to her, then that would make him taller and another way to estimate his height.

All this time and I never noticed that Bruce Springsteen has an underbite. And he has essentially the same complexion that Cooper must have had as well. How cool is that? Tina Mucklow is supposed to be 5'8" which would make her 5'10" at a mininum in shoes. Surely she saw Cooper standing up while he was attaching the money bag to himself (whichever way he did it). Maybe that's why the FBI rounded up his height? Could the length of his tie help with determining his height?

Wanted to de-lurk to add that Hahneman stood 5' 9" according to his 1942 draft card. (In 1946 he's down to 5' 8".) That seems to be a little short for Cooper who was reportedly 5' 10" to 6" tall according to the witnesses. Judging from the composites, the real Cooper seems to have had an underbite perhaps causing his pouty lower lip. The medical term is class 3 malocclusion, which would have required braces or orthodontic surgery to correct.