The Usual Suspects

Unpopular opinion: Many of the usual popular suspects in the D. B. Cooper case have rather... large... problems.

🤥 And don't even get me started on jumbo-sized noses!

😅 Now, let me say at the outset, I'm not looking to pick on anyone here - if you love McCoy, Weber, Rackstraw, or Reca, be my guest!

🐘 But time to address the elephant in the room: in the excitement of pursuing certain suspects, folks can tend to overlook certain features. For example, witnesses said McCoy looked too young, and his ears and nose were too big for Cooper.

👂Thus, if I fancy bedroom-eyes Rackstraw, I'm probably looking in the wrong age bracket. If we love Reca, we're ignoring that a wide nose is ruled out by eyewitnesses. And if you're eyeing up Wingnut Weber as Cooper, your theory is likely to fall on deaf ears.

😎 So the question is: Just how far can we reasonably stretch the key witness descriptions of Cooper's facial features etc, before we're clearly off into dumbo territory, or potential cherry-picking?

🍒 Cherry-picking suspect pushers, and Cooper theorists with odd fixations, are a prominent feature (pun intended) of the grand Vortex that is this mystery community. Documentary makers have also been leading the charge here in promoting highly implausible (or selectively plausible) suspects. In trying to cram an exciting square-peg suspect into the somewhat amorphous Cooper-shaped hole, it's easy to try and explain away or ignore what doesn't fit. Roll up, roll up! Pin the suspect on the Cooper!

⚒️ The overstretching and peg sledgehammering of this Procrustean approach has led to a huge suspect pool of familiar faces who look almost nothing like each other. Probably most of them resemble Cooper very little as well.

👀 Now, it can be argued that, as we're lacking any photos of the hijacker, we don't know what Cooper actually looked like. Eyewitnesses obviously don't all agree 100%, and their memories may not be perfect. Thus we can't say for sure exactly how well old D. B. matched any of the FBI artist sketches.

🐘 I think a key point, though, is that we do have several points where witnesses corroborate each other well. Nose and ear size, lower lip, and face shape all had a certain amount of consensus among the main eyewitnesses. And features commonly described as being small or narrow on Cooper are unlikely to have instead been an XL! And even if you argue that the hijacker may have been disguised... there's very little anyone could do to make his large nose temporarily smaller.

🤡 I've had enough of dumbo suspects being promoted. Let's look for suspects who better fit Cooper's physical profile, as well as the profile for "doing the job" when it comes to this crime.

~ D. B. Cooper Investigator 😎 🔍 🐊