Suspect Number One

The Man Who Was Not D. B. Cooper

🗃 The topic of Suspect Number One has come up again in the Vortex. I've been interested in this character, and the FBI's investigation into him, for a while now, especially since a large number of documents on him were released in August 2024. Joseph H. Johnston was one of the FBI's earliest leads, and was rigorously investigated before being eliminated.

Eliminated Suspect #1 had the perfect alibi.

🪂 Key points of interest that have drawn the attention of the FBI and amateur sleuths to Johnston include: he was a career criminal who had committed armed robbery; he was said to have recently taken parachuting lessons; he was familiar with Portland vicinity and had recently moved there; he was an unlicensed pilot; he had shown an interest in hijackings; and he had allegedly recently got aerial maps of Portland and Seattle!

🥃 However, Suspect Number One had an unbreakable alibi, having been in jail at the time of D. B. Cooper's skyjacking, after being arrested by Longview Police for drunk driving. Despite this, there have been suggestions that he could have been Cooper's accomplice, maybe dropping the hijacker off at PDX before getting sloshed.

👮‍♂️ A key question here then is: What time did this suspect get arrested? The initial document dated late night on Nov. 26th looks like an urgent teletype. This mentions Johnston's arrest at 2:25 p.m on the 24th. That might suggest he theoretically could have driven Cooper to the airport prior to getting arrested. A more formal document, though, from Nov. 27th, states that Johnston was in custody since the early morning of Nov. 24th. Another page, dated Nov. 29th, appears to confirm this, showing Johnston's arrest time at 2:25 a.m. If these 2 stamped and signed investigative documents are correct, then Suspect #1 was not driving & getting arrested in the afternoon, as the teletype claimed, but was already in lockup for many hours by the time Cooper would have reached PDX.

Hijacker accomplice? Hijacker wannabe? or crim who just happened to like skydiving...?

👤 Does this mean the theory of Suspect One as a Cooper accomplice is a bust? Not completely... but the more I look at Johnston, the less competent he seems as a possible accomplice. Quite apart from his drinking, he was very well-known to law enforcement (instant suspect, in fact!), which seems like a huge liability. The number of suspicious circumstances around him make it look as though he was planning something, though... maybe a similar heist to Cooper's, if not the same one!

✈ My researches in the FBI files have shown that many men in and pre- 1971 were thinking about parachuting heists, and dreaming up hijacking schemes, so Johnston would have been one of many. Johnston was not even unique in his location, because the suspicious hijacking heist novelist lead that I've mentioned before was also located in the vicinity of D. B. Cooper's skyjacking. What stands out about Johnston is that he also had the skillset: piloting, parachuting, and criminality. He looks like he could have become a nastier and less competent version of Cooper. In fact, he made the perfect decoy, since he looked custom-made for a Cooper suspect, and law enforcement wasted a lot of time on investigating him early on.

😎 Could D. B. Cooper have set Joseph Johnston up deliberately in advance as a diversion? That seems a bit far fetched, but no more far-fetched than some other Vortex theories I've seen about Johnston! Whether J. H. Johnston was a Cooper accomplice decoy, a set-up patsy, or just a massive coincidence - he certainly was in the "right time and place" to lead the FBI on a wild goose chase. I'm personally starting to doubt whether Cooper had an accomplice... and eliminated Suspect Number One seems like a poor and unlikely choice of accomplice. Despite his skillset, Johnston was alcoholic and unreliable, and it seems from his rap sheet that his own crimes were typically solo endeavours. I'm very curious to learn what my fellow D. B. Cooper investigators make of this character, now that more has come out about him.

~ D. B. Cooper Investigator 😎🔍🐊