HORST ONLINE: Murder

Who is this 'D. B. Cooper'? Where did he disappear to? Will he ever be found again? Does anyone know what happened to him? Not long ago I addressed a current "murder mystery" in one of my blog posts. Today I'll focus on a 'Mystery From Past History' (Nov. 24, 1971) which includes an airline hijacking, extortion, $200,000 in ransom, and a missing person who has yet to be found. This crime remains unsolved as of todays date. Will it ever be solved?

Please watch the following video of the CBS Evening News from November 25, 1971. This is only the beginning of the Mystery of D. B. Cooper, aka Dan Cooper (please note that Walter Cronkite initially refers to the hijacker as D. A. Cooper):

For more information you may link to:

http://www.fbi.gov/page2/dec07/dbcooper123107.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._B._Cooper

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17840873

Ian Punnet, the weekend host for Coast to Coast AM, is advertising a show addressing this topic for Saturday night May 24, 2008. He indicates he will have new information concerning this 'Mystery from Past History. You may link to their website through Coast to Coast AM.

This is a very serious story of a sinister and upsetting topic with a set of bizarre and apparently still unknown facts. I will attempt here to summarize some of what is known and make you aware of the apparent mystery surrounding a number of deaths in numerous states across the country. My interest here is to let others know about these cases and to help spread awareness of the mystery surrounding these seemingly unrelated deaths. I will attempt to give a number of links to various sources related to the story and allow you to follow up on as many as you wish. You may then draw your own conclusions about the possibilities and hopefully help to spread the awareness of this story to others who may not have heard about this Murder Mystery.

Warning, this topic may be too upsetting for some and you may want to link off to another site at this time.

One of my favorite places to get away from it all!

I recently heard a news story on that late night radio talk show, Coast to Coast A.M. hosted by Ian Punnett who was filling in for the regular host George Noory. The topic of the story was the ‘Smiley Faced Serial Killers'. Investigative Reporter, Kristi Piehl, was interviewed and questioned by the radio talk show host. They discussed the cases of numerous unexplained deaths of young men who were last seen at a party are bar who then turned up missing. After some time their body turns up in a nearby body of water usually along the bank of some riverfront. Since the deaths were being investigated by a number of different local law enforcement agencies across the country, it was a number of years before anyone made a connection between the numerous cases. In all cases the deaths was initially ruled as an accidental drowning and usually explained away as tragic, but simply an accidental death blamed on the alcohol since the young men apparently had just left a party or bar. Finally, in one case the law enforcement agency involved went back and changed the ruling of death for Chris Jenkins in Minneapolis from undetermined drowning to homicide. Chris Jenkins went missing Oct. 31, 2002 and his body was later found in the Mississippi River in Feb. of 2003. This is when two retired New York City policemen began to make a connection to a previous case they first investigated more that 11 years ago. The initial case was investigated by then NYPD Sgt. Kevin Gannon who made a promise to the parents of Patrick McNiel that he would not let the case rest until he found the killer or killers. This seemingly intelligent and well fit young man was last seen leaving a NYC bar in 1997. His body was found 50 days later and 11 miles downriver from where he went missing. The parents “knew it wasn’t suicide” and then Sgt Gannon had a ‘feeling’ that there was more to the story than could be explained away as ‘accidental death by drowning’. Now retired Kevin Gannon has teamed up with a former colleague Anthony Duarte also from the NYPD and they have devoted their time and personal resources not only to the further investigation of the initial crime,the recent case of University of Minnesota college student Chris Jenkins, and also to dozens of other deaths from across the country over the last decade. All of these deaths which were blamed on a drunken accident now appear to be connected by a set of mysterious and bizarre similarities. The most striking similarity is the clue which has been found at a number of the sites not where the body was found along the waterfront but where investigators have tracked back to where they believe the body to have entered the water. Initially the only crime scene investigated was the site of where the body was found. Gannon and Duarte took a larger view and reasoned that bodies may have drifted and been found in a different location from the initial crime scene. Many of these initial crime scenes have been revealed to have contained similar ‘tags’ or graffiti, the most notable being a Smiley Face. Thus we have the mystery of the ‘Smiley Faced Serial Killers’.