SEATTLE — A citizen sleuth has sued the FBI to get access to a key piece of evidence in the D.B. Cooper case.
Eric Ulis of Phoenix, Arizona has spent years trying to identify the man behind the more than 50-year-old skyjacking in the skies over the Northwest.
In a lawsuit filed Wednesday in federal court in Washington D.C., Ulis demands access to the black clip-on tie that the man known as DB Cooper left behind on the hijacked aircraft.
Ulis said the FBI denied his request to attempt to lift a DNA sample from a specific part of the tie.
Last year, Ulis claimed a deceased Pennsylvania man was Cooper, based on particles that a team of scientists lifted from the tie in 2009. Ulis says those patented particles came from a Pennsylvania metals company that produced the titanium materials found on the tie. Ulis said his suspect worked with those metals and traveled routinely to Seattle to work with Boeing on aviation projects.
KING 5 is not naming Ulis’s suspect because he has never been charged or accused of the crime by authorities.
Cooper boarded a Portland to Seattle jetliner in November 1971. In mid-air, he told a flight attendant he had a bomb in a suitcase and he demanded $200,000 ransom and four parachutes when the plane landed at Sea-Tac Airport. After he ordered the plane to take off for Mexico, he jumped from the aircraft somewhere over southwest Washington state.
The FBI closed the case – unsolved – six years ago.