A packing card. A cup. Two $20 bills. Cigarette butts. A headrest cloth. That hair strand
suspended on a slide. A plane seat. Bits of fuzz. Used matches. A limb hair.
I watched a recent documentary about a murder two decades ago in Houston. The woman
perpetrator was tried and convicted of stabbing her husband to death in their bed. She served her term in prison and is a free woman. The case will not be further adjudicated. They went into the county evidence room and the authorities still had the frame from the bed where the victim was murdered. There were piles of evidence related to a completely closed case. Why does everything in the still unsolved D.B. Cooper case seem to be missing, discarded, returned to the owner (the back parachute) or never even kept? It is all quite mystifying.
Did the F.B.I. think they would have the case solved for them as Cooper was likely Dead on
Arrival?
That does not explain why the hair slide seemed to vanish from the files as late as 1984, when the case was already quite cold. Surely it was not disposed of as it was apparently used to eliminate suspects with non-matching hair.
Any first-year defense attorney will tell you that tossing evidence in an open case could be a
get-out-of-jail-free-card for their client. I am imagining a handcuffed Cooper finding out his
favorite smokes were somewhere in a landfill.
Is this suspicious, or Standard Operating Procedure in federal cases?
I have no answers, only questions.
-Pat
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