WILLIAM Rataczak, the co-pilot caught at the centre of one of America’s most famous unsolved crimes, has died at 86.
Rataczak, the Northwest Orient Airlines first officer on the 1971 flight hijacked by the man known as DB Cooper, died at an assisted living facility in North Oaks, Minnesota.
His son Michael said he died of pneumonia on October 22.
Rataczak was born June 30, 1939, in Minneapolis.
He grew up obsessed with flying, earning his pilot’s license before he could legally drive.
After serving in the Air Force and graduating from the University of Minnesota, he joined Northwest in 1966 and retired in 1999.
He is survived by his children Michael, James and Sarah Rataczak; siblings Katherine Bensen, David Rataczak and Scott Rataczak; eight grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter.
His wife, Judith, died in 2022.
More than 50 years after the hijacking that made him an unwitting witness to an outlaw legend, the mystery of DB Cooper endures.
A former Air Force pilot, Rataczak spent decades fielding questions about the November night that became aviation legend.
The quiet Boeing 727 flight from Portland, Oregon, to Seattle, Washington, suddenly turned into the ideal backdrop for the “perfect crime.”
Nothing seemed unusual at first.
“It was a typical West Coast day,” Rataczak recalled on the BBC’s Witness History podcast in 2015.
It was misty and rainy, with passengers hurrying aboard under umbrellas.
One of them, a man in a dark suit and sunglasses, bought a one-way ticket under the name Dan Cooper, took a seat in the last row and ordered a bourbon and soda.
Mid-taxi, he handed a note to flight attendant Florence Schaffner, saying: “Miss, I want you to read that note. Read it now.”
The message said he had a bomb.
“You’re kidding,” Schaffner said.
But Cooper, described as a dark-haired man in his mid-40s, wasn’t joking.
As the plane lifted off, flight attendant Tina Mucklow alerted the cockpit: “We are being hijacked. This is no joke.”
Cooper then opened his briefcase to show what looked like dynamite wired together, before laying out his demands: $200,000 in cash, four parachutes and “no funny stuff.”
“What do we do now?” Rataczak remembered thinking.
“Is this really happening to us?”
For hours the crew circled Puget Sound while the ransom and parachutes were assembled.
In the cabin, Cooper smoked and chatted, and when asked whether he held a grudge against the airline, he replied: “I don’t have a grudge against your airline, Miss. I just have a grudge.”
After the passengers were released in Seattle, Cooper kept Mucklow aboard and ordered the pilots to head for Mexico.
Minutes after takeoff, he told her to join the crew in the cockpit.
Alone in the cabin, he lowered the rear stairs.
Rataczak felt a jolt and radioed air traffic control: “I think our friend has just taken leave of us.”
Cooper had parachuted into the night with the cash and vanished.
Searchers scoured the Cascades, some looking for him, others for the money.
“You can’t help but admire the guy,” a sheriff’s deputy told reporters.
Meanwhile, another man said: “I think he’s one of the slickest cats to ever walk on the face of the Earth.”
The mystery went on to fuel books, documentaries and decades of tips, suspects and theories, but none ever panned out.
In 2016, the FBI finally closed the case, saying no lead had “resulted in a definitive identification of the hijacker.”
Rataczak had his own view, telling the Associated Press after retiring: “My mind tells me he’s dead.
“And my heart tells me I hope he is, because he caused a great number of people a great deal of grief.”
It comes as newly released FBI files shed light on decades of false leads in the DB Cooper case but show the agency is still no closer to solving it.
The 398-page release details hundreds of tips that went nowhere, including one suspect who used a wheelchair, prompting agents to write: “A man confined to a wheel chair did not hijack the plane in this case.”
Many other names were ruled out after witnesses said they weren’t a match.
Meanwhile, a new clue has stirred fresh excitement in the long-running mystery as a parachute that Cooper may have used for his escape has reportedly surfaced on the 53rd anniversary of the hijacking.
