Above Photos: Marla Cooper believes her uncle, shown in the family photo on th eleft, is the real D.B. Cooper, pictured in the police sketch on the right. So this guy used his real name for the plane ticket? And the FBI still couldn't figure it out?
The recent emergence of new evidence in the D.B. Cooper hijacking case came courtesy of a woman who believes the famed air bandit was her uncle.
Marla Cooper has enduring childhood memories of a long-lost uncle plotting the heist and turning up bruised and bloody a day after the mystery hijacker parachuted out of a plane.
"I'm certain he was my uncle, Lynn Doyle Cooper, who we called L.D. Cooper," told ABC News.
The 40-year-old unsolved mystery came back into the spotlight when the FBI announced days ago that it had a "credible" lead into Cooper's real identity.
Sources tell ABC that Marla Cooper is at the center of the newly revived investigation.
Cooper has given investigators a guitar strap and pictures of her uncle in the hopes they can recover DNA or fingerprints to match to evidence left on the plane.
Cooper says her hazy memories of the case date back to when she was just 8 and overheard two uncles plotting something suspicious around Thanksgiving 1971 at her grandmother's house in Oregon.
"My two uncles, who I only saw at holiday time, were planning something very mischievous," she recalled. "I was watching them use some very expensive walkie-talkies that they had purchased."
"They left to supposedly go turkey hunting, and Thanksgiving morning I was waiting for them to return," she said.
A day after her uncles left, Northwest Orient Flight 305 was hijacked by a man who claimed to have a bomb and identified himself as Dan Cooper.
The man later escaped in spectacular fashion by parachuting from the rear of the plane near the Washington-Oregon border with $200,000 in ransom money.
He was never seen again.
Marla Cooper says not long after the hijacking, her injured uncle reappeared and claimed to have been in a car accident.
"My uncle, L.D., was wearing a white T-shirt and he was a bloody and bruised and a mess, and I was horrified," she said.
"I began to cry. My other uncle, who was with L.D. said 'Marla, just shut up and go to your dad."
She claims she later heard her uncles talking about the hijacking.
"I heard my uncle say, 'We did it. Our money problems are over. We hijacked an airplane,'" she said.
Officials say they now think D.B. Cooper lost much of the cash as he fell to earth, and Marla says her uncles talked about searching for money.
Some of the cash was found years later along a river bank not far from drop zone, leading investigators to speculate that Cooper had died in the fall.
She says she never saw her uncle - a Korean War vet - again after that Thanksgiving, and was told he died in 1999.
Marla Cooper says when her father died in 1995, he spoke of her long-lost uncle.
"He said, 'Don't you remember he hijacked that airplane?'" she said.
In 2009, her mother made a similar comment.
"She had always suspected that my uncle, L.D. was the real D.B. Cooper," she said.
Marla Cooper says she eventually contacted the FBI and gave them the guitar strap and photo.
Investigators say they have been unable to lift any usable prints from the material but are continuing to look into L.D. Cooper's possible role in the famed event.
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