Lynn Doyle Cooper was the middle of five brothers, the quiet member of a musical family who didn’t play an instrument, the homebody among siblings known to be rambunctious. L.D., as the Coopers called him, is the brother people seem to remember the least.

Yet Cooper’s niece now claims that L.D. Cooper is the man who committed one of the nation’s most memorable crimes.

On Nov. 24, 1971, the man who came to be known as D.B. Cooper took over a Portland-Seattle flight. He freed the passengers but kept crew members on board after receiving a parachute and $200,000 in small bills. When the flight was heading to refuel in Reno, Nev., D.B. Cooper parachuted from the plane somewhere in the area of the Columbia River. No body was found, and only a fraction of the cash was discovered — in a Columbia sandbar.

Marla Cooper, L.D. Cooper’s niece, recently told ABC News her uncle was the outlaw who inspired decades of songs, novels, nonfiction books and wild guesses. Marla, who was only 8 years old at the time of the crime, is writing a book on the case and says she has passed a polygraph test about her claim.

As Marla describes it, L.D. and another uncle were plotting something “very mischievous,” at the family home near Sisters. The next day, the plane was hijacked and sometime later L.D. arrived home — bloodied, bruised and claiming to have been in a car accident.

The FBI recently told The Bulletin that Central Oregon ties to the case have been investigated, but a spokesman declined to comment on the latest claims.

And so L.D. Cooper, who was buried in Pilot Butte Cemetery after his death in 1999, has emerged as the latest suspect in a crime that has become a part of American folklore. If L.D. was the hijacker, the money was likely gone by the mid-1990s when he died, apparently indigent and away from his family.

L.D. spent much of his youth living at a camp run by the lumber company Brooks-Scanlon outside Sisters, and people who knew him then scoff at the idea that he might be the hijacker, sometimes pointing instead to one of his brothers.

“I couldn’t imagine L.D. enough on the ball to rob a plane,” says former neighbor Doug Hockett, who now lives in Washington state.

A few dozen families, along with some bachelors, lived at the camp west of Sisters. On one end of the camp, Estle and Irene Cooper raised their five boys: Willie Clyde, Dewey, L.D., Don and Wendell.

Rambunctious reputation

The family arrived in Oregon from Missouri, where, according to Estle and Irene’s obituaries, most of their extended family remained. L.D. was born in the Ozarks town of Shell Knob, Mo., according to the city of Bend’s burial records.

Bud Keep, who now lives in Bend, “ran with” older brother Dewey when the two were Sisters High School students. He remembers the Cooper boys — and their father — as rambunctious. One day, as Keep walked to town, Dewey and Estle pulled up in the family Ford. Keep hopped in and Estle began joking.

“Oh, this car has a lot of zip today,” Keep remembers the father saying. “Dewey was just grinning.”

Later, Dewey explained the backstory. The night before he and his father had “got into a barrel of airplane gas” at a nearby airstrip.

Another time, said Keep, Dewey went hunting for rabbit north of Sisters. Instead of rabbit, he came back with a well-kept Ford Model A, which he drove around Sisters for the next week, claiming he’d found it abandoned in the forest. Dewey eventually turned it in to the police.

Eventually, Dewey joined the Air Force, according to Keep, who believes all five brothers are dead.

But the Coopers, for all their high-octane adventures, also seem to have been a hard-working family.

Estle was a faller with Brooks-Scanlon and even made an appearance in the company’s newsletter, the Pine Echoes. In 1947, a few years after the Coopers moved to Sisters, Estle and another faller were cutting down a tree that toppled with such force that it brought down a “lone snag,” according to the newsletter.

The snag crashed onto a coworker, fracturing his skull. The man was pronounced dead at a Portland hospital. The newsletter never mentioned Estle between then and his death in 1964.

Irene, meanwhile, worked as a cook at Sisters High, according to Sue Tewalt, whose brother was Wendell’s best friend.

“They were just a real nice family. They worked hard like everybody else,” Tewalt says,

Ramona Hernandez was married to L.D.’s brother Willie Clyde for a time and says her former in-laws were “very religious.” Hernandez, who moved to California in 1962 after divorcing Willie Clyde, remembers the family playing music together. L.D. was the only one who didn’t play an instrument, says Cathy Cooper, one of Ramona’s daughters. Hernandez recalls the boy as quiet and well-loved. In fact, Ramona and Willie Clyde named their first daughter after him.

“He was real proud of that,” Hernandez says.

L.D. always seemed to be around during former neighbor Hockett’s frequent visits to the Cooper home, though the brothers were often out working or getting into something.

“I always assumed his health wasn’t that good,” Hockett says.

Cathy Cooper remembers her uncle fondly, in particular his looks. L.D. was “an extremely handsome man,” the best looking of all the boys. And so when she saw the famous sketch of D.B. Cooper on the TV recently, she clearly recalled L.D.’s face. But that face in the criminal sketches was not her uncle.

“Oh my God! That picture, that looks more like my dad,” Willie Clyde.

Willie Clyde’s ex-wife agrees.

“The one they keep showing on the TV looks like my ex-husband. It better not be Clyde,” she says.

L.D.’s looks, Cathy says, may have shaped his approach to life. She remembers being warned by family members that not every story her uncle told was true, that maybe he thought he could get by with his looks.

Family friend Keep recalls a story about L.D. Cooper attempting to find employment at Brooks-Scanlon shortly after graduating from high school. According to Keep, L.D. stormed up to a foreman and shouted, “You owe me a job.”

At least one of L.D.’s brothers worked for the mill, and L.D. apparently felt the job was his birthright.

“They never did hire him,” says Keep, who spent his career with Brooks-Scanlon. “He had funny ideas like that.”

At the time of his death, L.D. was a surveyor, according to a Seattle Times report. He was also a U.S. Navy veteran.

Out of sight

Soon after the failed attempt to get work at Brooks-Scanlon, L.D. essentially disappeared from the region, Keep says. Property records show that L.D. lived in Reno, beginning in the 1970s. At various times, he also lived in California, Iowa and other parts of Oregon, the records show.

Like others, Keep doubts that L.D. Cooper is the notorious D.B. Cooper. Nonetheless, Keep isn’t ready to rule out the possibility that his old friend’s little brother — or any of the brothers — might be involved in the crime. .

“That looks like the Coopers, to a degree,” Keep says of the D.B. Cooper sketch.

Perhaps no one was more shocked to hear the claims of L.D.’s niece than Dale Miller, a Eugene resident who regularly preaches at the Eugene Mission, a homeless shelter. After matching up several points in L.D.’s life — his time in Reno, military service and surveyor work — it was clear the man Miller knew as Lynn was L.D. Cooper.

Sometime around 1996, Miller was at the shelter when he saw two men flashing money and behaving awkwardly. Worried other homeless would jump the duo, Miller offered both shelter in a duplex he owned. L.D. said he’d driven his old Ford pick-up to Eugene after his ex-wife kicked him out of their Reno home.

L.D. and the other man moved into Miller’s duplex, where Cooper stayed on and off for about three years. Even attending a birthday party for Miller’s daughter, L.D. became part of the Miller family. Miller gave L.D. periodic flooring work, but mostly the man stayed at the duplex.

The Millers often took L.D. out for dinner but did not prod him about his past, and Cooper rarely brought it up, only mentioning his military service and his family in Reno. Though just a few hours away from his childhood home, L.D. never mentioned Sisters.

Miller says L.D. was a kind man as well as a talented leather worker who made everything from belts to wallets.

“The last thing in the world I ever thought of was him jumping out of an airplane. I’ll tell you that,” Miller said.