Walter R. Reca was a former military paratrooper who claimed to be a spy. During a recorded phone call in 2008, Reca reportedly told his friend Carl Laurin that he was DB Cooper and allowed Laurin to tape their phone calls about the hijacking over a six-week period. In 2018, four years after Reca's death, Laurin published "DB Cooper & Me: A Criminal, A Spy, My Best Friend," which thrust Reca into the spotlight of the Cooper case.
Details included in Reca's account of the events, however, do not fully align with confirmed details about the Cooper investigation. Additionally, Reca did not resemble the composite sketch of Cooper and had significantly more skydiving experience than the hijacker, who the FBI profiled as an amateur skydiver at best. To date, the FBI has found no evidence that would prove Reca's involvement in the DB Cooper case beyond a reasonable doubt.
