For anyone who doesn't know the story, in November of 1971 a man calling himself Dan Cooper, wearing a black tie and a suit, boarded a Seattle-bound Boeing 727 in Oregon and told a flight attendant he had a bomb in a briefcase. He gave her a note demanding ransom. After the plane landed he released the 36 passengers in exchange for $200,000 in ransom money and parachutes.  He then ordered the plane to fly to Mexico, but near the Washington-Oregon border he jumped and was never seen or heard from again.

  But  Michigan publisher Principa Media says Cooper was former military paratrooper and intelligence operative Walter R. Reca, and Principa worked with Reca's best friend, Carl Laurin, in compiling the evidence. While the publisher did not disclose if Reca was still alive, an obituary online lists Reca, of Oscada, Mich., as having died in 2014 at the age of 80. 

Evidence includes:

• Witness testimony from an individual who spoke with Reca within an hour of his jump
• Documentation concerning how the $200,000 in stolen cash was spent
• Confessions from Reca to two individuals at two different times
• An article of clothing Reca wore during the jump

     In one of the audio recordings provided by the publishing company, Laurin is heard asking Reca about how he felt going through life knowing he was D.B. Cooper and if he ever had second thoughts about the heist.  

"Never even a second thought," Reca says.

After the heist, Reca said he put the money in the bank, and that he had "family to take care of" before jobs "overseas" came up. The daredevil said he treated it as any bank heist.

"It was no [big] deal really, it was done," Reca is heard saying. "It was done, and I lived through it."