Deathbed Confessions: Who Killed Maria? // I Am DB Cooper
In 1957, a man approached a young girl in Illinois and asked if she wanted a piggyback. That was the last time she was seen alive
And in 1971, a man known as "DB Cooper" hijacked a plane, stole $200,000, and disappeared without a trace.
Both of these cases involved shocking confessions that were made with dying breaths.
TW: child death, kidnapping, reference to sexual assault
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SOURCES
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2013/08/us/oldest-cold-case/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2013/08/us/oldest-cold-case/ch2.html
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2013/08/us/oldest-cold-case/ch3.html
https://nypost.com/2014/11/16/the-murder-that-became-the-oldest-solved-cold-case-in-america/
https://abc7chicago.com/jack-mccullough-maria-ridulph-1957-killing-girl-killed/1292945/
https://charleyproject.org/case/christine-marie-tessier
https://www.cnn.com/2013/08/13/us/oldest-cold-case-comments/index.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/can-a-childhood-memory-help-solve-1957-murder-of-maria-ridulph/
https://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/2012/09/seattle_man_convicted_in_1957.html
https://themountainnewswa.net/2020/06/16/db-cooper-new-clues-surface-in-the-walter-reca-story/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5737435/Deathbed-confession-man-says-D-B-Cooper.html
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/db-cooper-tina-mucklow-untold-story-1111944/
http://dbcooper.com/new-files-prove-that-the-fbi-covered-up-the-identity-of-d-b-cooper/
https://norjak.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/duane-weber.pdf
TRANSCRIPT
1957 in Sycamore, Illinois. A quiet, idyllic suburb. The kind of place where everyone knows each other. The kind of place where no one locks their doors because nothing bad ever happens. But all of that was about to change.
On the cold, snowy evening of December 3rd, 7-year-old Maria Ridulph was playing in the street with her best friend, 8 year old Kathy Sigman when a man walked up to them. He seemed young, and had blonde hair swept back in a ducktail, a popular style at the time. The two girls stopped playing, wondering why an adult man they didn’t recognize had approached them.
He introduced himself as Johnny. He said he was 24 and unmarried. “Did either of you want a piggyback ride?” he asked. Kathy was wary of him, there was something about this guy that gave her a bad feeling, but Maria seemed to not have the same reservations. She excitedly told him she wanted one. He gave her a ride but said he would only give her another one if she brought him one of her dollies from inside.
She ran to go grab one, leaving Kathy alone with the stranger. Johnny asked Kathy again if she’d like a ride. She, again, told him no. Well do you want to take a walk around the block? He asked. Still, the answer was no. What about a trip? In a truck or a bus? What was this guys deal? When Maria came back, Kathy left to go grab some mittens, and told her friend to come with her. But Maria was eager for her next piggyback ride. It was cold, and Kathy’s hands were freezing, so she ran off promising to be right back. But by the time she returned, Maria and the man were nowhere to be found.
The entire town helped search for Maria, but there was no trace of the two. They did learn something disturbing though. A few blocks away, on the day Maria disappeared, a man in an overcoat noticed two girls walking along State Street near the public library and attempted to strike up a conversation around 4:15 p.m. The girls, feeling uncomfortable, quickly entered a nearby restaurant. When they returned outside, the man was gone—but he had left something unsettling behind. several photographs of nude women scattered across the ground.
This wasn’t the only strange sign of something dark in Sycamore. Since Halloween, someone had been writing vulgar messages in chalk on a tree and stop sign at the intersection of Center Cross Street and Archie Place. The spot where Maria disappeared from. Were these all related?
Eventually The FBI was brought in. They had no luck finding any clues about Maria’s whereabouts either. Kathy was shown a binder full of photos of ex cons and known perverts, but she didn’t identify any of them as Johnny. It wasn’t until April, 5 months after she disappeared, that the worst case scenario came true. Maria’s body was found 120 Miles away in another county, by a mushroom forager. A forensic pathologist ruled she had been stabbed.
The case was upgraded from a missing persons case to a murder investigation. No one wanted to believe a child was killed by someone in their small community, but they all had to reckon with the fact that it might be.
soon enough, though, they had gone through their entire suspect list and had come up empty. They felt like it could be someone in the Sycamore community, but who? The father of two from down the road? The mailman? The high school science teacher? None of them seemed more or less likely than anyone else. Eventually, the case went cold. And Maria’s family lost hope that her killer would ever be brought to justice.
It wouldn’t be until over 50 years later that a man was arrested, tried, and convicted for the murder of Maria Ridulph. The beginning of the road to that conviction takes us back to Eileen Tessier, confessing to her daughter while on her deathbed.
“Those two little girls, and the one who disappeared.” Eileen started, barely able to breath. She took another sharp inhale. “John did it. John did it.” Wait, Janet thought? Their John? Like, her brother john?! Was her mother really saying what she thought she was saying, that her son was responsible for the little girls disappearance?
You have to tell someone. You have to do something.” She was nearly hysterical at this point. She had kept this to herself for so many years. Janet worried that getting this worked up would push her ailing mother over the edge, but Eileen had to keep going.
She told Janet that the night Maria went missing, cops stopped by their residence. Janet remembered them coming by that night. Eileen explained that back in 1957, they asked about 18 year old John, Eileens son and Janet’s half brother. Where was he between 5:45 and 7pm that night? She could tell that the cops were suspicious of her son, so she lied. She told them that John had been at home with her and her husband. According to Eileen, the cops jotted this down, and then went on their way.
But the truth was, Eileen didn’t know where her son was at that time. And he had a history of behavior that led her to believe he was the one who took Maria.
John Tessier was always seen as a bit of an outsider. He was different from the other people in Sycamore. Growing up, John earned the nickname “Commando” because he’d walk around in camouflage carrying a wooden sword. He had gotten expelled from his high school after he pushed a female teacher and called her an awful name.
As he got older, he was known around town as being a creep, especially towards young girls. Immediately after Maria went missing, the local police received calls to their tip-line to check John out.
Were John’s parents shocked to see red and blue flashing lights shine through their windows? When she opened the door to the police, did Eileen already have a suspicion as to why they were there? She knew a girl had gone missing, but could John have had something to do with it? Eileen wasn’t sure, but she made the choice to protect her son no matter what. It wasn’t the first time she had done it, and she couldn’t be sure it would be the last.
All she knew at that moment was that she needed to give her son an alibi for the last several hours. So when John told the officers that he had been home that entire night, Eileen and her husband corroborated his story. If John was home at the time they believed Maria was taken, at least according to himself and his parents, then it couldn’t have been him who took Maria. Right?
After the FBI took over the case, John came up again as a suspect and was brought in for questioning. When asked to give an alibi, John’s story changed. He told the FBI that he was in Rockford, Illinois on December 3rd, 1957. His story went like this:
the morning of December 3rd John was in Chicago to go to the US Air Force Recruitment Center where he failed the physical, after leaving the recruitment office, he spent the rest of the day wandering around Chicago. John said that at 5:15pm, he got on a 90 minute train from Chicago to Rockford, which was 40 minutes away from Sycamore, and said at around 7pm he placed a call home for his stepfather to come pick him up.
Law enforcement was able to confirm that John was at the recruitment office in chicago that morning and did fail the physical. They confirmed that he made a 7pm phone call from Rockford to his home because an operator made a note that someone named John Tessier placed that call. And they confirmed that after he made that phone call he went to another recruitment office in Rockford where he asked about getting a doctors note so that he could pass the physical. One of the recruiters mentioned he felt John was nervously twitching, and wondered if he was on drugs.
But what law enforcement couldn’t corroborate, was where John was after he left the recruitment office in chicago, and before he made a phone call in Rockford at 7pm. And this was where his alibi got sticky, because some reports of Maria’s disappearance place it as early at 5:50pm. Could he have snatched Maria and had enough time to make it to Rockford to make the phone call that would then become his alibi. But that would have required him to have a car, and he said he had taken the train that day.
The FBI still had him take a polygraph test in which he confessed to sexually abusing a young girl in the past, but he otherwise passed it. He was then taken off the suspect list.
John would go on to become a police officer. One who was later charged with the statutory rape of a 15 year old runaway he was looking after. His ex wife accused him of being inappropriate with her young daughter, and she claimed she found a picture of John’s naked daughter in his belongings.
And as Janet sat in her mother’s hospital room hearing this deathbed confession, all of this came flooding back to her. She remembered the time she got into an argument with John and he pulled out a gun and told her he’d kill her and dump her where no one would ever find her. She thought back to how her sisters had told her he abused them as well. The family secret that slowly ate at the siblings.
So Janet made the brave decision to tell someone. Her mother passed away a few months after her confession, but it would take years for Janet to find someone who would listen to her. She called the local police who told her to phone the FBI, but when she did that, they just redirected her to her local police. It was a never ending loop of people hwo just didn’t seem interested in this information
On September 11th, 2008 when Janet reached out to an Illinois State Police tip line, she had already decided it was her last attempt. Her final plea was this: “I’ve given information to the person responsible for the cold case in Sycamore. I’ve done this a few times. Nothing is ever done. This is the last time I mention this to anyone . . . I’m not going to keep doing this over and over. It’s exhausting and it dredges up painful, horrible memories.” She hung up the phone thinking that her pleas would go unanswered forever. She tried, and the system had failed her.
But then, her phone rang. She got a call back from a state police commander, Tony Rapacz. He told her he was going to put “his bulldogs” on the case: Larry Kot and Brion Hanley. They believed Janet’s story and started looking into the decades old cold case.
It wasn’t long before investigators started looking back into John. His alibi didn’t hold. Hanley learned through interviews with John’s childhood friends that he told them he would pick them up on the night that Maria went missing, but that he never showed up, and his friend never knew where he was.
More and more people started coming forward. A woman named Pamela Long, who was a child at the same time as Maria, said that a few years prior to Maria’s disappearance, she too had been offered a piggy back ride from a strange man who matched the description of Johnny. Except he didn’t introduce himself as Johnny to her. He introduced himself as Commando, John Tessier’s nickname.
And then, a bombshell piece of evidence came through. This one, from an ex girlfriend of John’s. She called the police and told them she had a photo of John from June 1957, it should look pretty similar to how he looked at the time of Maria’s disappearance, and it might be helpful to the investigation. So, she mailed it to the investigators.
When the photo arrived, officers were shocked to see it signed “Love, Johnny”. Woah. This was going into evidence, so Hanley popped it out of the frame.
And as he did, a yellow piece of paper fluttered out from behind the photo. It was a train ticket. One way from Rockford to Chicago Dated, December 3rd, 1957, the day Maria disappeared. And not only that, but it wasn’t punched.
That means John never took the train that day. But he was seen in Chicago, which means he must have gotten there another way, perhaps his own car. That would have allowed him to travel to and from Sycamore, Rockford, and Chicago that day. That also meant the call to his step father was potentially not about getting a ride home, like he had claimed. Was it about something else?
And also, the operator confirmed that a call came in at 7pm from a man saying he was John Tessier, but it was John who said the call took place in Rockford. It was a collect call that could have been from anywhere, including Sycamore. And now that it seemed he wasn’t confined to taking the train that day, his alibi had fallen apart.
In 2011 John Tessier, then going by another name, was arrested. By that time he was 73 years old, living in Seattle with his fourth wife, and was a retired police officer.
His arrest in 2011 was followed by a 7-hour interrogation. On September 10, 2012, Tessier stood trial for Maria’s murder. A judge would decide the verdict as Tessier waived his right to a jury trial. After only 25 minutes of deliberation, the judge reached his verdict. Guilty. He was sentenced to life in prison but continued to maintain his innocence. It seemed like the case was finally closed, like the living members of Maria's family could get some long awaited closure, and John's affected sisters could start their path towards healing.
But all that changed In 2016, when a judge vacated his sentence, and Tessier was released. The charges against him were dismissed. And then in 2017, even with all the evidence stacked against him, Judge William Brady declared John Tessier innocent in the murder of Maria Ridulph. Which is different than Not Guilty, by the way. The judge ruled that the 7pm phone call to his father was enough of an alibi.
Today, John Tessier is a free man, innocent of the murder of Maria Ridulph. And there have been debates over his mother’s deathbed confession. Was she REALLY saying John was responsible for Maria’s death? Did she mean something else? Was she out of it because of the morphine? We may never know. But what gets me about this case is this.
Even as a man who was declared innocent by a judge, what kind of life have you lived where those closest to you believe you could be responsible for the murder of a child? That, to me at least, speaks volumes.
In 2014, Walter Reca (Recka) gave his friend Carl Laurin a call. The two old friends had reconnected a few years ago, after being on the same sky diving team in the 60s and 70s, and they often had long phone calls. The men would tell each other everything about their lives, war stories, fond memories, their deepest and darkest secrets…
But on this particular call, Walter was dying. He didn’t know how many more of these calls he was going to get with his friend. “You remember what I told you, years ago?” Walter asked Carl, who did remember. “Well once I go, I want you to tell the world”. That was the last time the two friends ever spoke. Walter died not long afterwards.
Carl thought back to the big secret Walter had told him. It was the day before Thanksgiving in 2008. A specific but important date. 37 years ago, to the day, the infamous DB Cooper committed the only unsolved plane hijacking in US history. It was on this day that Walter had made his huge confession to Carl. That he, was in fact, DB Cooper. The infamous unidentified man who hijacked a plane, made off with $200,000 cash, and disappeared into the sky back in 1971.
November 24th, 1971. A man whose name on his boarding pass reads “Dan Cooper” boards Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 with service from Portland to Seattle. He’s described as being in his mid-40s with brown eyes, black hair, and an olive complexion. He was estimated to be around six foot one inches tall and weighed somewhere around 170-175 pounds. Not necessarily a man that would stand out in a crowd. Later his description and police sketch would be called a Rorschach test of sorts. It wasn’t difficult to superimpose his face onto a variety of faces. This would cause problems for investigators later.
The flight Dan Cooper (or DB Cooper as he would come to be known) boarded should have been a quick 30 minute trip if everything went as usual. Portland to Seattle. But Cooper has very specific plans for these next 30 minutes.
Once the plane’s in the air, Cooper hands a flight attendant a note. Written in the most casual way, as if he were just passing a friend a note in class, the message reads: "Miss, I have a bomb here and would like you to sit by me." Before going over to sit down next to the man, the flight attendant drops the note at the feet of her coworker Tina Mucklow.
Tina’s only 22-years-old. New on the job, and barely an adult herself. But now, Her life and the lives of all the passengers and rest of her crew were now in her hands. Could one wrong move kill them all? There’s nowhere to run and nothing she can do, so Tina gets on the intercom that connects the cabin to the cockpit. “We’re being hijacked. This is not a joke,” she tells the pilots.
But Cooper doesn’t seem worried. He opens his briefcase for the flight attendant, and she sees two rows of four red cylinders, which she assumes are dynamite. He has the flight attendant bring a second note up to the cockpit. It lays out the hijacker's demands. He wants $200,000 all in $20 bills (around $1.5 million in today’s money), and four parachutes. And If they don’t give him what he wanted, then he’ll blow up the entire plane. Kapisch?
The shocked flight attendant asks if he’s really doing this. Cooper responds that he is but he can’t believe it himself.
The pilot confirms that his demands would be met upon landing. The crew just needs to keep themselves together and keep everyone safe until then. And what if this, clearly out of his mind, man changes his mind and detonates the bomb before they reach the ground? Well, they just have to take that risk.
Flight Attendant Tina Mucklow becomes the point of contact between Cooper and the rest of the crew. Cooper tells her how the bomb works, how it’ll kill them all if he detonates it, and she says a little prayer. On the outside though, she seems pretty calm, and she thinks that keeps Cooper calm as well, though it’s hard to tell who is calming who.
Air Traffic Control has the plane fly in a holding pattern over the Puget Sound while they get everything in order. Tina realizes it’s because they wanted to make sure the plane’s over a body of water and not buildings or people in case the bomb goes off. This is not looking good.
She watches as the plane starts descending, the passenger so blissfully unaware that they could all just poof. They think they’re arriving at the destination, but when they get on the tarmac, none of them are allowed off.
Tina exits the plane to get the money and parachutes from a coworker of hers, one who was like a father to her. He asks her if she’s ok. She wipes away her tears, tells him she’s fine, and somehow gets herself to walk back onto the plane. What else was she going to do? If she tried to run, would the whole plane blow up? Would this all be her fault?
When she gets back on, she’s hit with this overwhelming sense of courage, and she asks the hijacker to let the passengers off. He thinks about it for a moment. He has what he needs, so he lets Everyone deplane without incident, but Tina and the pilots had to stay. He needs them.
He demands they fly the plane to Mexico City, but first they need to stop in Reno, Nevada to refuel. He directs them to fly below 10,000 feet and with wing flaps at 15 degrees which would keep the aircraft's speed below 200 knots. Hmm, sounds like he knows his way around an aircraft… Could he be a pilot himself? Tina wonders this to herself, but she doesn’t have time to assess him any further. Next thing she knows, he's asking her how to deploy the plane’s stairs in the air before telling her to go–and stay–in the cockpit for the rest of the flight.
The plane lands in Reno, and Tina and the pilots exit the cockpit. The hijacker was nowhere to be seen… He must have jumped out of the plane somewhere between Seattle and Reno. All that was left of him was a black clip-on necktie left in his seat.
But the mystery wouldn't end there. His body was never found, so does that mean he somehow survived the fall? If he did somehow manage to make it to the ground alive, where was he now?
The mystery of DB Cooper’s identity has been international news for decades now. But when Carl Laurin (Lauren) heard his friend Walter confess, there was not a doubt in his mind that Walter was Cooper.
Let’s take a look at the facts. This is what Laurin says Reca said that convinced him: after surviving the jump and parachute drop, Reca walked two and a half miles to Teanaway (Tee-anaway) Junction Cafe in Cle Elum (Clee Ellum), Washington. His leg was injured, but he was still able to make the trek. There he called his friend Jeff to come pick him up. Later, Jeff confirmed that he did pick up a soaking wet, freezing Reca that night from the restaurant.
Reca’s coworker also corroborated that he came into work the day after the hijacking with an injured leg.
Carl also provided some additional context about his friend in the 2018 documentary DB Cooper: The Real Story that he made. During his military career, Reca served as a paratrooper who then became a covert intelligence operator for multiple government agencies. So not only would he have already survived a jump from a plane using a parachute, but he would know his way around a plane.
And clearly, so did DB Cooper. Based on the very technical and specific instructions he gave the pilots. On top of that, he had also previously robbed a Big Boy restaurant. Sure, it wasn’t quite the same thing, but If anyone was going to hijack and then jump out of a plane via parachute, Reca could be the man to pull it off.
Carl said that he wasn’t the only person Reca confessed to. Reca’s niece, Lisa Story, also says that he told her he was DB Cooper.
In the documentary, Carl plays snippets from their recorded phone conversations. Reca walks Carl through exactly how that day went down.
And if you watch the documentary, you might start to feel like Carl, convinced that Reca fits the profile of DB Cooper.
But if you listen to Reca’s words closely, you’ll start to hear some testimony that doesn’t really line up with what we know about the case.
Reca says that he didn’t really plan out the day very well, he didn’t exactly know what he was going to do, and he wasn’t very familiar with the type of plane he was on, a boeing 727-100. He says that it was actually the flight attendant, Tina, that suggested he jump out from the stairs of the plane.
However, we know from Tina that DB cooper knew exactly what he wanted to do that day, down to exiting through the stairs. Actually, none of Reca’s story on what happened that day was corroborated by the accounts of those who were on the plane for the hijacking.
Reca also doesn’t match the FBIs composite sketch of what Cooper looked like. The sketch showed cooper with a slim lower face, slender nose, and slightly receding hairline. Reca had a broader nose, and even into his middle age maintained a full head of thick hair.
And then there's Laurin’s lack of physical evidence. According to him and expert Koenig, the evidence brought forward helps prove that Reca was DB Cooper. But they never divulged what the evidence consisted of.
Ok, but what about Reca being at Cle Elum the day of the hijacking, and people confirming they saw him. Well, there’s no way to verify that actually happened on the day that Cooper hijacked the plane. Reca could have been there at anytime.
For many people, this deathbed confession just never seemed convincing enough, and many people bring up the fact that Walter Reca wasn’t even the only person who confessed to being DB Cooper at the end of their life.
Another man, on his deathbed, confessed to his wife that he was the one who hijacked that plane. A man named Duane Weber.
Apparently, on his deathbed he told his wife he was Dan Cooper, which was the name that appeared on DB coopers plane ticket, Not DB. it was 1995 and he was dying of Kidney disease, and he just had to get it off his chest.
Photos of Duane from the time show a man who looks much more like the FBI composite drawing than Walter Reca. He also had a knee injury he told his wife was from jumping out of a plane.
His wife also said one time he took her on a sentimental hike along the Columbia river near Seattle, a spot where just months after their walk, wads of cash confirmed to be from DB Cooper were found. An 8 year old boy was walking that part of the river when he found about $5800 in twenty dollar bills, arranged just how it was given to DB Cooper. Which raised the question, was the spot sentimental to Duane because it was where he landed?
Lastly, and this is a point I see brought up a lot by people who believe Duane truly could be DB Cooper, but Duane tossed and turned from a nightmare one night, and his wife said that he was talking in his sleep about jumping out of a plane leaving his fingerprints on the 'aft stairs.
It doesn’t sound that important, until you realize that DB Cooper was meticulously careful about not leaving his fingerprints on the plane that day. There weren’t even fingerprints found on the cigarette butts he left behind. Was Duane having flashbacks at night, paranoid that he left behind a fingerprint by the plane's stairs that would give him away?
However, Duane was eventually ruled out because his DNA wasn’t a match with traces
found on the black clip-on neck tie.
A DNA profile wasn’t made on Cooper until 2007 from what was found on the tie. however, not every investigator is convinced the DNA is actually the hijackers. After all, he was meticulous about his fingerprints, would he have been careful to not leave any clues behind that could identify him?
There are other, more compelling suspects in the DB Cooper case, and civilian sleuths are still trying to find answers, long after the case has been declared officially cold.
But it brings me to my final question. What would compel two men to declare that they were the infamous hijacker upon their deaths? When in fact they werent
Was it fear that they would never be remembered for anything else, so in a last minute panic they came up with a bombshell confession. Or was it really that they had a secret they needed to get off their chest.
I’ve spoken to hospice workers on this show, doctors, nurses, and others who have been around people at the end of their lives, and they’ve told me all sorts of reasons people reveal secrets. For some, they’re out of it by the end. A mix of drugs, dementia, other cognitive issues. Sometimes they can’t differentiate what’s real and what’s not, and all sorts of confessions start coming out.
But for others, the secrets they kept became too much to bear. They assumed their truths were like candles they could keep in the back of their minds, dimming over the years until they were really extinguished, when in reality, they became like forest fires, growing and growing until they were all consuming. And in a moment of panic they needed to be released before the fire swallowed them whole.
But what do you think? Is it better for the truth to come out, or should some secrets stay with us to the grave? Let me know, I’m curious what you think. I’ll be back here next week with another big secret that didn’t come out until someone's death. We’re going to be looking into why so many children went missing in a small community in Tennessee in the 40’s. This one is an iceberg, you guys, and it goes way deeper than you could imagine, so you’ll definitely want to join me for it.
Until next time, what are you hiding? OooooOOOOoooOOOO