It’s one of the biggest mysteries in US criminal history: what really happened to DB Cooper, the man who stole the plane before he took off with 200,000 dollars in cash?
Now, more than 50 years later, the ugly crime may have been solved, after two brothers came forward to say they found the parachute used in the robbery, in their mother’s shed, and that Cooper was their father.
Chanté and Rick McCoy III say their father, Richard McCoy Jr, was the man who identified himself as Dan Cooper when he boarded a Northwest Orient Airlines flight from Portland to Seattle in November 1971.
Cooper, or perhaps McCoy, first ordered a bourbon and soda before handing a note to a flight attendant who said he had a bomb in his bag.
“Girl, I have a bombshell and I want you to sit next to me,” the letter said.
When the plane landed in Seattle, Cooper collected $200,000 in ransom money, along with four parachutes, and released the passengers. He then ordered the flight crew to go to Mexico City, via Reno, Nevada, but 30 minutes after takeoff, Cooper jumped from the plane somewhere southwest of Washington.
The carjacking shocked the FBI, who spent 45 years investigating the case before officially closing the case in 2016. It also caught the attention of laypeople, especially after a $5,800 ransom was found near Vancouver, Washington, in 1980.
In November, Dan Gryder, a retired pilot who spent 20 years investigating the case, told Cowboy State Daily that the FBI was re-examining the Cooper case, after a parachute was found in the McCoys’ mother’s shed.
“It’s a real billion dollar rig,” Gryder said of the parachute, according to the Cowboy State Daily. He said FBI agents visited the home of the McCoys’ mother, Karen, who died in 2020, last year. Agents searched “every nook and cranny”, according to Gryder, and the McCoys provided a parachute.
Gryder released two videos in 2021 and 2022 on the YouTube channel Probable Cause, documenting the McCoys’ statements. In Gryder’s latest video, published on November 18, he says that the FBI reopened its investigation after meeting with him at the end of 2023. Gryder says that the FBI, which has McCoy’s parachute, is now looking for “a good DNA connection between McCoy’s DNA, and the Cooper DNA left on the plane”.
The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The suggestion that Richard McCoy may have robbed Northwest Orient Airlines is not as outrageous as it sounds.
McCoy, a former helicopter pilot who served in the Vietnam War, was one of the suspects investigated by the FBI after hijacking a plane on April 7, 1972, jumping from a plane with $500,000 in cash, over Provo, Utah. McCoy was arrested two days later and sentenced to 45 years in prison, but escaped in 1974 – after three months on the run he was killed by an FBI agent.
Perhaps McCoy died hiding the secret of DB Cooper’s kidnapping with him – and 50 years later, the truth may have come out.