It is without doubt one of the greatest mysteries in US legal historical past: simply what occurred to DB Cooper, the person who hijacked an airplane earlier than leaping out in mid-air with $200,000 in money?
Now, greater than 50 years later, the notorious crime might have been solved, after a pair of siblings got here ahead to assert they’d discovered the parachute used within the hijacking, of their mom’s shed, and that Cooper was their father.
Chanté and Rick McCoy III say their father, Richard McCoy Jr, was the person who recognized himself as Dan Cooper when he boarded a Northwest Orient Airways jetliner from Portland to Seattle in November 1971.
Cooper, or maybe McCoy, proceeded to order a bourbon and soda earlier than handing a observe to a flight attendant that mentioned he had a bomb in his briefcase.
“Miss, I’ve a bomb and would really like you to sit down by me,” the observe mentioned.
When the airplane arrived in Seattle, Cooper collected $200,000 in ransom cash, together with 4 parachutes, and launched the passengers. He then ordered the flight crew to go for Mexico Metropolis, through Reno, Nevada, however half-hour after takeoff, Cooper jumped out of the airplane someplace over south-west Washington.
The hijacking baffled the FBI, who spent 45 years investigating earlier than formally closing the case in 2016. It additionally caught the eye of beginner sleuths, significantly after about $5,800 of the ransom cash was discovered close to Vancouver, Washington, in 1980.
In November, Dan Gryder, a retired pilot who has spent 20 years investigating the case, instructed the Cowboy State Day by day that the FBI was re-investigating the Cooper case, after the invention of the parachute within the McCoys’ mom’s shed.
“That rig is actually one in a billion,” Gryder mentioned of the parachute, in response to the Cowboy State Day by day. He mentioned FBI brokers had visited the property of the McCoys’ mom, Karen, who died in 2020, final 12 months. Brokers searched “each nook and cranny”, in response to Gryder, and the McCoys handed over the parachute.
Gryder launched two movies in 2021 and 2022 on his YouTube channel Possible Trigger, documenting the McCoys’ claims. In Gryder’s newest video, printed on 18 November, he claims the FBI successfully re-opened its investigation after contacting him in late 2023. Gryder claims that the FBI, which is in possession of the McCoy parachute, is now trying to find “a constructive DNA connection between McCoy’s DNA, and the Cooper DNA left on board the plane”.
The FBI didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
The suggestion that Richard McCoy might have hijacked the Northwest Orient Airways just isn’t as outrageous as it could appear.
McCoy, a former navy helicopter pilot who served within the Vietnam battle, was amongst a variety of suspects investigated by the FBI after he hijacked a airplane on 7 April 1972, leaping out of the plane with $500,000 money, over Provo, Utah. McCoy was arrested two days later and sentenced to 45 years in jail, however he escaped in 1974 – after three months on the run he was killed by an FBI agent.
Maybe McCoy died hiding the key of the DB Cooper hijacking with him – and 50 years on, the reality might lastly have come to mild.
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