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On November 24, 1971, a man by the name of D.B. Cooper, also called Dan Cooper, took control of Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305, a Boeing 727.
When Cooper informed a flight attendant that he had a bomb and wanted $200,000 (about $1.5 million in today’s currency) in ransom, along with four parachutes after landing in Seattle.
The plane had been halfway between Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington. After letting the passengers disembark from the airplane in Seattle.
He gave the flight crew instructions to refuel the plane and go toward Mexico City, making a stop in Reno, Nevada, to refuel.
Cooper unlocked the aircraft’s rear door, unfolded the stairs, and parachuted out into the skies above Washington about half an hour after the plane took off from Seattle.
It has never been established with certainty who he really is, where he is, or if he survived the leap. The remainder of the ransom money has never been located.
But a tiny portion was discovered in 1980 on the Columbia River’s banks close to Vancouver, Washington.
The FBI had long conjectured that Cooper might not have survived the jump because of the bad weather, the lack of appropriate skydiving gea.
He forest terrain, the lack of specific knowledge of the landing area, and the fact that the remaining ransom money had vanished and never been used.
The crime is still the only unsolved case of air piracy in the history of commercial aviation.
After purportedly discovering Cooper’s parachute concealed in their house, two siblings in North Carolina now think they have proof that their late father may have been Cooper.
According to the Cowboy State Daily, Chanté and Rick McCoy III believe their father, Richard McCoy Jr., may have been the notorious hijacker.
The two held off on sharing their notion until their mother passed away in 2020, out of concern that she would be connected to the murder after discovering the purportedly Cooper-owned parachute in her storage cache outside the home.
Dan Gryder, an aviation YouTuber, spoke with the siblings after she passed away. He looked at the parachute and thinks it may be the same one Cooper used in 1971.
The publication quoted Gryder as saying, “That rig is literally one in a billion.” He said that the parachute the McCoys discovered was identical.
To the one that experienced skydiver Earl Cossey had modified for the police in response to Cooper’s requests.
People also conjectured that Richard Jr.’s criminal history may have contributed to his status as the elusive fugitive.
Richard Jr. was apprehended after a similar highjacking in Utah five months after the first one, and he died during a firefight with police after escaping from jail.
The McCoys informed Gryder that they had known the truth for a number of years but were afraid to come out for fear that their mother would be linked to both hijackings.
The FBI apparently contacted the McCoys to see the evidence after Gryder released pictures of the parachute.
The siblings informed the magazine that the FBI had seized the parachute in 2023 after searching the North Carolina facility for further evidence.
Rick had also given agents a DNA sample. He says he was informed that his father’s corpse may be exhumed as the next step, but the request has not yet been made.
The FBI has not publicly discussed the investigation or the allegations this year. Due to a lack of leads, the case was formally closed in 2016, forty-five years after the crime was committed.