It's one of the biggest mysteries in U.S. criminal history: just what happened to DB Cooper, the man who hijacked an airplane before leaping out in mid-air with $200,000 in cash? Now, more than 50 years later, the infamous crime may have been solved, after a pair of siblings came forward to claim they had found the parachute used in the hijacking in their mother’s shed and that Cooper was their father. Chanté and Rick McCoy III say their father, Richard McCoy, Jr. (pictured, right), was the man who identified himself as Dan Cooper when he boarded a Northwest Orient Airlines jetliner from Portland to Seattle in November 1971. Cooper handed a note to a flight attendant that said he had a bomb in his briefcase. When the plane arrived in Seattle, Cooper collected $200,000 in ransom money, along with 4 parachutes, and released the passengers. He then ordered the flight crew to head for Mexico City, via Reno, Nevada, but 30 minutes after takeoff, Cooper jumped out of the airplane somewhere over southwest Washington. The hijacking baffled the FBI, who spent 45 years investigating before officially closing the case in 2016. It also caught the attention of amateur sleuths, particularly after about $5,800 of the ransom money was found near Vancouver, Washington, in 1980. In November, Dan Gryder, a retired pilot who has spent 20 years investigating the case, said the FBI was re-investigating the Cooper case after the discovery of the parachute in the McCoys’ mother’s shed. He said FBI agents had visited the property of the McCoys’ mother, Karen, who died in 2020, last year. The McCoys handed over the parachute to the FBI at that time. Rick McCoy also provided a DNA sample to the FBI and they are now searching for a positive DNA connection between McCoy’s DNA and the Cooper DNA left on board the aircraft. Perhaps McCoy died hiding the secret of the DB Cooper hijacking with him – and 50 years on, the truth may finally have come to light.
