A little over 53 years ago, someone the Federal Bureau of Investigation describes as “a nondescript man,” bought a one-way ticket to Seattle, Wash., and kicked off a mystery that’s stumped investigators for decades.
Has the DB Cooper case finally been solved? Dan Gryder – a retired pilot, skydiver and YouTuber – and people who believe they are the man’s children think it just might be, according to Cowboy State Daily in Wyoming.
Let’s go back to November 1971, when that man approached the counter of Northwest Orient Airlines in Portland, Ore. He called himself “Dan Cooper” (he’s has since become known as “DB Cooper) and bought his ticket to flight #305 in cash.
Per the FBI, he was a quiet man who appeared to be in his mid-40s. Copper wore a business suit with a black tie and a white shirt, and he’d ordered a bourbon and soda on the plane before takeoff. Just after 3 p.m., he handed a flight attendant a note telling her that he had a bomb and that he wanted her to sit with him.
He showed her a briefcase filled with wires and told her to bring a note to the captain demanding four parachutes and $200,000 in twenty-dollar bills. When the plane landed in Seattle, the man exchanged the flight’s 36 passengers for the money and parachutes.
Then, he took off again with several crew members still aboard and ordered the plane to set course for Mexico City, Mexico. Before it landed, he jumped from the plane with a parachute and the ransom money.
Even though the pilots landed the plane safely, the hijacker managed to disappear into the night. While a young boy found a rotting package full of twenty-dollar bills totaling $5,800 in 1980 that matched the ransom money serial numbers, Cooper himself never been identified, even after a decades-long investigation by the FBI.
“The FBI learned of the crime in-flight and immediately opened an extensive investigation that lasted many years. Calling it NORJAK, for Northwest Hijacking, we interviewed hundreds of people, tracked leads across the nation, and scoured the aircraft for evidence,” said the bureau. By the five-year anniversary of the hijacking, we’d considered more than 800 suspects and eliminated all but two dozen from consideration.”
One of those suspects is Richard Floyd McCoy. That’s who Gryder thinks Cooper really was. Chanté and Richard III, or “Rick,” McCoy’s children, think so too.
McCoy has been dead since 1974, when FBI agents killed him in a Virginia Beach, Va., shootout. He had just escaped from federal prison in Pennsylvania after being sentenced to 45 years for a hijacking in Utah.
“Richard Floyd McCoy, is still a favorite suspect among many,” according to the FBI. “We tracked down and arrested McCoy for a similar airplane hijacking and escape by parachute less than five months after Cooper’s flight. But McCoy was later ruled out because he didn’t match the nearly identical physical descriptions of Cooper provided by two flight attendants and for other reasons.”
At the time of the DB Cooper hijacking, McCoy was a criminal justice student at Brigham Young University, said Cowboy State Daily. Before that, he served two tours of duty in the Vietnam War as a highly decorated Green Beret and he was a demolition expert, helicopter pilot, and active member of the Utah National Guard.
In 2016, the bureau announced that it would redirect resources from the Cooper case to other cases. However, it also said that “should specific physical evidence emerge – related specifically to the parachutes or the money taken by the hijacker – individuals with those materials are asked to contact their local FBI field office.”
According to Cowboy State Daily, Gryder has what he thinks is the “missing link” in the DB Cooper mystery – a modified military surplus bailout rig owned by McCoy that Gryder believes was used in the heist. Per the outlet, it was stored in the storage stash of McCoy’s deceased mother until recently.
“That rig is literally one in a billion,” Gryder said.
McCoy’s children said their family kept the secret of their father’s involvement for years because they feared that their mother, Karen, would be implicated. After a book about the mystery was published in 1991, she sued to stop its printing because it claimed she was complicit. She admitted to helping her husband with the Utah incident “claiming she’d been a victim of severe physical and sexual abuse as a child,” during a hearing for that suit but denied that they had any connection to the Cooper incident.
When Karen died in 2020, her children came to Gryder, who has been researching the case for more than 20 years and has posted a two-part series on his YouTube channel.
In it, “he connects the dots and shows actual footage of him finding the parachute in an outbuilding on the McCoy family property in North Carolina in July 2022,” according to Cowboy State Daily. The outlet said that Gryder and McCoy’s son met with FBI agents last year to provide them with the harness and parachute, “along with a skydiving logbook found by Chanté that aligned with the timeline for both hijackings.”
Later, an FBI agent called to ask to search the family property in Cove City, N.C., said the report. He said he believes they are taking the discovery seriously and that he has provided a DNA sample to the FBI. His sister also offered to provide a sample but the FBI did not follow up on it, Cowboy State Daily said.
As of Nov. 23, the FBI hasn’t given them an update on where the case stands.
“The FBI would not confirm or deny that it is actively re-investigating the Cooper case nor would the agency provide an update on the status of the parachute or other evidence agents acquired from the McCoys related to this case,” said the outlet.
Others who have researched the case, including former FBI agent in charge of the Salt Lake City office, Russell Calame, and McCoy’s parole officer Bernie Rhodes, also believed that Cooper and McCoy were one in the same. So did FBI agent Nick O’Hara, who fired the fatal bullet killing McCoy, Cowboy State Daily said. On the other hand, retired FBI Special Agent, Larry Carr, who briefly took over the case in 2007, doesn’t think so.
“Perhaps Cooper didn’t survive his jump from the plane,” said the FBI. “After all, the parachute he used couldn’t be steered, his clothing and footwear were unsuitable for a rough landing, and he had jumped into a wooded area at night – a dangerous proposition for a seasoned pro, which evidence suggests Cooper was not.”
Did Cooper die that night? Did he die in that 1974 shootout? Or, is he still out there?
At least for now, that still remains a mystery.