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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 jetliner from Portland to Seattle in November 1971. “That rig is literally one in a billion,” Gryder said of the parachute, according to the Cowboy State Daily. He said FBI agents had visited the property of the McCoys’ mother, Karen, who died in 2020, last year. Agents searched “every nook and cranny”, according to Gryder, and the McCoys handed over the parachute. McCoy, a former military helicopter pilot who served in the Vietnam...

A pair of North Carolina siblings claim their late father is the ever-elusive Boeing hijacker DB Cooper after allegedly finding his parachute hidden in their home, according to a new report. Chanté and Rick McCoy III claim their father, Richard McCoy Jr., was the infamous fugitive who disappeared when he leaped out of a Boeing plane with $200,000 in cash after taking passengers and crew hostage in 1971, the Cowboy State Daily reports. The siblings said they waited until their mother’s death in 2020 to come forward, fearing she could be implicated as the parachute that allegedly belonged to Cooper...

Most Americans have heard of the case of DB Cooper, who is accused of pulling off the only plane hijacking in the history of the United States that has never been solved. Now, 44 years after the brazen air heist, a Michigan author has put forward a new theory linking the mystery of DB Cooper to an obscure missing person case involving a married father of four who vanished two years before the skyjacking and was never heard from again. Over the years, the facts of the skyjacking history have become the stuff of legends: on November 24, 1971, a...

D.B. Cooper: 40 years later November 24th, 2011, marks the 40th anniversary of the legendary Cooper case, an unsolved crime that has baffled agents, detectives and amateur sleuths, and spurned one of the greatest manhunts in law enforcement history. The FBI’s case file on D.B. Cooper runs some forty feet long. It is located in the basement archives of the Bureau’s field office in Seattle, where for four decades agents have hunted for the man who ransomed a passenger jet for a small fortune and parachutes, then jumped out the back over the rural Northwest, during the middle of a...

D.B. COOPER REDUX Help Us Solve the Enduring Mystery 12/31/07 On a cold November night 36 years ago, in the driving wind and rain, somewhere between southern Washington state and just north of Portland, Oregon, a man calling himself Dan Cooper parachuted out of a plane he’d just hijacked clutching a bag filled with $200,000 in stolen cash. Who was Cooper? Did he survive the jump? And what happened to the loot, only a small part of which has ever surfaced? It’s a mystery, frankly. We’ve run down thousands of leads and considered all sorts of scenarios. And amateur sleuths...

On This Day In History November 24, 1971 Hijacker parachutes into thunderstorm A hijacker calling himself D.B. Cooper parachutes from a Northwest Orient Airlines 727 into a raging thunderstorm over Washington State. He had $200,000 in ransom money in his possession. Cooper commandeered the aircraft shortly after takeoff, showing a flight attendant something that looked like a bomb and informing the crew that he wanted $200,000, four parachutes, and "no funny stuff." The plane landed at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, where authorities met Cooper's demands and evacuated most of the passengers. Cooper then demanded that the plane fly toward Mexico at...

On a rainy night in 1971, the notorious skyjacker jumped out of a 727 and into American legend. But recently, a chance lead to a Manhattan P.I. may have finally cracked the case.