Free Republic

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...

This is the first of a two-part series. Part two is located here.More than five decades ago, a mild-mannered passenger in a business suit boarded a Seattle-bound flight in Oregon under the name Dan Cooper on Nov. 24, 1971. He ordered a bourbon and soda, and once in the air, handed a stewardess a handwritten note demanding $200,000 in cash and four parachutes under the threat of what appeared to be a bomb in his ratty briefcase. The plane landed in Seattle, and authorities complied with the hijacker’s demand. After refueling, the airliner took off again. Somewhere between takeoff and...