Siblings speak out about their father being D.B. Cooper after finding parachute in his home: ‘One in a billion’

After two siblings suspect their late father of leading a covert second life, the true identity of D.B. Cooper may have finally come to light.

 

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 told a flight attendant that he had a bomb and demanded $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 opened the aircraft’s aft door, unfolded the stairs, and parachuted out into the skies over 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 whether he survived the jump.

The remainder of the ransom money has never been located, although a tiny portion was found 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 gear, the 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 might 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 crime after discovering the purportedly Cooper-owned parachute in her storage cache outside the house.

Dan Gryder, an aviation YouTuber, spoke with the siblings after she passed away. He looked at the parachute and thinks it might be the same one Cooper used in 1971.

The publication quoted Gryder as saying, “That rig is literally one in a billion.”

He asserted that the parachute the McCoys discovered was identical to the one that veteran skydiver Earl Cossey had modified for the police in response to Cooper’s requests.

People also conjectured that Richard Jr.’s criminal history might have contributed to his status as the elusive fugitive.

Richard Jr. was apprehended during a similar highjacking in Utah five months after the first one, and he died following a firefight with police after escaping from prison.

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 view 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 more clues. Rick had also given agents a DNA sample.

He says he was informed that his father’s body might be exhumed as the next step, but the request has not yet been made. The FBI has not publicly discussed the case 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.