Richard McCoy (1942-1974) has long been a D. B. Cooper suspect, not least because he pulled off a very similar hijacking a few months later. But there are reasons to be skeptical. Ten witnesses said Cooper wasn’t McCoy, based on physical and age disparities, and McCoy seems to have been elsewhere at the time.
But McCoy’s children believe he was Cooper and their mother was complicit in his crimes. They kept quiet until her death, then led FBI agents to a parachute harness stashed in a shed on the family’s property in North Carolina (read story here).
The four parachutes supplied to Cooper had alterations that make them identifiable. One of the parachutes Cooper left behind on the hijacked plane is now in the Washington State Historical Museum. A match of the parachute harness from the McCoy property with that chute would be persuasive evidence he was Cooper.
Skeptics have questioned, among other things, whether Cooper’s jump was survivable. A skydiver laid this question to rest by repeating it. But if Cooper survived, how did some of the ransom money end up in a Columbia River sandbar, and the rest never turned up?
That skydive may provide an answer for that, too. The skydiver says he lost his grip on the 22-lb. money bag moments after leaving the plane. But there’s still this question: If McCoy was Cooper, why did he keep a parachute that could incriminate him?
