A secret parachute in the FBI’s possession may have finally solved DB Cooper’s identity

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• The children of a suspect DB Cooper turned over new evidence to the FBI because they believe their father was the culprit.

• A parachute long hidden on the family’s North Carolina property is said to match the type used in the only unsolved skyjacking in American history.

• The suspect in question was arrested for a similar skyjacking just months after the DB Cooper event.

The children of convicted skyjacker Richard McCoy II thought their dear old dad might have been DB Cooperthe infamous (and notoriously unidentified) central figure in 1971’s unsolved skyjacking. It’s the only one in US history actually without an answer – until maybe now.

Just months after the Cooper incident, McCoy was convicted of an incredibly similar skyjacking that also included a parachute jump. His children, Chanté and Richard III (Rick), have long believed that the tracks coincided.

They may now have evidence to back up their suspicions.

Chanté and Rick had kept quiet out of concern for their mother, Karen, who they believed was potentially complicit in both crimes. But since both parents are now dead, the possibility arose that siblings could come forward with their suspicions. And, crucially, they appear to have hard evidence: a modified parachute that they (and amateur DB Cooper practitioner Dan Gryder) believe was used in the daring escape.

“The rich is literally one in a billion,” Gryder told Cowboy State Daily after to publish a series on YouTube about his suspicions. It was that YouTube series, Gryder said, that drew the FBI back into the case.

According to Gryder, the FBI now has the parachute and harness that were once stashed away in a storage shed on the family’s property in North Carolina, along with a harness and a skydiving log that Chanté claims show DB Cooper’s movements near Oregon and Utah (the sites of the two skyjackings events). This is the first real move by the FBI on the case since the agency closed it in 2016– even if some former staff claimed it remained secretly open.

After receiving the new evidence, the FBI followed up with the family and searched the property where the parachute was kept for four hours with more than a dozen agents, according to Gryder. The unique changes to the parachute may be key to the new evidence’s value in the more than 50-year-old case. The FBI knows that the original parachutes were modified by Earl Cossey, a veteran skydiver who was working with the FBI until the murder in his home in 2013. If the new find is consistent with what they already know, it could give a boost to the hunt for the real DB Cooper.

The DB Cooper case has taken on a borderline mythic quality with countless theories put forward by amateurs online, in books and in documentaries. One 1990s book—DB Cooper: The Real McCoy—even claimed that McCoy was the culprit, but the book was pulled from print after Karen sued, claiming libel.

On November 24, 1971, DB Cooper—his name was Dan, but the media misreported the name as DB—paid $18.52 in cash for a one-way ticket to Portland and boarded Northwest Orient Flight 305 without offering any identification (due to a lack of rules at the time).

Carrying a briefcase and a paper sack, Cooper passed a note to a flight attendant sitting behind him halfway through the flight, whispering that she had to look at the note as he had a bomb. Cooper opened his briefcase to reveal what appeared to be a bomb and relayed his demands for $200,000, more parachutes and a tanker waiting in Seattle so he could take off again, bound for Mexico City.

After Cooper’s demands were met, the planned 30-minute flight expanded to a two-hour loop over Puget Sound while ground crews prepared. Cooper released the airliner’s 35 passengers and some crew members, then dictated the flight path and flight configuration to the remaining crew — demanding specific speeds, flap angles and more. With these negotiations complete, Cooper and the four remaining crew members took off again.

Somewhere still above Washington, Cooper then opened the rear staircase and parachuted out of the plane, but the exact location and time of that jump are unknown. Immediate searches yielded no evidence, and over the years experts have been unable to determine an exact search area due to the many variables involved in the nighttime jump.

One of the only real pieces of evidence Cooper left behind was a $1.49 clip-on tie from JCPenney, which the FBI has. Fools have sued the government for access to the DNA and particles left on the tiebut to no avail.

Having the actual parachute would expand the evidence in the case by enormous amounts.

McCoy is an intriguing suspect – one who was later passed over because many FBI personnel had come to believe that the real DB Cooper died in the jump when McCoy emerged as a possibility. And McCoy didn’t exactly match the physical description, as he was much younger — 27 years old at the time — than the original estimate of Cooper’s age in the mid-40s.

However, McCoy would have had the chops to commit the famous crime. He proved it in April 1972 when he succeeded successfully the skyjacking of a United Airlines flight after demanding $500,000. He boarded the plane in Denver, and was able to have it diverted to San Francisco, get his demands met, and force the plane back into the air. McCoy then jumped from the plane over Utah and was arrested by the FBI within three days, thanks to an anonymous tip. That tip then led the FBI to a waitress who recalled serving him a milkshake at a roadside hamburger stand the night of the skyjacking, and a teenager who said McCoy paid him $5 to give him a ride from the stand to a nearby town. Eventually, they were able to match his fingerprints to those left on the demand note.

McCoy was arrested after the FBI raided his home. He was convicted and sentenced to 45 years in prison, but eventually broke out of a maximum security prison and evaded capture for three months until he was shot by police in Virginia in 1974.

The parachute offers the best chance for evidence that could potentially link McCoy to Cooper. “This,” Gryder said, “will definitely prove it was McCoy.”

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