Newly uncovered evidence could lead to hijacker D.B. Cooper’s identity

The case regarding the mysterious disappearance of the unidentified pirate D.B. Cooper may have had a breakthrough, thanks to a newly uncovered piece of evidence.

Siblings Chanté and Richard McCoy III found a parachute in an outbuilding on the family property in North Carolina. That parachute may have been used by the hijacker himself.

The children have always believed their dad, Richard McCoy II, was D.B. Cooper. Chanté and Richard III waited until their mother passed before reaching out to Dan Gryder, a retired pilot and aviation expert who has been documenting his own search for D.B. Cooper on his YouTube channel in his retirement.

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“I had tried for 20 years to contact Richard and Chanté,” Gryder said on “The Jake and Spike Show.”

The children waited until after their mother passed because they suspected she may have been complicit in the hijacking. The FBI stopped investigating the case in 2016.

“Did the FBI get in touch with you after you put this video out?” Jake Skorheim, co-host of “The Jake and Spike Show,” asked Gryder.

“Yes,” Gryder answered.

Richard McCoy II was arrested five months later after attempting a near identical heist to D.B. Cooper’s over Utah. He was arrested, and then broke out of jail and was eventually killed in a police shootout.

McCoy previously served two tours in Vietnam as a Green Beret. He worked as a fixed-wing pilot, a rotor-wing pilot and as an instrument pilot while serving, according to Gryder. He had 39 previous military jumps before ever attempting a free-fall jump.

McCoy was originally dismissed as a suspect by the FBI due to him not matching Cooper’s description. McCoy was much younger, 27 years old, when the heist occurred. Cooper was described to be in his mid-40s.

“If there was anybody on the planet that was qualified to step off the steps of a 727, it was Richard Floyd McCoy,” Gryder said.

Many FBI personnel had come to believe that the real D.B. Cooper died in the jump, but others, including Gryder, believe this recently uncovered piece of evidence could be a breakthrough.

“I knew once I saw it, this parachute came right there from Seattle,” Gryder said. “Issaquah Sport Parachute Center used to be the huge parachuting center just east of here.”

But Skorheim and Spike O’Neill, co-host of “The Jake and Spike Show,” asked Gryder why the authorities prosecuting McCoy didn’t attempt to link McCoy’s hijacking five months later to the D.B. Cooper case.

“To pin the D.B. Cooper case on him, even though they wanted to, they only wanted to get some kind of a conviction and send him away for something,” Gryder theorized. “At that point, they would settle for anything.”

According to Gyrder, the FBI is now trying to match DNA samples.

“They have now asked to exhume the body of Richard Floyd McCoy, who was also buried on that same farm,” Gyrder said. “The DNA link is probably the missing link that they’re going to have to have.”

Nov. 24 — the 53rd anniversary of Cooper’s disappearance

In 1971, Cooper, a middle-aged man dressed in a business suit, was on board a plane when he gave a note to a stewardess claiming he had a bomb. He demanded $200,000 in $20 bills (equivalent to approximately $1.5 million in 2024) plus four parachutes in exchange for releasing the passengers. Cooper showed the stewardess the contents of his briefcase, which looked like it contained wires and explosives.

The jet circled Seattle while authorities on the ground gathered the cash and the parachutes to meet Cooper’s demands.

After the plane hovered above the city for nearly three hours, an FBI agent brought the money and the parachutes onto the plane.

Once the passengers were off the plane and the 727 was refueled, it took off again at 7:37 p.m. with its crew of three in the cockpit, and stewardess Tina Mucklow in the cabin with Cooper. After takeoff, Cooper directed Mucklow to join the crew in the cockpit, where she remained for the rest of the flight.

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Cooper had directed the crew to fly to Mexico at low speed, with the landing gear down and at an altitude no higher than 10,000 feet. This, Cooper was told, would require a fuel stop in Reno, Nevada.

Sometime after sending Mucklow to the cockpit, Cooper took off his necktie and put on one of the parachutes. He took hold of the $200,000 (which weighed about 21 pounds, according to the FBI) and lowered the rear stairs. In the cockpit, an indicator light showed the door opening around 8 p.m. Then, about fifteen minutes later, over an area east of Interstate 5 (I-5) near the community of Woodland, authorities later said, Cooper likely walked down those stairs and jumped off.

“How do they know that he actually jumped out of the plane in the area that they claim?” Skorheim asked Gryder.

“It’s all speculation, but the air stairs definitely did get lowered. They felt a bump in the pressurization when the stairs came down, and there’s a light that comes out on the panel. When a door is compromised in flight, they get a light in the panel,” Gryder answered. “So, just barely north of Vancouver, when that airplane was southbound, still a little bit north of the Columbia River, that’s when the light came on, and they felt the bump of this stair being protruded down into the airstream.

While his exact landing area remains unknown, Gryder shared a theory of a specific spot he had to have landed if he survived the jump.

“Either over the Columbia or just north of the Columbia River would have been my night parachute jump spot. We call it a landing zone,” Gryder said. “That would have been my target landing zone because if you’ve ever driven down there, it’s totally flat. Everything right there around Portland and PDX and Vancouver, it’s totally flat for 20 miles around. Very soft ground and very flat.”

All that was left of Cooper was his clip-on necktie. Searchers combed the woods around southwest Washington, but never found a trace of anything.

“Do you think he landed with any of the money?” O’Neill asked.

“I think he landed with some of the money,” Gryder answered. “He was seen stuffing a bunch of wads of money into his jumpsuit, which means he probably had, who knows, $4, $6, $8, $10 thousand in cash inside of his jumpsuit, and then he put his parachute on. He did land with some and I’m sure it did get spent. I’m sure it ended up in circulation. But we will never know at this point.”

Contributing: Feliks Banel, MyNorthwest resident historian

Frank Sumrall is a content editor at MyNorthwest. You can read his stories here and you can email him here.

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