Is he the real McCoy?
A pair of North Carolina siblings claim their late father is the ever-elusive Boeing hijacker DB Cooper after allegedly finding his parachute hidden in their home, according to a new report.
Chanté and Rick McCoy III claim their father, Richard McCoy Jr., was the infamous fugitive who disappeared when he leaped out of a Boeing plane with $200,000 in cash after taking passengers and crew hostage in 1971, the Cowboy State Daily reports.
The siblings said they waited until their mother’s death in 2020 to come forward, fearing she could be implicated as the parachute that allegedly belonged to Cooper was found in her storage stash outside the house.
After her death, the siblings met with aviation YouTuber Dan Gryder, who has seen the parachute and believes it’s the very one Cooper used in 1971.
“That rig is literally one in a billion,” Gryder told the local outlet about the unique parachute he saw.
Gryder claimed the parachute at the McCoys’ home matched the modified parachute prepared by veteran skydiver Earl Cossey for police as part of Cooper’s demands before he disappeared somewhere between Seattle and Reno, Nevada.
DB Cooper sleuths have raised the possibility that Richard Jr. was the fugitive for years given his own criminal past.
Five months after Cooper pulled off his famous caper, Richard Jr. was caught pulling off a similar hijacking in Utah. The thief eventually broke out of prison and died in a subsequent shootout with police.
The McCoy siblings told Gryder they’ve known the truth for years, but talking about it remained taboo in their family over worries that law enforcement would implicate their mother, Karen, in both hijackings.
Gryder published his latest theory and images of the parachute, with the FBI allegedly reaching out to the McCoys to see the evidence themselves.
The McCoys told the Daily the FBI searched the North Carolina complex for additional clues and took possession of the parachute in 2023, with Rick also providing investigators with a DNA sample.
The agents allegedly informed him that the next step could be to exhume his father’s body, but such a request has yet to be made.
The FBI has not made any public statements about the investigation or acknowledged that it has been actively looking into the DB Cooper case.
The agency has said that the case was officially closed in 2016 over a lack of leads.
Whether Cooper survived the jump over a rugged, wooded landscape somewhere between Seattle and Reno, Nev., has never been confirmed.
One of the few clues about the hijacker’s identity was his recovered black tie and a crumbling package of $20 bills matching the ransom money’s serial numbers, which was unearthed by a young boy from a sandbar along the Columbia River in 1980.