It's been more than half a century since DB Cooper entered crime lore by parachuting out of a plane he hijacked in the Northwest, and an amateur sleuth thinks he has cracked the case thanks to the discovery of a telltale parachute, reports Cowboy State Daily. YouTuber Dan Gryder says he found the modified device matching the one used in the hijacking on property owned by the family of the late Richard McCoy in North Carolina, after searching a shed with their permission. "That rig is literally one in a billion," says Gryder, who released a series on YouTube about his investigation.
Gryder says he has turned the parachute over to FBI investigators, though the agency still has not changed its 2016 status update declaring the case inactive. McCoy's name would be familiar to those who have studied the infamous crime because he was arrested after a nearly identical hijacking months later, then fatally shot after escaping from prison in 1974. What's more, his photo bears a striking resemblance to a sketch made of the man who called himself Cooper.
McCoy's own children, Chante and Richard III, say they agree with Gryder. The two say they have long suspected their father was the hijacker but said nothing out of respect for their mother, Karen, who died in 2020. According to Gryder, FBI investigators told him a possible next step would be to exhume McCoy's body and attempt to get a DNA match with evidence left behind. Cowboy State Daily has a two-part series on the development, with part one here and part two here. (More DB Cooper stories.)
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