I watched a program a couple of weeks back, on the Discovery Channel, with a misleading title like"The Truth About DB Cooper," or something similar.
The program was not about the documented DB Cooper airjacking and subsequent disappearance over the Pacific Northwest. Instead, it was about a similar crime committed by a Richard McCoy and the similarities between the 2 crimes. However, they did not offer any proof that McCoy was actually DB Cooper and merely implied that, perhaps he could be.
So anyone else want to make a guess as to who DB Cooper was, or what ultimately became of him? I believe he died after making the jump over the Pacific Northwest. A bundle of money delivered to DB Cooper before he jumped has been found, decaying in the forests of the Pacific Northwest so I don’t believe he ever made it out of there.
There’s been a lot on the Internet about Dan Cooper lately. An older guy in Florida, Duane Weber, made a death bed confession to his wife that he was Dan Cooper. Lamentably, the wife had no idea who Dan Cooper was and the story broke a little later than it might have.
I’ve read the accounts about Duane Webers deathbed confession. My only question is whether or not Weber would have been to old to make the jump. He would have been 46/47 around the time of the DB Cooper Sky Jacking.
Here is some info about Richard McCoy. McCoy was a special forces Vietnam Veteran as well as a helicopter pilot in the Utah National Guard at the time of his arrest.
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On April 7, 1972, Richard Floyd McCoy Jr. hijacked a United Airlines flight traveling from Denver to Los Angeles. His modus operandi was nearly identical to Cooper’s, right down to the wording of the note passed to the flight attendant. These details were not made public at the time. The only difference was that McCoy demanded $500,000.
McCoy bailed out near his hometown of Provo, UT, and was captured a few days later. So, it IS possible to survive a parachute jump from a passenger aircraft after all!
McCoy was sentenced to 45 years, but escaped from the federal prison in Lewisburg, PA. He was killed in a gunfight with FBI agents, never confirming or denying that he was Cooper.
Former FBI agent Russell Calame, who headed the McCoy investigation, is convinced that Cooper and McCoy are one and the same. Besides a similarity in physical appearance and m.o., members of McCoy’s family identified a certain secret object as McCoy’s property, that was left behind by Cooper during the Northwest hijacking.
Moreover, the white shirt, dark suit and narrow black tie were stereotypical attire of students at Brigham Young University, where McCoy was studying to become a police officer. Both hijackings were even committed during vacation periods at BYU. <