One of history’s biggest mysteries might seemingly be over. On Nov. 24, 1971, a man known as D.B. Cooper hijacked a plane and parachuted off of it with a $200,000 ransom. Cooper was never caught, and his identity remained one of history’s biggest mysteries.
The way Cooper was able to pull off the hijack is that when he bought the ticket for the plane, there was no ID required so he was able to give a fake alias and go straight onto the plane. He took a seat in the back of the plane and handed a flight attendant a letter stating he had a bomb. Once the plane got to its destination, Cooper got his $200,000 ransom and all of the passengers got off the plane. The only people that remained were Cooper and four crew members. Cooper demanded that they go to Mexico, but it was impossible for the plane to go that far so they settled on travelling to Reno, Nevada. As the plane was traveling to its destination, Cooper opened the rear air stairs and parachuted off the plane. The FBI wasn’t able to find his body or the identity of Cooper.
“I think it was very interesting that he was able to get away with it for so long,” said sophomore Lucas Heath.
The investigation continued up until 2016, when the FBI said it was a waste of time and resources and that they weren’t going to continue the search.
The case has been at a hiatus ever since, up until 2024. Dan Gryder has been developing a series over the last couple of years trying to crack the case on who D.B. Cooper was. In 2024, he posted a video claiming that he found the parachute that belonged to Cooper in North Carolina. The parachute belonged to Richard Floyd McCoy II and was kept in his mother’s storage container. The parachute Cooper used was very unique, and the one that was found was the exact same design.
Along with the parachute, there are numerous other pieces of evidence that prove McCoy was D.B. Cooper. A couple of months after the D.B. Cooper incident, McCoy pulled off a hijacking that was very similar, but this time, he got caught a couple of days later. McCoy escaped prison by using dental paste to make a fake handgun and using a garbage truck to crash through the gates with a couple of other convicts. All of the other convicts were caught a couple of days later, other than McCoy, who travelled to Virginia. The FBI located McCoy a couple of months later and got into a shootout with him, killing McCoy.
McCoy’s children also believe he was D.B. Cooper, but they have kept their silence out of fear that their mother was involved in the hijackings. McCoy also looked like what people described Cooper to have looked like. The FBI contacted and met with Gryder to discuss the case, but it is unclear if they will continue to look into the case.
“I think there could be other suspects if they find more evidence for other people,” said Heath.
McCoy is dead, so if the FBI was to continue to pursue the case, it wouldn’t be about finding justice for who did the hijacking, but instead putting an end to the only hijacking case in the U.S that remains unsolved.
