DB Cooper found? -- New evidence and FBI has requested exhumation

I hope they can match the DNA and finally put this thing to rest.

When the hell did he get married and have kids?

Was his hijacking spree as a result of marriage and kids?

Did he ever have a legit job?

Curious whether the Feds tried to link this guy to Cooper after the Utah hijacking attempt. Did they ever realize who they had in custody?

Seems improbable since he was known to be alive after the jump.

Who cares? It was a million years ago.

McCoy is an intriguing suspect—one who was later passed over because many FBI personnel had come to believe that the real D.B. Cooper died in the jump by the time McCoy surfaced as a possibility. And McCoy didn’t exactly match the physical description, as he was much younger—27 years old at the time—than the original estimation of Cooper’s mid-40s age.

McCoy would have had the have the chops to commit the famous crime, though. He proved it in April of 1972, when he successfully pulled off the skyjacking of a United Airlines flight after demanding $500,000. He boarded the plane in Denver, and was able to get it diverted to San Francisco, have his demands met, and force the plane back into the air. McCoy then jumped from the plane over Utah and was arrested by the FBI within three days, thanks to an anonymous tip. That tip then led the FBI to a waitress who remembered serving him a milkshake at a roadside hamburger stand the night of the skyjacking, and a teenager who said McCoy paid him $5 to give him a ride from the stand into a nearby town. Eventually, they were able to match his fingerprints ones left on the demand note.

[quote]Who cares? It was a million years ago.

Maybe they checked their pictures.

All of the eyewitnesses on the plane said that DB Cooper looked like he was in his late 40s. This guy was only in his 20s.

Personally, I think Cooper died in the jump.

Ha ha I am DB Cooper so I laugh at stories like this because I’m DB Cooper.

He smoked cigarettes on the plane (of course in those days smoking on planes was allowed) and the butts were collected but somehow the butts disappeared at some point over the years.

If only those cig butts were still around they could be tested for DNA and a reverse geneaology could be done to finally learn his identity.

My Cuban grandmother swore she dated the real DB Cooper in 1987 but she lied constantly so doubtful.

[Quote] He smoked cigarettes on the plane (of course in those days smoking on planes was allowed)

Oh I’m glad, otherwise they would have had to tell the man what a bomb to extinguish his cigarette.

r12 you're not making sense.

r10 - The FBI has a clip on necktie. According to the article, the FBI has been sued by "sleuths" trying to obtain it for touch DNA testing.

I have been obsessed with the DB Cooper case since my late teens.

McCoy is not Cooper.

When I lived in Oregon years ago, I had some renovations done to a house that I bought. One of the contractors told me at some point that year that he and his siblings and mother were convinced that his dad was DB Cooper. His dad would have been in his 40s at the time, and being from Oregon would make sense. However I can also imagine a lot mothers of fatherless children of that era "revealing" that their deadbeat father is actually DB Cooper and absolutely not some piece of shit who went out for a pack of smokes and never came back. So who knows? But this contractor guy was CONVINCED.

What kind of idiot would hold onto the parachute?

r16 the wife of Duane Weber, who made an alleged deathbed confession in 1995, was convinced he was Cooper. She spent the rest of her life obsessed with trying to prove it. Similarly, Kenneth Christiansen's brother was certain Christiansen was the hijacker.

Wolfgang Gossett is another oddball who falsely confessed.

What interests me almost as much as the case itself are the crackpots like these who have surfaced over the years.

What exactly might a modified parachute prove? Likewise, the prospect of 'touch DNA' on a JC Penny clip-on tie connected to an exhumed body in North Carolina seems dubious, and no less so in the hands of Youtube 'sleuths.'

Not one article states that the FBI has requested exhumation, only that the YouTube sleuth has said that 'a possible next step could be' for the FBI to do so.

Exactly, r19

I think the parachute jump killed him, and this mystery will never be solved.

I'm legendary like DB Cooper. Why is no one searching for me?

What DNA did he leave behind for comparison?

r23 some DNA was recovered from the clip-on JC Penney tie that Cooper left on the plane. However, the FBI can't even be sure the DNA recovered belongs to the hijacker.

The clip on tie is tainted because the FBI was mailing it around to different offices around the country back in the 70s.

This is really the perfect mystery. It's my favorite unsolved American crime. So many interesting angles and elements.

For example, on December 11, 1971 -- a couple weeks after the hijacking -- the following letter was mailed to The New York Times, Seattle Times, Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post:

"Sirs, I knew from the start that I wouldn't be caught,” the letter read. “I didn't rob Northwest Orient because I thought it would be romantic, heroic or any of the other euphemisms that seem to attach to situations of high risks. I'm no modern day Robin Hood. Unfortunately I do have only 14 months to live.

“My life has been one of hate, turmoil, hunger and more hate; this seemed to be the fastest and most profitable way to gain a few fast grains of peace of mind. I don't blame people for hating me for what I've done nor do I blame anybody for wanting me to be caught and punished, though this can never happen. Here are some (not all) of the things working against the authorities:

I'm not a boasting man

I left no fingerprints

I wore a toupee

I wore putty make-up

“They could add or subtract from the composite a hundred times and not come up with an accurate description; and we both know it. I've come and gone on several airline flights already and am not holed up in some obscure backwoods town. Neither am I a psychopathic [sic] killer. As a matter of fact I've never even received a speeding ticket.

Thank you for your attention."

The only certain thing about the Cooper case is that if he didn’t die during his jump, he never retrieved the ransom money that he jumped with. The bills’ serial numbers were all recorded, and none of them have ever been spent or deposited in a bank in the subsequent decades. $5800 was found in a riverbank in 1980, all bundled in the same rubber bands and in the same order as they were when given to Cooper.

Could DB Cooper actually been a lesbian dressed as a man for a night on the town at the Clam Licker?

That sketch always gave me Nancy Kulp vibes.

[QUOTE]many FBI personnel had come to believe that the real D.B. Cooper died in the jump

[QUOTE]I think the parachute jump killed him, and this mystery will never be solved.

[QUOTE]Personally, I think Cooper died in the jump.

Wasn't this McCoy fella a former Army Ranger? I could swear I read that somewhere. If so, as a Vietnam era Ranger, he would have had night jumps into forrested terrain or area with a lot of water.

What's fascinating is that he gave the pilots who left from Seattle very precise flying instructions, including how/when to lift wing flaps when he directed them from the cockpit where he sat with them. It seems like he knew where he wanted to land, generally.

It probably was a CIA operative working on behalf of the government to test something.

I am surprised they gave him a parachute that worked. Maybe they didn’t and that’s how they’re sure he didn’t survive it.

r31 he requested four parachutes. They were scared he would try to take a hostage from among the flight crew and couldn't risk giving him faulty equipment.

He was a highly decorated Green Beret. I wonder why he turned out the way he did. He escaped from prison and died in a shoot out. They suspected him for years. Fascinating story.

r29 the flight attendants and others who interacted with the hijacker said he was decidedly NOT McCoy. In addition, McCoy's behavior was also erratic during his own hijacking in 1972; DB Cooper was calm and very much in control. McCoy was a copycat, not the hijacker of Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305.

The flight crew changed their flight path because they told Cooper they would need to land to refuel before entering Mexico (hence the stop in Reno).

Sounds like another cash grab.

Get it?

[quote] Get it?

Unfortunately, yes.

Maybe he didn’t care about the money.

Maybe it was just for the thrill of it?

I doubt that, r37. He deliberately tied the money bag to his body before jumping.

I think that was a big part of it R37. He seemed to live his life doing daring and illegal things.

It was Walter Reca. Case closed.

Reca CLAIMED to be Cooper, as did countless others.

He wasn't Cooper.

DB Cooter

I think it is Richard McCoy. From what I read, the rigging that he wore and that they found in that barn was said to match what some guy made for him. The parachute, too. He had the training to jump out of both planes. Then he went to prison and escaped from there. There's a documentary about him that's pretty convincing and it was made way before his kids told the FBI about him being DB Cooper.

All the people known to have who interacted with the hijacker said that he was decidedly NOT McCoy, r43. For one, the said the hijacker did not have dumbo ears.

Excuse garbled syntax at r44

Lol, R44. No Dumbo ears. I guess he would have needed a parachute!

He did have a parachute R46. He didn't just jump out of there with his dick in his hand.