Recovered Parachute Leads to Break in Unsolved D.B. Cooper Hijacking Case

The FBI may have just gotten the biggest break yet in the decades-old, unsolved case of D.B. Cooper, the man who hijacked a flight from Portland, OR to Seattle, WA and successfully escaped with $200,000. A pair of siblings in North Carolina, whose father was one of a long list of suspects in the case, recovered a parachute identical to the one used in the caper.

On Nov. 21, 1971, Cooper, dressed in a smart suit and carrying a suitcase, ordered a bourbon and lit a cigarette after boarding the flight. Shortly after takeoff, he handed a flight attendant a note that said he had a bomb and provided a list of demands. In addition to the $200,000 in ransom money (equivalent to about $1,500,000 in 2024), he asked for four parachutes to be provided to him when the plane landed in Seattle.

Cooper also requested that the flight crew to refuel the aircraft and begin a second flight to Mexico City. But about 30 minutes after taking off in Seattle, Cooper deployed the aircraft's staircase and parachuted into the night over southwestern Washington. It's never been clear whether he survived the jump, but in 1980, a small amount of the ransom money was discovered along the banks of the Columbia River near Vancouver, WA.

Chanté and Rick McCoy III found the parachute, which belonged to their father, Richard Floyd McCoy II, years ago in a storage unit. However, they waited until the death of their mother in 2020 to come forward with the evidence, lest she be implicated in the crime. The pair then reached out to retired pilot, skydiver, and YouTuber, Dan Gryder, who has spent the past 20 years investigating the case.

Gryder recently told the Cowboy State Daily that he believes the parachute unequivocally belonged to the mysterious D.B. Cooper. "That rig is literally one in a billion," he said of the parachute, which is identical to one of the four housed in the Washington State History Museum.

"Cooper demanded four parachutes during the hijacking," museum director Derek Nguyen told Newsweek. "When the exchange was made in Seattle, he was provided with four parachutes. He jumped from the plane with two parachutes and left two behind on the plane. We have one of the two parachutes left behind on the plane in our collection."

Further connecting the dots, McCoy II was arrested in April 1972 after pulling off a similar hijacking in Utah just five months later. He was subsequently tried and convicted, and sentenced to 45 years in prison. However, two years later he escaped from prison and was killed in a shootout with police.

Gryder also documented his findings in a two-part series on his YouTube channel, Probable Cause, released in 2021 and 2022. Though the FBI officially closed the case in 2016, after watching the videos, agents reached out to Gryder and McCoy III in order to inspect the parachute.

"Although the FBI will no longer actively investigate this case, should specific physical evidence emerge—related specifically to the parachutes or the money taken by the hijacker—individuals with those materials are asked to contact their local FBI field office," the the federal agency said in a 2016 press release.

Gryder said in his series that investigators told him that a possible next step would be to exhume McCoy II's body and attempt to get a DNA sample that could provide a match to recovered evidence.