In November 1971, a man in a dark suit pulled off the only unsolved hijacking in American aviation history.
He bought a ticket in Portland under the name Dan Cooper sat near the back and calmly told a flight attendant his briefcase held a bomb.
DB Cooper went on to give the FBI sleepless nights for half a century.
And worst of all, nobody knew who he was.
Well, until now.
So, who was DB Cooper?
A trained soldier or just a desperate crook with nothing to lose.
For over 50 years, he was the ghost America couldn’t catch.
And with over 1,000 FBI leads, somebody was bound to find the truth eventually.
Now, after 55 years, a parachute pulled from a family home in North Carolina may have finally revealed his true identity.
How did it get there?
And who kept it hidden?
How on earth did one man jump into a freezing storm with $200,000 and simply vanish?
A veteran pilot and a parachute he calls one in a billion now point to a single name.
It started at Portland International Airport the night before Thanksgiving.
I’m Ambrose Wild.
Today we’ll rebuild the hijacking minuteby minute.
Look at why the FBI cleared the leading suspect back in 1972 and then follow that parachute from a North Carolina storage shed to an FBI evidence room.
By the end, you’ll know what it proves and the one test that could still prove it wrong.
Part one.
Northwest Orient flight 305.
On Wednesday the 24th of November 1971, Portland International Airport was packed with holiday travelers trying to get home.
The man calling himself Dan Cooper paid cash for a one-way ticket to Seattle, a hop of about 30 minutes on a Northwest Orient Boeing 727.
He took seat 18 C in the back of the cabin, lit a cigarette, and ordered a bourbon and soda.
Shortly after takeoff from Portland, he handed a folded note to a flight attendant named Florence Shaner.
Lonely businessmen slipped flight attendants their phone numbers all the time back then, so she dropped it into her purse without reading it.
He leaned toward her and quietly told her she’d better look at that note because he had a bomb.
The note was printed in neat capital letters with a felt tip pen.
It said he had a bomb in his briefcase, that he would use it if necessary, and that she should sit next to him.
Later in the flight, he made sure to get that note back, and none of his notes were ever recovered.
So Shaner sat down beside him.
He opened his briefcase just wide enough for her to see red cylinders, a coil of wire, and a battery.
Whether it was real dynamite, nobody on that jet was willing to find out.
His demands went from the cockpit to the ground in Seattle.
He wanted $200,000 in $20 bills, well over $1.5 million in today’s money, four parachutes, and a fuel truck waiting at Seattle Tacoma International Airport.
Two of the shoots had to be the kind worn on the back and two the kind worn on the chest.
That request still gets argued about today.
By asking for spares, he made it risky for the FBI to hand over a tampered parachute because for all they knew, he planned to jump with a hostage strapped to one of them.
Through all of it, Cooper stayed strangely polite.
Tina Mucklo, the flight attendant who sat with him for most of the ordeal, later described him as calm and considerate.
According to the FBI’s account of the flight, he seemed to recognize Tacoma from the air and mentioned that McCord Air Force Base was only about 20 minutes from SeaTac.
That’s not something a random traveler would know.
It hinted at a man who had spent real time around Seattle and possibly around military airfields.
So, the jet circled Puet Sound for about 2 hours while the airline gathered cash.
Before the money left the bank, the FBI photographed every single bill.
All 10,000 of them, so each serial number could be traced for as long as the case stayed open.
The parachutes came from a skydiving operation outside Seattle, and a rigger named Earl CSy helped supply them.
One detail from that delivery matters later in this story.
In the batch was a reserve shoot used only for classroom training, sewn shut so it could never open.
Cooper ended up taking that one with him.
Just before 6:00 in the evening, the plane finally landed at SeaTac.
A Northwest employee walked a canvas bank bag full of cash up the airstair.
The parachutes followed and Cooper let all 36 passengers off the plane.
Then came the part that told investigators this man understood the Boeing 727 better than most passengers ever would.
He ordered the crew to fly toward Mexico City with a fuel stop in Reno.
He wanted the jet below 10,000 ft, landing gear down, wing flaps lowered to 15 degrees, and the cabin unpressurized.
Those settings keep the jet flying about as slowly as it safely can.
He also knew this particular airliner had a staircase built into its tail that could be lowered in flight.
The crew was sent into the cockpit, and the jet took off into the rain.
Around 8:00 p.m., a warning light showed the rear air stair had opened.
At 13 minutes past 8 over the Lewis River in southwest Washington, the cockpit instruments registered a sudden jolt in the tail.
Then the plane flew on.
When it landed in Reno a little after 10, agents rushed the cabin and found it empty.
Cooper, the money, and two of the parachutes were gone.
He had jumped into that storm wearing a business suit, a raincoat, and loafers.
At 10,000 ft that night, the air was well below freezing, and he was falling through wind and rain in total darkness over a forest he couldn’t see.
He left very little behind.
A few cigarette butts, a parachute he’d cut open for its cords, and a black clip-on tie from JC Penney with a mother of pearl tie clip left on his seat.
That tie would sit in an FBI evidence locker for 30 years before anyone thought to test it for DNA.
Part two, the manhunt that found nothing.
By morning, the search zone covered thick forest north of Portland around the town of Ariel and the Lewis River.
Soldiers from Fort Lewis walked the woods in long lines.
Planes and helicopters swept the area for weeks afterward, and searchers checked lakes, logging roads, and farmland.
They didn’t find a parachute, a money bag, a footprint, or a body.
In 1972, the FBI even flew a 727 with the rear stairs down and pushed a weighted sled out the back.
It produced the same jolt in the tail the crew had felt, which is how investigators grew confident that this jolt marked the moment he jumped.
Even so, small errors in the plane’s speed, course, and the winds that night meant the real landing zone could have been off by miles.
Even his name came out wrong.
Early on, the FBI questioned a Portland man whose real name was DB Cooper.
He had nothing to do with the hijacking and was cleared quickly, but a reporter ran with those initials and the rest of the press copied them.
The hijacker had only ever called himself Dan.
The copycats followed.
In 1972 alone, more than a dozen men tried to hijack American jets for ransom and parachutes, many of them following Kooper’s method step by step.
That wave forced the airline industry to change.
Boeing fitted its 727s with a small metal flap, nicknamed the Kooper vein that kept the rear staircase locked shut while the plane was flying.
And starting in January 1973, airlines had to screen every passenger and every carry-on bag.
The same routine you still go through at the airport today.
Most of those copycats got caught.
And one of them, a hijacker over Utah, will matter a great deal in this story.
But the original man left no trail at all until an 8-year-old went digging on a riverbank.
Part three, the money on the Colombia River.
In February 1980, a boy named Brian Ingram was on a family outing at Tenner Bar, a sandy beach on the Colombia River a few miles downstream from Vancouver, Washington.
While smoothing out the sand for a campfire, he uncovered three bundles of rotting $20 bills, still held together by rubber bands.
The serial numbers matched the FBI’s ransom list.
It came to $5,800, the first piece of Cooper’s money anyone had ever found.
It should have cracked the case open, and for a while, people thought it might.
But the find raised a problem nobody could solve.
Rubber bands break down fast in water and sun, so those bundles probably didn’t drift around loose for years.
A geologist who studied the beach for the FBI even argued the cash landed there after dredging work in 1974, long after the jump.
So, how did money from a jump over the Lewis River end up buried on a Colombia River beach still bundled years later?
Nobody has ever answered that.
The rest of the $200,000 has never turned up.
Not a single serial number in more than half a century.
After that, the lead slowed to a trickle.
In 2001, FBI scientists pulled a partial DNA profile from the clip on Tai, but it matched no suspect.
And on the 12th of July 2016, the bureau announced it was ending its active investigation.
It said that solving the case meant proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and none of the tips had come close.
Over 45 years, agents had worked through hundreds of suspects, and not one of them could be tied to that plane.
That’s where the FBI stepped back.
A pilot who refused to let it go was just getting started.
Part four, the pilot who kept digging.
Dan Grider is a longtime pilot and skydiver who runs an aviation channel called Probable Cause, where he breaks down plane crashes.
He’d been chasing Cooper for about 20 years, and unlike most armchair sleuths, he tested his theories in the air.
He even recreated the jump himself, carrying a simulated moneybag to see how a falling body with that kind of load would behave in the dark.
Eventually, he laid out his whole case in a video that runs close to three hours.
His research kept circling back to one suspect the FBI had dismissed decades earlier.
So Grryder went to see that suspect’s family in North Carolina, partly to visit the man’s grave.
What he found there, by his own account, almost by accident, was an old parachute rig.
Grider says the rig matches the color, the type, and the unusual modifications of the parachute Kooper demanded in 1971.
The gear Cosy helped put together.
In his words to the family, “The rig is literally one in a billion.”
If he’s right, that parachute should be lying somewhere in the forests of Southwest Washington.
Instead, he says it was sitting in a house on the other side of the country, and the family it belonged to carries the name of the one man who copied Cooper’s hijacking almost perfectly.
Part five, the Sunday school teacher who hijacked a jet.
His name was Richard Floyd McCoy Jr., and on paper, he was the last man anyone would suspect.
He was an Army veteran who had flown helicopters in Vietnam and later served in the Utah National Guard.
He was married to his wife Karen with two young children, taught Sunday school at his church in Provo, and studied law enforcement at Brigham Young University with plans to join the FBI or the CIA.
He was also an experienced skydiver.
On the 7th of April 1972, McCoy boarded United Airlines Flight 855 in Denver, headed for Los Angeles.
Once in the air, he passed a note to a flight attendant, claimed he was armed, and demanded $500,000, more than double Cooper’s ransom, and four parachutes.
The jet was another Boeing 727.
If that sounds familiar, the FBI noticed, too.
The plane landed in San Francisco to collect the ransom, then took off again on his orders.
This time, the hijacker had come dressed for the job in a jumpsuit and a helmet instead of a business suit and loafers.
Over Utah near Provo, he lowered the rear air stair and jumped.
Where Cooper left almost nothing behind, McCoy left plenty.
Cooper’s notes were never recovered.
McCoy left his handwriting and his fingerprints on the plane, and a tip pointed agents straight to his door.
2 days after the jump, the FBI arrested him at home in Provo.
He was convicted and sentenced to 45 years in federal prison.
Two hijackings, 5 months apart, on the same model of airplane with the same escape through the tail.
So why didn’t the FBI simply write McCoyy’s name on the Kooper file and close it?
Part six, why the FBI said no.
The bureau’s answer came down to faces.
Shaner and Mucklo spent more time with Cooper than anyone else on that flight, and they described a man in his mid-4s with olive skin and dark eyes.
McCoy was 29, fair, and lean.
The FBI says he was ruled out because he didn’t match those descriptions, and for other reasons, it has never spelled out in public.
There’s a second problem, and it goes back to that classroom parachute.
A sky diver with McCoy’s experience would have inspected those four shoots carefully.
And yet Cooper left with a reserve that was sewn shut.
To a lot of investigators, that looks like the move of an amateur who didn’t know what he was holding.
But McCoyy’s defenders have answers.
Cooper wore dark wraparound sunglasses for most of the flight in a dimly lit cabin, and judging age under those conditions is hard.
A man planning a second hijacking also had every reason to look different the first time.
And a reserve shoot only matters if the main one fails.
So a jumper who trusted his main might have grabbed whatever was handy.
The agent who led the Cooper investigation for years, Ralph Himlsbach, saw a bigger obstacle.
He was convinced Cooper never survived the jump at all.
Given the darkness, the weather, the forest, and those loafers.
That matters here because the McCoy theory only works if Cooper walked out of those woods alive and was ready to do it all again 5 months later.
The strongest backing for the McCoy theory came from inside law enforcement.
In 1991, a former FBI agent named Russell Calame helped write a book called DB Cooper, the real McCoy, arguing the two hijackers were the same man.
Even the FBI’s own website admits McCoy is still a favorite suspect among many.
For decades, it stayed exactly there.
A former agent on one side and the bureau on the other.
The only people who might have settled it were McCoyy’s own family, and they weren’t saying anything.
Part seven, the family secret.
McCoy never got the chance to tell his side.
In August 1974, he and several other inmates escaped from the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania by commandeering a garbage truck.
Three months later, FBI agents tracked him to Virginia Beach, Virginia, and he was killed in a shootout that left Karen to raise their children, Shante and Rick McCoy III, under a name that had been all over the evening news.
In public, the family’s story was simple.
Their father had hijacked one plane, gone to prison, escaped, and died.
According to the siblings, there was a second story underneath that one.
Inside the family, talking about it was off limits, and the parachute grider came across had been kept in their mother’s storage area outside the house for decades.
So, for years, the evidence sat quietly in North Carolina, while the FBI’s case file sat closed in Seattle.
That changed the moment Grider posted what he’d found.
Part eight, the FBI comes back.
According to the family, more than a dozen agents in at least seven vehicles showed up at the house in 2023 and searched it for about 4 hours.
For the first time since 2016, agents were working the Kooper case in the field again.
According to the people who watched, the parachute, its harness, and an old skydiving log book were handed over to the FBI, McCoyy’s son also gave agents a sample of his own DNA, and he has said he’s willing to have his father’s body exumed for testing.
That’s where the clip-on tie comes back.
It holds the closest thing anyone has to Cooper’s genetic fingerprint, and now there’s family DNA to compare against it.
The son’s sample matters because a man passes his Y chromosome to his son almost unchanged.
If male line DNA from the tie lines up with Rick’s, it would point squarely at his father.
And if agents exume McCoy, they could compare the hijacker’s DNA to the man himself.
But the tie is messier than it sounds.
The FBI has said it carries DNA from more than one person and that someone else may have worn it before Cooper did.
For that reason, a mismatch can’t clear McCoy.
A match would be the first hard link anyone has ever produced.
And there’s something on that tie that’s hard to square with McCoy.
In 2017, a team of private researchers studied particles stuck to it under an electron microscope.
They found traces of rare metals, including pure titanium, which in 1971 was used mostly in aerospace and chemical plants.
That points towards someone who worked around jet manufacturing like the Boeing plants near Seattle.
And McCoy was a student in Utah.
That Boeing angle has been chased before.
One of the FBI’s more serious suspects, Sheridan Peterson, had worked as a technical editor at Boeing and was an experienced smoke jumper.
He looked like a strong fit on paper until DNA and fingerprint comparisons cleared him.
Other suspects have been tested against the tie as well, including a Northwest Orient person named Kenneth Christensen, and his DNA didn’t match either.
So, the Titanium may say something about where Cooper worked, but the one Boeing man the FBI looked at hardest was cleared.
In other words, the tie could still prove McCoy was Cooper, and it also holds one of the best clues against him.
As of this year, reporting on the family’s DNA comparison describes the results as pending or inconclusive.
The FBI hasn’t commented publicly, and when reporters ask, it points them back to its 2016 statement.
Part nine, what the children say.
In November 2024, after the parachute was already in FBI hands, the McCoy siblings went public.
They told the New York Post they believed their father was DB Cooper and that they’ve known the truth about him for years.
Grider had already been making that case online.
Now, the man’s own children were making it too on the record.
They also explained the timing.
They say they waited until their mother died in 2020 because they were afraid she could be implicated since the parachute had been sitting in her storage area the whole time.
That’s an unusual thing for a family to do.
Coming forward meant attaching their father’s name to the most famous unsolved hijacking in the country and offering to dig up his grave to prove it.
Part 10.
Was it McCoy?
On one side, you have two nearly identical hijackings 5 months apart.
Both on 727s, both ending with a jump out of the tail.
You have a parachute from the McCoy family home that Grider says matches Cooper’s, a former FBI agent who wrote a book saying it was him and two grown children who say they’ve known for years.
On the other side, the flight attendants who sat with Cooper never matched his face to McCoys.
The sewn shut reserve and the titanium on the tie both point away from him.
Nearly all of the ransom is still missing.
And the FBI, the only agency that can officially close this case, still hasn’t said a word.
If the DNA ever matches, the only unsolved hijacking in American aviation history, gets a name, and it belongs to a Sunday school teacher from Provo.
If it doesn’t, the ghost of Flight 305 keeps flying.
55 years in counting.
So, where do you land?
Was it McCoy or someone the FBI never found?
Tell me in the comments.
I’m Ambrose Wild and there are plenty more cold cases like this one coming to this channel.
So stick around because the next one is already on its
