Did the FBI Bury the Truth About DB Cooper?

If you think the FBI started its lying with Hillary and the Russia dossier, you should have been with me 30 years ago when they told me the best suspect in the DB Cooper skyjacking had a solid alibi. Since then, every Thanksgiving, I’ve told the story of Richard McCoy on the radio.

McCoy was a decorated Green Beret and skydiving student but poor as dirt in the fall of 1971. He skyjacked a flight from Portland to Seattle, demanded $200,000 and parachutes, then jumped out the back stairs of the plane and disappeared. I interviewed the former head of the FBI in Utah, who wrote the book on McCoy back in 1992. They figure he lost most of the money in the jump because he planned badly. Some of the decaying bills turned up buried in the sand of the Columbia River.

After the DB Cooper skyjack, Richard McCoy was suddenly flush with cash and spent it. Six months later, he staged a second, nearly identical skyjacking and stashed the money in his attic. But his state police buddy reported his suspicions to the FBI. They caught him and convicted McCoy.

Twenty years later, the FBI in Seattle told me they’d eliminated McCoy as a suspect because he claimed he was at home with his family—even though they had a gas station receipt showing he was in Vegas the day after the Cooper skyjack. A non-drinking, non-smoking, non-gambling Mormon in Vegas on Thanksgiving? Please.

Both skyjackings began in Las Vegas, a few hours’ drive from McCoy’s home in Provo, Utah. The town would have allowed him to clean up the money at the gambling tables. His wife helped him in the second skyjacking but was never charged. Now, his family tells Jennifer Kocher at Cowboy State Daily that their mom kept a parachute identical to the one packed for Cooper.

It sounds like another example of FBI incompetence. They had the guy in their hands, convicted him of one skyjacking, but never charged him with the Cooper skyjack. McCoy escaped from prison, started robbing banks, and died 50 years ago, on November 9, 1974, in a shootout with the FBI. I guess you could say they closed that case for good.

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