The D.B. Cooper mystery lives on a single cheesy tie, a disappeared man and the sort of family secret that people keep until the very end. Thanks giving Eve in 1971, a name-giving passenger on Northwest Orient Flight 305 identifying himself as Dan Cooper attempted to hijack the plane and demanded ransom in the form of 200,000 dollars and parachutes, and then jumped off a Boeing 727 into darkness over Washington state. That alias was subsequently inaccurately reported as “D.B.,” and the legend assumed its course at that point: a dressed businessman, a briefcase bomb threat, and a getaway that left investigators with little to nothing to go on.
More than 50 years later, one of the most believable assertions is made by Richard “Rick” McCoy III who, when talking about his mother, says she did not reveal to her kids until she died that she “helped plan both of his heists.” The “he” in his version was an Army veteran, Richard Floyd McCoy Jr., a skilled skydiver who was convicted of a different hijacking incident in 1972 which was similar to the Cooper case. Rick McCoy alleges that he gave federal investigators DNA, but he claims a confession in the family is merely a baseline in a case where hyperbole is the new reality.
Such a distrust is constructed into the Cooper file itself. The internal portrait of the hijacker provided by FBIs themselves does not depict more of a lucky gambling man, rather, it makes the hijacker look like a proficient worker who has converted the cabin into a working environment. Recently released information explains how the hijacker demonstrated a wealth of knowledge about the plane, including arguing over refueling with the crew and dictating the use of flaps and speed and altitude. In one particularly indicative incident, one of the witnesses saw that a parachute had been unpacked and, when questioned on whether he had disassembled it, the hijacker answered yes, a little bit that indicated that he was careful about being sabotaged but not that he was sure of getting itself out.
The same methodical propensity justifies why so many confessions have not made it. The hijacker insisted that notes and even minute objects be given back making no readily available fingerprints. What still exists, over and above the recollection of the witness, is the item of the $1.49 clip-on tie, which he left on the plane such as the one which can be tested, re-tested and disputed, without reference to the memory of another.
Confessions, on the contrary, are profuse and usually theatrical. A wife of one of the men remembered that he had died on his deathbed and on his deathbed, he bent over and told her, I am Dan Cooper. Stories of secret money, coded messages, and safety-deposit boxes supposedly filled with ransom notes have been given by others. Such tales are likely to feature a common issue: either these are incongruent with information held by investigators, or can not be linked to the flight, or fail their forensic scrutiny when the fingerprints and DNA do not tally.
The recent releases of documents highlight the extent to which the net of the government had to be in the pre internet period. The leads pursued by the FBI used phone books, local police contacts, and tedious searches of records and by early 1972 the FBI had begun to put 325 individuals under investigation, and had done away with 220. More recent dumps of declassified material keep on coming out, filling out more names and interviews and never providing that one item that would tie the circle.
This is why McCoy family assertion with all its emotional appeal is still subject to examination with other confessions in the same test chamber: it has to acknowledge the technical proficiency of the hijacker, cover the holes that the facts may leave, and tie in with that which the case can actually establish. In the Cooper universe, the distinction between a tale and a solution is generally the gap between a tie.
