DB Cooper Hijacking
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The children of convicted skyjacker Richard McCoy II believed their dear old dad may have been D.B. Cooper, the notorious (and notoriously unidentified) central figure in 1971’s unsolved skyjacking. It’s the only one in United States history, in fact, without an answer—until, perhaps, now.
Just months after the Cooper incident, McCoy was convicted of an incredibly similar skyjacking that also included a parachute jump. His children, Chanté and Richard III (Rick), have long thought the clues added up.
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they (the children) seem to have hard evidence: a modified parachute that they (and amateur D.B. Cooper sleuth Dan Gryder) believe was used in the daring escape.
“That rig is literally one in a billion,” Gryder told Cowboy State Daily after releasing a series on YouTube about his suspicions. It was that YouTube series, Gryder said, that drew the FBI back into the case.
According to Gryder, the FBI now has the parachute and harness that were once tucked away in a storage shed on family property in North Carolina, along with a harness and a skydiving logbook that Chanté claims show D.B. Cooper’s movements near Oregon and Utah (the locations of the two skyjacking events).
https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/a63009965/db-cooper-parachute-fbi/
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The story doesn't mention that they found a big stack of bills many years later in the area, that were definitively part of Cooper's haul. It seems unlikely that he survived the jump, but left some of the money behind.
These sorts of retconned narratives to establish the identity of some mysterious person, often exist for multiple people. There have been books written about multiple people being DB Cooper, and I'm sure they are all convincing in their own way. The most interesting part to me is how it is possible to craft a convincing narrative to establish something that isn't actually true. There are lots of similar narratives around the zodiac killer's identity.
