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Alex Cabrero reporting It's one of the biggest mysteries in FBI history, a case that's still unsolved. Now, however, the FBI may have a new clue in the case of D.B. Cooper.
D.B. Cooper is the infamous airplane hijacker who released hostages for money and a flight to Mexico. Only thing is, he parachuted out of the airplane with the money, never to be seen again. Now, his parachute may have been found in southwest Washington state.
"I decided to just bring the chute back and try to make a determination of whether or not this could have been D.B. Cooper's parachute," said FBI special agent Larry Carr.
There are many cases Carr has helped solve in his time. This case would top them all. "If it is, we need to go back and do some more digging," he said.
A man grading his field in Amboy, Wash. dug up something that didn't belong. It turned out to be a parachute, and knowing the story of D.B. Cooper, he called the FBI.
In 1971 Cooper hijacked a flight heading to Seattle by saying he had a bomb. Once on the ground, he traded passengers for parachutes, $200,000 and a flight to Mexico.
The plane took off, and Cooper jumped out and was never seen again. "I took the address and I overlaid that on the map--the grid we had of the most probable landing areas--and the chute was recovered in the most probable landing area," Carr said.
But former FBI agent Russell Calame thinks he knows the real story. Calame lives in Utah and wrote a book on Cooper. He thinks Cooper was actually BYU student Richard McCoy, who was arrested in Provo a few months after the Cooper incident, because McCoy pulled the same type of hijacking stunt in San Francisco.
"I do. I feel about the same. I don't have any reason to feel otherwise yet," Calame said.
Officially, the FBI doesn't think McCoy, who died in a shootout with them, and Cooper are the same person. But it does think this parachute is interesting.
"If it happens not to be the parachute that D.B. Cooper used, then it's a heck of a coincidence," Carr said.
The FBI still thinks Cooper died after jumping out of the airplane. But in 1980, some of his money was found along the Columbia River near where he might have landed. If this parachute is Cooper's, it just adds to the mystery.
E-mail: acabrero@ksl.com
