D.B. Cooper was killed by the FBI when he escaped prison, a former federal top agent has claimed.
On November 24, 1971, Cooper took off on a parachute with thousands of dollars in ransom after hijacking Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 over Oregon never to be seen again... but that may not be the case, RadarOnline.com can reveal.
According to former FBI bureau chief in Salt Lake City, Russell P. Calame, Cooper was actually a Mormon from Provo, Utah, named Richard McCoy Jr., who was also a decorated Vietnam War hero.
Calame claims McCoy was even able to pull off a second skyjacking just five months after the infamous Cooper parachuted out of a plane with $200,000, some of which was later found partially buried on a riverbank. However, unlike Cooper, McCoy was actually caught and ended up behind bars .
After breaking out of Lewisburg Penitentiary in Pennsylvania with a handmade gun on August 10, 1974, McCoy – who had told authorities he would "escape" – died in a shootout with FBI agents at age 31.
Calame said: "When you look at the D.B. Cooper skyjacking and the second one, there are something like two dozen similarities so striking it’s unbelievable."
Calame said the FBI never charged McCoy with the Cooper skyjacking because they had a “watertight case” against him in the second skyjacking.
He continued: "I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that D.B. Cooper and Richard McCoy are the same man. The evidence is just overwhelming."
The FBI previously released a 161-page report, claiming they "pursued more than 1,000 potential suspects and thousands of leads".
Bruce A. Smith, the author of D.B. Cooper and the FBI — A Case Study of America’s Only Unsolved Skyjacking , doesn't believe the FBI is being truthful when it comes to their findings.
He raged: "This whole thing stinks. The FBI has lost a lot of evidence, but is anyone looking for it? Has the FBI’s investigation been squashed by powerful sources claiming national security concerns?
"Is the FBI just sloppy, overwhelmed, unlucky” – or, as Calame believes, covering its own tracks?"
Meanwhile, McCoy's own children also believe their father was Cooper – a secret that hung over the family but they kept quiet over fear speaking out may implicate their mother, Karen, whom they believe was involved in both hijackings.
McCoy's kids, Chante and Rick, reached out to retired pilot, skydiver, and YouTuber Dan Gryder in 2022 and invited him to their family property in North Carolina.
Gryder had been contacting the family over the years during his own investigation of the case.
While on the property, inside McCoy's mother's storage unit, Gryder discovered a modified military surplus bailout rig, which he believes was used by Cooper during the hijacking and could be the case's missing link.
"That rig is literally one in a billion", he said of the specific parachute .
FBI agents took the harness and parachute into evidence, along with a skydiving logbook found by Chanté that matched the timeline of both hijackings, adding another intriguing piece to the decades-long investigation .
Meanwhile, U.S. Army paratrooper veteran Robert W. Rackstraw Sr . was also suggested to be Cooper following the Netflix mini-series D.B. Cooper: Where Are You?! .
Rackstraw, who died at 75 before he could ever face justice, closely resembled the police sketch of the skyjacker.