Was D.B. Cooper, the legendary hijacker, really a Broughton grad from Raleigh?
No criminal could thrill the public and frustrate the FBI like D.B. Cooper, the mystery man who boarded a flight with a bomb in his briefcase, collected four parachutes and $200,000 cash, then leaped from the plane at 10,000 feet — a John Dillinger for the aviation age.
He looked like the average, middle-aged business traveler in his dark suit, and he ordered a bourbon and Coke before handing the stewardess his ransom note, flashing her a peek at the red sticks and wires in his case.
But when he jumped into the midnight sky somewhere between Seattle and Reno, he looked like nothing more than an FBI sketch — a ghost nobody could catch, a fugitive more elusive than Bigfoot.
Now, after 53 years, a pilot from Georgia with a prominent YouTube channel insists he’s nailed down Cooper’s true identity: a Raleigh-raised, Broughton High School graduate named Richard Floyd McCoy Jr.
Over three YouTube episodes, Dan Gryder leads us into his 20-year obsession with the Cooper case, which finally hits paydirt outside New Bern in a storage shed owned by the McCoy’s. There, in front of the camera, Gryder uncovers a cardboard box containing what he describes as the one-of-a-kind parachute Cooper wore on his jump into folklore.
“This right here is what I’ve been looking for 20 years,” Gryder says. “We just solved it literally. Literally.”
But is he the real McCoy?
As ground-shaking as this development might sound, it hasn’t moved the investigative needle for the FBI. The feds concede that McCoy remains “a favorite suspect among many.” But nothing that Gryder uncovered has changed their official position since 2016, which essentially says there’s no proof and we’re moving on.
So what of McCoy, the mischief-maker from Raleigh Gryder pulled from a decades-old grave?
In many ways, McCoy seems a no-brainer for Cooper — a profile made to order. He served as a Green Beret and a helicopter pilot in Vietnam and practiced his parachute jumps well after the war. The Cooper caper spawned a string of copycat crimes, and one year later, the FBI caught McCoy pulling an almost identical parachute hijacking, this one for $500,000, landing him in prison for 45 years.
McCoy would soon escape prison in a garbage truck, then elude capture for weeks hiding out in the Craven County swamps. Not long after, in 1974, the FBI tracked him to Norfolk and killed him with a shotgun blast while he walked inside his rental house.
All of this, plus Gryder’s interviews with McCoys two children, who finger their dad for the crime, would seem to cinch the case.
Still, while Gryder’s discovery has landed him on CNN and in the pages of The Guardian, he has drawn legions of skeptics online, one of whom asks this excellent question:
“Why would he haul a parachute all the way from the northwest to North Carolina, then hide it in a shed?”
I’m not here to quibble over details in a historic crime, or poke holes in anybody’s research, especially since Gryder didn’t answer my messages. The D.B. Cooper case has inspired so many armchair sleuths that they hold an annual conference with seminars titled “Cooper’s Tie, New Particle Discoveries” and “The Drop Zone Reconsidered,” so I’ll let him make his case before that jury.
But I am here to dust off the story of Richard McCoy, a largely forgotten figure from our own streets, who for me defines the brazen, over-the-top, 1970s style of criminal.
His is a crazy story, D.B. Cooper or not.
A daredevil in Raleigh
Richard McCoy Jr. proved himself a thrill-seeker early in life.
In 1957, he led police on a breakneck chase through Raleigh while only 14 and driving his dad’s station wagon — an adventure that turned into a foot race when he crashed into a ditch and escaped into the forest. Officers chased him unsuccessfully for two miles.
In 1961, while preparing to graduate from Broughton High, he again led police on a chase, this time in a Volkswagen. He and a teenage chum spun the car around a parking lot until it flipped over, fracturing his buddy’s arm. Young McCoy was charged with reckless driving and possession of fireworks.
The McCoys, however, were prominent Mormons in Raleigh, and they sent him to Brigham Young University to study and shape up.
It didn’t take. McCoy dropped out, joined the Green Berets, went to Vietnam as a pilot/demolition expert and came back with a Purple Heart. A few years later, he went back again, this time as a helicopter pilot.
Somehow in all of this, he married his college sweetheart, proposing under the lights of the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City. He also fathered a pair of children.
The oldest, his daughter Chante, appears prominently in Gryder’s videos, even visiting Broughton High and declaring it looks “like a castle.”
In Gryder’s videos, she declares her belief that both her parents planned both hijackings, a “deep family secret” she and her brother endured along with teasing over their father’s criminal conviction. She describes McCoy as a man driven to desperation by a $243 monthly check from the military and a country that offered him few prospects post-Vietnam.
“The daddy I remember is one of a kind, gentle man with an even keel, slow to anger,” she says. “He was fun-loving and always up for an adventure ... Daddy was dealing with severe migraines and PTSD from serving two tours in Vietnam … The system had failed him. He was backed in a corner. He was not only spat on … he was un-hirable. Yes, he had a grudge.”
‘War does funny things to people sometimes’
I don’t think it matters much whether McCoy solves the Cooper puzzle. Some mysteries are better left unsolved. Who, for example, enjoyed finding out Deep Throat’s identity? Wasn’t it better when the shadowy Watergate snitch could have been anyone, even President Richard Nixon himself, rather than some guy you never heard of at the FBI?
McCoy’s story strikes me as unbearably sad, all intrigue inside. The episode below qualifies as an epic gut-punch.
After the second hijacking, The News & Observer sought out McCoy’s father and found him digging in his North Raleigh yard, dazed by the news, performing what appeared to be unnecessary work.
The elder McCoy had been a master sergeant in the Army, and a high priest in the Church of the Latter-day Saints, and he clearly got into parenting unprepared for anything like federal charges or his son photographed on the front page wearing handcuffs.
“War does funny things to people sometimes,” he told the reporter.
But even with this gem of a quote, The N&O reporter lingered, watching the hijacker’s father dig in sullen silence. The story, even in the limited way McCoy’s father knew it, was a lot to take in.
“Beads of perspiration formed on McCoy’s temples,” the reporter wrote. “His black hair was thinning and graying. He half-heartedly turned over another shovel-full of dirt.”
This story was originally published December 9, 2024 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Was D.B. Cooper, the legendary hijacker, really a Broughton grad from Raleigh?."