Episode Details
Back to Episodes#263 The Best Podcast Episode on D.B. Cooper
Description
D. B. Cooper is the name we use for a man who hijacked a Boeing 727 aircraft in the pacific northwest, in the airspace between Portland and Seattle on Wednesday, November 24, 1971. He demanded a ransom and leaped from the plane with a parachute…probably. Despite a manhunt and massive FBI investigation, the man has never been located or identified. It remains the only unsolved case of air piracy in commercial aviation history. The FBI maintained an active investigation for 45 years after the hijacking. The FBI kept the case open till July 2016.
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Other possible suspects not mentioned in the show:
William Gossett
Gossett was a veteran who saw action in Korea and Vietnam. His military experience included advanced jump training and wilderness survival. He was a crazy fan of DB Cooper, claiming he could "write the epitaph for D.B. Cooper". Late in his life he reportedly told three of his sons, a retired Utah judge, and a friend in the Salt Lake City public defender's office that he had committed the hijacking. Photos of Gossett taken circa 1971 bear a close resemblance to the most widely circulated Cooper composite drawing. According to Galen Cook, a lawyer who has studied Gossett for years, claimed Gossett once showed his sons a key to a Vancouver safe deposit box which, he claimed, contained the ransom money. Gossett's eldest son, Greg, said that his father, a compulsive gambler who was always "strapped for cash", showed him "wads of cash" just before Christmas 1971, weeks after the Cooper hijacking. He speculated that Gossett gambled the money away in Las Vegas. In 1988, Gossett changed his name to "Wolfgang" and became a Roman Catholic priest, which some interpreted as an effort to disguise his identity. The FBI has no direct evidence implicating Gossett and cannot even reliably place him in the Pacific Northwest at the time of the hijacking.
Richard McCoy, Jr.
McCoy was an Army veteran who served two tours of duty in Vietnam, first as a demolition expert, and later, with the Green Berets as a helicopter pilot. On April 7, 1972, McCoy staged the best-known of the so-called "copycat" hijackings. He boarded United Airlines' Flight 855 (a Boeing 727 with rear stairs) in Denver, Colorado, brandishing what later proved to be a paperweight resembling a hand grenade and an unloaded handgun, he demanded four parachutes and $500,000. After delivery of the money and parachutes at San Francisco International Airport, McCoy ordered the aircraft back into the sky and bailed out over Provo, Utah, leaving behind his handwritten hijacking instructions and his fingerprints on a magazine he was reading. He was arrested on April 9 with the ransom cash in his possession, and after trial and conviction, received a 45-year sentence. Two years later he escaped from Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary with severa