← America's Most Infamous Crimes with Katie Ring
America's Most Infamous Crimes with Katie Ring
D.B. Cooper: After 53 Years, Here's Where the Case Stands Pt. 3
00:26:14
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- [00:02]
Katie Ring
Hi. We have some exciting news. Crime House plus and Murder True Crime Stories are celebrating America's 250th by dropping a four part limited series on the crimes that built America. These are the crimes and cases that gave us Miranda rights, sparked criminal profiling, and a murder that built America's missing children movement. Follow Murder True Crime Stories for a new episode every Monday leading up to July 4th. Or you can listen to all of them right now with Crime House Plus. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of the show's page.
- [00:45]
Carter Roy
This is Crime house.
- [00:49]
Katie Ring
For almost 50 years, the investigation into D.B. cooper produced exactly one confirmed piece of physical evidence. A cheap clip on tie from James JCPenney. Every suspect was investigated and cleared, every promising lead dissolved. The FBI formally suspended the active investigation in 2016. And then in the 2020s, new evidence emerged. Evidence that could finally expose DB Cooper's real identity. An aviation investigator who'd spent 20 years on the case said it was, quote, literally one in a billion. The FBI looked into it and quietly, the investigation that had been suspended came back to life. Today I'll tell you where the DB Cooper case stands right now. The new evidence, the McCoy family's explosive claim, the DNA question, and whether after more than 50 years, we are finally close to an answer. Every crime tells a story about the people involved, the system that tried to stop, and the nation that couldn't look away. Some cases are so shocking, so deeply woven into who we are, that decades later, we're still asking, how did this happen? I'm Katie Ring, and this is America's Most Infamous Crimes. Every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, I'll take you deep into cases that have a lasting imprint on society and still haunt us. Today, I want to thank you for being part of the Crime House community. Please rate, review and follow America's most infamous crimes wherever you get your podcasts and to get all episodes at once ad free. Subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. Let's get into the recent developments in the DB Cooper case. What happened after the FBI suspended its investigation, why it came roaring back in the 2000s, and where things stand right now.
- [02:44]
Carter Roy
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- [04:00]
Katie Ring
in 2016 that it was suspending active work on the D.B. cooper case, the public reaction was a mix of resignation and disbelief. Resignation because after 45 years and no confirmed identification, it was hard to argue the FBI hadn't given it their best effort. And disbelief because this was the kind of case that felt like it deserved an ending, and suspending it felt like an admission that one might never come. But the FBI was careful about its language. The case was not closed. The file remained open. The $200,000 reward for information leading to an identification remained technically in place. It was just that the agents assigned to the DB Cooper case were being moved to other priorities. If credible new evidence surfaced, the case would be revisited. And a few years later, that credible new evidence came out. In late 2020, two siblings, the adult children of Richard Floyd McCoy Jr. Came forward publicly to claim that their father was the man who'd hijacked Northwest Orient Flight 305 on November 24, 1971. Remember, this wasn't the first time McCoy's name had been attached to the Cooper case. Just a few months after the DB Cooper hijacking, McCoy had committed a nearly identical crime before getting caught. He'd been seriously investigated for both crimes. But the McCoy family had always pushed back against that theory. And when McCoy was arrested after his own hijacking, his family said he'd been home for Thanksgiving the year before. The implication being if he was home for Thanksgiving in 1971, he couldn't have been on a plane over Southwest Washington on the night of November 24th. But decades later, the story changed because his children said they'd found something in their mother's shed after her passing in December of 2020. Something that could turn this entire investigation on its head. It was a parachute rig, and not just any parachute. It was a highly specific combination of harness, container and reserve that McCoy's children believed corresponded to the equipment used in the Cooper hijacking. The siblings brought their claim to Dan Greider, an aviation investigator who'd spent more than 20 years independently researching the DB Cooper case. And when Grider examined the rig, he was convinced. In interviews, he described it as literally one in a billion, meaning the specific combination of components was so unusual that the chances of it being unrelated to the Cooper jump were, in his opinion, essentially zero. Grider documented his findings in two videos released on his YouTube channel, Probable Cause, in 2021 and 2022. The videos laid out the McCoy family's claim in detail, walked through the physical evidence, and made the case that the FBI's original investigation had been too quick to dismiss the connection between Cooper and McCoy. He'd been ruled out based on a fingerprint found on Cooper's bourbon glass, but there was no guarantee it was actually his print. Throughout it all, the McCoy family cooperated fully with Greider. They allowed people onto their property, handed over the parachute rig, and made themselves available for interviews. Whatever they believed about their father, they clearly felt the truth was worth pursuing. Even if what came out of that pursuit wasn't flattering to his memory, it was convincing enough for the authorities to look into it more. And in late 2023, the FBI contacted Dan Grider. According to his public statements, the FBI had picked the case back up as a result of his work in the McCoy family's claims. And now, he said that investigators were actively searching for what he described as a positive DNA connection between McCoy's profile and whatever they could scrounge up on DB Cooper. Which brought the investigation back to the same wallet had been hitting for years. The evidence problem. The hair sample collected from the headrest of Cooper's seat on Flight 305 was gone. The cigarette butts were also gone. They'd been lost or thrown out somewhere in the decades of storage and transfers between FBI field offices. And when that news came out, the online reaction was intense. True crime researchers and amateur DB Cooper investigators were furious. Some questioned whether the evidence had truly been lost or whether the FBI was covering something up. Plenty of others took it at face value, an innocent and embarrassing mistake. But there was still some hope in the form of a tie. The same cheap clip on JCPenney tie that was left on the plane. The same tie that had been sitting in FBI evidence storage since November 1971. The same tie the Bureau had never been able to confirm with absolute certainty had actually been worn by Cooper. It was what they had. And for investigators still working the case, it was their last hope. I sold my car in Carvana last night. Well, that's cool. No, you don't understand. It went perfectly. Real offer down to the penny. They're picking it up tomorrow. Nothing went wrong. So what's the problem? That is the problem. Nothing in my life goes to smoothly. I'm waiting for the catch. Maybe there's no catch. That's exactly what a catch would want me to think.
- [09:21]
Carter Roy
Wow.
- [09:22]
Katie Ring
You need to relax. I need a knock on wood. Do we have wood? Is this table wood? I think it's laminate. Okay. Yeah, that's good. That's close enough. Car selling without a catch. Sell your car today on Carvana.
- [09:32]
Carter Roy
Pick up.
- [09:32]
Katie Ring
Fees may apply.
- [09:35]
Carter Roy
Hi, listeners. It's Carter Roy, host of Murder True Crime Stories. I wanted to let you know that Crime House plus and Murder True Crime Stories are celebrating America's 250th by dropping a four part limited series on the crimes that built America. These are the crimes and cases that gave us Miranda rights, sparked criminal profiling and a murder that built America's missing children movement. Follow Murder True Crime Stories for a new episode every Monday leading up to July 4th, or you can binge all of them right now ad free with call Crime House Plus. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of this show's page.
- [10:26]
Katie Ring
The history of D.B. cooper's tie is almost as strange as the case itself. For 36 years after the hijacking, it sat in FBI storage, examined, cataloged and largely set aside. Standard forensic tools during the 1970s and 1980s, weren't able to extract much from a piece of fabric beyond fiber analysis and trace material identification. DNA profiling didn't exist when the tie was collected. And by the time it did exist, there wasn't enough reason to try and use it on the case with no active suspect. But like I talked about yesterday, the tie did yield some Important information in 2007, when the FBI let civilian researchers perform some tests on it, and they found traces of pure, unalloyed titanium, which they thought was a sign that DB Cooper was somehow involved in the aerospace industry. It was a significant find, but the FBI approached it with caution. They acknowledged the results, but declined to confirm that the tie had definitively belonged to Cooper. After all, there were a lot of other passengers on that plane, including one who had to run back onto the plane after it landed in Seattle. It could have belonged to him. And the FBI wasn't willing to build a case on evidence it couldn't authoritatively attribute to Cooper. That caution was frustrating, but it was understandable in a criminal case, if it ever got that far, the chain of custody and attribution of physical evidence would be a huge deal. If the FBI made the wrong statement about the tie, it could tank a prosecution before it even started. Still, it was useful information. And In January of 2024, the DB Cooper Research Community was energized again by an announcement from a group of amateur sleuths who claimed they'd extracted trace DNA from the tie fabric itself. Like the titanium findings, this announcement was treated with appropriate caution by forensic experts. Extracting usable DNA from a piece of fabric that is more than 50 years old, has been handled by multiple people, and whose chain of custody has had some documented gaps, is not exactly a slam dunk. Contamination is a constant risk. As of this recording, the results of the DNA analysis have not been made public in any definitive form, which means we don't know if the DNA was Cooper's, if it was contaminated, or even if it matches any other suspects. But hopefully we'll get that information soon. Meanwhile, In March of 2025, the FBI released a giant collection of previously internal documents from the Cooper investigation. It was hundreds of pages of case files. Most of them were heavily redacted, but they still offered the most details into the investigation. Yet, unfortunately, the files didn't contain any bombshells, no additional suspects, no major evidence that hadn't been released, no sense that the FBI had tried to cover up any part of the investigation. What they did show was an investigation that had been thorough and methodical. One of the most intriguing aspects of the documents was the sheer breadth of the search. Investigators had looked at bank robbers with parachuting experience. They'd examined military veterans with jump training. They'd run down anyone with the last name Cooper who fit even a loose physical description. They'd followed tips from prison informants, from estranged family members, from anonymous letters, from people who'd seen something in a Bar in 1972 and waited 40 years to report it. If there was any stone, they made sure to turn it over. But they hadn't found anything especially useful. The FBI weren't the only ones looking into it, though. Separate from the official investigation, a community of civilian researchers had built something called the Citizen Stage. Loose project. They'd been involved with analyzing the tie and also maintained a detailed public database of findings, flight maps, photo galleries and forensic analysis. One of their more interesting findings involved the original hope for the tie, that pollen trapped in the fabric might reveal what part of the country DB Cooper had come from. Without getting into a whole science lesson. Different plant species pollinate at different times of the year and in different geographic regions, which means pollen analysis can sometimes function as a kind of botanical gps. And they did try and analyze it, but the results were inconclusive. There either wasn't enough pollen or not enough specificity in what was found. To narrow down the geography, the Citizen Sluice project also covered one of the more overlooked aspects of the money story. That not a single bill from the DB Cooper ransom was ever found in circulation. In 50 plus years, through countless bank transactions across an entire country, not one single bill has ever been processed. The fact cuts in two directions. Either Cooper had insane self control about never spending it, or the money has been sitting somewhere, inaccessible since 1971. Underground, underwater, or maybe in a shed,
- [15:37]
Carter Roy
foreign.
- [15:43]
Katie Ring
There's another major suspect for the DB Cooper case that I want to talk about. Robert Rackstraw. He was an explosives expert and paratrooper who served in Vietnam, who earned dozens of air medals and also got kicked out of the military. According to one of his friends, Robert was extremely charismatic with what's described as a criminal mind. So he definitely ticks a lot of the boxes right there. And in 1978, four years after the D.B. cooper hijacking, he was convicted of forging checks and stealing a plane. Robert was ID'd as a possible candidate for Cooper early on, although he was dismissed for being too young. But a miniseries documentary released in 2016 took another look at him, and there's a lot of compelling evidence there, from his background to his appearance. Even a coded letter Cooper supposedly wrote that translates to, and please tell the lackey cops, DB Cooper is not my real name. I am First Lieutenant Robert Rackstraw. D.B. cooper is not my real name. For his part, Robert has always been a bit cagey about the allegations. And if he was D.B. cooper, he took that secret with him when he died in 2019. So what do I think about it? Before I give you my own take on this case and where it stands today, I want to talk about what it actually changed. Because whether DB Cooper is dead or alive, a genius, or a lucky amateur, his actions have had real and lasting consequences for every person who's boarded a commercial flight in the United States in the past 50 years. In the immediate aftermath of the hijacking, the FAA moved to close the specific vulnerability Cooper had exploited, the Boeing 727's aft staircase. By 1972, the year after the hijacking, Boeing had developed a mechanical device that prevented the staircase from being deployed while the aircraft was in flight. Inside the aviation industry, that device is known as the Cooper vane. But the changes went much further than one mechanism on one type of plane. The wave of hijackings that define the early 1970s and Cooper's audacious escape at the peak of the wave led to a fundamental rethinking of how commercial aviation handled passenger security. By 1973, the United States had implemented mandatory screening of all passengers and carry on baggage at domestic airports. The era of walking up to the counter, paying cash, giving any name you liked, and boarding a plane was over. The world Cooper had exploited so precisely. The one where a man in a suit could carry a briefcase full of wires onto a commercial flight without anyone looking twice was gone within two years of his jump. In a strange way, he helped build the security apparatus that would have stopped him. Culturally, the legacy is harder to summarize because it has never really stopped growing. The town of Ariel, Washington, the small community near the original search zone along the Lewis river held an annual DB Cooper celebration. For decades, people came from across the country to toast a man no one could identify at a party built around a crime no one could solve. The event became a kind of American folk ritual, a yearly acknowledgment that some mysteries are so perfectly constructed they become their own reward. And it's had a huge impact on pop culture, books, movies, and at least one song about D.B. cooper that was a top 40 hit. The name D.B. cooper has become a shorthand for a kind of elegant consequence free disappearance. The person who took what they wanted and simply ceased to exist. The resonance has not faded. If anything, it's deepened with time as the case has remained unsolved and the man has remained unknowable. Now, the question I have been building towards since episode one, did D.B. cooper survive the jump? Let's start with a less interesting possibility that he didn't survive the jump. The case for that argument is built on the conditions that night. It was November in the Pacific Northwest. Raining heavily with near freezing temperatures. At the plane's altitude, the aircraft was traveling at approximately 250 miles per hour. Cooper was wearing a business suit and loafers, so no thermal protection, no waterproofing, no gear. Tailored to an extended night in the wilderness. He was carrying a heavy bag of cash in one hand and a briefcase in the other. He might not have known one of his reserve shoe options was a sewn shut training dummy. And he was jumping blind into 75,000 acres of roadless old growth forest with only a cloud obscured quarter moon for light. The case's lead investigator, FBI agent Ralph Himmelsbach, was convinced that Cooper had died. He didn't even think that Cooper had gotten his parachute open before the impact. I can definitely see the reasoning there, but with no body and no answer, it lets us wonder, could he have lived? No evidence of what happened to Cooper has been found either way. The forest floors of Washington's dark divide has been walked, searched and surveyed for over five decades with helicopter passes, ground teams, and eventually digital mapping tools. But still nothing. And then there's the money. If Cooper died from the jump and his body was somewhere in the wilderness near the Lewis river, the most natural expectation would be that the ransom money stayed with him or washed into the local watershed from where he landed. Instead, only $5,800 turned up on a riverbank more than 20 miles away, with analysis showing that it had only been in the water for about a year before an 8 year old dug it up in 1980. That timeline and that location don't fit cleanly with a body landing in the Cascade Wilderness in 1971. If the money moved, something moved it. That something could have been flooding, dredging, or the natural action of two river systems over nine years. Or it could have been a person. There's also the matter of the jump itself. Everything Cooper did on November 24, 1971, paints the picture of a man who'd thought everything through. He knew which aircraft to hijack. He knew how its aft staircase worked. He knew the flight parameters that would let him jump out of the plane and survive. He'd thought his way through every foreseeable problem and done it while appearing completely relaxed, drinking bourbon, and chatting with a flight attendant. It is hard to square that level of preparation with a guy who had then jumped into the mountain wilderness in a business suit without a viable backup plan for survival. If Cooper was the person that everything about the hijacking suggests he was, trained, methodical, and knowledgeable, then it's hard to believe his disappearance was an improvised disaster. He would have known where he was going. He would have had planned for what came next. Or maybe that is exactly the kind of thinking that has kept this case alive for 50 years. We look at the evidence of his planning and assume Competence all the way to the end. But even careful people misjudge conditions. Even train jumpers die in bad weather. The dummy chute, the one he presumably didn't catch, suggests his knowledge had limits. Maybe the last decision he made was one miscalculation too many. I have spent a lot of time with this case, and I will tell you, honestly, I do not know. I think the conditions stack the odds against survival in a way that's hard to dismiss. But I also think the absence of a body in a region that has been searched as thoroughly as any wilderness in the country means something. Bodies do not simply vanish, especially bodies carrying $200,000 in cash. What I keep coming back to is the case has never produced a confirmed death because it has never produced a body and it has never produced a confirmed identity. After more than 50 years, with all of the tools modern forensics has to offer, the answer is still we don't know. And maybe that's the most honest thing that can be said about D.B. cooper. He pulled off something that shouldn't have worked as well as it did in a window of history that was closing even as he moved through it. And then he went somewhere that no one has been able to follow. Whether he died in the dark, over the dark divide, or walked away in a different life, he has never been found. Could it be Richard McCoy? The jury's still out, but if you go on Reddit, you'll see plenty of arguments on both sides. I won't get into that discourse, but I'll say this. He's the likeliest suspect we've gotten so far. But as of this recording, D.B. cooper remains the only person to successfully hijack a commercial aircraft in the United States and escape without being identified. The FBI calls it the only unsolved case of air piracy in American Indian aviation history. After 53 years, that distinction still holds. At the end of each episode, I like to take a moment to answer any questions you may have about the case and share my thoughts, so make sure to comment below. The McCoy family claim is the most significant new development in years. Does it change your view of who Cooper was? It definitely moves the needle for me. The parachute rig is a tangible piece of physical evidence that doesn't have an obvious, innocent explanation. You don't just end up with a highly specific piece of a jump equipment in your shed by accident. And the fact that the family came forward voluntarily without being compelled and cooperated fully with the FBI makes it harder to dismiss as attention seeking. The earlier dismissal of McCoy was based primarily on the fingerprint comparison. And as we've talked about, that comparison was built on evidence that the FBI itself could never definitively attribute to Cooper. So if those prints weren't his, ruling McCoy out on the basis of the non match is circular logic. I do find the fact that his family came forward and said that his original alibi that he was home for Thanksgiving in 1971 was actually made up to protect him is compelling. Again with the family, though, the fact that they are eager to come forward and the fact that if he wasn't actually Cooper, he was at least a fan slash copycat does give me some doubts. If DNA from the tie does eventually come back with a match to McCoy, what does that mean for the case? It would definitely be a pivotal moment in true crime history because this case has been the longest running unsolved hijacking case anywhere in the world. It would confirm the connection between two crimes that baffled investigators for decades. And it would mean that the FBI had, in 1972, the right answer essentially handed to them and dismissed it based on a fingerprint comparison that was already on uncertain ground. I do want to be careful here because the DNA work on the tie is also complicated. The tie is over 50 years old. It has been handled, stored, examined, and potentially contaminated multiple times. Getting a clean profile from it that would stand up against scrutiny is genuinely difficult. And getting a match to McCoy would require a reliable sample from his lineage for comparison. And even then, given the uncertainty about whether the tie was actually Cooper's or not, a DNA match would be powerful, but not completely airtight. So 53 years later, why does this case still matter to people so much? I think it's a few things layered on top of each other. There's this obvious appeal of the unsolved mystery, because the human brain does not like open loops. And this is one of the most perfectly open loops in American criminal history. It has all of the elements of a great story. The audacious crime, the narrow escape, the charming unknown figure, and the decades of pursuit and near misses. But I also think there is something specific to the moment it happened. In 1971 was a time when a lot of Americans felt like the systems they lived inside. The government, corporations and institutions were not working for them. And Cooper walked into one of those systems, took money from it and walked out. No one died, no one was even injured. And the airline was out $200,000. It was basically just that the FBI was embarrassed and he was gone. In a cultural moment defined by frustration and distrust in the system, he almost became a Robin Hood figure that people were cheering on. There's kind of something romantic and slightly terrifying about the idea that the jump worked and that he landed somewhere and walked out of the forest and went back to his life. That somewhere, for some period of years, a man who had hijacked an airplane was living an ordinary life, getting groceries, watching television, going to work, and nobody knew. And I think that's a version of the story that people really want to hold on to. Thanks so much for joining me for this episode. Make sure to rate, review and follow America's Most Infamous Crimes so we can keep building this community together and to get all episodes at once. Ad free. Subscribe to Crime House. Less on Apple Podcasts. Come back next week for another deep dive into a true crime that changed America.