McCoy's relationship to DB Cooper
Greetings everyone.
I am conducting a major editing of my book on DBC, and currently focusing on Richard McCoy and his curious relationship to the Cooper hijacking. Here is what I have found, currently:
"McCoy is one of an estimated twenty Cooper copycats—hijackers who performed their heist using the methods employed by DB Cooper—and McCoy is one of five known skyjackers to have parachuted successfully from their plane.
But the McCoy story also reveals that he might have been intimately involved in the DB Cooper skyjacking.
During the FBI's investigation of McCoy's April 1972 hijacking, he was discovered to have been in Las Vegas during the time of the Cooper skyjacking.
Here is the timeline Calame's team developed for Richard McCoy in the Thanksgiving holiday period.
On Tuesday, November 23, McCoy attended his last class at Brigham Young University before the holiday recess.
On Wednesday, November 24—the day of the Cooper skyjacking—McCoy was scheduled to be on duty with his National Guard unit, but wasn't. Instead, McCoy was far south of Provo, buying gas in Cedar City, Utah, which is 182 miles northeast of Las Vegas.
On Thanksgiving Day, November 25, McCoy bought additional gas at a Power Thrust station adjacent to McCarran airport in Las Vegas, according to his credit card receipts. Then, at 10:41 pm that evening he made a collect call from the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas to his home in Provo.
Hence, the burning question is why was McCoy in Las Vegas on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and staying through Turkey Day itself?
Calame wondered if McCoy was actually DB Cooper, and catching a flight to Portland to perform his first skyjacking—the DB Cooper caper—and using Las Vegas as an intermediary travel point.
Unfortunately, Calame's team was unable to determine if McCoy actually flew to and from PDX, since the airlines servicing Las Vegas' McCarran airport destroyed their flight manifests after four months—one month prior.
In addition, Calame's team discovered that McCoy had been in Las Vegas on the evening of November 2, 1971 and absent from his family for several days. Hence, they speculated that McCoy was flying round trip to Portland on a scouting mission.
Digging more deeply, Calame and Rhodes found many similarities between the Cooper skyjacking and McCoy's hijacking of United Flight 855, concluding that McCoy was DB Cooper, and doing a second hijacking in April 1972.
Many disbelieve that hypothesis because McCoy was too short, and at 29, too young, to be Cooper. Plus, McCoy had blue eyes.
But Calame and Rhodes showed that McCoy was at least a carbon-copy type of copycat of Cooper, using methods identical to Cooper in his November skyjacking, or conducting actual refinements.
