Richard McCoy Jr: Hijacking, Escape, and the FBI Cooper Review

Richard McCoy Jr. was a Vietnam War helicopter pilot and Brigham Young University student who hijacked United Airlines Flight 855 on April 7, 1972, parachuted into Utah with $500,000 in ransom, was caught within two days, escaped from federal prison in 1974, and was shot and killed by the FBI in Virginia Beach that November. He is also the suspect most often named by outside researchers as the real D.B. Cooper, though the FBI has never agreed.

Who He Was Before 1972

McCoy was born in 1942, joined the Army, trained as a parachutist, and became a Green Beret and combat helicopter pilot.¹²

Back in the States, he settled in Provo, Utah, with his wife Karen and their two children. He joined the Utah National Guard as a warrant officer and enrolled at Brigham Young University, where by 1972 he was a senior studying law enforcement.³ He was an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and had taught Sunday school until roughly a month before the hijacking. Neighbors described him as a fine, quiet family man; a classmate said he was fascinated by organized crime and wanted to “make his dent on the world by busting crime syndicates.”⁴ Underneath it, he was in serious financial trouble.

The 1972 United Airlines Hijacking

On April 7, 1972, McCoy boarded United Airlines Flight 855 under the name “T. Johnson.” The Boeing 727 was flying Newark to Los Angeles with a stop in Denver.⁴ About twenty minutes after takeoff from Denver, he showed a hand grenade and a pistol and had a flight attendant deliver a sealed envelope of typed instructions to the cockpit.³

He demanded $500,000 in cash, four parachutes, and a landing at San Francisco International Airport on a specific runway, with vehicles and personnel kept at a distance. Most passengers never knew what was happening; the captain told them the diversion was a minor mechanical problem. After the money and parachutes were loaded in San Francisco, McCoy released the passengers and one flight attendant, moved the remaining crew into the cockpit, covered the peephole, and killed the cabin lights. Over the intercom he directed the pilots to fly at 16,000 feet and 200 miles per hour across specific Utah towns. Then he put on a jumpsuit, helmet, and parachute, and jumped from the rear of the 727 over Provo.³

Caught Within 48 Hours

The morning after the hijacking, a tipster called the FBI’s Salt Lake City office and named McCoy, saying he had once laid out a “foolproof” airplane hijacking plan. Agents interviewed him and collected handwriting samples. The FBI Laboratory matched his writing to notes left on the plane and matched a latent fingerprint on a magazine from the aircraft to a print on file from his military service.³

A hamburger-stand employee identified him as the man who had bought a milkshake late on the night of the jump, and a teenager said he had given McCoy a ride from that stand. On April 9, agents arrested McCoy at his Provo home. Inside they found skydiving gear, an electric typewriter whose keys matched the typed hijack note, and $499,970 of the $500,000.³

Prison, Escape, and Shootout

A federal grand jury in Salt Lake City indicted McCoy on April 14, 1972, for aircraft piracy and interfering with flight crew. Air piracy then carried a 20-year minimum and a possible death sentence.⁵³ He was convicted in June 1972 and sentenced to 45 years. The Supreme Court denied his appeal on October 9, 1973.⁶

On August 10, 1974, McCoy and three other inmates broke out of the federal penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, by ramming a garbage truck through the prison barriers. About sixteen miles away, they switched to a civilian car taken from passersby and vanished into the central Pennsylvania mountains.⁷ McCoy stayed on the run for three months with Melvin Dale Walker, a bank robber on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.⁸

Agents traced the pair to a house in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and set up a stakeout. On November 9, 1974, it ended in a shootout. McCoy, 31, was killed by agent Nick O’Hara.⁹ Walker was taken into custody minutes later.⁸ The house held disguises, cash, and equipment that O’Hara later said pointed to planning for more hijackings. The FBI has never disclosed how it found McCoy; O’Hara called the source “highly confidential” and would not confirm or deny that Karen McCoy had been an informant.¹⁰

The D.B. Cooper Theory

Five months before McCoy hijacked Flight 855, on November 24, 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper hijacked a Northwest Orient Boeing 727, collected $200,000, and parachuted into the Pacific Northwest night. He was never identified. McCoy’s method was close enough that the FBI looked at him for the Cooper case in 1972 and ruled him out.

The fullest public argument that the two hijackers were the same man came in the 1991 book D.B. Cooper: The Real McCoy, by former FBI Special Agent in Charge Russell Calame and former federal probation officer Bernie Rhodes. Both hijackers took over Boeing 727s, demanded four parachutes, passed typed notes to the cockpit through a flight attendant, stayed calm, and used the phrase “no funny stuff” in their written instructions.¹¹ Both hijackings fell during BYU vacation periods. The authors wrote that members of McCoy’s family identified a clip-on tie and clasp left on the Cooper flight as his, and cited an FBI memo placing McCoy in Las Vegas and Portland shortly before the Cooper hijacking.¹²

The FBI has consistently disagreed. The bureau said McCoy was ruled out because “he didn’t match the nearly identical physical descriptions of Cooper provided by two flight attendants,” along with other reasons it has not disclosed. Larry Carr, the former lead agent on the Cooper case, said: “I know he wasn’t McCoy.”¹³ FBI historian John Fox said the agency had “never been able to firmly connect the D.B. Cooper hijacking with any of the allegations” about McCoy, and attempts to pull usable DNA from the Cooper flight’s tie failed.¹² In pre-sentence interviews, McCoy himself refused to confirm or deny being Cooper.¹¹

The 2022 Parachute and the FBI’s Latest Review

After Karen McCoy’s death in 2020, her children Rick McCoy III and Chanté went public with their belief that their father was D.B. Cooper. They said they had stayed quiet to protect their mother from being implicated.¹⁴

In July 2022, aviation YouTuber and retired pilot Dan Gryder found a modified military surplus NB-8 parachute rig and canopy in an outbuilding on the family property in Cove City, North Carolina. Gryder called the rig “one in a billion,” pointing to modifications he attributed to Earl Cossey, the skydiver who had supplied the parachutes for the Cooper hijacking: a repositioned ripcord handle, cut straps, added D-ring attachments, and an enlarged pack tray.¹⁵¹⁶¹⁴

About two years of forensic work followed, including DNA testing, soil analysis, and review by a parachute expert. In December 2025, the FBI returned the equipment to Rick McCoy. He said an agent told him the bureau could neither credit nor discredit the material’s link to the Cooper hijacking, but had pulled “all the data off it that they could.” According to McCoy, the DNA they worked with was degraded, with only about seven of the 23 markers needed to confirm a match. The FBI’s Seattle office declined further comment and pointed to its 2016 announcement moving the Cooper case to inactive status.¹⁷

Nick O’Hara, the retired agent who killed McCoy, told Gryder he thinks the bureau “dropped the ball” and that the case is solved. A veteran skydiver who had once instructed McCoy said the same.¹⁵ The FBI’s position has not shifted: the agency has never named McCoy as a viable Cooper suspect and continues to say the Northwest Orient hijacker likely died the night of the 1971 jump.¹³

His Widow, the Book, and a Courtroom Admission

The 1991 book produced lasting fallout for Karen McCoy. She sued the authors, saying it falsely cast her as an active accomplice in the 1972 hijacking, a conspirator with the FBI in her husband’s death, and the romantic partner of an FBI agent, and testified that it had “destroyed her life.”¹⁸ During the proceedings, her own attorney Thomas Taylor said she had admitted under oath to involvement in the 1972 hijacking, and she repeated the admission at a hearing.⁶

The suit settled in January 1994. Taylor paid $100,000 and the University of Utah Press, which had put out roughly 3,000 copies, paid $20,000; the amount paid by the authors was kept confidential.¹⁹ The press stopped printing the book, and the authors issued no retractions.²⁰ Karen McCoy denied to the end that her husband was D.B. Cooper. She died in 2020.¹⁴

1
USPA. Skyjacker — The Richard McCoy Jr. Story
2
Military Times. Richard F. McCoy
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FBI. Richard Floyd McCoy Jr.
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TIME. Crime: The Real McCoy
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GovInfo. Senate Hearing on Aircraft Hijacking
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Deseret News. McCoy’s Widow Admits Helping in ’72 Hijacking
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The New York Times. 4 Inmates Escape From Lewisburg
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The New York Times. Hijacker Is Killed and Fugitive Seized in FBI Stakeout
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Audacy. Has DB Cooper Finally Been Found
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The Mountain News. Interview With Nick O’Hara, the FBI Agent Who Shot Skyjacker Richard McCoy
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Los Angeles Times. Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
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ABC4. D.B. Cooper: The Real McCoy Part 2
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The Oregonian. Favorite D.B. Cooper Suspect Resurfaces
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New York Post. Richard McCoy Jr.’s Kids Claim He’s DB Cooper After Finding Hidden Parachute
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Cowboy State Daily. Who Is D.B. Cooper? New Evidence May Crack One of America’s Greatest Mysteries
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Axios. D.B. Cooper Case: FBI Parachute Discovery
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Cowboy State Daily. FBI’s ‘One in a Billion’ Parachute Returns and Revives D.B. Cooper Mystery
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Deseret News. Widow Says D.B. Cooper Book About Hijacker Destroyed Her Life
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Deseret News. Hijacker’s Widow to Gain $120,000
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Seattle Times. Lawsuit Settled Over Skyjacker Book