Was DB Cooper A Skyjacker Who Later Repeated The Same Crime?

According to new reports, the FBI may have a clue that could link Northwest folklore legend DB Cooper to another US hijacking. They reportedly closed the case 8 years ago.

   FBI is said to hold a parachute as evidence.

According to Yahoo News,  2 children of a former North Carolina successful airline hijacker have just come forth with evidence that perhaps the same person who pulled off a skyjacking in 1972 was DB Cooper, and that name was an alias.

Cooper became a part of NW Legend when on November 4th, 1971, he bought an airline ticket on a Northwest Orient 727 airliner from SeaTac to Portland, but then hijacked the plane. After letting it land to refuel and prepare his ransom demand (he said he had a bomb in his briefcase and reportedly showed it to a stewardess)  the plane took off bound for Mexico. However, just over the WA border near Vancouver, Cooper, told the pilots to descend to a certain altitude, and make the plane assume a certain position or pitch.

He then had them lower the rear exit ramp out from below the tail, and he parachuted into the rainy night--never to be seen again.  Years later in the 1980's some of the $200,000 ransom money was found in a sandbar along the Columbia River, but little else.

 Now, a North Carolina family says they have a parachute, and their dad was DB Cooper

Chante and Rick McCoy of North Carolina suspected their mother was in on the ruse as well as their father, who in April of 1972, was captured and convicted after hijacking and parachuting from a United Airlines Flight bound from Denver to San Francisco.  Richard McCoy II successfully jumped out of the plane over Utah, then landed, but was later captured and sent to prison. He'd bailed out with $500,000 in ransom money.

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Now that McCoy and his wife are dead, their children have come forward with new evidence. Tucked away in their North Carolina barn was a specially modified parachute that experts say is 'one in a million' that McCoy used in his Utah jump, as well as a skydiving logbook showing activity by a "DB Cooper" in Oregon.

They say their parachute is amazingly similar to the remains of the one used by Cooper to bail out of the 727 near Portland.

The children and researchers say the FBI never connected McCoy and "Cooper" because in 1972 McCoy was 27, and Northwest Orient crew members claimed Cooper looked like he was maybe 40. But, sketches of Cooper from eyewitnesses show he could have likely been younger. And, the FBI assumed Cooper did not survive his plunge from the 727 airliner.

They also say, who else could have pulled off such a jump.except for their dad? And the logbook, they say, is additional evidence. Reportedly, the FBI has now reopened the case, and the children of Richard McCoy II say this new evidence strongly suggests their dad was, in fact, DB Cooper.