Richard McCoy Jr. was a Vietnam War veteran who worked as an Army demolition expert and later as a helicopter pilot for the Green Berets. After his time in the Army, McCoy became a warrant officer for the Utah National Guard and a frequent recreational skydiver.
On April 7, 1972, he boarded a Boeing 727-22C aircraft under the alias James Johnson. Using an unloaded handgun and a paperweight that resembled a hand grenade, McCoy hijacked the plane, taking four parachutes and $500,000 — the equivalent of nearly $3.5 million in 2022. With the help of fingerprints found on a magazine he'd been reading and a handwriting analysis of a note he'd left behind, police arrested McCoy two days later. In 1974, McCoy, who received a 45-year sentence, escaped prison and was killed in a shootout with FBI agents three months later.
In 1991, parole officer Bernie Rhodes and former FBI agent Russell Calame released "DB Cooper: The Real McCoy," which posited that the modus operandi for McCoy's hijacking could make him a suspect for the DB Cooper case. Despite suspicions about McCoy's involvement in the hijacking, the FBI does not consider him a viable suspect primarily due to mismatches in age and description, as well as a solid alibi placing him in Las Vegas on the day of the Portland hijacking and at home in Utah having Thanksgiving dinner with his family the following day.
