What better way to promote a book on Halloween than to make it look like the late U.S. District Court Chief Judge Willis W. Ritter signed an order inviting the public to an autograph party at San Weller's Bookstore, 254 S. Main, on Thursday, Oct. 31, between 4-6 p.m.
Authors Bernie Rhodes and researcher Russ Calame are circulating, with permission of federal court officials and the late judge's family, an order that contains the judge's signature advertising the autograph party.Rhodes, a former federal probation agent, and Calame, former agent in charge of the Salt Lake FBI office, collaborated to write "D.B. Cooper - The Real McCoy," which attempts to show that Richard Floyd McCoy, a Utah man convicted of hijacking an airplane and bailing out over Springville April 7, 1972, with a ransom was the same person who hijacked an airliner Nov. 24, 1971, and bailed out in the Pacific Northwest.
The authors have spent several years researching their book and believe that McCoy and D.B. Cooper, the name the man gave when he boarded the airliner for his hijacking foray, are the same man. Although some of the ransom money was found in the Cooper case, nobody has every been arrested.
Following McCoy's arrest at his Utah County home, he was convicted and sentenced to federal prison by Ritter. He escaped from a federal prison in Pennsylvania and on Nov. 9, 1974, was killed in a gunfight with law officers.