Nineteen years ago Richard McCoy, then a law enforcement student at Brigham Young University, was arrested for a hijacking that occurred on a United Airlines flight on April 7, 1972, in which he parachuted out over Utah County with $500,000 in ransom money from a San Francisco bank.
One former neighbor said it would have been great to have a dollar for every person who came to look at the house and the room where McCoy took the half-million dollars.Now, a former FBI bureau chief and a parole officer have collaborated on a book connecting McCoy's hijacking with another that remains unsolved and has become the subject of folklore.The latter, unsolved hijacking was done by a man using the alias D.B. Cooper.
A number of ironies, similarities and so-called differences between McCoy and Cooper and the two hijackings are pointed out by Russell Calame, now retired bureau chief of the Salt Lake FBI office, who was assigned to the case.
A decorated officer with the Green Berets during the Vietnam War, McCoy was studying law enforcement at BYU and was a Sunday School teacher - generally not the background and characteristics of a criminal. "It was kind of surprising," said Calame, who has a reason to still be suspicious.
Four months earlier, on Nov. 24, 1971, D.B. Cooper hijacked a plane flying across Oregon. He parachuted out with $200,000 in ransom money from a Seattle bank. The man was never caught, and only $5,880 was recovered, with the case remaining the only unsolved hijacking in U.S. aviation history.
Calame and Bernie Rhodes, a parole officer for Utah's U.S. District Court who was also assigned to the case, both believe there was a connection between the two hijackings but could not prove anything at the time.
Now, Calame and Rhodes outline reasons for their belief of a connection in their book, "D.B. Cooper: The Real McCoy." The book is due out in October - just in time to mark the 20th anniversary of the Cooper hijacking.
Rhodes said the effort took them a long time, but "we have substantiated every claim we have made in the book."
There are numerous similarities, Calame said. "And the McCoy case improved in many ways over the Cooper case."
The Cooper case was the first recorded hijacking where the assailant had jumped from the plane's rear aft staircase. McCoy did the same thing in April 1972.
Also, when FBI agents went to the spot in Oregon where Cooper had jumped, they found two pieces of evidence that were later "identified by McCoy's relatives."
What are the two pieces of evidence? Rhodes said that's one of the book's surprises.
He said the FBI has kept these two pieces of evidence secret to weed out fake D.B. Coopers. Whenever someone claimed to be Cooper, the agents would ask what two things Cooper left on the plane, with the responses then eliminating the impostors.
The two men found other clues. McCoy become a certified sky diver about two months before the Cooper hijacking. They also discovered that McCoy had taken both flights exactly one week before the actual hijackings happened.
There were some clues that didn't fit, but they were so minimal that Calame didn't worry.
People identified conflicting physical characteristics about the two hijackers, such as eye colors. But, Calame said, "I've been around so many cases where people identify different eye color in a suspect that it didn't mean very much."
McCoy never was charged with the Cooper hijacking, but he was sentenced to 45 years in prison for the April 1972 incident.
A few years later, McCoy escaped from the Lewisburg Penitentiary in Pennsylvania and later was shot to death by an FBI agent who was trying to apprehend him.