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Updated: 8:46 AM- How's this for a New Year's resolution? After 36 years, hundreds of suspects and thousands of leads, the FBI still wants to solve the case of D.B. Cooper.
On Nov. 24, 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper hijacked a passenger plane, traded most of the passengers for $200,000 in cash and then - en route to Mexico - parachuted from the plane in the pitch-black night, in a driving rain, wearing loafers and a trench coat at 5,000 feet.
Many believe that Cooper was Richard McCoy, a Vietnam War veteran, experienced parachutist and BYU political science student who staged a similar hijacking several months later. But the FBI says McCoy - who was killed in a shoot-out with law enforcement officers after a prison break in 1974 - simply didn't fit the description of Cooper provided by two flight attendants.
"The case remains unsolved," the bureau announced in a posting on its Web page, http://www.fbi.gov" Target="_BLANK">http://www.fbi.gov, on Monday. "Would we still like to get our man? Absolutely. And we have reignited the case."
Seattle case agent Larry Carr, of the FBI's Bank Robbery Task Force, is heading up the case, but Carr said he said it's unlikely that Cooper even survived the jump.
"We originally thought Cooper was an experienced jumper, perhaps even a paratrooper," Carr said in the FBI's report on the reopened case. "We concluded after a few years this was simply not true. . . . Diving into the wilderness without a plan, without the right equipment, in such terrible conditions, he probably never even got his chute open."
Former FBI agent Russell Calame, who co-authored a book supporting the theory that Cooper and McCoy were the same man, said Tuesday that he saw no new evidence in the FBI's recent announcement that changes his mind.
"I'm open," Calame said. "We haven't seen anything that really destroys our theory. Maybe we will, but for right now I haven't seen anything to the contrary, so I have no reason to change what I think." mlaplante@sltrib.com" Target="_BLANK">mlaplante@sltrib.com