Part 97, page 276

Transcript

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FD-350 (Rev. 5-8-81)

(Mount Clipping in Space Below)

(Indicate page, name of newspaper, city and state.) The Oregonian Portland, Oregon

Date: December 2, 1989 Edition:

Title: NORJACK

Character: 164A-SE-81 or 80-715 Classification: Submitting Office:

Indexing:

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New book claims Cooper Utah man

The Associated Press

SALT LAKE CITY — Two ex-law-enforcement officers claim Richard Floyd McCoy Jr., a slain Utah sky-jacker, was Dan Cooper.

A man who identified himself as Cooper hijacked a Northwest Orient 727 on Thanksgiving 1971, extorted $200,000 from the airline and para-chuted into the night.

No trace of Cooper was found after he parachuted from the jetliner near Portland, but some of the cash surfaced along the Columbia River in 1980. Most investigators believe the man perished.

McCoy was convicted of hijacking a Denver-to-Los Angeles flight on April 7, 1972, and bailing out over his hometown of Provo, Utah, with $500,000. McCoy was sentenced to 45 years in prison and was shot to death Nov. 9, 1974, by FBI agents in Virginia Beach, Va., after escaping with three others from a federal prison at Lewisburg, Pa.

In the recently completed manu-script, "Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (D.B. Cooper — No Longer a Mys-tery)," Bernie A. Rhodes, former FBI division chief in Salt Lake City, and Russell P. Calame, former chief U.S. probation and parole agent, contend McCoy was Cooper.

They cite parallels in the hijack-ings, such as both men getting four parachutes, both using the phrase "no funny stuff" in their ransom notes and both showing knowledge of pilot terminology.

At the time of the McCoy hijack-ing, it was thought to be a rather inept copy of the earlier, greatly publicized skyjacking.

Both hijackings were during vacation time at Brigham Young University, where McCoy was a stu-dent.

They also said they have found evidence disputing family accounts that McCoy had been at home in Provo on Thanksgiving 1971.

They speculate that McCoy drove from Provo to Las Vegas on or before Thanksgiving Eve, flew to Portland, bought a ticket on North-west Orient to Seattle, hijacked the plane, parachuted, walked back to Portland, caught a flight to Las Ve-gas and drove home to Provo.

Rhodes said that in a pre-sentence interview with him in 1972, McCoy neither admitted nor denied guilt in the Cooper hijacking.

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164A-SE-8/-33

b6 b7c

FBI/DOJ DB Cooper-43814