The brutal murder of the man who grabbed the parachute used in the infamous DB Cooper hijacking remains a mystery for more than a decade.
Earl Cossey delivered the parachute to the skydiving center contacted by police when the hijacker seized a Boeing 727 at Seattle-Tacoma Airport on November 24, 1971.
Cooper, whose real identity has remained a mystery for fifty years, took the plane’s crew and passengers hostage with a bomb threat and ultimately made off with $200,000 in cash – the equivalent of $1.2 million today.
The enigmatic thief jumped from the plane above the dense forest in the Pacific Northwest using the skydiving center’s parachutes and disappeared.
Cossey was key for investigators as they tried to identify the unique gear Cooper used when he jumped from the plane.
YouTube researcher Dan Gryder believes he has found the missing parachute harness on suspect Richard Floyd McCoy Jr.’s property. – but Cossey is no longer around to identify it.
The veteran skydiving instructor, 71, was found brutally murdered in his home in Woodinville, Washington, on April 26, 2013, by his daughter. KIRO.
The King County Medical Examiner’s Office determined the cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head and said he was killed on April 23 – three days before he was discovered.
Earl Cossey (pictured) provided the parachute issued to DB Cooper when the hijacker captured a Boeing 727 at Seattle-Tacoma Airport on November 24, 1971
Cooper, whose real identity remains a mystery, made off with $200,000 in cash after being parachuted into the woods of the Pacific Northwest.
After he was murdered, his son Wayland arranged for his father’s mail to be forwarded to his home. His father’s ID, bank cards and a casino gaming card were later sent to him anonymously.
Police do not believe the person who returned the items was the killer.
Instead, they believe the items were stolen by the killer before being picked up by the anonymous sender.
At the time, the King County Sheriff’s Office was offering a $1,000 reward for the person who returned the cards to come forward.
An additional $2,500 reward was offered for information leading to the arrest of Cossey’s killer.
But the rewards have yet to be claimed and the case remains unsolved and active to this day.
Cossey’s son and police believe the murder is not related to the Cooper case.
Wayland Cossey told it The Seattle Times his father ‘was a man of peace’ and ‘had no enemies.’
Cossey’s former brother-in-law Richard Bowyer told the story KIRO 7: ‘I’ll be very surprised if they find out that what happened has anything to do with the DB Cooper thing, because it’s so old. It really is a thing of the past, a long time ago.
“I know he got really tired of hearing about it.”
Cossey was the key to investigators as they tried to identify the unique vehicle Cooper made off with
Internet sleuth Dan Gryder said in part three of his documentary series about the case he visited with the Cossey family. They gave him a jumpsuit that Cossey was wearing (pictured in Gryder’s hand)
Cossey (pictured in the jumpsuit given to Gryder) was a beloved math teacher and sports coach who worked as a rigger and parachute packer on weekends
The veteran skydiving instructor was found dead at the age of 71 at his home in Woodinville, Washington by his daughter on April 26, 2013
Internet sleuth Dan Gryder said in part three of his documentary series on the case that he visited Cossey’s family after finding the parachute he said Cooper used.
“Earl Cossey’s lifelong math teacher in seventh and eighth grades, who was also a sports coach. Very loved by many people, a very good math teacher in the public education system,” Gryder said.
‘He was only a rigger and parachute packer on the weekends and he did that for many, many years. So he was a jumper and a rigger and packer.
“Earl was cheap, he often did cheap things, which fully explains why Earl bought a surplus NB8 bailout rig in the late 1960s or early 1970s, maybe 1971, and modified it to make it a sports rig.”
Gryder told DailyMail.com that the parachute found in the McCoy’s storage room has the same unique modifications as the parachutes in the Cooper hijacking.
He said the parachute started out as a military-grade rescue operation sold to Cossey through the civilian military surplus system.
Cossey then modified it to create a sports facility for the skydiving center. The same alternations were found on the chute in the McCoy house.
“It was born into existence as a military rescue platform. Without all these other accessories. Someone took it and modified it, making it a little bigger, moving the drawstring, cutting the straps and installing the D-rings. That makes this parachute one in a billion,” Gryder said.
Before his untimely death, the FBI had sought Cossey’s help in identifying parachutes that were sometimes discovered near Cooper’s jumping area.
“They keep bringing me trash,” Cossey told The Associated Press in 2008, after the FBI brought him a silk parachute discovered by children playing on a newly constructed road in southwest Washington.
Gryder discovered what he believes to be the Cooper parachute in the warehouse on the McCoy family estate in North Carolina
Archived footage of the plane that DB Cooper hijacked in 1971
The canvas bag containing one of the parachutes given to DB Cooper by Cossey in 1971
“Every time they find a squat, they take it out, open their trunk and say, ‘Is that it?’ and I say, “No, go away.” They come back a few years later.’
DB Cooper is the only unsolved hijacking in US history, despite FBI investigators vetting more than 800 suspects.
Gryder told DailyMail.com that the FBI is taking his parachute discovery very seriously and is conducting DNA testing.
One of the few clues in the case is DNA found on a tie left on the plane in 1971.
After considering the similarities between the DNA, Gryder told DailyMail.com that investigators are now calling for McCoy’s body to be exhumed for examination.
‘All the kids (the McCoy kids) were able to tell us that there are DNA markers present, and they have X number of them that line up perfectly like Swiss cheese models where all the holes in the Swiss cheese end up aligning, but they I need more of those markers, and where they fell is the difference between the son’s DNA and the tie versus the actual Richard Floyd McCoy,” he said.
‘Indisputable DNA, which would give them more of those markers, is what they’re looking for. That’s what they were doing. And that’s why they asked to exhume the body, which is a huge task.”
“If the kids want to give consent, and they feel like they’re so close, if they could get those final markers to match what was left on the plane, compared to Richard Floyd McCoy himself.”