FBI considered more than 800 suspects
By the five-year anniversary, the FBI had eliminated all but 24 suspects. Of those remaining, we believe the most convincing suspects include Richard Floyd McCoy Jr., Lynn Doyle Cooper, and Walter Reca.
Lynn Doyle Cooper was an engineering surveyor who worked in Sisters, Oregon and has been linked by his niece, Marla, to the 1971 skyjacking. Cooper’s brother worked for Boeing at roughly the same period as the hijacking. Marla Cooper, 48, citing memories from when she was 8 years old, first told ABC News this week that she recalled her uncles planning something suspicious just before Thanksgiving 1971 at her grandmother’s house in Sisters, Ore. The two used walkie-talkies and left supposedly to go turkey hunting, she said. On Thanksgiving morning, Lynn Doyle Cooper, known to the family as “L.D.,” returned home bloody and bruised, claiming he had been involved in a car accident.
Richard Floyd McCoy Jr. was one of the most convincing culprits of the D.B. Cooper case and the only suspect arrested and questioned by the bureau. On April 7th, 1972, five months following the D.B. Cooper, McCoy hijacked United Airlines Flight 855 from Newark to Los Angeles. McCoy demanded $500,000 in cash and 4 parachutes and released all the passengers after the flight diverted to the San Francisco International Airport, just as D.B. Cooper did. McCoy was a Vietnam veteran, a helicopter pilot, and an avid and capable skydiver. McCoy, 29, was reportedly a member of the Utah Air National Guard and a Police Science Major at Brigham Young University. He was arrested on April 9, 1972 and sentenced to 45 years in jail.
Walter Reca was a former paratrooper who was publicly linked to crime several years later by his best friend, Carl Laurin. Evidence, including almost-daily discussions over a 14-year period and 3-plus hours of audio recordings featuring the skyjacker, was compiled by Laurin. The audio recordings, created in 2008, include Reca discussing skyjacking details that were not known to the public prior to the FBI’s information release in 2015
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