The brutal murder of the man who packed the parachute used in the infamous DB Cooper hijacking remains a mystery more than a decade on.
Earl Cossey provided the parachute to the skydiving center contacted by police when the hijacker commandeered a Boeing 727 at Seattle-Tacoma airport on November 24, 1971.
Cooper, whose real identity has remained a mystery for five decades, held the plane’s crew and passengers hostage with a bomb threat and eventually made off with $200,000 in cash – the equivalent of $1.2 million today.
The enigmatic thief leapt out of the plane over dense Pacific Northwest woodland using the parachutes provided by the skydiving center and vanished.
Cossey was key to investigators as they sought to identify the one-of-a-kind rig Cooper used when he jumped out of the plane.
YouTube investigator Dan Gryder believes he has found the missing parachute rig on the property of suspect Richard Floyd McCoy Jr. – but Cossey is no longer around to identify it.
The veteran skydiving instructor, 71, was found brutally murdered in his Woodinville, Washington, home by his daughter on April 26, 2013, reported KIRO.
The King County Medical Examiner’s Office determined his cause of death as blunt-force trauma to the head and said he had been killed on April 23 – three days before he was discovered.
After he was killed, his son Wayland organized for his father’s mail to be forwarded to his home. Hs dad’s ID, bank cards and a casino gaming card were later sent to him anonymously.
Police do not believe the person who returned the belongings was the killer.
Instead they believe that the items had been stolen by the murderer before being picked up the anonymous sender.
At the time, the King County Sheriff’s Office issued 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 an arrest of Cossey’s killer.
Yet the rewards are yet to claimed and the case remains unsolved and active to this day.
Cossey’s son and police are adamant his murder has no connection to the Cooper case.
Wayland Cossey told The Seattle Times his father ‘was a man of peace’ and ‘didn’t have any enemies.’
Cossey’s former brother-in-law Richard Bowyer told KIRO 7: ‘I will be very, very surprised when they figure out what happened has anything to do with the DB Cooper thing because it’s so old. It’s really in the past, a long time ago.
‘I know he got real tired of hearing about it.’
Internet sleuth Dan Gryder said in part three of his documentary series on the case that he had visited Cossey’s family after finding the parachute he believes Cooper used.
‘His whole life, Earl Cossey seventh-, eighth-grade math teacher who also coached sports. Well loved by a lot of people, a very good math teacher in the public education system,’ Gryder said.
‘He only was a rigger and a 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 did things kind of on the cheap a lot of times, which fully explains why in the late 60s or early 70s, maybe 1971, Earl bought a surplus NB8 bailout rig and modified it to make a sports rig.’
Gryder told DailyMail.com that the parachute found in the McCoy’s storage unit has the same unique alterations as the chutes in the Cooper hijacking.
He said the parachute started as a military grade ‘bailout rig’ that had been sold to Cossey though the civilian military surplus system.
Cossey then modified it to make it a sport rig for the skydiving center. These same alternations were found on the chute found in the McCoy house.
‘It was born in life as a military bailout rig. Without all these other accessories. Somebody took it and modified it made it a little bigger, moved the ripcord handle, cut the straps, installed the D-rings. That’s what makes this parachute one in a billion,’ Gryder said.
Before his untimely death, the FBI had sought Cossey’s help identifying parachutes that were sometimes discovered near Cooper’s jump area.
‘They keep bringing me garbage,’ Cossey told The Associated Press in 2008, after the FBI brought him a silk parachute discovered by children playing at a recently graded road in Southwest Washington.
‘Every time they find squat, they bring it out and open their trunk and say, “Is that it?” and I say, “Nope, go away.” Then a few years later they come back.’
DB Cooper is the only unsolved hijacking in US history, despite FBI investigators vetting over 800 suspects.
Gryder told DailyMail.com the FBI is taking his parachute discovery very seriously and conducting DNA tests.
One of the few clues in the case is DNA found on a clip-on tie left on the plane in 1971.
After considering the similarities between the DNA, Gryder told DailyMail.com investigators are now asking to exhume McCoy’s body for testing.
‘All [the McCoy children] were able to tell us is that there’s DNA markers that are present, and they have X amount of those that line up perfectly like Swiss cheese models where all the holes in the Swiss cheese eventually line up, but they need more of those markers, and where they have fallen down is the difference between the son’s DNA and the necktie versus actual Richard Floyd McCoy,’ he said.
‘Undisputable DNA, which would give them more of those markers, is what is what they’re looking for. That that’s where they were at on the thing. And that’s how come they’ve requested to exhume the body, which is a huge deal.’
‘If the kids will give permission, and they feel like they’re that close, that if they could get those final markers to align with what was left on the airplane compared to Richard Floyd Mccoy himself.’