Despite the possible indicators that Richard McCoy Jr. (aka James Johnson) and D.B. Cooper were the same person, there are a number of unexplained contra-indicators, including (but not limited to):
- McCoy spoke with a distinct and highly noticeable lisp, which he could not have disguised. Everyone who verbally interacted with Cooper or overheard him talking said that he spoke normally, with no sign of any speech impediment.
- McCoy had been a Sunday School teacher and was known to be a devout Mormon who strictly abstained from tobacco, alcohol and coffee. Cooper smoked 7 cigarettes over a period of about 4 to 5 hours and ordered a bourbon and soda (7-Up) while waiting for take-off. Even if this was intentional misdirection, the cigarettes would represent a pretty difficult feat for a non-smoker without some obvious coughing.
- McCoy was 29 years old at the time of the D.B. Cooper hijack in 1971, but every witness described Cooper as in his mid-to-late 40s. That’s quite a discrepancy, even allowing for disguise or mistaken beliefs. Apart from him wearing sunglasses and flight attendants describing his hair as slightly thinning brown/dark with distinct, neat Marcel waves (such that he might have altered his hairstyle or used a hair dye) there was no other evidence of disguise. The suggestion that he might have been wearing a toupee came from an anonymous letter to a newspaper, but there’s no supporting evidence. No witness identified the 1971 hijacker as resembling McCoy from photographs shown to them. In fact, every single witness explicitly stated that McCoy was definitely not the man on their flight.
- Although DNA recovered from the clip-on tie discarded by Cooper only yielded a partial profile, no potential match to McCoy could be established (the tests were conducted in more recent times, since such techniques didn’t exist in 1971). Equally, for the 66 latent fingerprints and a palm print found in and around the seat occupied by Cooper, including from the arm rest and from a magazine he had been reading, no potential matches to McCoy were found. The suggestions that none of the prints were from Cooper, and were all from previous passengers or cabin crew, and that the DNA on the tie was not his are rather weak.
[Note that McCoy’s alibi, placing him at home with his family in Provo, Utah during the Thanksgiving holiday week doesn’t necessarily hold water, since it came only from his family. In any case, a covert 12 hour, 800 mile drive from Provo to Portland, Oregon where Cooper boarded the flight, and a return trip from wherever he landed would have been theoretically possible, albeit within a narrow window and with meticulous planning.]
