The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks (39 page)

The publication of Asinof’s book about Trapnell two years later created a buzz of publicity around the conman turned hijacker, including an interview on news programme
60 Minutes,
in which he expressed his fascination with the story of Henri Charriere, aka Papillon. One of those attracted to him was Barbara Ann Oswald, who seemed on the surface to be an ordinary housewife and mother of five. In fact, she had been a prostitute in her teens before enlisting in the US Army. She started writing to Trapnell, who was now at Marion prison, from her home in Richmond Heights, St Louis, Missouri, around 120 miles away. Telling friends that she intended to marry the convict (the source of some accounts which claim that she was his wife), she knew that they could only truly be together if prison walls weren’t between them.

Marion prison, however, wasn’t a place that was easy to escape from. Although it is now a medium-security institution, after being downgraded in 2006, at the time it was a maximum-security facility, built and opened in 1963 initially to take the prisoners from Alcatraz who were transferred there (and not lost in time as a recent TV series would have you believe!). Ten years after the prison began functioning, control-unit cells were introduced: prisoners would spend no more than one hour a day outside these one-man cells which were designed to prevent their contact with other people. Two years later came the first escape in the prison’s twelve-year history, when five inmates were able to release the doors of the cells using a radio remote control. Rather stupidly, a prisoner who had been an electrician outside was allowed to work on the lock mechanisms of all the doors – inevitably he used his knowledge to find a way around the system. They were all eventually recaptured.

That wasn’t going to deter Barbara Oswald. By spring 1978, the forty-three-year-old was regularly visiting Trapnell at Marion, and during these sessions the plot was hatched. As well as freeing Trapnell, the plan was to get his fellow prisoners James Kenneth Johnson and hijacker Martin J. McNally out from Marion at the same time. The idea of a helicopter flight topped the agenda, possibly arising from Trapnell’s biographer’s earlier book
The 10-Second Jailbreak,
about the escape of Joel David Kaplan from a Mexican prison in 1971. Around $5,000 was needed to sort out the various expenses involved. After the plan failed, Trapnell explained to a fellow inmate that there hadn’t been time to send Oswald to somewhere far away from Illinois so she could safely learn to fly a helicopter herself, rather than risk taking a hostage. He had learned that a new tower was being constructed in front of the institution, and he was concerned that it would be up and running before Oswald would have time to complete a course of lessons.

They therefore decided that Oswald would hire a helicopter from St Louis International Airport, and then hijack it, bringing it in to land in the prison yard – an area that was strictly out of bounds to the prisoners. The three escapees would be waiting there, with one of them wearing a yellow jacket so the pilot would know exactly where to land. Oswald would be carrying handcuffs for use on the pilot if they needed to use him as a hostage. They would then take off, and head to a nearby airport, where guns, changes of clothing, and a car would be waiting for them. They would drive to Kentucky, and fly down to New Orleans, where they planned to carry out some robberies. What they didn’t factor into their plans was thirty-year-old Allen Barklage, the helicopter pilot. The former Vietnam combat pilot had no intention of participating in the plot.

In the late afternoon of 24 May 1978, Oswald hired a Bell Jetranger II helicopter from Fostaire Helicopter Company, apparently to fly to look at some real estate in Cape Giradeau in Missouri, about thirty-five miles beyond Marion prison. They had been flying for just over half an hour when Oswald produced the .44 calibre pistol, pointed it at Barklage and ordered him to fly to the prison. At point-blank range, Barklage wasn’t going to argue, and set course. During the flight, Oswald told him that they would be landing in the exercise yard, and that one of the people they were collecting would have a yellow jacket. She showed him the handcuffs she had brought with her, and said that they would be used on him.

Barklage knew that the chances were that he would be picking up desperate men, and that the odds of him surviving the next few minutes were not great. When they were less than three miles from the prison, he took advantage of a momentary lapse on Oswald’s part. As she tried to open the door of the helicopter, she switched the gun from her left hand to her right, and put her finger on the trigger guard, rather than on the trigger itself. Barklage let go of the helicopter’s controls, knowing that it would begin to pitch and turn wildly, and grabbed for the gun. A ten to fifteen second struggle ensued between the combat veteran and the Missouri housewife. Knowing it was a life-or-death situation, Barklage fired the gun repeatedly, but the helicopter was moving around so much that only one bullet hit its mark. It was enough: Oswald was dead.

Barklage quickly regained control of the helicopter and brought it down to earth outside the administration building. Not thinking too clearly, he started looking for a guard, and nearly found himself on the receiving end of a fusillade of bullets from them. He quickly explained the situation, and the three escapees were rounded up. In later life, Barklage commented, “The dominating thought that I have when I think back on that is there may have been a way to do that without shooting the person . . . Could I have talked her out of it?” He was killed while flying an experimental helicopter in 1998.

The three escapees were charged with various offences, and although Trapnell tried his usual torturous legal defences, he was found guilty.

If Oswald’s daughter had had her way, though, he wouldn’t have been around to answer to the charges. Seventeen-year-old Robin Oswald was devastated by her mother’s death, and dropped out of high school. She kept in touch with Trapnell, whom friends said she regarded as a “father figure”, and in the week that Trapnell went on trial for charges relating to the incident, Robin took matters into her own hands, apparently at Trapnell’s instigation.

Eighty-three passengers and six crew were on board TWA flight 541 from Louisville, Kentucky to Kansas City, Missouri on the morning of 21 December when she claimed that she had three sticks of dynamite strapped to her body underneath a bulky sweater, and wanted Trapnell released. The plane was diverted to Williamson County Airport, near Marion, and was quickly surrounded by the FBI. Robin commandeered the back rows of the aircraft and sent notes via the flight attendants.

“She kept talking about how her mother died in the helicopter and her family had disowned her,” one witness recalled. However, after negotiations, the passengers and crew were released unharmed (while many others escaped through a door that Robin couldn’t see), and Robin was taken into custody. At pretty much the same time, the jury found Trapnell guilty. The “dynamite” proved to be railroad flares wired to a doorbell. She spent twenty-two months in a treatment program, after being tried as a juvenile, and then turned her life around.

Although Trapnell would continue to brag that he would eventually escape from Marion, it never happened. In 1993, Garrett Brock Trapnell died of emphysema while still being held prisoner.

Sources:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&v=HsBv5SIICIY
Alan Barklage look back

St Louis Magazine,
February 2012: “Historic and Harrowing St. Louis Prison Escapes”

St Joseph News-Press,
21 December 1978: “Plane hijacked”

St Louis Today,
25 June 2011: “Airline hijacking at Lambert in 1972 turns bizarre”

Lakeland Ledger,
22 December 1978: “Passenger –‘Beautiful Girl’ Was Serious”

New York Times,
16 January 2005: “The First Hijackers”

Los Angeles Times,
11 March 1974: “Manson ‘daughter’ arrested in diplomatic kidnap plot”

United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, 10 April 1974: “United States of America, Appellee, v. Garrett Brock Trapnell, Appellant”

Time
magazine, 29 January 1973: “Return of Dr. Jekyll”

Time
magazine, 1 January 1979: “Skyjack sequel”

Kansas City Star,
December 2003: “Hijacking family”

Kentucky New Era,
22 December 1978: “17-Year-Old Hijacks Plane to Free Hijacker”

San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle,
30 January 1972: “ Another skyjacker shot”

United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit, 30 December 1980: “UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Garrett Brock TRAPNELL and Martin Joseph McNally, Defendants-Appellants”

San Francisco Chronicle,
22 December 1978: “Girl, 16
(sic),
Surrenders in Airline Hijacking”

Waterloo Courier,
25 May 1978: “Hijacker killed in aerial drama near penitentiary”

Journal of Prisoners on Prisons,
1993, Formatted Online Version 2006: “Breaking Men’s Minds: Behavior Control and Human Experimentation at the Federal Prison in Marion”

Altoona Mirror,
25 May 1978: “Pilot Kills Female Hijacker, Prevents 3 Inmates’ Escape”

Highly successful Australian drugs smuggler David McMillan is back behind bars, following his arrest in the usually quiet London suburb of Orpington in spring 2012. But as the
Australian Times
pointed out in its feature on his conviction in September 2012 (for heroine (sic) smuggling), McMillan had quickly “become infamous for his miraculous ability to evade imprisonment,” and wondered whether the fifty-six-year-old criminal would attempt to escape, this time from a British cell.

McMillan featured in two escapes – one which he maintains was a scam set up to fleece him; the other in what was described by no less a person than the former Australian Attorney General Robert McClelland as “quite exceptional and athletic circumstances”. The first, in 1983, would have been from Australia’s Pentridge Prison in Melbourne; the second, thirteen years later, saw him become the first man to get out from the infamous Bangkok Hilton in twelve years.

The smuggler had come to Britain after many years as a feared member of the Australian underground, apparently to retire in comfort, and write books based on his adventures. He was born in London, but his family moved to Australia when he was very young, and he became widely known as a reporter while still only twelve years old, on the Nine Network’s
Peters Junior News.
A continuing interest in the world of film and television – possibly derived from reading about his father, who was the controller of one of the early independent television networks in the UK and had remained behind when the family moved – led him to the fringes of the underworld in Melbourne. McMillan thrived in these environs, and soon became one of the leading drugs smugglers, reluctantly stopping bringing the drugs in himself as he was certain he would be arrested.

McMillan became involved with Lord Tony Moynihan, the disgraced British peer who had left England for Spain after facing fifty-seven criminal charges. He had ended up in the Philippines, where he ran a brothel and became involved with the drugs trade. Moynihan tried to con McMillan into rigging the cockfights in Manila, but McMillan saw through him, although this meant he created a dangerous enemy for himself.

In January 1982, McMillan, his wife Clelia, his business partner Michael Sullivan and his wife, were all arrested at the end of a major operation by the Australian state and federal police. What McMillan refers to as “The Great Helicopter Escape” in his books (although he gives no details, and didn’t discuss it during a lengthy TV interview with actor Danny Dyer) would have seen a former SAS corporal, Percival Roger Hole, then living in the Philippines, bring a helicopter down onto Pentridge Prison’s tennis court to collect McMillan, Sullivan and a third member of the gang, Supahaus Chowdury. They would then be deposited next to a van fitted with side panels that would allow them to hide as they were driven from Melbourne to Sydney; from there, a yacht would take them to freedom in Manila.

According to some reports, Moynihan got wind of the scheme and reported it to Australian authorities, who ran it as a “sting” operation; McMillan himself, in an online blog, called the whole plot “a scam to fleece the accused as well as help the prosecution fluff an otherwise evidence-thin case.” McMillan was charged with the attempted escape, and authorities carried out a dummy run to check whether such an escape would be viable, and if so, what measures should be taken to prevent it. According to John Eacott, who was part of the Victoria Police Air Wing, writing on an internet forum in 2007, “it was prudent to prove that a helicopter could be used as implied, so on a Wednesday sometime in June 1983, Dave A. flew a 206 into the exercise yard, doors off, and picked up 3 Sons Of God who were milling around looking lost. In and out in [less than] 30 seconds, case proved.” As a result, prison authorities were advised to string marked wires over all the walls, but it seems as if they didn’t carry this out.

Hole was arrested on 19 January after police bugged the hotel room in which he was staying, and he was heard discussing the plan with accountant Charles Maxwell McCready. Contemporary newspaper reports suggest that he was paid $US397,000 to collect McMillan, Sullivan and Chowdury; he was sentenced to four and a half years in prison. By this point, though, McMillan had far worse things to worry about. Clelia and Sullivan’s wife were killed in a prison fire at HM Prison Fairlea on 6 February while being held on remand; McMillan was sentenced to seventeen years in prison.

Beyond the helicopter getaway, it seems as if McMillan didn’t try to escape from his prison sentence, although he claims that he assisted “half a dozen” others with their various attempts, without giving details. He waited for the various appeal stages to work their way through, and by the time that happened, he would have been near to release. He was freed in 1993 on parole, and promptly flew to Thailand. One policeman who worked on the original arrest told Australian paper
The Age,
“We let him go to Thailand and get picked up there because we thought he might get hanged.”