The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking (13 page)

Holder carefully concealed his planning from Kerkow, who was busy trying to peddle enough of Fast Eddie’s marijuana for the couple to stay afloat. Sometimes Holder would disappear for an entire day, later telling her that he had taken his twin daughters to the beach or the zoo. But he had actually spent the time flying between San Diego and San Francisco, scoping out the airlines’ security procedures and the layouts of their jets. He was able to make these trips thanks to the kindness of a Pacific Southwest Airlines stewardess with whom he’d had a fling the year before: whenever space was available, airline employees were allowed to give complimentary
tickets to friends.

As Holder shaped his plot to free Angela Davis, his living situation with Kerkow hit a snag. Beth Newhouse and her boyfriend, Lee Davis, finally moved out of the El Cajon apartment on May 1, having decided they could no longer tolerate Holder’s kooky vibes. The place was too pricey for Holder and Kerkow to keep on their own, so they stiffed the landlord on the May rent and began to look for
cheaper accommodations.

Around that same time, Holder decided that he needed to go to his parents’ house to retrieve one of the few possessions he had kept from his Army days: a May 1966 manual titled
Guide to Selected Viet Cong Equipment and Explosive Devices
. The booklet contained diagrams of numerous improvised bombs, including a briefcase-size model of particular interest to Holder. The device’s detonation was controlled by an ordinary wristwatch connected to
an alkaline battery.

Kerkow drove Holder to his parents’ place in her beat-up Volkswagen Beetle—the first time she had ever done so. While he searched for the explosives manual, she introduced herself to his mother and father,
Marie and Seavenes. They were not pleased with their son’s choice of girlfriend: Kerkow’s Coos Bay connection reminded them of a demeaning chapter in their family’s history, one they had spent the past thirteen years
trying to forget.

But Holder was oblivious to his parents’ scorn. Every scrap of his mental energy was dedicated to planning the perfect hijacking. He
knew in his heart that he would be the one to succeed after so many others that year had failed.

“W
HEN
I
GET
up, you have to watch the other one. Otherwise we’re all gonna crash.”

Ida Robinson was puzzled by this cryptic instruction, whispered into her ear by her boyfriend, Allen Sims. The couple’s Pacific Southwest Airlines flight was just minutes away from landing in Los Angeles, and Robinson was focused on her five-month-old son, Atiba, who was asleep in a cradle next to her. She figured that a combination of exhaustion and the engines’ roar had caused her to mishear Sims.

But when Sims reached into Atiba’s cradle, Robinson suddenly understood what was about to happen and what would be expected of her.

Sims whipped out a sawed-off shotgun that he had stashed beneath Atiba’s blankets and jammed it into a passing stewardess’s nose. Robinson then pulled a pistol from the cradle and aimed it at the flight’s other stewardess. She had no clue why her boyfriend had decided to hijack the plane, but the bookish college student trusted him a thousand percent. She was crazy in love with the charismatic Sims, a disciple of the radical Third World Liberation Front, and totally unaware that he had been hospitalized for paranoid delusions just four months earlier.

Sims demanded passage to Africa, though he didn’t specify a country. But even if he had, he would have been out of luck: Pacific Southwest’s operations were confined to California, so the airline didn’t own a single jet capable of traversing the Atlantic Ocean. Sims was enraged to learn of his error and took out his frustrations on a long-haired male youth, whom he clubbed with his shotgun while yelling, “Fuck you, hippie!”

Robinson, meanwhile, started to loosen up and enjoy her dalliance with absolute power. She ordered one stewardess to feed Atiba his formula, and the other to crochet the baby a hat.

With Africa out of the question, the hijackers settled for a trip to Havana, reaching the Cuban capital on the afternoon of January 8, 1972, after a refueling stop in Tampa. It was America’s first hijacking of the year; compared to the multitude that would follow, it was a
relatively mundane affair.
^*

By month’s end, another five planes had been hijacked in American airspace—the most in a single month since January 1969. The boldest caper involved a former Army paratrooper named Richard LaPoint, who commandeered a Hughes Airwest Airlines DC-9 by showing the crew what appeared to be ten sticks of dynamite taped together. (They were actually road flares.) After obtaining $50,000 in ransom and two parachutes at the Reno, Nevada, airport, LaPoint jumped from the plane over northeastern Colorado. Unlike the mysterious D. B. Cooper, he knew a fair bit about skydiving—he requested a crash helmet, for example, as well as a steerable parachute that allowed him to alight in a wheat field. But he made a poor choice of footwear, electing to jump in zip-up cowboy boots that provided little support. As a result, he sprained his left ankle upon landing on the frozen earth. Totally immobilized by his injury, LaPoint was quickly tracked down by the FBI, which had arranged for him to receive parachutes bugged
with radio transmitters.

At his arraignment two days later, the judge informed LaPoint that he was entitled to adequate medical care for his busted ankle. The Vietnam War veteran grumbled a reply that resonated with untold thousands of ex-soldiers struggling to cope with life after combat: “How ’bout some
mental assistance instead?”

Considering what happened to two of his fellow skyjackers that month, LaPoint was lucky to have suffered a mere sprained ankle. A former mental patient named Garrett Brock Trapnell was shot in
the hand and shoulder after a nine-hour standoff at New York’s Kennedy Airport; the shooter was an FBI agent who managed to board the TWA flight by disguising himself
as a relief pilot. Another skyjacker, a forty-five-year-old father of seven named Heinrich von George, was decapitated by an FBI agent’s shotgun blast while trying to flee the Albany, New York, airport with a $200,000 ransom. His family later claimed that von George had hijacked Mohawk Airlines Flight 452 because he needed money to pay for his eldest son’s
open-heart surgery.

In response to this latest rash of hijackings, Lt. Gen. Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., the nation’s skyjacking czar since September 1970, ordered all American airlines to submit reports detailing their security protocols. Davis was stunned to learn that several airlines had stopped using the FAA’s behavioral profile, deeming it too much of a hassle. “You know, we get an awful lot of funny people coming aboard our aircraft every day,” an Eastern Air Lines ticket agent explained to
The Washington Post
. “If I tried to stop everybody who fits the skyjacker syndrome, I don’t think very many planes would
take off from my gate.” Of the nine most recent hijackings, seven had occurred on flights whose passengers hadn’t
been screened at all.

The airlines’ reports to Davis revealed a second major problem with the FAA’s antihijacking system: metal detectors were in short supply, and the airlines refused to purchase more. America’s airports handled roughly 15,000 commercial flights per day, yet they had just 350 functioning
detectors among them. These handheld devices had to be shuffled from gate to gate as planes prepared to board, a virtually impossible task at the busiest airports. Rather than delay a flight’s departure until a detector arrived, ticket agents usually
skipped screening altogether.

Since the security status quo was clearly untenable, the FAA issued an emergency order making its screening system mandatory rather than voluntary, at least for flights longer than a couple hundred miles. That meant airlines could no longer instruct their ticket agents to ditch the behavioral profile for reasons of expediency. But the FAA stopped short of requiring the airlines to search all passengers whom
the profile red-flagged, bowing to the industry’s argument that such an obligation was not feasible due to the dearth of metal detectors. Airlines were instead given the option to decline to search selectees who could present
valid photo identification.

A few weeks after the FAA issued its order, an entirely new threat emerged, one that could not be stopped by screening passengers: extortion by phone.

Shortly before noon on March 8, a man called TWA’s corporate headquarters in Manhattan and said there was a bomb aboard a flight that had just departed New York for Los Angeles. The caller instructed the airline to check a rented locker at its Kennedy Airport terminal. The specified locker contained two empty duffel bags and a note stating that there were bombs stashed aboard four TWA planes. Unless the bags were filled with $2 million and delivered to a location yet to be determined, the bombs would explode at six-hour intervals.

The flight to Los Angeles was rushed back to New York and its forty-five passengers evacuated. An explosives-sniffing German shepherd named Brandy was brought aboard to hunt for the alleged bomb. At 12:48 p.m. she began to paw furiously at a black briefcase in the cockpit. It was the sort of briefcase that pilots used to carry flight plans and technical guides; it was even labeled
CREW
in white block letters. An armored member of the New York City Police Department’s bomb squad carefully opened the briefcase and peered at its contents through the slit in his steel-and-nylon helmet. He saw a five-pound lump of C-4 plastic explosive attached to an alarm clock. The alarm was set to go off in twelve minutes.

The officer dashed off the plane, clutching the briefcase to his flak jacket. He knelt down on a remote section of the tarmac and clipped the wires that connected the C-4 to the detonator. He waved his arms as the signal for “all clear”
at 12:55 p.m.

TWA grounded more than two hundred flights to search for additional bombs, all the while keeping up negotiations with the anonymous caller. The airline dispatched a private jet containing $2 million to Atlanta, where the extortionist said he would arrange a meeting to
obtain the money. But after the jet landed, TWA never heard from the man again.

Around one a.m. that night, a bomb exploded in the cockpit of an empty TWA jet at the Las Vegas airport; the massive blast would have caused the death of everyone aboard had the plane been aloft. The airline’s inspectors had somehow missed the device despite having
searched the plane twice.

Over the next two days, a dozen more bomb threats were phoned into various airlines throughout the United States, with extortion demands ranging from $25,000 to several million. Though no more bombs were discovered, tens of thousands of frightened Americans canceled their air-travel plans. Empty seats suddenly outnumbered passengers on flights that had
routinely been overbooked.

For the second time in eighteen months, President Richard Nixon felt compelled to address the nation about the crisis in aviation security:

The president ordered the airlines to restrict access to their baggage facilities, so that nonpassengers couldn’t sneak luggage onto flights. He also toyed with the idea of forbidding the airlines to pay money to extortionists or skyjackers. But his legal advisers concluded that only Congress could enact such a ban, and even then it would have to include exceptions for extreme circumstances—a private company could not be forced to
let its customers die.

The five largest airlines in the United States, meanwhile, banded together to create a special $250,000 reward fund, hoping to tease out information about
bomb plots and skyjackings. And they gave their
crew members new preflight duties to help ensure that planes were free of explosives before takeoff. TWA, for example, instructed its stewardesses to check all first-aid kits for bombs and to throw any grenades they found into
an unoccupied lavatory.

A
THOUSAND THEORIES
bloomed regarding the skyjackers’ psychological motives. John Dailey, the psychologist who had developed the FAA’s behavioral profile, believed the typical skyjacker was an egomaniac who yearned for instant fame. The only reward that such a man truly cared about was not money or political gain, but press coverage. “He is like the Indian scalp hunter,” Dailey testified before Congress. “If the other Indians didn’t know when he scalped someone,
he wouldn’t do it.”

William Davidson, president of a Beltway think tank called the Institute for Psychiatry and Foreign Affairs, took a more sympathetic view of skyjackers, whom he considered protesters against an increasingly heartless society. “They are the dispossessed,” he wrote of the skyjackers in a
Washington Post
op-ed. “They do not care about their own lives or the lives of others. They feel utterly powerless, and the airplane is an enormous symbol of power and of the technology that overwhelms. So they seize it and make it their own with little or no thought that at some point, inevitably, the adventure will be over.” Davids on argued that the only way to curtail the epidemic was to provide members of the “psychological rock-bottom of society” with meaningful jobs that didn’t involve “tightening screws on a metal plate
480 times a day.”

But in the spring of 1972 the most celebrated commentator on the skyjacker mind-set was a Dallas psychiatrist named David Hubbard, author of the national best seller
The Skyjacker: His Flights of Fantasy
. As a consultant for a federal prison hospital in Missouri, Hubbard had interviewed more than three dozen skyjackers since January 1969. These conversations had convinced him that all these men were shaped by childhood traumas that caused them to fixate on flight.

The American skyjacker, Hubbard concluded, was the offspring of a violent, alcoholic father and a devoutly religious mother. He’d had a difficult time learning to walk and was subsequently bullied at school for his lack of physical coordination. Later in life his relationships with women were all dismal failures due to his feelings of sexual ineptitude. As a result of these ordeals, the skyjacker developed a keen interest in airplanes, which he subconsciously associated with both graceful movement and liberation from past humiliations. To commandeer such an awesome vessel was tantamount to triumphing over gravity, the force that had once vexed the skyjacker as a wobbly toddler.