The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking (33 page)

The embassy officer replied that although he couldn’t arrange for the hospital transfer, he might be able to secure Holder a travel visa and a one-way ticket home. He advised Holder to come visit the embassy as soon as he was released from Pitié-Salpêtrière so they could iron out the details.

Holder showed up at the embassy four days later. He raised the possibility of serving a reduced sentence should he return to the United States voluntarily, but he was told that no such deal was possible—the Justice Department was not predisposed to strike bargains with fugitive skyjackers. Holder said he would need to consult with Jean-Jacques de Felice before moving forward, and he promised to return to the embassy within forty-eight hours to
discuss the matter further.

But Kerkow convinced Holder not to go back. As much as she disliked playing Holder’s nurse, she shuddered at the thought of him being trapped in an American prison. But more important, she worried that his departure might affect her own status in France. Kerkow was having the time of her life hobnobbing with the glitterati; she was living a life that exceeded the wildest fantasies of her Coos Bay adolescence. She didn’t want to give the French government any excuse to bring her happiness to an end.

Right after Holder’s brief flirtation with surrender, Kerkow announced she was moving into her own apartment, paid for by a movie producer paramour. She promised to check on Holder regularly and to never be more than
a phone call away. But after four and a half arduous years, she was finished being Holder’s companion. Kerkow had a future of her own to pursue, and Holder was not part of her ambitious plans.

T
HE
A
SSOCIATED
P
RESS
reporter who interviewed Holder on the night of May 6, 1977, could barely get a word in edgewise. Holder had
given careful thought to the logistics of his return to the United States, though many of his ideas were clearly the products of a manic mind. He stated, for example, that he would like to prove his patriotism by coming home on June 14—Flag Day, as well as his twenty-eighth birthday. Though he acknowledged that he would have to stand trial for air piracy, he proposed pleading guilty to a lesser charge, for which he would serve his sentence not in prison but as a “civilian adviser to the Military Assistance Command Group, dealing primarily with the Third World.” He added that he was granting the interview not only to reach President Jimmy Carter but also to alert his parents and children to his impending return, so that “they could take whatever steps they have to take to shield themselves.”

The reporter finally managed to ask what Kerkow thought of all this, to which Holder gave a surprising answer: he hadn’t seen Cathy for over a month, and he worried that one of his many enemies—the French police, perhaps—had caused her to come to harm. He expressed regrets over putting Kerkow in such a dangerous situation, and he vowed to “make it up” to her
family in Oregon.

In reality, Kerkow was doing quite well for herself in Paris, enjoying her wealthy boyfriends’ attentions and avidly accumulating fine garments. She had failed to check on Holder only because her sisterly sense of obligation to him was growing fainter by the day.

As could be expected, no one from the Carter administration contacted Holder to discuss the deal he proposed to the Associated Press. But one person did take action upon reading the published interview: Eldridge Cleaver.

Despite his comfortable circumstances in France, which included a vacation apartment near Cannes, Cleaver had quickly wearied of life in exile. Suffering from writer’s block, he had switched creative gears and tried to establish himself in the world of fashion, designing a pair of men’s pants that featured an external pouch for the genitalia—a codpiece, more or less. “All these designers are concentrating on the bottom, you know?” Cleaver explained to a group of curious Harvard
students who came to visit him in Paris in 1975. “They’re all accentuating your ‘boo-boo,’ you know? They’re not concentrating on those areas that really differentiate a man and a woman. This is what I’m
trying to get away from.”

When Cleaver failed to move his pants past the prototype stage, he sank into a deep depression. He was disturbed by his children’s growing preference for speaking French instead of English, and by how his son, Maceo, loved soccer but didn’t know the first thing about American football. Many of Cleaver’s activist friends were gaining real power back in the United States, becoming mayors, state legislators, even congressmen. “So I contacted these old friends and said, ‘Hey, remember me? How about helping me get back home?’ ” Cleaver would later recall. “Surely, if the astronauts can come back from the moon, I could stroll through California again.”

But no one could make Cleaver’s attempted murder charge disappear. His friends advised him to “settle down and become a black Frenchman and enjoy all those French pastries.” Despondent over the prospect of living the rest of his life in France, Cleaver retreated to his Cannes apartment and contemplated suicide.

Then, one night in the summer of 1975, as he looked out at the Mediterranean Sea from his balcony, Cleaver saw an image of himself cast across the luminous moon. As he stared at this image, it slowly morphed into a parade of the revolutionary heroes he had rejected: Fidel Castro, Mao Zedong, Karl Marx. Then, once the last Communist icon vanished, the lunar image turned into a figure whom Cleaver hadn’t thought of in years: Jesus Christ.

Cleaver burst into tears, rushed inside the apartment, and opened his neglected Bible to the 23rd Psalm. In that moment, the man who had once yearned to burn down the White House became
a born-again Christian.

That November, confident that God would solve his legal problems, Cleaver flew back to New York, where he was arrested by the FBI. He was eventually bailed out not by his former Black Panther
allies, who had denounced him as a traitor, but by an evangelical insurance tycoon. As he awaited trial, Cleaver made numerous appearances at revival meetings to testify that he and his wife, Kathleen, were now full-fledged “
companions to the Lord.”
^*

When he read Holder’s interview, Cleaver decided to do the Christian thing and help a man in need—even though that man had long despised him as a revolutionary poseur. With the help of his new evangelical friends, Cleaver reached out to Representative John Buchanan of Alabama, who had been a Baptist minister before entering politics. He hoped the congressman could secure a passport for Holder, then convince the Justice Department to offer a plea agreement that would take into account Holder’s combat-related trauma. But Buchanan discovered that the French government, which was still planning to try Holder for hijacking, was afraid to cooperate; even if Holder left on his own accord, the administration of President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing worried that French voters would accuse it of engaging in “disguised extradition.”

Still, Cleaver refused to give up. In October 1977 he flew to Paris and escorted Holder to the American embassy, to appeal for assistance in dealing with the reluctant French. Cleaver asked a consular officer to supply him with a letter “stating [that] Holder, if released from French judicial control, [would] be provided with travel documents for return to [the] U.S. to face charges there and to take care of personal and legal affairs.” Cleaver thought that if he presented this letter to the French magistrate who was preparing the hijacking case, Holder would be permitted to leave.

But the embassy rejected Cleaver’s idea, concluding that “it would be untimely to inject embassy into French judicial process, even indirectly.” The consular officer suggested that Holder go to the magistrate himself and explain his desire to go home. Perhaps the magistrate could be swayed by the emotional heft of a personal request.

Holder promised to give the officer’s proposal careful thought. But he
never followed through.

S
NOW WAS COMMON
all over Paris in February 1978, with three successive blizzards bringing the city to a frigid standstill. Unable to wander the streets without getting chilled to the bone, Holder camped out in his new apartment on the Rue Vaneau; the place was owned by Count Denis de Kergorlay, a generous young aristocrat who helped fund the humanitarian group
Doctors Without Borders. Though he was surrounded by his beloved models of aircraft and trains, Holder was feeling every bit as miserable as the weather outside: all his efforts to return home had failed, and he was dreading the French hijacking trial that seemed inevitable.

When the buzzer rang, he had no clue who the caller might be. But he was too lonely to turn down company; he hurried downstairs to greet his visitor.

Holder could barely recognize Cathy Kerkow, whom he hadn’t seen in months. Her dress was more elegant than ever, her neck and wrists draped with jewelry that must have cost a small fortune. She exuded the confidence of a woman accustomed to being treated with great deference. The naïve teenager who had come to San Diego in a beat-up Volkswagen was now just a ghost.

Holder and Kerkow made small talk for a while, discussing film director Roman Polanski’s arrival in Paris a few weeks earlier; Polanski was also a fugitive from American justice, having come to Paris to avoid a prison term for sexual assault. They joked about the advice they should offer Polanski on coping with the threat of extradition.

Then Kerkow cut to the chase: “I can’t be in this situation we’re in anymore.”

Holder asked what she meant.

“Being here, waiting for this trial,” she replied. “I have to go and find a way to take care of all of this. I have to go.”

Holder couldn’t understand what she was trying to say. Kerkow had previously made it clear that she would never return to the United States. But what else could she have in mind? They were, after all, forbidden to leave Paris, much less France. What was her plan for wriggling free of their limbo?

Kerkow could tell that Holder was unsettled by her words, which she had purposefully left vague; since he had blurted out his true identity to the Paris police three years earlier, she knew better than to trust Holder with secrets. She tried a more soothing approach.

“Listen, I’m going to go away for a few days, to Geneva with friends. We can talk more about this when I get back, all right?”

Does she want me to beg her to stay?
Holder thought as Kerkow fished around in her purse for something.
Does she expect me to get down on my knees?

She handed him a small box; it contained an expensive Omega watch. Holder was nearly moved to tears by the gift. “I’m sorry I haven’t been able to do anything to help you,” he said as he draped the watch over his wrist. “But, look, I never treated you bad, right? Never called you a bitch.”

Kerkow just smiled and asked Holder if she could use his phone to call a taxi. She had to run and meet someone else.

They waited inside the building’s front door until the cab arrived. They chastely embraced, and Kerkow again assured Holder that she would contact him after her return from Switzerland. They would
discuss the future then.

And with that Kerkow ventured out into the icy February night, knowing full well that she intended to break her promise.

T
HOMAS
C
RAWFORD WAS
still bleary-eyed from a good night’s sleep when William Newell rang. Newell was one of Western Airlines’ top executives now, having been promoted to vice president of flight operations just a few months earlier, at the start of 1980. Crawford couldn’t imagine why such a big shot would be calling a lowly pilot like himself at seven-thirty in the morning.

“I just wanted to make sure you were all set to go to Paris,” said Newell.

Crawford, who was scheduled to fly from Los Angeles to Washington later that day, was confused: “Captain, as of ten seconds ago I had no idea I was going to Paris.”

“Awwww, jeez. Really? No one informed you?”

“No, no. No one.”

“Hrrrmmm. Okay, look, you have a passport, yeah?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“All right, good. Then listen, Tom, I’m going to need you to pack a bag and come out here to the airport right away. What we’ll do is we’ll buy you a full-fare ticket to Orly on TWA. We need you in Paris no later than tomorrow morning. The trial’s supposed to start on Thursday.”

The reason for the hurried trip now dawned on Crawford. Five years earlier he had heard that the two hijackers of Flight 701—one of
whom he had tricked into giving up his demand for Angela Davis—had been apprehended in Paris. The time had evidently come for the couple to stand trial, albeit in France rather than the United States.

The French magistrate handling the case had asked Western to supply two witnesses from the first plane, the Boeing 727 that Roger Holder had seized on approach to Seattle. Jerome Juergens, the flight’s captain, had committed suicide in 1978, so Crawford had been picked to represent the cockpit crew. Gina Cutcher, the stewardess who had spilled bourbon on Holder’s Army dress uniform, had also been called to testify.

At the Los Angeles airport, a Western official handed Crawford a thousand dollars in traveler’s checks and a first-class TWA ticket to Paris. When Crawford arrived in the French capital on June 11, 1980, a car from the American embassy whisked him to a hotel, where
Cutcher was also staying. The two witnesses were instructed not to venture outside, for they might be targeted by rabble-rousers seeking to disrupt the trial. An armed guard was posted outside their adjacent doors as
they slept that night.

The next morning Crawford and Cutcher were taken to the embassy, where a legal attaché briefed them on what to expect. She apologetically explained that the court was unlikely to mete out harsh punishment, since the French were so sympathetic to Americans who had opposed the Vietnam War.