The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking (2 page)

Yet what seems most archaic about that bygone age is not the pampering that passengers received while aloft, but how easily they moved while on the ground. It was once possible to pass through an entire airport, from curbside to gate, without encountering a single inconvenience—no X-ray machines, no metal detectors, no uniformed security personnel with grabby hands and bitter dispositions. Anyone could stroll onto a tarmac and queue for boarding without holding a
ticket or presenting identification. Some flights even permitted passengers to pay their fares after takeoff, as if jets were merely commuter trains with wings.

A generation of skyjackers exploited this naïveté. Between 1961, when the first plane was seized in American airspace, and 1972, the year Flight 701 was waylaid en route to Seattle, 159 commercial flights were
hijacked in the United States. All but a fraction of those hijackings took place during the last five years of that frenetic era, often at a clip of one or more per week. There were, in fact, many days when two planes were hijacked simultaneously,
strictly by coincidence.
^*
Few other crime waves in American history have stoked such widespread paranoia: every time a plane’s public address system crackled to life, passengers could not help but think that a stranger’s voice was about to intone, “Ladies and gentlemen, I am now in charge …”

In struggling to make sense of this madness, pundits and politicians often invoked the term
epidemic
to describe the skyjacking crisis. They spoke more truly than they knew, for one of the best ways to understand the Golden Age of Hijacking is through the lens of public health. The phenomenon spread in strict accordance with the laws of epidemiology: skyjackings always occurred in clusters that traced back to a single incident that had turned contagious. These outbreaks grew more and more devastating over time, as the impulse to hijack jumped from host to host like
any organic pathogen. This “virus” traveled via mass media, especially television newscasts; the networks’ stately anchormen were forever narrating clips of hijacked planes and the tearful families of hostages. Rather than empathize with the victims, some viewers were titillated by the skyjackers’ ability to create spectacles that held the whole country in thrall.

Those viewers were susceptible to the skyjacking virus because they had lost all faith in America’s promise. It is no accident that the
epidemic began to crest as the last vestiges of 1960s idealism were being extinguished. Large segments of the population were aggrieved that words and placards had failed to end the war in Vietnam, or cement the gains of a civil rights movement that was decimated by assassinations. That disappointment quickly mutated into a more pervasive sense of hopelessness, a feeling that no amount of civic engagement could ever salvage a system that had been rigged to serve a selfish elite. Some of the frustrated drifted into hedonism, papering over their disillusionment with sexual excess or cheap brown heroin. But others sought increasingly radical ways in which to articulate their vague yet all-consuming rage.

Airplanes were ideal targets for these troubled souls. On a practical level, skyjackers could use planes to flee to distant lands, where they presumed they would be celebrated for their audacity. But there was also a strong psychological component to skyjacking’s allure, one that stemmed from America’s love affair with flight. Even as commercial air travel became accessible to the masses during the 1960s, it retained an aura of wonder and privilege—pilots were debonair heroes, the planes themselves marvels of technological might. By seizing a jet as it hurtled across the nation’s most exotic frontier, a lone skyjacker could instantly command an audience of millions. There was no more spectacular way for the marginalized to feel the rush of power.

Though all skyjackers shared a common hunger for respect, their individual narratives were bewilderingly varied. When I first became fascinated by the Golden Age of Hijacking, after reading about a Puerto Rican nationalist who spent forty-one years in exile after diverting a Boeing 707 to Cuba,
^†
I was awed by the sheer range of characters who had
commandeered the era’s planes. Their ranks included frazzled veterans, chronic fabulists, compulsive gamblers, bankrupt businessmen, thwarted academics, career felons, and even lovesick
teens. Each had an intensely personal, if sadly deluded, rationale for believing they could skyjack their way to better lives.

The more I immersed myself in the annals of American skyjacking, the more I fixated on the epidemic’s final, most frenzied phase: the great outbreak of 1972. The skyjackers that year were bold and foolish beyond measure, prone to taking risks that smacked of lunacy. Middle-aged men parachuted from jets while clutching six-figure ransoms to their chests; manic extremists demanded passage to war zones a hemisphere away; young mothers brandished pistols while feeding formula to their infants. The FBI’s burgeoning zeal for violent intervention did little to dissuade these adventurers, who were far beyond caring whether they died in pursuit of their grandiose goals. By the end of 1972, the skyjackers had become so reckless, so dismissive of human life, that the airlines and the federal government had no choice but to turn every airport into a miniature police state.

There is an absorbing tale to tell about each of the forty American skyjackers who made 1972 such a perilous year to fly. But none is as captivating as that of Willie Roger Holder and Catherine Marie Kerkow, the young couple who took control of Western Airlines Flight 701 as it soared past Mount Rainier.

Holder and Kerkow were ordinary skyjackers in many ways. He was a traumatized ex-soldier motivated by a hazy mix of outrage and despair; she was a mischievous party girl who longed for a more meaningful future. Neither was a master criminal, as evidenced by the utter zaniness of their hijacking plan.

Yet through a combination of savvy and dumb luck, Holder and Kerkow pulled off the longest-distance skyjacking
in American history, a feat that made them notorious around the globe. Their success set them apart from their peers: by the end of 1972, virtually all of the year’s other skyjackers were either dead or in jail. In its annual “The Year in Pictures” issue that December,
Life
ran a rogues’ gallery of a dozen skyjackers who had already been convicted of air piracy, along with captions detailing their stiff sentences: twenty years, thirty years,
forty years, forty-five years,
life without parole. Holder and Kerkow were notably absent from that catalog of failures.

But Holder and Kerkow’s story was far from over once they managed their escape. In the months and years that followed, they would take up with revolutionaries, melt into an international underground, and mingle with aristocrats and movie stars who lauded them as icons. But when their fame inevitably began to fade and their love dissolved, Holder and Kerkow were forced to learn that reinventing oneself, that most American of aspirations, is never without its sorrows.

T
HE KNOCK ON
the door came at an inopportune moment for Cathy Kerkow, right as she was working a gob of shampoo through her long brown hair. Though she wasn’t expecting any visitors that January afternoon in 1972, she was far too genial a soul to ignore the caller. She wrapped a kimono-style bathrobe around her slender body and hurried from the shower, leaving a trail of soapy
water in her wake.

Kerkow opened the door to discover an exceptionally tall, rail-thin black man with close-cropped hair and manicured sideburns. A pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses shielded his sleepy eyes from San Diego’s midday glare. He grinned at the lovely sight before him, a scantily clad twenty-year-old girl with rivulets of water sluicing down her cleavage. Kerkow flashed back a coy smile, pleased to know that her abundant charms were working
their standard magic.

The man asked if he had the right apartment for an acquaintance of his, a young lady by the name of Beth Newhouse. Kerkow replied that Beth was her roommate, and that he could probably find her shopping at the local drugstore. The man promptly left without saying goodbye; Kerkow stood in the doorway and watched him speed off in a yellow Pontiac Firebird. As the car vanished around the Murray Street bend, she thought,
I
know him from somewhere
.

Twenty minutes later the man and Newhouse returned to the
apartment together. Apologizing for his prior rudeness, the man now introduced himself to Kerkow as Roger Holder. He explained that he had once been Newhouse’s downstairs neighbor, back when she lived near Ocean Beach. They had recently bumped into each other on Broadway near 4th Avenue, down among the saloons of San Diego’s red-light district, and Newhouse had passed along her current address in suburban El Cajon. With time to kill that afternoon, Holder had decided to pop by for a visit.

Newhouse was less than thrilled to see Holder again. She had always considered him something of a creep—not least of all because he had used a different name, Linton Charles White, when they had first met the year before. She had given him her address only after much cajoling, and now she was eager to get rid of her unwelcome guest without causing a scene. So Newhouse remarked that her boyfriend would be arriving soon, and that he was the insanely jealous type; if Holder didn’t split,
there could be trouble.

But Kerkow didn’t want Holder to leave just yet—not while she was still trying to piece together why he looked so darn familiar. To delay his departure, she suggested they all share a quick joint; the girls were small-time marijuana dealers who never lacked for pungent grass. Holder readily accepted the offer.

As the joint circulated around the trio, Kerkow and Holder kept making eyes at each other, lobbing signals back and forth. They both pined to take a roll on Kerkow’s queen-size waterbed—the only piece of furniture she owned—but the circumstances weren’t right. Before he left, though, Holder asked the two women if he could repay their kindness by treating them to breakfast that coming Saturday. Newhouse declined, but Kerkow said yes to the morning date.

Two days later Holder picked her up in his Firebird and took her to a diner on University Avenue. As they spooned sugar into their coffees, Holder made a confession: he had been driving himself crazy trying to figure out where he and Kerkow had met before. He had the strangest sense this wasn’t the first time their paths had crossed. But try as he might, the memory of their previous encounter was eluding him.

Kerkow admitted that she, too, had felt a powerful twinge of recognition upon seeing Holder at her apartment door. But how could that be? She had been in San Diego for only five months, scarcely enough time to forget such a memorable face. Prior to that she had spent virtually her whole life in Coos Bay, a logging town on Oregon’s southern coast. Surely there was no way Holder had ever passed through such an isolated place.

Holder set down his coffee and leaned back in the booth. He rubbed his chin and mouth in thought, then filled his lungs with soothing Pall Mall smoke.

Coos Bay. Yes, he said, he knew Coos Bay. He
knew it very well.

W
HEN
C
ATHERINE
M
ARIE
Kerkow was born in October 1951, Coos Bay was in the midst of a splendid postwar boom. Located on a thickly forested peninsula dotted with scenic lakes, the town was blessed with a harbor deep enough to accommodate the world’s largest timber ships, which hauled off Oregon’s precious firs and cedars by the millions. A never-ending stream of logging trucks jammed the coastal roads, rumbling past the enormous waterfront sawmill that draped the town in the scent of fresh-cut wood.

The timber trade produced vast fortunes for Coos Bay’s leading families, who resided in chandeliered homes overlooking the harbor and the verdant hills beyond. Yet the town’s middle class thrived, too, as the logging money trickled down to saw operators, shopkeepers, and civil servants. Families grateful for their prosperity packed the church pews every Sunday to hear sermons about the virtues of hard work and the perils of sin. Their children were Boy Scouts and Campfire Girls who spent their allowances on double features at the Egyptian Theater, the town’s
Art Deco centerpiece.

Newlyweds Bruce and Patricia Kerkow seemed to be on track for just such a pleasant future when Cathy became their firstborn child. The couple wasted little time rounding out their family: by the time she was six, Cathy had been joined by three younger brothers. Though
he loved his children dearly, Bruce was also frustrated by fatherhood’s demands. A driver for a
dredging company by trade, he yearned to make his living as a
jazz organist instead. But there was no way to carve out such an offbeat career while stuck in Coos Bay with a sizable family. As Bruce’s dream became more remote with the birth of each child, he turned morose: at the Kiwanis Club meetings and church potlucks that were the linchpins of Coos Bay’s social life, rumors swirled that the Kerkows’ marriage might be
on the rocks.

In the summer of 1959, however, the town’s gossipmongers began to chatter about news far more salacious than the Kerkows’ marital woes. A year earlier the Navy had opened a sonar station on Coos Head, a bluff overlooking the bay, in order to track Soviet submarine activity in the Pacific Ocean. Now the installation had taken on a new chief cook, a fifteen-year Navy veteran who had recently returned from duty in the Taiwan Strait. To the horror of Coos Bay’s more provincial inhabitants, this cook was also black. His name was
Seavenes Holder.