The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking (34 page)

The legal attaché also informed Crawford and Cutcher that there would only be
one defendant on trial.

A
S A CONDITION
of her bail, Cathy Kerkow had been required to check in with a French magistrate on the first and third Monday of every month. When she missed her appointment on February 20, 1978, the magistrate was not overly concerned—he chalked up the absence to inclement weather. Nor did he see fit to panic when Kerkow failed to appear on March 6, March 20, April 3,
or April 17. It was not
until Kerkow’s sixth consecutive no-show on May 8 that the magistrate decided to alert the French National Police.

When informed that Kerkow had vanished, the American embassy in Paris launched an inquiry into her whereabouts. The investigation yielded a confidential tip that she had gone to Switzerland—not to hide, but rather to
obtain a new passport.

Getting into Switzerland would have been easy enough for Kerkow, despite her lack of identity documents. The underpaid and overworked guards at the Geneva border crossings were lax about checking papers. A well-dressed young woman like Kerkow, presumably traveling as a passenger in a car with French license plates, would arouse no suspicion.

The embassy feared that Kerkow had then traveled on to Zurich or Bern, the two cities where American citizens could apply for passports. Though the State Department warned traveling Americans that it was difficult to obtain replacements for lost or stolen passports, the reality was quite different—especially in tranquil countries like Switzerland. Consuls often failed to scrutinize the sob stories told by stranded Americans. They would only check the applicant’s name and description against a master list of “lookout cards,” which identified fugitives and personae non gratae. But bizarrely, Kerkow was not part of that list: her lookout card had expired in November 1977, and the State Department had mistakenly
neglected to renew it.

Kerkow would probably be asked to furnish some proof of American citizenship—a copy of a driver’s license or birth certificate, for example. But the embassy in Paris knew that such documents could be easily obtained by a woman with Kerkow’s connections; all it would take was the complicity of another American woman in her mid to late twenties, or the assistance of a modestly skilled forger. As long as Kerkow could convincingly field basic questions about her borrowed background, a consul in Bern or Zurich would be unlikely to give her a hard time. And Kerkow was adept at using her words and smile to deceive.

Embassy officials in Paris alerted their colleagues in Switzerland to keep an eye peeled for any women
fitting Kerkow’s description. Yet they knew this was probably a futile request: Kerkow had been gone for at least three months, and replacement passports valid for five years were often issued
within forty-eight hours. With the financial backing of her wealthy film industry friends, she could have fled almost anywhere in the world—even the United States.

T
HERE WAS NO
shortage of drama in Holder’s life after Kerkow disappeared. His actress girlfriend Danielle, the one with the David Bowie haircut, gave birth to a son who she claimed was Holder’s; she committed suicide shortly thereafter, and her grieving family
absorbed the child. Holder, meanwhile, decided to check into a psychiatric clinic in the Parisian suburb of Rambouillet, to receive fresh treatment for his worsening anxiety and paranoia. He failed to inform his supervising magistrate about his hospitalization, however, and the French National Police declared him a fugitive, resulting in the indefinite delay of
his hijacking trial.

When Holder returned to Paris in May 1979, he moved back into the Rue Vaneau apartment owned by Count Denis de Kergorlay, one of his most
prominent French supporters. Holder relied on his friends’ largesse to survive, though he also found sporadic work. He briefly manned the door at a transvestite bar in
the Marais district; he later swept floors at a university, in the vain hope that the job might lead to admission to the school’s aeronautical
engineering program. He also cycled through several brief affairs with women who were initially charmed by his intelligence and charisma but quickly wearied of nursing him through his
psychological crises.

Through it all, Holder couldn’t shake his longing to see his twin daughters, Teresa and Torrita. Like so many once-reckless men who start to glimpse middle age, Holder had come to regret his youthful selfishness. He had once planned to donate his hijacking ransom to the Vietcong, in order to assuage his guilt over his role in the war;
now he felt a commensurate amount of guilt over how the hijacking had turned him into a derelict father. And so throughout late 1979 and early 1980, Holder visited the American embassy every few weeks to beg for a passport and a plane ticket home. But his pleas were always greeted with the same response: the French were now dead set on prosecuting him for the hijacking, and they wouldn’t let him leave the country before his
trial had taken place.

On the eve of that long-awaited trial in June 1980, Jean-Jacques de Felice assured Holder that he had nothing to fear. He was certain because of his previous success in defending
the Hijacking Family, Holder’s fellow travelers from Algiers.

In May 1976 four of that group’s members—Melvin and Jean McNair, Joyce Tillerson, and George Brown—had been arrested in Paris, where they had been secretly living for three years. Still livid over France’s refusal to extradite Holder and Kerkow the year before, the American government pressured the country’s Ministry of Justice for a more agreeable result this time: the State Department threatened to ignore future French extradition requests should the hijackers not be returned to the United States.

The Ministry of Justice received the message loud and clear. At the October 1976 extradition hearing, the French government was represented by the same
avocat general
who had recommended that Holder and Kerkow be allowed to stay in France. This time, however, he took the exact opposite position, arguing that the Hijacking Family had never made any political statements while flying to Algiers. Holder, by contrast, had been a “wounded, decorated veteran suffering ill health as [a] consequence,” whose stated desire to reach Hanoi had been tantamount to an antiwar protest.

But the
avocat general
was no match for the spirited de Felice, who portrayed his clients as “symbols of repression” who had exercised their “sacred right” to struggle against institutional racism. He vividly described the daily hardships of life in America’s ghettoes, as well as the contempt that most Americans felt for France. The court was duly moved and declined to extradite the Hijacking Family.

Two years later, at the hijackers’ trial in Paris, de Felice called a parade of witnesses who detailed the horrors of American bigotry. The defense experts spoke of police brutality, the failure of desegregation, and the prevalence of malnutrition among black children. De Felice himself characterized the proceedings as “a trial on American history” and asked the court to find his clients innocent. He did not get his wish, at least not exactly: the McNairs, Tillerson, and Brown were convicted on all charges. But citing “extenuating circumstances,” the court sentenced the hijackers to just five years each, with credit for time served. Within six months of the verdict, all of the Hijacking Family’s members had been released from prison and granted permission to
settle in France.

De Felice expected a similarly favorable outcome in Holder’s case, though not the same level of media attention. The Hijacking Family’s trial had been a spectacle, attended by movie stars who had read the hijackers’ popular memoir,
Nous, Noirs Américains Évadés du Ghetto
. Holder’s celebrity, by contrast, had largely evaporated by 1980. His cause was no longer touted by the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Yves Montand but rather by a handful of activists from the fringes of French politics—aging veterans of the 1960s protest movement who were beginning to seem like relics, much like skyjacking itself.

B
Y THE TIME
Gina Cutcher and Thomas Crawford arrived at the Palais de Justice on the afternoon of June 12, 1980, a dozen protesters had gathered on the boulevard opposite the building’s main entrance. Two of them held a crude banner urging the court to honor the French tradition of
Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité
by
exonerating Holder.

Inside the courtroom, another twenty or so of Holder’s supporters sat in the public gallery; their scruffy manner of dress irked Crawford as he walked to the witness stand.
Typical non-tax-paying, worthless pieces of crap
, Crawford thought as he began to answer the judge’s
straightforward questions about the hijacking. He was struck by how quickly the judge excused him from the stand and brought on Cutcher; it seemed as if the court were just going
through the motions.

After Cutcher testified about the hijacking’s initial moments, Holder took the stand. The judge asked him to explain his motives, to which Holder responded with a rambling monologue that cited his resentment toward the Army, his spiritual impetus to help Angela Davis escape to North Vietnam, and even the dissolution of his marriage to the unfaithful Betty Bullock. The judge then asked Holder whether he would like to apologize for having terrorized so many innocents. But Holder refused to play along, instead continuing to riff about his ill-fated military career.

The judge grew exasperated, burying his head in his hands as Holder went on and on about his last days in Vietnam and his ensuing desertion. “What I am looking for is some remorse,” the judge finally interjected. “If you could do it all over again, what would you do differently?”

Holder, who had been resting his elbows on his knees as he spoke, sat up straight once the judge’s words had been translated into English. Yes, of course he had regrets—much deeper regrets than he could express in any two-sentence apology. But with the gallery packed with the last of his admirers, Holder could not let the court diminish his life’s most memorable achievement.

“My only regret,” he said, “is that I did not smash that plane into the ground.”

Holder’s supporters roared their approval, until the judge had to order them to pipe down. Holder did not bat
an eye at the cheers.

The court reconvened the next day for the verdict. Holder was found guilty of hijacking and kidnapping, but with extenuating circumstances. He was given a five-year suspended sentence, which meant that he wouldn’t spend a single day in prison. But the sentence came with one onerous condition: Holder could not leave France until his term was up. His exile would have to continue until
at least 1985.

And so the day before his thirty-first birthday, Holder walked out of the Palais de Justice a free man, though one confined to France. He did not feel the slightest
tinge of joy.

H
OLDER DID NOT
stay long in Paris after the trial. His friend and benefactor, Count Denis de Kergorlay, had recently inherited an eleventh-century château in the Norman village of Canisy. He invited Holder to move into one of the castle’s
many splendid rooms.

Life at the château was merry and freewheeling, with a steady stream of intriguing characters stopping by for weeks or months at a time. The folksinger Joan Baez was one of the count’s most frequent guests: at communal meals lubricated by fine wines, she would listen intently to Holder’s graphic tales from the Vietnam War, a conflict she had prominently opposed. Holder was also fond of telling Baez that he had once hated her guts, back in the late 1960s when she was urging young men to
resist the draft.

By day, Holder would typically stroll the château’s forested grounds for hours, then hole up in his room to
work on his memoirs. When he did venture off the estate, he often went to a nearby oyster farm, where he
performed odd jobs. He also befriended a local physician who restored vintage airplanes, a skill that Holder was
eager to learn.

Everyone in Canisy thought of Holder as delightful company, even though he barely spoke a word of French. They loved his hearty American laugh and his enthusiasm both for lewd jokes and for
James Baldwin novels. But Holder’s outward bonhomie masked his true feelings of near-suicidal depression. There were only two things he desired at that point: to see his twin daughters again, and to cleanse his mind of Vietnam. The artists and the idle rich who passed through the château could not help him
reach either goal.

In October 1981 Holder burned his unfinished memoirs in the fireplace of his room—dozens of handwritten pages went up in smoke. Shortly thereafter he left the château without saying goodbye and checked himself back into the psychiatric clinic in Rambouillet. The
count, who had treated Holder like a member of his own family, never
heard from him again.

Holder spent over a year at the Rambouillet clinic, where his therapy focused on helping him deal with his
memories of combat. He was discharged in early 1983 and returned to Paris, where he begged old friends for money. One of those friends invited him to a dinner party, where Holder met a sharp-tongued journalist named Violetta Velkova, a six-time divorcée a dozen years his senior. The leftist Velkova, who was paralyzed on one side of her body due to a stroke, instantly fell for Holder, whom she adored for having embarrassed the United States in such dramatic fashion. The two instantly became lovers as well as colleagues; Holder took charge of lugging his new girlfriend’s photography equipment and typewriter from one
assignment to the next.

In 1984 Velkova took Holder to the southeastern town of Apt to meet her father, Janika, who had been a Partisan resistance fighter in Yugoslavia during World War II. Janika coaxed Holder into proposing marriage to his daughter by buying him a brand-new Citroën. The betrothed couple then settled in the city of Aix-en-Provence, north of Marseilles, where Holder got a job stocking shelves at a
hardware store.

But the relationship between Holder and Velkova had more downs than ups. They fought bitterly at times, and their disputes often ended with Holder living in
his car for days. Still plagued by debilitating anxiety attacks, he drifted in and out of hospitals and jails: he was arrested at least twice in Aix-en-Provence, once for his involvement in a brawl, the other time for
possession of hashish.