The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking (37 page)

While explaining his opaque motives for the hijacking, Holder expressed deep resentment toward Angela Davis. In a May 1996 interview with
Essence
magazine, Davis had discussed his attempt to free her: “During my trial, someone hijacked a plane, demanded to be flown to Algeria and demanded that I be released and brought to the airport, wearing a white dress and carrying ten parachutes or something like that. The judge put us all under house arrest inside the courthouse. They thought that this was my way of escaping before the verdict came down.”

Holder had interpreted Davis’s recollection as a slight. She seemed to think he was a fool, unworthy of having his name enshrined in her memory. Where was her appreciation for all he had sacrificed?

I asked, of course, a good deal about Cathy Kerkow. The first time I mentioned her name, Holder smiled crookedly as he swore that he wasn’t responsible for her disappearance—“I didn’t leave her in some closet in France, I can tell you that much.” Holder was obviously accustomed to being accused of having murdered Kerkow, something that upset him greatly given his lingering feelings for his Operation Sisyphus accomplice.

“Cathy, she was definitely on the ball,” he said. “She was
beautiful—too beautiful, too beautiful. About the hottest piece of ass you’ve ever seen! And this chick, she had a brain on her, and she knew how to use it. She even did all her own sewing. She was the kind of woman a man wouldn’t mind working seven days a week for.… I wish she was available so I could spend the rest of my life taking care of her.”

When I returned the next morning to continue the conversation, I arrived in Holder’s neighborhood a few minutes earlier than planned. As I pulled off the freeway onto North Park Way, I was surprised to see Holder sitting beneath an ash tree in an empty drugstore parking lot, savoring a Pall Mall and staring off into space. This was, I would learn, one of his favorite pastimes, a crude form of meditation during which he revisited more glamorous days. No one who passed Holder’s humble curbside perch would ever guess that this reedy, pensive man had once hijacked a plane to Algiers.

Later that day Holder shared some pages from his fragmentary memoir, now titled
Eli and the 13th Confession
. (He improbably claimed not to know that this was also the title of a famous Laura Nyro album.) He hadn’t managed to write many chapters that lasted more than a few paragraphs—concentration was not his strong suit. He had, however, completed a prospective table of contents. The chapter about his relationship with Kerkow was to be called “Season of the Witch,” a title that seemed at odds with the loving sentiments he had expressed the day before.

I asked Holder whether this meant that Kerkow had been a malevolent force in his life. He had once viewed their Coos Bay connection as a sacred sign that they were meant to do something spectacular together; did he now consider it an omen that he should have steered clear?

As was his custom when confronted with a difficult question, Holder removed his eyeglasses and rubbed his face. Then he walked to the living room window and peered outside cautiously; he seemed to be concerned that an eavesdropper might be crouching on the
building’s shabby lawn. As he scanned the grass below, I noticed that the tag on his Levi’s listed a slender waist size of 30, yet the jeans were still slipping down his withered frame.

“You know, I still haven’t gotten over all this,” he muttered as he returned to his seat and tried to light a stubbed-out Pall Mall. His hands were shaking, and he had trouble with the lighter’s flint wheel. He appeared to be fighting back tears.

I decided to take a more direct approach: “If you could go back and make the choice again, do you think you would still go through with the hijacking?”

For the first time since we had met, Holder turned visibly angry. “There’s no way to determine that, sir!” he barked as he jammed his unlit cigarette back into the ashtray. He had refused to let either a French judge or American prosecutors strip him of his personal mythology; there was no way he was going to express contrition to the likes of me.

After his dark mood passed, though, Holder sounded a slightly more confident note about the hijacking’s righteousness: “I just did something everybody else was too scared to do.”

At the end of my week in San Diego, as JetBlue’s check-in kiosk was printing out the boarding pass for my flight home, I received a call from Joy Holder. “I know Roger didn’t say anything about this,” she said, “but I thought you should know this, that you should understand—I don’t know how much longer Roger has.”

She explained that Roger had undergone triple bypass surgery in 2009, and that the procedure had almost killed him. He had subsequently been diagnosed with two inoperable brain aneurysms. His doctors had told Joy that Roger would be lucky to last a year.

So that’s why he had started smoking those Pall Malls again. There was no reason not to.

Over the next few months Holder and I talked regularly. He was floored when I told him about the September 2011 arrest of George Wright, the fifth member of the Hijacking Family, who had been living in Portugal under the pseudonym Jose Luis Jorge dos Santos;
Holder asked me to keep him apprised of developments in Wright’s fight against extradition.
^†
He also wanted me to put him in touch with two other members of the Hijacking Family, Melvin and Jean McNair, who now operate an orphanage in Caen, France. He hadn’t spoken to them in over thirty years.

But a rekindled friendship with the McNairs was not to be. Just before Christmas in 2011, Holder was hospitalized in poor health. On February 6, less than two weeks after his release from the hospital, Joy came home from work one evening to find him sitting in their living room, holding a butcher’s knife. “I don’t want to live anymore,” he said.

Joy took away the knife and told Roger to get some rest in the adjoining bedroom—they would make a psychiatric appointment in the morning.

A few hours later Joy heard a loud thud. She rushed into the bedroom to discover Roger lying facedown on the carpet, the apparent victim of a burst aneurysm. He was sixty-two years old.

Holder’s obituary in
The San Diego Union-Tribune
was literally just a single line, noting only the dates of his birth and death and the funeral home responsible for his body. Joy honored Roger’s last request by having him buried
in a military cemetery.

S
EVERAL YEARS AGO
the Coos County Historical Society decided to honor Patricia Kerkow as one of the town’s pioneering women. She certainly deserved the award after so many decades of distinguished service to the community. She had raised four children by herself while working at such important local institutions as Southwestern
Oregon Community College, the Weyerhaeuser pulp and paper company, and the Coos Bay Police Department. Kerkow also organized trips for ElderWise, served on the board of the First Community Credit Union, and managed the office of a Methodist church. The whole town regarded her with the utmost respect.

Kerkow was grateful for the historical society’s recognition, but she made a request before agreeing to take part in the celebration: she asked that no mention be made of her fugitive daughter, and that any materials related to the hijacking of
Western Airlines Flight 701 be removed from the society’s archives.

Coos Bay has heeded Patricia Kerkow’s evident wish to induce collective amnesia about Cathy. The town reveres another figure from the Marshfield High School Class of 1969, runner Steve Prefontaine, who perished in an auto accident at the age of twenty-four; tales of his splendid athletic feats and tragic death still pepper the conversations at Coos Bay’s stores and taverns. But mention his track teammate Cathy Kerkow to a lifelong resident, and you’ll elicit nothing more than a blank stare. Even men who grew up playing street football with Kerkow’s brothers have no recollection of her existence,
let alone her crime.

The FBI has not entirely forgotten about Kerkow, but its investigation stalled long ago. In the years following Kerkow’s 1978 disappearance, agents would periodically contact her parents, on the off chance they had heard from her and might be providing her aid. But the FBI eventually became convinced that Kerkow would never reach out to her family; the parental interviews ended in the late 1980s. (Kerkow’s father, Bruce, passed away in 2001.)

Beth Newhouse, Kerkow’s best friend and roommate in San Diego, last heard from the FBI in 1991. She was living in a Seattle suburb at the time, working for Alaska Airlines and raising two children with her straitlaced husband; her wild youth was long behind her. Newhouse was distressed to be reminded of Kerkow after so many years; she worried that Alaska would fire her if the airline learned of her connection to a wanted skyjacker.

The FBI agent was surprisingly forthcoming about the sorry state of the investigation. He confessed that he and his colleagues were stumped; their only recent lead was a tip that Kerkow had become so fluent in French that she could pass for a native, and that she may have mastered other European languages, too. The agent begged Newhouse for any scrap of information she could provide.

But Newhouse had nothing to offer aside from a suggestion that Kerkow might have died while on the run. It was the only explanation she could muster for why her best friend had never tried to contact her again after proposing that ludicrous hashish-for-guns
swap in 1972.

Newhouse’s hypothesis is one of the few plausible theories regarding Kerkow’s fate. If Kerkow did succeed in obtaining an American passport while in Switzerland, as the State Department
seems to believe, she could have skipped off to any corner of the globe. But given her taste for the finer things in life, Kerkow would not have settled in a country where creature comforts are scarce. Contrary to persistent rumors, then, she did not flee to Havana, where a small community of fugitive American skyjackers still live openly. Nor did she follow in the footsteps of other International Section members by moving to Tanzania or Guinea-Bissau, where her skin color would have made her too much of a curiosity.

Kerkow could have slipped back into the United States with a valid passport, but it is difficult to imagine that she would have returned without asking friends or family for help—something she never did, according to both the FBI and confidants like Newhouse. Besides, forced exile had proven to be a blessing for Kerkow, a woman who had always been vaguely dissatisfied with her given circumstances—a condition inherited from her musician father, who had turned his back on cloistered Coos Bay. She never gave any indication that she pined for her rejected life.

The likeliest scenario is that Kerkow returned to France after obtaining false documents in Switzerland, then melted into French society under an assumed name. Perhaps she married a wealthy boyfriend, who arranged for her to obtain French citizenship and relocate
to a provincial town where she would attract little notice. The French police could not be trusted to track her down; they had, after all, been totally unaware of her move from Algiers to Paris until Roger Holder foolishly blabbed his true identity. After a few years of adjusting to her new milieu, Kerkow would have become indistinguishable from those around her.

There is also a possibility that Kerkow opted for a more nomadic and exciting life abroad. She could have journeyed from Switzerland to West Germany, Italy, or even the Netherlands, all places where her movie business friends worked in the late 1970s, making soft-core films about sexual liberation. As the FBI noted to Newhouse, Kerkow’s language skills were so sharp that she could have thrived almost anywhere in Europe.

Then there are darker outcomes to consider: a misadventure with drugs; a catastrophic illness; a car accident in the Alps that produced an unclaimed body. Any such tragedy would explain why Kerkow never tried to contact figures from her Oregon days.

But I prefer to imagine Cathy Kerkow as having achieved the sort of radical reinvention that eluded most of her fellow skyjackers—a version of the American dream that some can attain only by leaving America behind. I picture her as a dignified French woman in her early sixties, her once-lustrous hair now short and streaked with gray. She and her retired husband occupy a well-appointed house in a sleepy hamlet a few hours’ drive from Paris, where they also own a pied-à-terre. They have always been a very private couple, though Kerkow has told a few neighbors that she moved to France as a small child, after her late American father was transferred by his company. Her grown children, now with families of their own, were baptized at the local church; they know nothing of their mother’s criminal history and clandestine rebirth.

This Kerkow of my daydreams rarely pauses to reflect on how a rash decision made in the bloom of youth led to such unexpected bliss. But every so often, her thoughts can’t help but wander to the pain she caused those left behind: the brothers she helped raise, the bohemian
father who pursued his own path, the mother who sacrificed so much for her children. And in those fleeting moments, she understands that however much we might wish to sever ourselves from the past, ties of blood and memory remain. Even the most rebellious soul cannot be immune to that human truth.

T
O ADEQUATELY EXPRESS
my gratitude to each and every person who made this endeavor possible would require a good ten thousand words, if not more. Rather than bore you in such a manner, let me instead apologize to all deserving parties who go unmentioned in the note below. I respectfully ask that you understand my predicament, and I beseech you to drop me a line if you feel slighted; I will do my best to make things right at the Queens Boulevard drinking establishment of your choice.