How D.B. Cooper Inspireda Skyjacking Craze and the FBI’s Battle to Stop It
JOHN WIGGER
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2023938615
ISBN 978–0–19–769575–3
eISBN 978–0–19–769577–7
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197695753.001.0001
For my dad, who taught me how to fly. He wouldhave lovedthis story.
Contents
Author’sNote
Prologue
PART I. The Heist
1. The Hijacking
2. Sharon Wetherley
3. David Spellman
4. The Friendly Skies
5. Heinrick von George
6. The Money
7. Mohawk Airlines Flight 452
8. The Pilots
9. The Parachutes
10. D.B. Cooper
11. Tom Parker
12. Richard McCoy
13. The Switch
14. David Hanley
15. Cadillac Impact
16. The Boeing 727
17. Snipers
18. Chase Planes
19. A Short History of Parachuting
20. Wheels Up
21. The Jump
PART II. The
Chase
22. The Call
23. Dead or Alive
24. Peru, Indiana
25. Nowhere Man
26. The Sketch
27. Survivors
28. The Money, the Guns, and the Pants
29. Show Me the Money
30. Tell Me Your Name
31. The Parachute
32. The Tip
33. A Life of Crime
34. The Plan
35. A Ride Home
36. The Informant
37. Fingerprints
38. The Arrest
39. Evidence
40. Fallout
41. Hijacker’s Heaven
42. How It Began
PART III. Connecting Flights
43. Take Me to Cuba
44. Anywhere but Here
45. Hijack House
46. Security
47. Ransoms
48. A Means of Escape
49. The Trial
50. Prison Break
51. Finding D.B. Cooper
52. Arrivals Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Author’s Note
THIS STORY IS largely based on the more than sixty in-depth interviews I did with people directly connected to airline hijackings in the 1960s and 1970s, including retired FBI agents, stewardesses, and pilots, along with some of the hijackers and their friends, family, and associates. Though these hijackings happened more than fifty years ago, I was continually amazed at the accuracy of these people’s memories when compared against court records and newspaper accounts. The generosity of everyone who agreed to talk made this book possible, and I am deeply grateful. The individual interviews are cited in the endnotes.
Prologue
HE INCHED HIS way feet first down the aft stairs of the Boeing 727. The roar of the jet’s three engines, mounted on the tail only a few feet above his head, was deafening. The stairway was buffeted by the 320-mile-an-hour slipstream, nearly flattened against the plane’s fuselage by the force of the rushing air. The gap between the stair’s bottom lip and the underbelly of the jet’s tail section was barely three feet. Even in June, the air at ten thousand feet chilled his limbs.
As he worked his way slowly down the stairs on his stomach, he pulled along a mailbag with half a million dollars in cash, forty pounds in all, tied to his leg. He had already tossed out the machine gun he had carried onto the plane, a wig for which he had paid thirty dollars, and the coat and pants he had worn when he boarded. His only parachute was a small reserve chute attached to the front of the harness he was wearing. He had never jumped out of a plane before.
He reached the bottom of the stairs, his feet dangling over the edge. Slowly he lowered himself down until only his fingers grasped the bottom stair. The rest of his body was flying, stretched out prone behind the plane, buoyed by the rushing wind.
He had only a vague idea where he was, didn’t even know what state he was over. (In fact, it was Indiana.) It was not quite three a.m., nearly twelve hours since he had hijacked the flight from St. Louis to Tulsa. Much of his plan had gone awry, but it was too late to change any of that. There was nothing left to consider.1
He let go and fell into the void.
PART I
The Heist
The Hijacking
AMERICAN FLIGHT 119
THE MAN WALKED across the apron adjacent to the terminal toward the Boeing 727 carrying a briefcase containing the thirty-dollar wig, a pair of rubber gloves, a smoke grenade, and two guns—a Spitfire machine gun with the stock and front grip removed and eleven inches cut off the barrel, making it compact enough to fit in the briefcase, and a small-caliber pistol.1 It was Friday, June 23, 1972, just after two p.m. and about eighty degrees, but not particularly humid for St. Louis, with a light breeze. He had paid seventy dollars for the round-trip ticket to Tulsa and back, under the name “Robert Wilson.” As was almost always the case in the era before metal detectors and heightened security, he had walked through the terminal and directly to his gate without stopping. No one asked to see what he was carrying.
He boarded the plane through the main cabin door and took a middle seat toward the back in row 24, on the left side, in front of the galley. To the stewardesses, there was nothing about him that seemed unusual. Flight 119 had left LaGuardia Airport in New York at 12:50 p.m., bound for Los Angeles, with stops in St. Louis, Tulsa, and Phoenix.2
The man was twenty-eight but looked younger. He had a boyish grin and the sort of boisterous personality that went with growing up in a large Irish Catholic family. Neighbors would later describe him as “clean-cut.”3
They left St. Louis at 2:35 p.m. It was only a fifty-eight-minute flight from wheels up to landing. He still had a choice to make, but
time was running out. If he just sat there and did nothing, like any other passenger, no one would ever know the difference. Friends back in Detroit had urged him not to go through with his plans. But he had already invested $1,500 in the scheme, all his available cash. He was behind on his mortgage. He needed the money.4
Jerry Stewart had the aisle seat next to his. He owned a clothing store in Tulsa and was on his way home. For the first half hour of the flight, Stewart tried to engage the man, who was wearing aviator-style sunglasses, but he seemed preoccupied.
“Are you going to Tulsa?” Stewart asked.
“Yes,” the man said, without elaborating.
In fact, he was about to make the most fateful decision of his life. Damn. You’ve got to pump up your nuts here, he thought. You’ve gottodoitnoworforgetaboutitforever.5
Still, he hesitated until the plane was nearly to Tulsa. When the pilot announced that they were starting their final descent and would be on the ground in fifteen minutes, he turned to Stewart.
“Where is the men’s room at?” he asked.
“Around the corner,” Stewart said, motioning toward the back of the plane.6
In the lavatory, the man opened his briefcase and put on the wig and rubber gloves. He took out the machine gun and pulled back the bolt, careful not to let it slip and fire a round. Stepping out of the restroom, he stood at the back of the plane. And waited.7
For what seemed like several minutes, nothing happened. He stood in the aisle, gun held across his chest, waving his hand, waiting for someone to notice. Thisisfuckedup, he thought as the surreal silence stretched on. Finally, a stewardess, Jane Furlong, looked up and saw him as she walked down the aisle collecting glasses.
“Don’t hurt anybody,” she said, once she was close enough for him to hear.8
2
Sharon Wetherley
AMERICAN FLIGHT 119
THE STEWARDESSES THAT day were Jennifer Dumanois, Diana Rash, Sharon Wetherley, and Jane Furlong, all based in New York. Rash had joined American in July 1969. She and Dumanois, the senior member of the group, tended to the twenty-three passengers in first class on the flight to Tulsa. Furlong and Wetherley had only been flying for three months. Together they worked the coach section toward the back. This was what they called a “liquor and snack flight.” The plane was a stretch 727-200, about two-thirds full, with ninety-three passengers.1
Wetherley, twenty-two, had enrolled at the American Airlines Stewardess College in Fort Worth, Texas, in February 1972. She and Furlong were roommates and became friends. The school, which opened in 1957, included classrooms, offices, a lounge, a rec room, and dorm suites. By 1969, it could accommodate two hundred students at a time. During the six-week course, only one afternoon was spent talking about what to do in a hijacking. “Basically, do as the hijacker says, and don’t try to play hero” was the gist of the advice they were given, Wetherley remembered. It was generally understood that domestic hijackers did not want to die or kill passengers and crew unless they had no way out. Defusing tension offered the best chance of getting everyone out alive.2
Wetherley took her first airplane ride in Ventura, California, when she was around eleven. A friend’s father owned an open-cockpit biplane. The pilot handed her a parachute. “If you see me jump, you jump, too,” he told her. They did loops and rolls, and she loved it. She graduated from high school in Ojai, California, and attended a
year of junior college a few miles away in Ventura. After a five-week vacation in England with her mother, she decided not to return to college. “All I wanted to do was to fly and to travel.”3
One of her four brothers had just deployed to Vietnam, and Wetherley accompanied her sister-in-law to Florida to live with her parents. There she became friends with a group who skydived. She watched them one weekend and decided, Ican dothat. Growing up with four brothers made her competitive and adventurous. At the time, you didn’t learn by buddy-jumping or with a static line. The next Saturday, she jumped on her own, pulling the ripcord on her way down.4
In Florida, she worked in a grocery store and a bank until another brother, who flew helicopters, invited her to fly with him to Alaska. They went to Dallas and then spent six days ferrying a Bell Jet Ranger helicopter to Anchorage. She loved the experience. In the summer of 1971, she applied to become a stewardess at American Airlines.5
Wetherley and Furlong graduated from stewardess college together on March 21, 1972, and were transferred to New York. Wetherley’s first two flights were in and out of LaGuardia. Her third flight left from LaGuardia for Los Angeles but returned to Kennedy Airport, arriving late at night. She was still new to New York and had no idea how to get back to her apartment in Queens. A bus driver took her to a subway station and told her what line to take from there. That left her more than a half-mile walk to get home. On the way, a car passed her and made a U-turn. A man jumped out, grabbed her purse, and sped away. Afterward, she realized that it could have been much worse.
Furlong had a car and lived close by. Once they were eligible, they started bidding for the same flight assignments. Having a ride to and from the airport made Wetherley feel safe. They had been flying together for most of June when they boarded Flight 119 at LaGuardia.6
Once he had Furlong’s attention, the man in the wig handed her two typed notes, one in black type and the other in black and red.
The notes, which were mostly the same, demanded $502,500 in cash (equivalent to $3.6 million today), five parachutes, five parachute harnesses, an altimeter, a pair of goggles, and two collapsible shovels. The shovel (he really only needed one) was to bury the money once he was on the ground. He also instructed the pilot to turn around and fly back to St. Louis. The extra $2,500 was spending money. He wanted to make sure that he cleared an even half million. He told Furlong to take one of the notes to the captain and give the other one back to him.7
Wetherley had just finished serving sandwiches and drinks when she noticed a “funny look” on Furlong’s face and a note in her hand. She looked up to see a man “standing at the rear of the plane, holding a gun.” As Furlong went forward to the cockpit, Wetherley walked back to the galley without making eye contact and quickly pulled plastic wrap off a tray of sandwiches, standing only a few feet in front of the man. She made a point of smiling as she served the sandwiches, determined to maintain a sense of calm.8
As Furlong approached the cockpit, she pulled Dumanois, the head stewardess, aside. “Jenny, you’re not going to believe this, but we are being hijacked.” She stepped into the cockpit and told the pilots the same thing.9
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Captain Ted Kovalenko said.
“No, here’s the note,” Furlong said.10
Kovalenko still thought it might be a joke and handed the note to flight engineer Rod Bradley.
Meanwhile, as Rash walked through first class, Dumanois pulled her aside. “Diana, did you hear?” she asked.
“What?” Rash said.
“We are being hijacked.”
They always knew it could happen, but the reality of it was still a shock.11
Copilot Richard Sturm radioed Air Traffic Control, reading the single-spaced note, which filled nearly an entire 8½-by-11-inch sheet. It began, “Don’t panic, this is a ransom hijacking.” The note said that the hijacker was armed with a gun, a pistol, dynamite, and
a hand grenade. “There were a series of casual threats such as ‘don’t try to stop me,’ ” Sturm later recalled. Near the end was written, “I will surely feel sorry for anybody who tries to stop the hijacking.” It was all “poorly organized,” Sturm said, with lots of misspelled words; “individual” was spelled “indivigal.” Bradley, the flight engineer, also immediately noticed the poor spelling and grammar. They had to read it several times to figure it all out. Sturm shook his head. Hard to believe that the guy who wrote this was now calling the shots.12
After Furlong returned from the cockpit, the hijacker—for that was what he now was—demanded that they clear the last two rows on the right side of the plane looking forward, rows 25 and 26. In front of these two rows was an empty space adjacent to the emergency exit door on the right. Across from the exit door on the left was the galley. The emergency exit and galley provided a buffer from the rest of the cabin, isolating the last two rows. Sitting on the right also allowed the hijacker, who was left-handed, to point the gun down the aisle from the aisle seat.13
From his command post in the back two rows, the hijacker began shuffling the rest of the passengers around. He ordered all the women and children moved to first class and the men moved back to coach, which meant separating families. Wetherley did her best to stay calm and smile, reassuring passengers that everything would be OK. It was just a man who wanted to return to St. Louis, and he happened to have a gun.14
3
DavidSpellman
AMERICAN FLIGHT 119
DAVID SPELLMAN WAS in seat 4B in first class. Spellman, in his midtwenties, lived in Tulsa and had worked as a field auditor in American’s Audit and Security Department for the past year and a half. He had always been fascinated by airplanes and dreamed of becoming an Air Force pilot growing up. But his vision fell short of the 20/20 the Air Force required. Working for American kept him connected to airplanes and flight, and flying first class was one of the perks of the job. He was on his way back from Haiti, where American had recently merged with a Caribbean airline, creating several new routes.1
Stepping off the plane in Haiti had been like stepping back in time. Scattered around the small airport were a few DC-3s and a propeller-driven Lockheed Constellation, stalwarts of commercial aviation in the 1940s and 1950s, obsolete in the jet age. He was shocked by the poverty he encountered in Port-au-Prince and the tension made obvious by the young men in uniform carrying automatic weapons. Haiti had languished under the rule of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who had died a year earlier, only to be replaced by his son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier. The regime was suspicious of Americans, and the family of the Caribbean airline’s general manager had recently been threatened at gunpoint.
Deciding that there was little he could accomplish under the circumstances in Haiti, Spellman booked a flight for New York, leaving the next day. He got little sleep that night in his oppressively hot hotel room, the sound of drums beating through the night. By the time he made his way from Port-au-Prince to LaGuardia and onto
the flight to Tulsa, he was exhausted. The only thing keeping him awake was the attractive stewardesses, with whom he had been “flirting outrageously,” as he later put it. His efforts seemed to be paying off. When the FBI interviewed Wetherley after she got off the plane, she remembered his “sandy brown hair” and that he was “sharply dressed in a blue and white striped shirt.” Spellman later realized that when he told her he worked for American’s Audit and Security Department, she might have assumed “security” meant something more than accounting.2
As the women and children moved forward on the hijacker’s orders, Spellman ended up about halfway back in coach, on the left side. Once everyone was settled, an eerie silence descended over the cabin. The hijacker demanded the film from all cameras on board, which the stewardesses collected. Spellman overheard two passengers whispering about rushing the hijacker and overpowering him. He wasn’t sure that was a good idea. At least a few people would likely get shot before it was over. Captain Kovalenko announced that no one was to look back to the rear of the plane. A woman tried to hand Wetherley her Bible.
As they prepared to land in St. Louis, the hijacker took out the grenade, which resembled a can with a lever on top, and set it on the seat beside him. “If this won’t do the job, then this will,” he said, motioning first to the machine gun and then to the grenade.3
The Friendly Skies
EARLY COMMERCIAL FLYING was not for the faint of heart. Planes were slow, loud, and unpressurized, which meant that they could not fly above the weather. A DC-3, the workhorse of commercial aviation from the 1930s to the 1950s, cruised at 150 miles an hour. Flying through thunderstorms and weather fronts meant getting bounced around, sometimes for hours. Tickets were expensive, often five or six times the cost of taking the train, and affordable only for businessmen or the wealthy. To lure them into the skies, airlines knew that they had to provide an exceptional level of service. This is where stewardesses came in. The first stewardesses were former nurses, hired by what would become United Airlines in 1930. From the start, airlines wanted to give flying a sense of professionalism. Stewardesses wore crisp uniforms and did not accept tips. For young women who did not want to become nurses, schoolteachers, secretaries, or salesclerks, flying offered adventure and travel. Twenty thousand young women applied for fewer than 250 stewardess positions available at American Airlines in 1951. “How else but by being caught up in aviation could a girl find time to see so much of the world?” asked Lore Millick, who flew as a stewardess for Capitol Airways beginning in 1955.1 It could be exhausting and sometimes dangerous. Engine failures were frequent. “Every time we had a crash we flew with no passengers for a while,” recalled Marjorie Howe, who began flying with American Airlines in 1936.2 Duties included washing the windows, loading baggage, punching tickets at each stop (a dozen or more between Chicago and San Francisco), keeping up with train
schedules for each city in case of an engine failure, tightening the bolts that held seats to the floor so that they would not rattle loose and bounce around in flight, and making sure that passengers who went to the lavatory did not open the exit door by mistake and fall out. To save money, the airlines did not send enough meals for the stewardesses. If they wanted to eat, they had to hope that one of the passengers was not hungry.3
In prolonged turbulence, passengers often became airsick. Once one vomited, they all did. Even without pressurized cabins, pilots occasionally ventured up to 14,000 feet to escape the worst of the weather. Passengers were given oxygen masks, but the stewardesses continued to serve meals. Billie Crabtree, who became an American Airlines stewardess in the mid-1940s, kept a diary of her experiences. Describing a flight at 14,000 feet, she wrote, “Stopped to breathe oxygen from a bottle, then served three more passengers . . . stopped for more oxygen . . . my fingers and lips were turning blue . . . I got so lightheaded I forgot the orders by the time I got back to the galley.”4
Jets revolutionized commercial aviation in the 1960s. Flying became more sophisticated, though it was still expensive. Comfort replaced adventure. Jets flew above the weather, and men—70 percent of passengers—wore suits and ties when they traveled. Airline deregulation, which began in 1978, would make flying cheaper but also less luxurious. Bigger planes meant more seats to fill. A DC-2, which began commercial service in 1934, carried fourteen passengers. The Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet, introduced in 1970, could carry four hundred. With more capacity to sell, airlines turned to their stewardesses to market the glamor of flight.
There was no shortage of interest. In 1968, there were twentytwo applicants for every available position in the US. The sexy stewardess became a staple of pop culture. Stewardesses were now permitted to marry and keep their jobs, but the airlines still enforced weight restrictions. A few extra pounds could lead to suspension. During interviews, aspirants were routinely asked to lift their skirts above their knees so that interviewers could get a good look at their
legs. Betty Riegel, who became a Pan Am stewardess in 1961, remembered that before each flight, a supervisor would give the stewardesses a “pinch or slap on the bottom” to make sure they were wearing the “regulation girdle.” “We just got used to it,” Riegel wrote. She loved wearing the iconic pale-blue Pan Am uniform and the freedom to travel the world that her career afforded.
Over time, uniforms became racier. On Southwest Airlines, stewardesses sported tangerine hot pants and miniskirts with white go-go boots. In 1971, National Airlines launched its “Fly Me” advertising campaign. The first printed ad featured a close-up of stewardess Cheryl Fioravante, smiling sweetly, next to the caption “I’m Cheryl. Fly Me.” A television version featured twenty-something stewardess Judy saying, “I’m Judy, and I was born to fly,” as she drove a convertible to a Florida beach. “You can fly me morning, noon, or night,” she said, while stripping down to a bikini and then running across the sand into the water. The ads were hugely effective.5
The book Coffee, Tea, or Me? The Uninhibited Memoirs of Two Airline Stewardesses, published in 1967, was supposedly written by Trudy Baker and Rachel Jones, two new “stews” from small-town America, navigating the swinging ’60s from 30,000 feet, partying their way from coast to coast. “Airline crews stay at the same hotels and layovers,” they wrote in the introduction. “But that doesn’t mean it’s sex, sex, sex all the time. It can be if you want it that way, and some do.”6 The book was actually written by Donald Bain, a young public relations executive with American Airlines and an aspiring writer. After an editor arranged for him to meet with two Eastern Air Lines stewardesses, Bain realized that they only had half an hour’s worth of material. So he used his imagination and industry background to create a Playboy version of life in the sky. Coffee, Tea, or Me?and its three sequels sold more than 5 million copies in a dozen languages. Bain’s name originally appeared only in each book’s dedication.7
The success of Coffee, Tea, or Me? led to imitators, including the far more salacious and sexist How to Make a Good Airline
Stewardess, published in 1972, which described itself as the “expert guide to the luscious stews of every airline you’re likely to fly.” It made no pretense of being written by a woman. Partly in response to these books, stewardesses campaigned to change their title to “flight attendant” starting in the early 1970s, though for years most people still called them stewardesses. “I’m tired of the company selling our bodies rather than our service,” said Bernice Dolan in an October 1970 interview.8
Despite these crosscurrents, glamor remained firmly entrenched in the culture of commercial flight. Victoria Vantoch, author of TheJet Sex, a history of stewardesses, writes that her mother, who had a BA in Slavic languages from UCLA, lobbied on Capitol Hill for the Equal Rights Amendment at the same time she was working as an Eastern Air Lines stewardess, wearing “pale blue hot pants.”9 At Pan Am, America’s most international airline in the 1960s and 1970s, stewardesses touched down in nearly every corner of the world. They transported troops on R&R from Vietnam, lived independently in Hong Kong, spent long layovers in French Polynesia, stayed at the InterContinental Phoenicia in Beirut, and went to beach parties in Monrovia. “How can you change a world you’ve never seen?” asked a Pan Am ad.10
“Suddenly your world becomes anywhere between the Atlantic and the Pacific . . . Canada and Mexico . . . traveling, meeting interesting people. Every day is different,” read an American Airlines ad in 1969, inviting young women to apply. It was a “professional career,” but only for women with the right look. The ad specified that applicants needed to be single, over the age of twenty, five feet two inches to five feet nine inches tall, and 100 to 140 pounds. Pan Am had similar requirements: single, at least twenty years old, five feet three inches to five feet nine inches, and 105 to 140 pounds. The weight requirements persisted through 1972. A five-foot-two-inch stewardess on American could weigh no more than 115 pounds; the limit was 118 on Delta and 121 on United.11
The airlines may have been selling a certain look, but most of the young women who made it through training were smart and
capable, as would be proven over and over during a sudden wave of hijackings.
Heinrickvon George
BY THE 1970S, the frequent crashes of early flying were in the past, but for stewardesses, a new threat took their place. Hijackers targeted them as hostages. More often than not, they were the ones who ended up with a gun at their back. In January 1972, less than two weeks before Sharon Wetherley and Jane Furlong enrolled at the American Airlines Stewardess College, a forty-five-year-old unemployed father of seven, Heinrick von George, hijacked a Mohawk Airlines turboprop with forty-two passengers, demanding $200,000 and two parachutes. He seemed erratic and dangerous. Saying that he had a bomb, von George held a pistol to stewardess Eileen McAllister’s head for nine hours, getting “edgier” as the ordeal dragged on, according to the pilot. Von George said that she was going to jump with him.
In the nineteen years he and his wife, Barbara, had been married, von George had frequently changed jobs in hopes of doing better. Barbara went along with his decisions, always trusting her husband’s judgment. Together they had seven children. In 1963, Ozzie, as Barbara called him, left his job as a supermarket manager to open a cigarette and candy company in Peekskill, New York, Barbara’s hometown. The business failed, and they were forced into bankruptcy, losing their car and their house. His confidence and the family’s finances never fully recovered. Still, despite his periodic setbacks, von George was generally upbeat, not the sort to sit around and complain.
By 1970, he was back on his feet, working for a drugstore company in Massachusetts. He and Barbara bought a modest twostory house in Brockton, in a working-class neighborhood. But von
George was restless, and toward the end of the year, he took a job with a new drug company that offered him fifty dollars more a week. Three months later, the company went under.
Von George was meticulous about his appearance, always dressing neatly in a suit and tie, and Barbara had always thought him handsome. But he was now in his mid-forties and overweight. He took a job selling insurance. After his eight-year-old son underwent a difficult open-heart surgery, he lost interest, and soon that job was gone.
He did not tell Barbara for three months. Instead, he applied for both unemployment and welfare, a violation of the law. Their phone was disconnected, and they fell behind on their mortgage. Even after he confessed to Barbara that he had been indicted for fraud over the welfare and unemployment payments, there were details he kept from her. He was $87,000 in debt from his earlier business dealings, a huge sum given his earning potential. He told her not to worry, that he had a job prospect in New York.1
What Barbara did not know was that her husband, the father of her seven children, was not Heinrick von George.
He was born Merlyn LaVerne St. George in St. Paul, Minnesota, where his parents, Thelma G. Beaird and LaVerne St. George, had married. Merlyn, born in 1926, was the oldest of seven children. By the time of the 1930 census, they had moved to Cincinnati, where Thelma’s parents lived. In February 1941, LaVerne joined the Army. Following his father’s example, on his seventeenth birthday in July 1943, Merlyn enlisted in the Navy. That November, he boarded the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown, serving as an aircraft gunner. Merlyn had a difficult time adjusting to life aboard ship and made few friends. In early 1944, his closest buddy, Harold L. Lerch, was killed in action on the Yorktown. Lerch’s death traumatized von George, as later events would prove.2
In April 1944, a week after returning to Pearl Harbor, Merlyn boarded the SS Henry Bergh, a Liberty ship converted into a troop transport, bound for San Francisco. The ship had a capacity of less than 600 but was carrying 1,300 sailors and a crew of 100. On May
31, it ran aground on rocks two hundred yards offshore of South Farallon Island, thirty miles off the coast of San Francisco. Though everyone survived, some by swimming ashore through the frigid water, Merlyn remembered it as a harrowing experience. After returning to the Pacific, he was involved in an accident on the USS Lexington that landed him in the Naval Hospital at Guam. From there, he was transferred to a hospital at Pearl Harbor and, in December 1944, to the Naval Hospital in Seattle. He received a medical discharge for “emotional instability” on April 6, 1945. His mother later told Barbara that when he called home collect from the hospital, his father refused to accept the call.3
The war never left him. He spent the next several years in and out of psychiatric hospitals. Today he would probably be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a condition not widely acknowledged at the time. Years later, Barbara remembered that he had nightmares about the war, waking in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. In October 1945, the director of student personnel at a college in Texarkana sent a letter to Merlyn’s parents at their home in St. Paul, addressed to “Mr. & Mrs. Howard Lerch.” “We had a young man in Texarkana who registered under the name of Harold L. Lerch,” the director wrote. “I have discovered through reliable sources that his real name is Merlyn LaVerne St. George.” Merlyn had evidently told the school that Howard was his stepfather.
The director had hoped that college would help Merlyn adjust to civilian life, as so many young men needed to do after the war. Initially, things seemed to go well. “I found him to be a good natured and likeable boy during the short time I knew him,” the director wrote. “He seemed to fit himself well into the group of students here and showed indications of becoming popular on campus.” Then he had disappeared, and rumor had it that he had joined the Army.4
In fact, two weeks earlier, Merlyn, using his real name, sent a telegram to his mother saying that he had enlisted in the Army.5 (Later Barbara would hear that he had joined under the name Harold L. Lerch, though it seems unlikely that he had enlisted at all.)
In December 1945, Thelma received another letter from Arkansas, this time from the Veterans Administration Hospital in North Little Rock, which specialized in psychiatric care. A Colonel D. D. Campbell wrote to say that “Mr. St. George is adjusting very satisfactorily here in the hospital. He is up and about the ward every day, is in good physical condition. . . . The history is that he was arrested and accused of breaking into an armory in Texarkana, Arkansas. He was placed in jail and later sent to this hospital, for examination and observation.” According to later news reports, Merlyn had stolen a gun from the armory. An evaluation at the hospital concluded that he was “psychopathic” and “asocial,” with a tendency toward “criminalism.” He was nonetheless released in early January 1946.6
Shortly thereafter, Merlyn L. St. George joined the Army at Louisville, Kentucky, to serve in the Ordnance Department. Whatever his treatment at North Little Rock had accomplished, he was still a troubled nineteen-year-old. On April 10, he went AWOL while stationed in Maryland. When he was tracked down the next day, he struck “a non-commissioned officer on the back of the head with a hollow piece of lead pipe,” according to a letter his mother received from the Army in August. Barbara would later hear that he had been drunk at the time and driving a Jeep he had taken without permission. He had been confined to the post stockade for six months at hard labor, beginning May 13. With good behavior, he would be eligible for release that September.7
In August 1947, roughly a year later, he arrived in Fresno, California, and got a room at the Salvation Army hotel and a job as a “food checker” at the Californian Hotel. Two weeks later, he stole $646 from the hotel and took a bus to Los Angeles. From there, he flew to Seattle and signed on as a sailor on a merchant ship. When the ship made port in San Francisco in September, he was arrested. He pleaded guilty to theft of the money in Fresno County Superior Court and was sent to San Quentin.8 After he was paroled in 1949, he apparently returned to Minnesota, where, in 1951, he may have received psychiatric treatment at a veterans’ hospital in St. Paul. An arrest warrant issued in March 1952 charged him with stealing
nearly $4,300 from a theater in Duluth. Before the warrant could be served, Merlyn St. George disappeared.
Barbara Gordineer met him at a convent in Peekskill in early 1952, where Heinrick von George, as he now called himself, was recuperating from a stay at a hospital for a heart murmur. In exchange, he helped out with chores. Her grandfather was the caretaker of the convent, and they met as he worked the grounds. She was seventeen, and he was twenty-six, though he initially lied about his age. They were married that summer.
He told her he was from Cincinnati and that his parents were dead. He said that he was raised by an older brother and sister whom he did not get along with. “For nineteen years we lived a very happy life,” Barbara told a writer for Esquire after the hijacking. “Ozzie” was a proud father who loved his kids. He went to Little League games and Cub Scout meetings. When their youngest daughter was born, he surprised his wife by painting the dining room a “shocking pink.” Their only troubles had been financial, “but we always figured we could pick ourselves up again,” Barbara said.9
Marriage and family grounded von George. It gave him a sense of purpose and accomplishment. Much of this was the result of Barbara’s stabilizing influence. The family was devoutly Catholic and attended Mass every week. A pharmacist at a drugstore von George worked at said, “The man I knew was a deeply devoted family man. He talked constantly about his wife and kids.”10
Yet by January 1972, von George had lost the sense of control that held his life together. Desperate to set things right, he turned to darker impulses from his past. The fault line between his younger, troubled self and the stable family man he had become suddenly snapped.
He left the house in Brockton around nine a.m. on January 25 with only one dollar, just enough for the bus to Boston. He said that a ticket and money were waiting for him there, enough to get him to New York. Barbara couldn’t understand why he refused to take an overnight bag. He always packed a fresh change of clothes for each day of a trip, but not this time. Still, as he walked away from the
house, he turned to blow her a kiss as she watched from the window. She smiled and gave him the peace sign.11
