Criminal - The Fox

Episode Date: October 19, 2018

This episode picks up where Episode 100 left off. We suggest you listen to them in order. When Martin McNally met another plane hijacker in prison, they started coming up with a plan to escape...using the very thing that got them there in the first place. For a transcript of this episode, send an email to [e-mail] with the episode name and number. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Criminal is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX. Please review us on Apple Podcasts! It’s an important way to help new listeners discover the show: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's called 10,000 Feet in the Air. If you haven't listened to that one yet, you may want to go back and listen to them in order. After Martin McNally hijacked a plane, lost the money parachuting to the ground, and was surrounded by FBI agents near his house a few days later, he was given two life sentences and sent to Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Kansas. When I went to prison, the doors opened, Pandora's boxes opened,

and I will do anything and I will do everything to get out of prison because I'm not going to accept it, and I never did accept it, and the fact is, I should be free. It was there, in 1975, that he met another hijacker. His name was Garrett Trapnell. Okay, Garrett Trapnell. I like that dude. He was a solid, smart genius.

Garrett Trapnell was a maniac. He is kind of like a combination of Leonardo DiCaprio's character in Catch Me If You Can with D.B. Cooper and like a little bit of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. He was both petty but also kind of a megalomaniac. And he was sort of a bomb that he would sort of drop into people's lives and use them

how he wished for his own gains. And he found sort of a counterpart in McNally. This is Danny Wisentowski, a reporter for the Riverfront Times in St. Louis. Garrett Trapnell was said to have had six different wives at the same time and at least 25 aliases. In 1972, just months before Martin McNally hijacked his plane, Garrett Trapnell hijacked a plane from Los Angeles to New York. He was one of the 130 hijackings that happened between 1968 and 1972. Garrett Trapnell pretended to have a broken arm and he hid a gun in the fake cast.

He demanded $306,800 and a phone call with President Nixon. After the plane landed in New York, an FBI marksman posing as a member of the flight crew shot Garrett Trapnell

and took him into custody. This wasn shot Garrett Trapnell and took him into custody. This wasn't Garrett Trapnell's first arrest. He'd been arrested at least 20 times before for robbing banks, forging checks, and stealing more than $100,000 worth of jewelry from a store in the Bahamas. And for all those crimes, he'd spent less than two years in jail. He developed this

tactic of studying psychiatry, and he was able to use the insanity defense as a strategy to get himself out of prison situations and into mental hospitals where he could either be released after a year, which happened a number of times, or escape outright. In an interview, Garrett Trapnell bragged that he knew more about psychiatry than your average resident psychiatrist. He described the insanity plea as a license to kill. He said he could go out on the street in New York, shoot ten people, and be free in six months. He added that, of course, he'd never do a thing like

that. In 1973, he used the insanity plea during his trial for the hijacking. It was a hung jury. During the second trial, Garrett was convicted, given a life sentence, and sent to Leavenworth. That's where he met Martin McNally. I knew his case, and he knew my case. And at one particular point there, I said, listen, if I ever have an opportunity, I'll snatch a plane and demand your release. And he said, Mac, if that happens, I'll do the same thing for you. The two plane hijackers started coming up with a plan to get out of prison using the very thing that got them in there in the first place.

As Garrett Trapnell once said, escaping is as American as apple pie. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Garrett Trapnell was sent to prison in 1973. And by 1976, a journalist named Elliot Asanoff had published a book about him. It was called The Fox is Crazy Too. The subtitle was

The True Story of Garrett Trapnell, adventurer, skyjacker, bank robber, con man, lover. There's this line at the beginning where Asanoff is describing him, this moment where Trapnell is in the midst of this hijacking. And he writes, It was as if he thrived on the brink of a towering precipice, a man for whom danger was the stimulant that sparked his genius.

His mind was as sharp as his speech. His eyes took in everything, figuratively and literally. He kept his back to the wall. This was kind of the picture that he was painted as, this outlaw, this person who both used people but was above it. He was like a main character of a thriller novel but who lived in real life. And the book is really, you know, gives you a sense of kind of the spell he could put you under.

At the end of the book, the author printed Garrett Trapnell's address at Leavenworth. He received a lot of fan mail, much of it from women. He's certainly got a gift to gab, and that gift to gab had all the women flying to him like into his fly trap that he could get them. These fan letters were forwarded on to him when he was relocated to the first federal Supermax prison, the U.S. Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois. Martin was sent there too. They happened to end up in the same cell block,

just two cells apart from each other. That's where they were when Garrett got a letter from a 43-year-old woman named Barbara Oswald. She had read The Fox is Crazy too. It was required reading for a criminal justice course she was taking. Do you remember Garrett telling you about her? Of course. What did he say? Of course. He showed me letters that she had written him, and Garrett was spending hours and hours and hours writing to her. Barbara Oswald was a former Army flight controller. She was a single parent living in a suburb of St. Louis. After a motorcycle

accident a couple of years before, she left the army and was studying criminal justice, specifically inmate rehabilitation. She and Garrett wrote for months. She said she loved him. She started visiting four times a week. She would sometimes bring her teenage daughter, Robin, on visits. Martin says that Garrett promised Barbara that they were going to run off together to Australia. He even showed her photos of the house where they were going to live. He comes back from a visit one time, knocks on my door and said,

Can I come in? I said, Yes, come on in. he said, can I come in? I said, yes, come on in. I said, what's up? He said, how would you like to leave this place in a helicopter? And I said, well, I paused. Well, I don't know. We're going to have to discuss this. We'll have to discuss the details before I make a decision on something like that. But, yeah, let's look into this. We'll have to discuss the details before I make a decision on something like that.

But yeah, let's look into this. Martin and Garrett looped in a third man, a bank robber named Kenny Johnson. He would help them rob a bank once they were out. Within a few months, they had a plan in place. It all hinged on Barbara Oswald. She would hijack a helicopter and pick them up. He convinced her. He told her, he says, you could do this. I think there was a sense of almost disbelief that this could actually happen because they virtually had to do nothing. All they had to do was make sure they were in the right place of the yard, getting ready to run, and that's really it. They're, you know, in the moment

imagining what it'll be like to fly out of this prison, shooting down at the guards as they go. And what happens? Everything goes wrong. Barbara Oswald followed their instructions exactly. She put a diagram of the prison yard in her pocket. She hid guns in her briefcase. She made up a story about being a real estate agent interested in seeing aerial views of some property. And on May 24, 1978,

she went into St. Louis and chartered a helicopter. And for some reason, she gets into a helicopter being flown by the worst possible person she could have chosen. A former Vietnam combat pilot named Alan Barklage. And Barbara Oswald tells him that she wants to look at some property, you know, in the area from above, some flooded areas. The flight starts, and not long after, Barbara yanks off his headset, puts a gun to his temple, and says, you're flying to Marion, and we're going to get Garrett out.

We saw the chopper, all three of us saw the chopper at about 5,000 feet, and it was coming over the trees, and there was a high whining like a muffler. It'd go, and then when it gets out of the trees in the open ground, it would go, eeeh, the difference on that. So when I heard it go, eeeh, I yelled out. I says, now, now, go. As we're waiting there, I'm jumping up and down, standing on a yellow jacket. And I'm waiting for the pilot to see me, and then I hear the rotor of the chopper. It's a rum-rum-rum-rum-rum.

And it's a level. It's not moving. And I hear it start to run down. In other words, shut down. And I looked over to Trapp and I says, oh, Trapp, we got a problem here. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Thank you. in Redmond as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family.

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is kind of unbelievable even to describe. He tells Barbara Oswald, you should open the doors while we're still up here. They're very heavy and they're difficult to open. And if you're concerned about time, do it now. Barbara Oswald begins to struggle with these heavy metal doors and she shifts the gun out of the hand she was using to point at him. She's now holding the gun in her right hand and her fingers

off the trigger. And then Alan Barklage turns around, he takes his hands off the controls, and he grabs the gun in her hand. He told investigators later that her last words were, it doesn't matter, I've got another one. She reached under the seat. And that's when Alan Barklage shot her four times. He said he just kept pulling the trigger until he saw her slump over. One bullet blew a hole through the helicopter window. Alan Barklage managed to regain control of the helicopter

and safely land it 70 feet away from the prison administration building. And down on the ground, McNally is sort of hopping up and down, waving his arms, and door open, waving them in with, you know, handguns and weapons, they see a guy in a blue flight suit run out of the helicopter and run into an administration building. He is terrified of what he's just done. He's also terrified of being shot by the guards. And eventually, he's confronted by prison guards who, with their, you know, weapons drawn. And Alan Barklage is beside himself.

He, you know, according to the guards, you know, in these later investigations, the guards are saying they came upon Alan Barklage who was just repeating over and over again, I've been hijacked, I've killed someone. I've been hijacked, I've killed someone. When Travnell came back from being talked to, he said, Barbara's been

shot and killed by the pilot. And I said, damn. Oh, God. Martin, Garrett, and Kenny were each charged with attempted escape and kidnapping and waited for their trials.

Garrett insisted on defending himself, and because of that, he was given certain privileges. He was actually able to inspect the site of the crash. And he's also given leeway to interview his own witnesses. And one of those witnesses is Robin Oswald, the 16-year-old daughter of Barbara. After her mother's death, Robin dropped out of high school. She wrote letters to Garrett Trapnell. A friend of Robin's told the newspaper

that Garrett was like a father to her. Robin said Garrett told her about all the things she could have, a horse, all the clothes she could ever want, the Jeep she'd always talked about. But he could only do that if she helped him escape. Here's Garrett in a TV interview recorded years later. I felt a responsibility. I was the one who caused her mother's death. At the same time, I wanted to get out of prison. He convinces Robin to finish the work that her mother started.

On December 21, 1978, 17-year-old Robin Oswald boarded a flight in Louisville, headed for Kansas City, prepared to follow the instructions Garrett had given her. Five minutes before the plane landed, she handed the flight attendant a note. It said that she had three sticks of dynamite strapped to her waist. She demanded to be taken to the small airport near the Marion prison in Illinois,

and for Garrett Trapnell to be released and brought there. There are some problems. First, she was supposed to have made the demand in the first five minutes of the flight, not the last. Second, the dynamite wasn't real. She hijacks a plane herself at the age of 17 with no weapons and with nothing more than what will turn out to be road flares and a detonator that is, you know, fashioned from

some pieces of plastic that are connected to nothing. And she just keeps repeating, I want Garrett. I have some of the toughest guys in prison talk about what they're going to do. And they never do anything. And here was a, she turned 17, here was a 17-year-old girl that went out and took a plane to break someone out of prison. You know, I don't think hearts get any bigger than that. After the plane landed in Illinois, no one was let off.

Everyone waited for Garrett Trapnell to be brought to the airport. Robin requested sandwiches, coffee, and milk. One passenger later told newspapers that she kept talking about her mother and how she died in a helicopter. You know, later the passengers on that plane would, you know, tell news reporters that, you know, she was in charge but she wasn't mean. Another man said, you know, her grammar was good, never used a curse word, everything was please and thank you. And you know, he recounted that at some point Robin even sort of quipped to a stewardess, aren't I the nicest hijacker?

At the same time, when the FBI are looking at this, they're trying to figure out if she has a real bomb. The FBI knew that Robin's mother had been able to get weapons. And they assumed Robin could as well. Some passengers pretended they were going to the bathroom and snuck off the plane, but there were still people on board. And so they were faced with a very tense situation. Eventually, though, the mechanical issues on the plane meant that a lot of the air circulation went off. It got very hot and uncomfortable.

And Robin steadily allowed more and more people to leave the flight. When she was distracted, basically the rest of the plane emptied out, and she eventually surrendered to the FBI after 10 hours, and she was taken into custody. And what happened to her? It's hard to say. A lot of the reports around the time said that she was put in juvenile detention, that she was released not long after, that she was not, you know, considered an adult, she didn't do a lengthy amount of time, and she really disappears. A lot of what we know about her comes from an interview she gave to an FBI crime show. Her face was hidden. She said, quote, I think he was very wrong for involving other people in his dirty work.

At 16 years old, you think you know all, and you don't. I was just a little kid. Garrett Trapnell was never charged for any involvement in Robin Oswald's case. Both Trapnell and Martin McNally were found guilty in Barbara Oswald's case and returned to Marion Prison to serve life sentences on top of their existing life sentences. an entire family, Robin's life, Barbara's life, and that she had just wanted something very similar, I think, that he did, to make something of herself, to do something adventurous and larger than life, to be the main character of your own masterful thriller, to be that adventurer, the lover, to be someone who would be on the cover of a pulp paperback.

Garrett Trapnell didn't try to escape again. He died in prison in 1993. Martin McNally was released on parole in 2010. He lives in St. Louis now. Danny Wisentowski has been interviewing him for almost three years. Airline hijackings almost destroyed what was sort of a civil institution, the idea of getting in a plane right off on the tarmac, you know, not even needing, even buying a ticket on a plane after you've taken off. The idea that a plane was just, you know, another conveyance, maybe even a luxury you would get dressed up for. It was

something incredibly American in the sense of a frontier that had not yet been explored. And in a matter of years, you had men like Garrett and McNally destroy this idea. Criminal is produced by Lauren Spohr, Nadia Wilson, and me. Audio mix by Johnny Vince Evans. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC.

We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best shows around. Shows like The Truth, a beautifully produced anthology of short, scripted stories. Their latest is a four-part serial called The Off Season. It's a thriller that takes place in an abandoned beach house and goes deep into a world of crime, cover-ups, and whether or not redemption is ever possible. Subscribe to The Truth wherever you get your podcasts or go to thetruthpodcast.com.

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