The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking (9 page)

C
ONVINCED THAT FATE
had brought Cathy Kerkow back into his life as part of some grand design, Roger Holder quickly became a fixture at her shared apartment in El Cajon. He would often drive her to and from her job at the Spring Valley massage parlor, then spend the nights regaling her with gory tales from Vietnam and lessons on astrology. Sometimes they would head to Ocean Beach to stroll amid the head shops plastered with antiwar graffiti, or catch dollar matinees at the Strand movie house
on Newport Avenue. No matter where they went in San Diego, the young couple always attracted stares: even in the city’s most open-minded precincts, interracial romance still carried a
whiff of the taboo.

As they strolled through a Point Loma park one evening, Holder and Kerkow were accosted by a group of white men who vulgarly advised Cathy to date someone paler. Holder responded with a challenge to fight, which caused the men to slink away. When Holder turned to check on Kerkow, he saw that she was digging in her purse for something. A moment later she pulled out a black-handled switchblade.

“I wanted them to see it,” she sighed, clearly disappointed that she had missed her chance to scare the punks. She had been carrying around the weapon for weeks, hoping to have the chance to show Holder that she was more than just some fun-loving
girl from Coos Bay.

Kerkow’s obvious infatuation with Holder baffled her friend and roommate Beth Newhouse, who had always disliked the
reedy Vietnam vet. She confronted him regarding his occasional use of the name Linton Charles White, which was how he had introduced himself to her when they were neighbors the year before. Holder explained that he had adopted the alias because he was an Army deserter trying to avoid a court-martial. He further claimed that he had fled from Vietnam to swinging London, where he had mingled with artists, musicians, and aristocrats who appreciated his nuanced opposition to the war. Newhouse correctly dismissed this tale as pure fantasy meant to impress girls with hippie leanings. She suspected that Holder was a
con man at heart.

Newhouse’s boyfriend, a moody rocker name Lee Davis, had an even lower opinion of Holder. He was unsettled by the way Holder’s eyes flitted around the room during routine conversation, as if he were scanning for eavesdroppers. And Davis was struck by the fact that Holder didn’t seem to have a single black friend, nor any apparent desire to socialize with members of his own race. Like the Oakland youths who had teased Holder a decade earlier, Davis slagged
Holder as an Oreo.

In early March 1972, Holder decided to skip his court date for the bad checks that he had written as Linton Charles White. He planned to evade the resulting arrest warrant by shedding his alias once and for all, a maneuver that would require a final reckoning with the Army. Once that situation was resolved, he would be free to forge a remarkable new life with Kerkow, just as fate intended.

To scrap his false identity, Holder destroyed his fraudulent driver’s license, abandoned his rented apartment, and sold the yellow Pontiac Firebird that he had purchased under White’s name. Then he went to his father, Seavenes, and confessed that he had been AWOL for nearly two years. His boast about having received an honorable discharge had been an utter lie.

This revelation was upsetting for Seavenes, a career Navy man who prided himself on devotion to country. But part of him also understood
that Vietnam had changed his son in ways that even Roger was struggling to comprehend. Seavenes dutifully drove his second-born child to Naval Base San Diego, where he arranged for the military police to notify Fort Hood of
his son’s surrender.

By this late stage in the Vietnam War, the Army was accustomed to dealing with soldiers who had fled from service; between 1968 and 1971, five percent of
its enlistees deserted.
^*
Rather than fill its stockades with men who lacked the will to fight, the Army typically offered a deal to fugitive soldiers who turned themselves in: instead of facing a general court-martial, which carried the risk of a lengthy prison term, they could accept an undesirable discharge. This type of discharge, also commonly handed to drug abusers and psychiatric casualties, was not without severe consequences: recipients were barred from receiving virtually all future military benefits, and they often became pariahs to potential employers. But in order to dodge the threat of incarceration, most defendants opted to
accept “bad papers.”

Holder was galled to learn of the Army’s deal, which also included demotion to the lowest possible rank. He thought it terribly unjust that he would receive the exact same discharge as some basic-training washout who had never spent a day in Vietnam, let alone twenty-eight months. The way he saw it, all his problems traced back to that lone marijuana charge in September 1969. If the Army had given him a break in Saigon, he never would have butted heads with that colonel in Phu Bai, nor been shipped back to Fort Hood against his will. Now the Army wanted to sever all ties, as if he had never existed. He could not believe that one ill-advised joint had led to such bitterness.

But twenty-nine miserable days in the Long Binh Jail had taught Holder to avoid the stockade at all costs. As much as it infuriated him to do so, he accepted the undesirable discharge.

Before he was given his separation papers, Holder saw an Army doctor, to whom he described the images of combat that still haunted
him—the mangled bodies in the elephant grass, the blood of the wounded congealing on the floor of his Huey. The doctor prescribed him tranquilizers and sent him on his way. Due to the nature of his discharge, Holder would not be entitled to
any further medical care.

Embarrassed by their son’s deceit, Holder’s parents made clear that he was no longer welcome in their home, except to
visit his twin daughters. Right around this time, Holder also had a quarrel with Lee Davis that nearly turned violent. Afterward Davis and Newhouse decided they could no longer tolerate the constant presence of Holder, who had essentially moved into the El Cajon apartment; rather than risk a serious altercation, they began to look for a
place of their own.

But Kerkow’s love for Holder only deepened by the day. She found it exhilarating to be dating a genuine soldier who had been on the lam for two years; he seemed like such a man of action compared to the many poseurs she had encountered at San Diego’s bars and beaches. Most of those boys considered themselves brave for attending a peace rally in Collier Park, or for spray-painting
PIG STY
on the wall of a police station. But Holder had spent his nineteenth birthday mowing down Vietcong from atop an M113, then risked his freedom to flee the Army. Kerkow had never shared her bed with anyone so gutsy, so far-out, so
real
. And though she didn’t quite buy Holder’s contention that celestial forces had reunited them after thirteen years, she took pleasure in the fact that he had once been reviled in Coos Bay—even though she still lacked the courage to tell her mother
whom she was dating.

Holder grew more possessive of Kerkow as their relationship wore on. One evening when she returned home from work at the massage parlor, she found him perched on the edge of her waterbed, tensely sucking down a Pall Mall. “You’re never going back to that place, not ever again,” he said. “That’s no job for a lady like you.”

Kerkow was touched by Holder’s concern—she hadn’t realized how much he was disturbed by the thought of her pleasuring customers. But she asked how they would pay the bills if she left the massage racket. She made a little extra cash by selling dime bags of Fast
Eddie’s marijuana, but her drug-dealing skills were shoddy at best; she let Holder and other acquaintances smoke away too
much of her supply.

Holder motioned for her to sit beside him. He stroked her hair as he calmly assured her that the universe would provide; they would never want for anything.

Though Kerkow had the utmost faith in Holder, she couldn’t help but worry about their finances. Every few days she checked the dwindling balance in her Security Pacific National Bank checking account, an exercise that only elevated her anxiety. But Holder refused to look for work, telling Kerkow that his undesirable discharge barred him from any job worth having. He instead spent his days trying to divine the cosmos’s intentions. He consulted astrological charts and studied books on dream interpretation, carefully underlining passages on how to determine when dreams presage events in the waking world. A well-worn copy of Madame Blavatsky’s
The Secret Doctrine
became his constant companion, a source he consulted again and again to solidify his
understanding of the Zodiac. He was confident his careful scholarship would reveal the path he was meant to choose.

For a time, Holder thought he and Kerkow were supposed to move to Costa Rica and conduct groundbreaking zoological research in the jungle; later he toyed with the notion of defecting to China, where President Nixon had recently completed a historic visit. But he ultimately rejected these ideas as too trivial: the more he contemplated his shadowy destiny, the more he felt it must somehow involve Vietnam.

Holder thought he had uncovered the perfect explanation for his acrimonious break with the Army: fate had ordained his undesirable discharge so that he could express his inmost feelings about the war. He—and not some coddled hippie who wouldn’t last a second in the rubber groves near Loc Ninh—would be the one to finally open the nation’s eyes to the moral inequities of Vietnam.

Though he now had a hazy purpose in mind, Holder struggled to come up with a specific course of action, one that would be theatrical enough to alter history. Then, one day in April, while looking for
inspiration in a copy of
The San Diego Union
, he came across a story about the murder
trial of Angela Davis.

D
URING HER BRIEF
tenure at the University of California at Los Angeles, Angela Davis had managed to gain far more notoriety than the typical entry-level philosophy professor. An avowed Communist fluent in the lingo of revolution, she had been hired by UCLA in the spring of 1969, to little fanfare. But by the time the fall semester rolled around, word had spread about her radical politics and her penchant for calling police officers “pigs.” California governor Ronald Reagan openly lobbied to have her fired for breaching the university system’s long-standing rule against granting faculty positions to
Communist Party members. Nearly two thousand UCLA students voiced their opposition to Reagan’s meddling by flocking to Davis’s class “Recurring Philosophical Themes in Black Literature,” where the twenty-five-year-old professor expounded on the works of Karl Marx
and Frederick Douglass.

After a ten-month legal struggle, Governor Reagan finally got his way. “As head of the Board of Regents, I, nor the board, will not tolerate any Communist activities at any state institution,” the triumphant governor wrote in a June 1970 memo informing the UCLA faculty of Davis’s ouster. “Communists are an endangerment to this wonderful system of government that we all share
and are proud of.” Davis was out of a job, but the ruckus over her drawn-out dismissal had turned her into a countercultural celebrity.

Shortly after her firing, Davis gave several guns to seventeen-year-old Jonathan Jackson, a bodyguard she had enlisted after receiving numerous death threats. On August 7, 1970, Jackson used those guns to mount an assault on the Marin County Hall of Justice in northern California, where a black inmate named James McClain was on trial for stabbing a prison guard. That stabbing had occurred as part of a tit-for-tat feud between the guards and the Black Guerrilla Family prison gang—a gang that been co-founded by Jackson’s brother, George. In
addition to being a radical author of some repute, George Jackson was also one of the so-called Soledad Brothers, a group of prisoners charged with murdering a guard in retaliation for the January 1970 killing of three inmates.

The goal of the courthouse attack was ambitious, to say the least: Jonathan aimed to seize hostages, take over a nearby radio station, broadcast a message about the squalid conditions endured by California’s black inmates, and then demand the Soledad Brothers’ immediate release from prison.

Using the guns registered to Davis, Jackson managed to free both McClain and two other prisoners who were waiting to testify at his trial, including a convicted kidnapper named Ruchell Magee. The liberated men took five hostages, including Judge Harold Haley, to whose neck they tied a sawed-off shotgun. They marched their captives into the courthouse corridor, where they urged members of the press corps to document their escape attempt. “You take all the pictures you want,” one of the men told a
San Rafael Independent-Journal
photographer while aiming a revolver at Judge Haley’s head. “We are the revolutionaries.”

But the trip to the radio station was not to be. As the kidnappers tried to drive their hostages out of the courthouse parking lot, several police officers opened fire on Jonathan Jackson’s van. Jackson and two of the escapees were killed in the ensuing shoot-out, as was Judge Haley, whose face was blown off when someone fired the shotgun attached to his neck. Magee was the only kidnapper to survive, though he suffered
multiple gunshot wounds.

Once the provenance of Jackson’s guns was established, Davis became the focus of a nationwide manhunt. In October 1970, two months after being placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, she was arrested at a Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge on Manhattan’s West Side. She had disguised herself by concealing her trademark Afro beneath a
tight-fitting wig.

The ensuing murder trial was a circus from the start. “I stand before the court as the target of a political frame-up which, far from
pointing to my culpability, implicates the state of California as an agent of political repression,” she declared at her arraignment
in January 1971. Her codefendant Magee was just as defiant in court, though far less eloquent; he engaged in frequent outbursts, at one point kicking his attorney in the face while calling him an operative for
the Ku Klux Klan. Bailiffs began shackling Magee to his chair for his court appearances; his case was later separated from that of Davis, in the hopes of toning down
the courtroom theatrics.