Estimated reading time: 11 minutes
Garrett Trapnell was a career criminal, master manipulator, and convicted airplane hijacker whose influence inspired two women to attempt extraordinary prison rescues. What followed involved a .45-caliber pistol, a hijacked helicopter, another commandeered airliner, and one of the strangest crime stories of the 1970s.
Garrett Trapnell: The Charming Con Man With a Criminal Mind
My mom was a beauty queen, and my dad was a football star. Tragically, I didn’t seem to inherit any of that. Don’t feel sorry for me. I still ended up with plenty of other cool stuff. My parents are both freaking awesome. Much to most of what I am today I owe to their genetic influence, longsuffering tutelage, and superlative examples. However, that nature versus nurture thing runs in the other direction as well.
Garrett Brock Trapnell was born in 1938 in Brockton, Massachusetts. As near as I could tell, this guy just came from the factory broken. He lied about stuff when telling the truth would have been easier. His classic old-school crime spree spanned two decades.
Trapnell often passed himself off as a CIA agent as part of his cons. He robbed any number of banks across Canada before cleaning out a jewelry store in Freeport, Bahamas, of $100,000 worth of gems and sundry baubles. Along the way, he married at least six different women that we know of. Garrett Trapnell was a card-carrying full-time professional sociopath.
Here’s what is so weird. Despite being a pathological liar and an unrepentant polygamist, the women who hooked their wagons to Trapnell’s horse really did seem to fall for him. One in particular demonstrated her love for the man in a truly compelling fashion.
How Garrett Trapnell Used the Insanity Defense to Escape Prison
Trapnell was an unrepentant criminal, but he was also exceptionally smart. This is a rare and dangerous combination. When he was inevitably apprehended, he would often act utterly deranged and have his lawyers put forth an insanity defense. This technique got him committed to mental institutions rather than prison. It was easier to break out of insane asylums or change his behavior and be declared “cured” so that he could once again breathe free air.
This approach toward the criminal justice system was actually quite effective right up until 1972 when Garrett Trapnell stepped over an invisible line. That was when he hijacked TWA Flight #2 from LA to New York. Hijacking was much more common back then than it is now. Garrett Trapnell raised it to an art form.
TWA Flight 2: A .45-Caliber Pistol and a $306,800 Demand
On 28 January 1972, Trapnell boarded this cross-country passenger flight with a fake cast on his arm. Concealed within the cast was a .45-caliber automatic pistol. Once airborne in the vicinity of Chicago, Trapnell broke out his hogleg and laid out his demands.
Trapnell had lost a recent court case and owed his attorneys a great deal of money. As a result, he demanded $306,800 in cash for starters (about $2.5 million today). In addition, he mandated the safe release of Angela Davis. Davis was a philosophy professor at UCLA and an avowed communist. She purchased firearms for a small group of African-American terrorists who used the guns to kill a judge and several hostages during a failed escape attempt from a California courtroom. Acquitted of these charges later, Davis’ legal travails had become a cause celebre for the radical Left. Just to make sure there would be a happy ending to this sordid tale, Trapnell also made the safe release of the hostages contingent upon an unconditional pardon from President Richard Nixon.
Any idiot could have told him that this ridiculous plan was destined for failure. A disguised FBI agent shot and wounded Trapnell once they landed at Kennedy Airport. No one else was hurt. Trapnell recovered in short order, but that wild adventure landed him in federal prison.
Garrett Trapnell’s Insanity Defense Meets a Federal Jury
At his trial, Trapnell once again played the crazy card. He claimed to suffer from both schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder while vehemently asserting his innocence throughout. He explained that the guy who committed the hijacking was actually some dude named Greg Ross. The rub was that Ross seemed to have been physically occupying Trapnell’s body at the time of the crime.
The prosecution had done their homework this time. The government produced a recording made several months prior to the hijacking wherein Trapnell boasted to a journalist concerning how convincing he could be when pretending to be stark raving mad. Despite such compelling evidence, this trial still ended in a hung jury when one juror, a social worker by profession, failed to convict. This just goes to show that people are idiots.
Four months later, Trapnell was finally convicted of hijacking during his retrial. He was sentenced to life in prison and locked up at USP Marion in Williamson County, Illinois. Marion was the country’s first designated supermax prison. Now, hold that thought…
Barbara Oswald: The Woman Who Hijacked a Helicopter for Trapnell
Once on the Inside, Garrett Trapnell kept himself busy trying mightily to get out. He had an undeniably charismatic personality in the same vein as that of Charles Manson. Manipulating people was kind of his superpower. His target du jour was a female friend named Barbara Ann Oswald. Oswald was actually a Staff Sergeant on active duty in the Army.
On 24 May 1978, SSG Oswald took leave and hijacked a civilian charter helicopter based in St. Louis and piloted by a Vietnam veteran named Allen Barklage. Oswald forced Barklage at gunpoint to fly to Marion with the intention of liberating both Trapnell and one of his scumbag friends, Martin McNally. McNally was quite the character in his own right.
McNally was incarcerated for having hijacked an American Airlines Boeing 727 in June of 1972. He demanded $502,500 (where do they get these specific sums?) and then leapt out of the plane with a parachute over Peru, Indiana. Unlike DB Cooper, the cops scooped him up in short order.
Anyway, Barklage flew Oswald to the prison as directed. Just before touchdown, he grabbed the woman’s gun and a struggle ensued. Here’s where things got interesting.
The Bell 206 Helicopter Hijacking That Ended in Gunfire
Google claims the aircraft was a Bell 206 JetRanger II. This is the civilian version of the militarized OH58. I flew OH58 Aeroscouts operationally for Uncle Sam myself back in the day. Fighting somebody while simultaneously flying a JetRanger isn’t much like the movies.
If you let go of the controls of an OH-58 in flight, the aircraft will gradually roll upside down and kill you. I honestly cannot imagine trying to go mano-a-mano, even with a small woman, while trying to keep the greasy side down. Tom Cruise and James Bond can do that, but I sure couldn’t. Apparently, however, Allen Barklage had more in common with those awesome action movie guys than he did with me. He wrestled the gun away from Oswald and shot her dead while also successfully landing the helicopter. That’s a horrible story, but, wow, what a stud.
Robyn Oswald Hijacks TWA Flight 541: The Nightmare Continues
Seven months later in December of 1978, Barbara Oswald’s 17-year-old daughter Robyn boarded TWA Flight 541 in Louisville, Kentucky. Flight 541 was a McDonnell Douglas DC9 destined for Kansas City International. There were 87 souls on board.
Once the plane reached cruising altitude, Robyn stood up and calmly announced that she was wearing a bomb and that she now had control of the airplane. Witnesses later described her as gorgeous and completely at ease throughout. News releases afterward characterized her as a “calm, cool, and collected doll.” I’m not sure how that description would go over in the mainstream media today. Robyn demanded that Trapnell be freed or she would blow up the plane.
The pilots diverted to Williamson County Regional where the FBI got involved. After a tense nine hours on the ground, FBI hostage negotiators eventually orchestrated a peaceful resolution to the crisis wherein no one was harmed. The bomb was found to have been a handful of railroad flares wired to a doorbell. As she was a juvenile at the time, the details of her charges were never made public.
Three Hijackings, Two Women, and Garrett Trapnell’s Deadly Influence
If I’m counting correctly, that’s at least four different aerial hijackings at play in this sordid tale. Barbara Oswald considered herself Trapnell’s girlfriend at the time. Right, wrong, or otherwise, Robyn either believed Trapnell to be her actual father or at least viewed him as a father figure in her life.
Tragically, Allen Barklage perished due to injuries incurred in a helicopter crash twenty years later in 1998. McNally, the parachuting hijacker, was paroled in 2010. Despite a fair amount of effort, I couldn’t figure out what became of Robyn beyond that her time in prison had been brief.
Garrett Trapnell’s Final Years: Solitary Confinement and a Grim Ending
By now the good folks who ran the supermax prison at Marion had lost their patience with Garrett Trapnell. He was placed under a “No Human Contact” order and remanded to solitary confinement for the rest of his days. Journalist Eliot Asinof published a book about Trapnell’s life titled The Fox is Crazy, Too. In it, he describes Trapnell as an inveterate career criminal with a genius-level IQ but no functional conscience.
A decent psychiatrist could have had a field day with Garrett Trapnell. I would start with antisocial personality disorder and work out from there. However, such organically defective people seldom make wise life choices. Trapnell, for his part, was a voracious consumer of cigarettes.
In 1993, a dying Garrett Trapnell was transferred to the United States Medical Center for Federal prisoners in Springfield, Missouri. Emphysema was predictably killing him. On 7 September of that year, the master con man who so deftly manipulated women while claiming to be a CIA agent got to meet Jesus face-to-face. He was 55 years old. I obviously wasn’t there, but I suspect he had some pretty serious explaining to do.
Related Aviation Hijacking History From GunsAmerica Digest
For another remarkable chapter in the history of aircraft hijackings and the armed responses that followed, read Operation Isotope from GunsAmerica Digest, covering the 1972 hijacking of Sabena Flight 571 and the Israeli rescue operation that brought it to an end.
Will is still trying to figure out what he really wants to be when he grows up. However, shooting guns and claiming it was work seemed like a pretty sweet hustle. As a result, Will serendipitously transformed an avocation into a vocation.
Raised in the Mississippi Delta, Will flew UH1H, OH58A/C, CH47D and AH1S helicopters operationally as an Army Aviator. He is SCUBA-qualified and has parachuted out of perfectly good airplanes at 3 o’clock in the morning. Will has summited Mount McKinley, Alaska, six times…always at the controls of an Army helicopter, which is the only way sensible folk climb mountains.
Will has delivered sixty babies and occasionally wrung human blood out of his socks. He is married to his high school sweetheart and has three awesome adult children. Turn-ons include vintage German machineguns, flying his sexy-cool RV6A airplane, Count Chocula cereal and the movie “Aliens.”
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