Fight in Flight

Over New Toronto, Ontario, late one night last week, an airplane zig-zagged back & forth to the mild alarm of townsmen, who feared the pilot was lost. Much greater would have been their alarm if they had known that inside the lurching plane its pilot and his one small assistant were desperately fending off the attack of a bull-strong U. S. baseball player who had suddenly become a growling, biting sadist.

The berserk athlete was Outfielder Leonard ("Len") Koenecke, 31, onetime railroad fireman noted among his Brooklyn Dodger teammates for his muscular torso, his pugnacity, his inability to hold hard liquor. Last week he was given his paycheck in St. Louis, where the team was playing, told to go home to his wife and child. Disconsolate at this dismissal, he started drinking on the way, was ejected from an American Airliner at Detroit. There he hired Pilot William Joseph Mulqueeny and his friend Irwin Davis, a professional parachute-jumper, to fly him to Buffalo. At 10 p. m., they took off in a small cabin monoplane which once belonged to Torchsinger Libby Holman.

Sitting beside Pilot Mulqueeny, Outfielder Koenecke soon became rambunctious. He began nudging Mulqueeny, grabbing the controls, locking his arm about the startled pilot's neck. Suddenly Koenecke leaped at Parachuter Davis. sank his teeth through several layers of cloth into the smaller man's elbow, bore him to the floor, tore at his clothes, bit into his flesh again & again.

For nearly an hour the terrified little parachute-jumper tried to stave off the advances of the baseballer. Finally he was pinned to the floor, blood-smeared and near exhaustion. Then Pilot Mulqueeny realized: "It was either the three of us or just one. I left the controls and tried to pull Koenecke down. . . . Finally I grabbed the fire extinguisher. I walloped him over the head with it." A dozen times, Mulqueeny bashed the wild man, splashing blood and extinguishing fluid all over the cabin walls. At last Koenecke slumped into a heap. Just in time. Pilot Mulqueeny jumped back to his controls, managed to land the plane on a dark racecourse at New Toronto. When the police arrived, they found Koenecke practically naked, frightfully battered, dead.

In Ontario, a jury speedily exonerated the two aviators.

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