A Tale of Two Losers

After interviewing more than 40 skyjackers, Dallas Psychiatrist David G. Hubbard produced a prototypical profile of an insecure, effeminate loner who has probably never seduced a woman. Heinrich VonGeorge, 45, the man who hijacked a Mohawk Airlines propjet last week, scarcely fits that pattern. His motive was not an escape compulsion or an aberrant drive for momentary fame. It was a simple, brutal act of financial desperation.

VonGeorge was the kind of American failure that Theodore Dreiser was born to document. His real name, according to FBI files, was Merlyn La Verne St. George, and he once served two years in San Quentin for petty theft. He variously, and unsuccessfully, ran a tobacco shop, sold drug products and worked as assistant manager of a discount store. Despite his failures, though, friends in Brockton, Mass., where he moved in 1970, say that VonGeorge seemed determined to provide for his wife and seven children.

Finally, unemployed and debt-ridden, he told his wife that he was going to Albany to look for a job. He hijacked the Mohawk airliner with a track-meet starter's pistol, demanded and got $200,000 in ransom money, then forced the plane to land in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. There VonGeorge suffered his final setback: he was shotgunned to death at point-blank range by an FBI agent.

The week's second skyjacker, though, was one of the 40 that Dr. Hubbard studied last year after he allegedly stole a private plane. Shortly after 5 a.m. on Saturday, Garrett Brook Trapnell, 33, of Waltham, Mass., walked into the pilot's cabin aboard Trans World Airlines Flight 2 from Los Angeles to New York. He told the pilot and crew of the Boeing 707 that he had a time bomb and later produced an automatic from a phony plastic cast on his arm.

During the eight hours he held command of the plane, Trapnell demanded that he be allowed to talk to President Nixon, TWA Chairman Charles Tillinghast, and his lawyer in Miami; that he be given the precise sum of $306,800, the amount he lost in a lawsuit when the Federal Government took away a marina he owned; that he be flown to Dallas to see a psychiatrist; and that Angela Davis and a Dallas County prisoner named George Padilla, a friend, be released. Padilla told his Dallas jailers, "I'm not going anywhere with him. He's nuts." Trapnell agreed to let the 94 passengers debark at Kennedy Airport, ordered the pilot to take off, then forced him to return to Kennedy when the plane was over the eastern tip of Long Island. Once they were back on the ground, Trapnell ordered a fresh crew with, as he put it, "no heroes." Two of the new crew members, however, turned out to be FBI agents who shot Trapnell in the arm and hand and took him into custody. Authorities said that Trapnell was wanted for robbery in Canada and Miami, where he had been declared legally insane.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.