Brendan Koerner: The Skies Belong to Us

Plane hijackings aren’t very common anymore. But in the late 1960s and early 1970s, armed criminals were forcing commercial airliners to divert their flights, oftentimes demanding ransom. Author Brendan Koerner tells the story of an American couple turned hijackers, whose journey ends with some surprising twists. Koerner’s book is called: The Skies Belong to Us. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
So every time something is done to kind of keep
it in check, the virus in this case of behavioral
virus kind of mutates and it becomes different, and in
this case it became more violent.

Speaker 1 (00:27):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,

(00:50):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and a deep dive into the unpublished
details behind their stories. Plane hijackings aren't very common anymore,
but in the late nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies,

(01:12):
armed criminals were forcing commercial airliners to divert their flights,
oftentimes demanding ransom. Author Brendan Kerner tells the story of
an American couple turned hijackers whose journey ends with some
surprising twists. Kerner's book is called The Skies Belong to Us.

(01:33):
You know, I was talking to one of my kids,
their teenagers in high school, and I was talking to
one of them, and we were talking about picking somebody
up from the airport, and I said, I remember when
you could just walk right up to the gate and
Dad is there, he's getting off the plane, and you
hug them and then you all walk off. And I
think she thought I was lying. I don't think she
thought that day would come in. I know there are
members of our audience who were not, you know, alive.

(01:53):
They've always lived with this, the TSA, how strict they are,
not being able to go up to gates. And I
know a lot of that came from September eleventh. But
take me back further wherever you think is a good
place to start this story, to set the scene.

Speaker 2 (02:06):
The story really starts kind of at the dawn of
mass air travel in the United States, talking late nineteen fifties,
early nineteen sixties, the first time that the common man
and common woman could afford a plane ticket, and it
was starting supplant driving or taking a train to your destination.
The airlines wanted the flying experience to be just like

(02:27):
going to a bus terminal or going to a train station.
They didn't want people to feel like it was a
different kind of experience. So, and this is very hard
for people to understand now, there was basically no security
at all. So you'd be dropped off at the sidewalk
outside the terminal. You would walk through with your bag.
No one would check it, there were no metal detectors.
You would walk to the gate, you'd walk onto the tarmac,

(02:49):
you'd walk up to the top of the boarding stairs,
and that's the place oftentimes where they would ask to
see your ticket. You'd have to show ID. And there
were many flights in fact, where you could get on
the plane, the plane would take off, and then the
flight attendant would come down and you would pay for
your ticket while you were already in the air. That
was pretty much common practice for shuttle flights. So it

(03:11):
was very very easy for people to bring weapons onto planes,
and that really in nineteen sixty one when you had
the first hijacking in American airspace, it was someone who
just brought steak knife onto the plane and went to
the cockpit and held it to the pilot's throat and said,
I want to go to Cuba. And this was shortly
after the Cuban Revolution and we'd cut off diplomatic relations

(03:33):
with Cuba, and so there was real questions like should
we do this, and the pilot decided, well, the safest
thing is for me to fly this person to Cuba.
And then that kind of became the norm for the
next several years, because there's no real extradition from Cuba.
A lot of people idealized Cuba at that time is
this kind of like glorious workers paradise, and so you

(03:56):
had this huge rash of people that would take weapons
onto planes and that they would demand to be flown
to Havana, and the airlines, you know, kind of did
the math in their heads. I mean, there was some
early agitation and discussion of like, well, should we search
people before they get on planes? And what they decided
was that economically it made the most sense just to

(04:16):
comply with the hijackers demands and do whatever they said,
which at that time was always going to Cuba. The
calculus they had in their minds was like, Okay, so
we fly the person to Cuba, they get off, we
never see them again, the people on the plane, other
passengers are inconvenience, but they get to spend a night
at a hotel in Havana. People have great stories about

(04:37):
bringing back cigars in Rome, and like, you know, and
we give them, we comp them a ticket, and you know,
it costs us you know, a few hundred grand a year,
Whereas they thought, if we institute you know, security and airports,
we're going to scare away tons of customers and it's
going to cost us millions and millions of dollars. So
it became just an economic decision to institute this policy

(04:58):
of total compliance with high j actor's demands pretty early
on in this time period.

Speaker 1 (05:02):
And I think you said in your book that you know,
a hijacking to Cuba, it was like twenty five thousand
dollars is all it cost an airline to do that?
Is that right?

Speaker 2 (05:11):
Yeah? Basically, so the big expenses where you had to
comp the passengers on a ticket and you also had
to pay Castro. This actually became a revenue source for
the Castro regime after they had been deprived of American trade.
He would charge pretty exorbitant sums to refuel the plane
and get it back in the air, but again, twenty

(05:32):
five thousand dollars much much cheaper than spending millions, And
of course they were afraid of the business they would lose.
They didn't want people to feel like they were criminals
for the act of trying to fly.

Speaker 1 (05:46):
What were the reactions of the airline passengers. Was there
psychological trauma or was it just assumed, well, we haven't
had a fatality in one of these things yet, and
that's it.

Speaker 2 (05:57):
Well, certainly at first there wasn't real violence associated with
these hijackings. I think one thing I talk about in
the book a lot is that how this what I
call the Golden Age of hijacking somewhat tongue in cheek,
kind of followed the temporal, you know, structure of a
physiological epidemic in that it kind of starts small and

(06:17):
then it kind of mutates over time. So every time
something is done to kind of keep it in check,
the virus in this case of behavioral virus kind of
mutates and it becomes different. And in this case it
became more violent as it passed on. So in these
early years, people didn't really want to commit violence, and
people weren't committing violence in these hijackings, so people didn't
really feel threatened in you know, the early to mid

(06:40):
nineteen sixties. They weren't really super frightened at that point
because they said, Okay, they're just trying to negotiate. This
is just some mentally ill person or some person that
has personal problem, whatever it is. They just want to
go to Havana. I'll go down there, I'll spend a
night in a hotel. I'll stuff some cigars in my
suit case and smuggle them back, and I have a

(07:01):
great story to tell. But over time, these hijackings did
get terribly out of hand and terribly violent.

Speaker 1 (07:09):
When was the first or what were the circumstances of
the first fatality that happened on one of these flights.

Speaker 2 (07:15):
Well, actually one of the first ones was the murder
of a pilot. A passenger went and actually ordered the
pilots to go out it was out of Boston, I believe,
and went out over the Atlantic Ocean, and he actually
murdered one of the pilots, shot one of the pilots
in the head, shot another one who then actually managed
to land the fight back and land the plane. So
that was really the beginning. But when things really got

(07:37):
out of hand was really in the early nineteen seventies.
A lot of it associated with the FBI often trying
to storm these planes with guns drawn and trying to
rescue passengers and apprehend these hijackers. And that's when you
started to have some shootouts and some fatalities among passengers.

Speaker 1 (07:55):
So you said that a lot of these planes get
diverted through threats to Cuba, But that's not where we
end up heading with your story. Do you want to
sort of set the scene for who your main characters
are and by the way, you know, I read several
reviews that were all very complimentary of how empathetic you are,

(08:15):
not easy, but empathetic to the two people involved in
this hijacking and how unusual that is, and sort of
your how well you've done digging into the psychology behind
why people do this and not dismissing them as mentally
ill or you know, just a penchant for violence or
politically you know, drawn to this sort of thing. So
so setting the stage there, I think you know that

(08:36):
you have a lot of insight with these two folks,
and that's one of the great things about your book.

Speaker 2 (08:41):
Yeah, thank you. So my book is really set in
nineteen seventy two. This is at the very end and
really the craziest, wildest, most dangerous part of this criminal epidemic.
A couple of things that happened in a couple of
years leading up to this time. You know, I talked
about how for quite a while all these flights were
heading to Cuba. You know. Then you had kind of

(09:01):
a real landmark hijack in nineteen sixty nine where an
Italian American marine he's actually born in Italy but had
immigrated here. He had a dispute with the Marines, and
he decided to hijack a plane back to Italy. And
that was really the first time that a hijacker from
the US had taken a plane somewhere other than Cuba.
And so that created a new phase of this epidemic

(09:22):
where you had hijackers wanting to go other places. A
year after that, you had a truck driver from Arizona
who had a tax dispute, hijacked a plane and demanded
one hundred million dollars in ransom from the Supreme Court,
which he was upset had not taken his tax grievance up.
So in that instance, actually the Airline TWA made a

(09:44):
decision to pay him one million dollars. They didn't have
a one hundred million dollars lying around. They thought that might
placate him. And so that really set a precedent for well,
not only can you travel somewhere other than Cuba, you
can also get ransom, you can get money and rich
from doing this, and that kind of set off this
really wild part of this epidemic. So, you know, flashed

(10:05):
forward to nineteen seventy two, there's a young Vietnam veteran
named Willie Roger Holder and he returns from the war.
He had a really bad experience where he'd done several
tours and had kind of had a mental breakdown and
had gotten in some legal trouble with the army. Came
back to the States and went awall and was kind
of bumming around San Diego and he meets one day,

(10:28):
he goes to the house of a woman that he's
trying to romance, and this woman's roommate answers the door,
and this is Katherine Marie Kirkou, a twenty year old
young woman from Kusbe, Oregon who had come down to
San Diego. She kind of a hippie had come down
there to get some son and some sand, and she
was working in a massage parlor actually with her friend,

(10:51):
and so they meet this way kind of accidentally, and
they fall madly in love pretty instantly, a real infatuation
between the two of them. Roger Holder, you know, kind
of had a bit of his mental breakdowns continuing at
this time. You know, he is actually about to get
in trouble, some legal trouble for bouncing some checks, and
he's got some really bad personal circumstances, and he gets

(11:11):
it in his mind that he's going to do something
spectacular basically to reinvent himself and carve out this new
life with Kathy Kirko, the new love of his life.
And at that time, there's a huge story going on
up in San Jose. It's the trial of Angela Davis.
This is a communist philosophy professor at UCLA who stood

(11:32):
accused of having supplied firearms to a group of black
militants who had shot up a courthouse in an effort
to liberate one of their comrades. And now she was
on trial and faced life in prison. In this trial,
there's a real cause celebra the rolling Stones famously wrote
a song about her, and Roger Holder got in his

(11:53):
mind that he was going to do something, that he
was going to hijack a plane and he was going
to use that as a negotiating tactic to obtain Angeli
Davis's freedom as well as three million dollars. And his
plan was Angela Davis would get on the plane with
him and Kathy. They would fly to North Vietnam where

(12:13):
he would drop off Angeli Davis and Hanoi, and then
him and Kathy would fly to Australia where they would
homestead in the Australian outback and live happily ever after.
So it's not really a great plan, it's definitely ambitious,
but that was what was in the air at that
time that there was this kind of like mass delusional

(12:35):
feeling where people did have all these grandiose plans to
do with these hijackings, and a lot of it had
to do with a lot of veterans coming home, a
lot of people that were frustrated with the fact that,
like you know, there'd been all these protests against the
war and for civil rights and they'd ended assassinations and
a continuation of the war. A lot of feeling that

(12:55):
normal political channels and means had done nothing for these
people who had grieve vinces with the government, and so
there was increasingly turning to spectacular violence. That was Roger's plan,
but as you might imagine, didn't quite play out the
way he envisioned.

Speaker 1 (13:14):
What is the American government's response to all of this
is it's becoming more and more violent. Are they saying finally, okay,
we need more security on these planes. Are we pass
the point where we're trying to preserve the money coming
in from passengers versus their safety.

Speaker 2 (13:29):
So this is one of the most interesting things I
found in the course of researching this book is that
there was quite a bit of agitation pressing on the
governmental side for the institution of meaningful security. The people
resisted it were the airlines. The airlines were incredibly frightened
of what it would do to their bottom lines. Essentially,

(13:50):
do you have to institute all the security at every
airport by X ray machines search everyone. I talk a
lot about these congressional hearings that would take place every
so often in response to these ways of hijackings, And
you always had, you know, a pretty high paid lobbyist
from PanAm or TWA talking about, well, we can't do
this because imagine the line that would like stend out

(14:12):
the door. If you had a search every passenger, it
would destroy our industry. And they had a lot of clout.
It was a new, glamorous, wealthy industry. I've often told
people it's kind of like the tech of its day.
I mean, this was an era where the release of
the new Boeing seven forty seven was like the biggest event,
like the biggest tech event in the world. They had

(14:33):
a lot of clout, and they were able to stave
off government mandates about security. So you did occasionally have
things where you know, the government did come up. The
FAA came up with this identification system. They basically came
up with a behavioral profile for hijackers, and they would
have a ticket agent. They would say look for these
like twenty five different indications that someone may be a hijacker.

Speaker 1 (14:56):
So profiling essentially exactly.

Speaker 2 (14:59):
And so so when one of them is like if
they're wearing military surplus clothing, if they don't seem to
care about what's in their luggage. In those cases, you
can pull people over and search them. But it was
supposed to apply to like less than one percent of passengers.
And on top of that, you know, being an airline
ticket agent's a hard job. You're dealing with a lot
of harry, often angry customers. You're not really totally well

(15:23):
equipped to also be applying a behavioral profile to everyone
that comes past. So it wasn't very effective. But yeah,
really it was the airlines who were preventing a lot
of this institution of security, and that's really why the
government kind of made the decision, specifically the FBI, that like, well,
if the airlines aren't going to do something about this,

(15:44):
we're going to become more aggressive about apprehending hijackers. And
that's really when you got the FBI often plotting to
get agents, undercover agents onto planes to stop hijackers. And
that's when you did have some shootings on planes.

Speaker 1 (16:00):
And that is that sort of where the idea of
that air marshal was born, where you have these people
undercover on planes and you never know who's going to
be one.

Speaker 2 (16:08):
Yeah, that is they did have a force of air marshals.
The problem is that there's so many flights home and
you could only hire so many air marshals. So I did,
in the course of this speak in my research speak
to people who had been air marshals, but none of
them actually ever stopped a hijacking. They maybe dealt with
like unruly drunken passengers and they had stories about that,
but none of them really stopped a hijacking. You just

(16:30):
couldn't hire enough of them.

Speaker 1 (16:31):
So when seventy two, when this happens, there's still no
requirement to show identification along with your ticket.

Speaker 2 (16:39):
Yeah, absolutely not, even then in nineteen seventy two. This
epidemic has been going on for more than eleven years
at this time, and yeah, pretty much the same thing
that you could still just walk through the terminal with
a gun in your jacket and no would say a word.

Speaker 1 (16:56):
Wow. Okay, So when Roger and Kathy are formulating this plan,
most of it seems to come from Roger. Does Roger
hold her have a way to get a hold of
Angela Davis to check in with her and see if
he pulls us off this is something she actually wants
to do, be dropped off in Vietnam?

Speaker 2 (17:12):
That was a real flaw in the plan. He definitely
did not have a way to reach her, and in
fact jumping head just a little bit. When they had
their demands relayed to the airport in San Francisco and
they relayed those that instruction to Angela Davis, she said,
there's no way on Earth I'm getting on that plane

(17:33):
with this crazy person. I don't know smart Lin Good.
So that became a non starter that part of the
so he had to improvise a little bit.

Speaker 1 (17:41):
So we are going to be talking about an airline
that I think is defunct. I'm pretty sure why Western
Airlines along with twa so Western Airlines flight seven oh one.
Where is it taking off from? And where is it
destined to go? When Roger and Kathy get.

Speaker 2 (17:56):
Their tickets, so it's actually going from Los Angeles to
see they're going, and they actually fly almost all the
way to Seattle. It's not until the plane is descending
towards the airport in Seattle that Roger Holder calls over
one of the stewardesses and hands her a note. And
this is a part that he did think through. So
he basically said in the note, he claimed that he

(18:19):
was being forced to do this, that the weather underground
had kidnapped his children and was forcing him to carry
out this hijacking, and that there were three others on
the plane that were members of the Weather Underground, the
radical group, and so you know, obviously that created a
sense of fear, obviously pretending his numbers are larger than

(18:42):
they really are. And he had a briefcase and on
this note it had a diagram of the briefcase being
a bomb, and so he basically had a briefcase and
there was like a wire coming out of it and
a little ring on the wire and his finger was
through it, and he basically said, if I pulled this wire,
the whole plane's going to be a good blown up.
So you better take me to the cockpit right away.

Speaker 1 (19:03):
Okay. So the flight attendant is, I'm sure very stressed out.
They're trained at this point, I'm sure to be incredibly
calm and not panic passengers who are thousands of feet
up in the air. So she reports to the pilot
and the co pilot, and what is their response, We're
going to go somewhere.

Speaker 2 (19:19):
Yeah, that's exactly right, because that's the that's the official
policy of these airlines. And you have to see it
from the point of view of a captain. So the
captain has a responsibility for the safety of everyone aboard.
And so their number one thing is they don't care
if the airline's going to have to pay millions of
dollars or satisfy what every demands. All they're there to

(19:39):
do is guarantee the safety of the passengers. And it
was pretty much agreed upon that the way you do
that is by giving into their every demand so they
won't harm the passengers. So even if you're skeptical of like, well,
will this hijacker really hurt anybody, they always try to
air on the side of cautions. So they land in
Seattle and they immediately turn back around and fly to

(20:01):
San Francisco, which is where Roger Holder demanded they'd be
flown so they could obtain Angela Davis.

Speaker 1 (20:08):
Okay, and then so what happens once they reached San Francisco.

Speaker 2 (20:12):
So Roger Holder seeing that Angela Davis is not gonna
get with the program, and he demanded three million dollars
as well, and passage to Vietnam. Rustern Owen doesn't have
three million dollars, but they kind of negotiate, and so
they basically settle for half a million dollars. They'll bring
them half a million dollars in a big canvas sack,

(20:34):
and then Roger Holder makes kind of a snap decision,
doesn't consult with Kathy at all. Kathy is, by the way,
in the main cabin incognito. She has not revealed herself
to be part of this plan. She's actually sitting separately
from Roger, but she's aware that this was the plan.
And so Roger kind of in this kind of manick

(20:58):
state of things not going right and obviously he's having
some mental health issues, he makes the decision that he's
going to alter the plan severely, and so he no
longer wants to go to North Vietnam. He tells the
pilots that he now wants to go to Algiers in Algeria.

(21:19):
And this is an interesting choice and doesn't come out
of left field. So at that time, Algeria was kind of,
like I tell people, kind of like Venezuela today. It's
kind of like revolutionary socialist, anti American, anti Western country
that really welcomed all sorts of revolutionaries. So, for example,
the Vietcong had a villa in Algiers, and actually several

(21:43):
black Panthers lived there as well, including Eldridge Kleaver, the
very famous Minister of Information for the Black Panther Party,
author of soul on Ice. He had fled to Cuba
to avoid arrest, and then had fled from Cuba to Algier,
and so he was there, and obviously Roger knew about
the Panthers being there, and so he just kind of

(22:06):
made this decision on the fly that well, I don't
have Angela Davis, so there's no more reason to go
to Vietnam. I guess let's go to Algeria. And no
one had ever requested to go there before. So what
he did is he okayed the release of half the
passengers in San Francisco. And then the other part is that,
you know, the plane that he hijacked was a seven

(22:28):
twenty seven, a Boeing seven twenty seven. It's a somewhat
short distance jet, not something you can take over an
ocean at all. So he also had to request a
whole new jet capable of trans oceanic travel. Again total compliance,
he retained. He took half the passengers with him onto
the new plane. They got a new flight crew that

(22:51):
is kind of capable of doing transoceanic voyages, and they
flew to JFK Airport in New York, refueled there and
then flew to Algiers. He let off the rest of
the passengers in New York and then at the flight
crew and Roger Holder and Kathy flew to Algiers.

Speaker 1 (23:08):
So, just to take a pause real quick, what would
happen now? I've been thinking that through half of the
story here. What would happen? Now? Are airlines number one
allowed to pay a ransom? And number two? You know,
I'm assuming nobody would let him switch planes these days,
they would somehow intervene.

Speaker 2 (23:25):
Yeah, that's absolutely right, because now the assumption is that
anyone who commits a hijacking is doing it to create
as much death and destruction as possible. So there's no
question in my mind there would be a police and
or military action taken against the plane that he was on,
that they he wouldn't be allowed to take off, There's
no question in my mind. So it really is hard

(23:47):
to wrap your head around if you're used to our
current climate and our current conception of terrorism. I mean,
this was in a sense, these were terroristic acts. These
were people often with political ends, using violence spectacular you know,
examples of criminality to further political ends. So this was

(24:08):
early terrorism. But wasn't focused on killing as many people
as possible.

Speaker 1 (24:12):
Well, that's what's disturbing to me is the airlines are
clearly saying, look at the precedent, everything's been fine, nobody's
been murdered except I guess these pilots that we talked
about before, you know, and just counting on this not
escalating when clearly we're at a point in seventy two
that this has escalated. Has a weather underground ever done anything,
been involved with any of these or he just pulled
that out of thin air, essentially because they were an

(24:34):
organization that had caused some big problems.

Speaker 2 (24:37):
Yeah, he pulled that out of thin air. So in
my research, these were all generally people who when they
did and they often did, claim affiliation with organized groups
like the Black Panther Party or like Puerto Rican liberation groups,
but if you scrasp me at the surface, oftentimes they
had no actual interactions with those groups. They were people
who had were a desperate personal situations. They had lost

(25:02):
their families, they lost jobs, they were wanted by the
law was very frequent, like Roger Holder, of course, and
so that was really the unifying threat. It was people
who felt they had nothing left to lose, essentially, and
they would claim a political cause and maybe something that
really genuinely did interest them. So you know, for example,

(25:25):
Roger Holder was deeply obviously, deeply, genuinely scarred by his
service in Vietnam, but you know, he didn't have any
affiliation with the Weather Underground, had never interactions with the
Black Panther Party none at all.

Speaker 1 (25:38):
So tell me what happens, you know, after they let
half of the passengers off, So then does everybody, you know,
half of this plane plus the crew, plus Roger and Kathy,
do they all go straight to Algiers or is there
another stop along the way?

Speaker 2 (25:52):
Yeah? I no, So basically in San Francisco they let
half the passengers off. The other half have to go,
unfortunately to New York where they land at JFK for refueling.
That's where Roger lets off those passengers. And so the
only three people left aboard other than Roger and Kathy
are the three members of the flight crew, the pilot,

(26:15):
the co pilot, and the navigator. And so it's the
five of them who fly to Algiers together.

Speaker 1 (26:20):
Which is even riskier because now it's two people versus
these three and two of course, are all three of
them are occupied with trying to keep the plane going.
I'm sure this must have been terrifying, either for the
crew or of course the passengers. Who did you end
up talking to?

Speaker 2 (26:34):
Yeah? So I talked to several crew members, both flight
attendants and people part members of the flight crews, and
several passengers as well. On the Algiers bound leg I
talked to the captain William Newell, and he said, the
thing that terrified him the most was, you know, Algeria
was a hostile nation to the United States, So the
thing that freaked him out the most was them getting

(26:56):
shot down by fighter jets on approach to Algiers really
really concerned him.

Speaker 1 (27:01):
So what would be the protocol? Would that be calling
ahead and saying you're going to see a flight It's
been this is not us doing The Americans are not
doing this. We've been hijacked. What do we do? Is
that what they ended up having to do. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (27:14):
So, Fortunately, although we didn't have official diplomatic relations with
Algeria at this time, we did have an American interest
officer in Algiers. They got him and he was able
to contact the Algerian government and explain the situation. As
best he could. In fact, the Algerians were pleased to
have this flight coming in partly because it's like a

(27:34):
real black eye for their enemies, the Americans, that these people,
you know, stole this jet and brought it to Algiers.
There was a little trepidation. Obviously they didn't totally know
who these people were. So when they did land in Algiers,
there was interview by the government that they determined pretty
quickly that these people were essentially harmless and were just

(27:55):
kind of a couple of people who lucked into pulling
this off in a lot of ways.

Speaker 1 (27:59):
So did Roger and Kathy actually get this. It's half
a million dollars I think, is what you said they
settled for out of three million, is it right?

Speaker 2 (28:05):
Yeah, that's right. So they brought the five hundred thousand dollars.
They left five thousand dollars in the oven of the
galley of the plane as a tip for the flight crew,
and then, unfortunately for them, the Algerian government seized the
money and returned it to Western Airlines light several thousand dollars.

(28:26):
More clearly, someone stuck their hand in the bag and
took out a couple of bundles a couple of bundles
of cash, but they actually ultimately did not get to
keep the money.

Speaker 1 (28:34):
I mean, just to be cynical here, I would be
expecting if I were Algiers, I'd be expecting a lot
of money from Western Airlines for not shooting down their
plane as is approaching, you know, I mean, I wonder
why they didn't cut a deal like Castro must have done.

Speaker 2 (28:47):
Yeah, it's interesting. I think on some level they are
just so stunned that this happened in a lot of ways,
so interestingly enough. You know, soon after this, about six
weeks later, another group of American hijackers also demanded passage
to Algeria. It was a group from Detroit of five
adults and three children. In fact, hijacked a plane that

(29:08):
was bound from Miami and flew into Algeria, and they
got a million dollars in ransom. And I think that's
actually when the president of Algeria decided that this might
be a little creative and didn't want to be in
the business of hosting American hijackers anymore.

Speaker 1 (29:24):
Well, let's just briefly go back onto the plane, because
you know, I have a sense for Roger. His life's
falling apart. But he's met this new young woman who's
basically willing to go along for the ride, but he's
unraveling mentally. It sounds like, did anybody talk about what
he was like or what Kathy was like on the
plane ride? Was he erratic? Was he calm? What were
their characteristics like?

Speaker 2 (29:45):
One thing I should say about Roger is that, you know,
during the time before he executed the hijacking, he was
very normal. So this flight attendant I spoke with said
he was very pleasant and nice. He was wearing an
army dress uniform. One memory she had is that he
ordered a bourbon and she brought the drink and she
spilled some on him by accident, and she was very

(30:07):
apologetic and said she'd get a dry cleaning voucher for him.
But he was very cool about it, very nice. That
no need, so there was no indication that to observer
if there was anything wrong. When he went into the
cockpit and then was in the cockpit for most of
the rest of the hijacking, he was chain smoking marijuana
throughout this time, because you could also bring drugs as

(30:28):
well as weapons onto planes. So he did say I
remember speaking to the navigator, the first navigator, because they
did switch flight cruise in San Francisco, and the first
navigator was telling me that, you know, he didn't love
the fact that, you know, he was filling up the
cockpit with marijuana smoke, and you know, Roger was explaining, well,

(30:49):
this is the one thing that like calms me down
and makes me feel okay. So clearly trying to self
medicate to some extent. As for Kathy, you know, it
wasn't until really New York City that people realized that
she was in on this. You know, she didn't seem
alarmed or panic throughout. I think the only time people
got suspicious of her is that, you know, when Roger

(31:11):
went to the cockpit and after the hijacking me going
on for a while, he had left another bag by
his seat, and so some of the passengers started rummaging
around the bag, and Kathy actually objected to them doing it,
which they all thought was very strange that she would
care what they were rummaging around a hijacker's bag. Other
than that, there was no real indication she played cards
with a seat mate, just really pleasant and calm.

Speaker 1 (31:34):
So we have now landed in Algiers and the Algerian
government has interviewed him and said, nith the you know,
these two people aren't going to cause any problems here,
I guess right. And then the Western Airlines plane leaves.
What is the first thing that Roger and Kathy do? Do?
They seek out Cleaver since this seems to be one
purpose of coming here, is this you know, iconic man.

Speaker 2 (31:55):
Yeah, So initially the Algerian government puts them up in
a pretty fancy hotel, a beautiful old colonial hotel in Algiers,
and they stay there for a little bit until now
Duran government feels comfortable with them and they get interviewed,
and then yes, they transfer them essentially to the custody
of the Black Panthers. It was called the Black Panther
International Section, which is basically just this commune that's headed

(32:18):
by Aldridge Kleaver and his wife Kathleen Cleaver. And you
have several prominent figures from the Black Panther Party who
had fled the States, often to avoid arrest or trial
for alleged crimes, living together in this old villa in Algiers.

Speaker 1 (32:36):
Where is their money coming from to be able to
do this? Are people working? Are they being funded from
the Black panthers in America.

Speaker 2 (32:43):
So this is one reason why ALDRIDG. Kleaver took particular
interest in these hijackers, because he wanted the ransom money.
They had some money from supporters from the US. They
were a popular cause in the US, so they had
some money, not directly from the party, but from the
support orders, you know, wealthy people who sympathize with their
aims and goals. But it was drying up, it was

(33:06):
getting low. They were running out of money. At this time.
Elders Cleverer knew they needed new sources of income and revenue,
and so he really pressed the Algerian government to give
him the half million dollars that Roger and Kathy took
his ransom. And then six weeks later when this high
so called hijacking family lands with the million dollars, he

(33:29):
is so jazz to get this money. Actually, they drive
out to the airport, they get the hijacking family on
this bus to take them into central Algiers. There's a great,
a great moment where they are falling on this car
and elders Clever leans out the car and yells up
to them on the bus like don't give up the bread,
don't give up the bread because he doesn't want the
Algerian government taking the money again. But they do.

Speaker 1 (33:52):
Oh my goodness, But what did they end up? What
does Cleaver end up with from Rogers hijacking?

Speaker 2 (33:57):
Nothing except two more mouths defeat.

Speaker 1 (33:59):
Oh my gosh.

Speaker 2 (34:00):
You know, this is really the beginning of the end
of Cleaver's time in Algiers. He really creates a lot
of problems for himself by giving the Algerian government a
hard time about the fact that he didn't give him
the money. He directly complains to the president, who obviously
is letting him stay in the country as a guest.
This really infuriates the president. The president has their villa rated,

(34:21):
they can kind of see the handwriting on the wall,
and really, towards an end of nineteen seventy two, these
members of the Black Panther Instructive flee Algiers.

Speaker 1 (34:29):
Wow, now you had mentioned there's another hijacking.

Speaker 2 (34:32):
Is that right?

Speaker 1 (34:33):
That kind of ends terribly. Do you want to tell
me about that before we get back to Roger and
Kathy and where they end up next in this grand
adventure of theirs? Sure?

Speaker 2 (34:41):
Yeah, I mean, this is really the hijacking I wanted
to talk about is the one that really ends this epidemic,
this golden era of hijacking in November of nineteen seventy two.
This has been just a terrible year for hijackings. They're
progressively more and more crazy. And in this instance, you
have a group of three men who hijack a small
commuter plane in Alabama and Mississippi. It's just you know,

(35:06):
doing the local route there. And their concept they had
a real beef with the Detroit Police Department. They had
felt ill treated, and so they wanted to go to
Detroit and demand ten million dollars in ransom from the
airline to be paid by the airline, and they'd make
a big show of getting this in Detroit to kind

(35:28):
of be like a big middle finger to the Detroit
Police department. Detroit is having terrible weather, it's fogged in,
so they can't land there. They end up like going
to Toronto after flying around a bit to refuel. This
airline question is called Southern Airways. They don't have a
ton of money. They somehow get someone a loan them
some cash, you know. They basically it's a small amount

(35:51):
of money and they're like the hijacker's like, no, we
want the full ten million dollars, so they take off again,
and at this time the hijackers decided to drink all
of the liquor that was in the liquor cabinet of
the galley, and so now they're highly intoxicated, and they
decide to One of them is from Tennessee, and so

(36:12):
they decide to fly to Tennessee, and they start circling
Oakridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. And the thing about Oakridge
is it has at its heart a uranium two thirty
five reactor. And so what these intoxicated hijackers tell the
airline is that if they don't get the full ten

(36:34):
million dollars, they're going to crash the plane into the
nuclear reactor. So of course this really gets people panicked.
For good reason, Southern Airways somehow managed to scrounge up
two million dollars, a fantastic sum for a small deep
South commuter airline. The hijackers land the plane in Tennessee,

(36:56):
they bring the two million dollars in the plane, and
fortunately for the good people of Tennessee, the hidirogratys who
drunk to count it, they just think it's a ton
of money. So they think they got the full ten million.
They end up trying to fly to Cuba. They get
turned back, they land in Florida, the FBI shoots out
the tires of the plane, but they take off anyway
back to Cuba, and they land in Cuba with no

(37:20):
landing gear, essentially no landing wheels. The pilots make this
miraculous touchdown at Havana Airport, and this is it for Castro.
He's had enough. He arrests all three of these men,
throws them essentially into a dungeon for years and years
and years until he eventually lets them go I think
eight or nine years later, but just horrific, horrific conditions

(37:43):
in a Cuban dungeon. So that really represented the end
for Castro, but also the end for the airline's resistance
to security, because you know, for them, they looked at
this incident and said, we came this close to you know,
haveing planes uses weapons of mass destruction and maybe turning

(38:03):
a good chunk of Tennessee into a nuclear wasteland, and
just the liability of that issues around that would absolutely
destroy our industry, the entire industry. And so it's really
right after that they dropped their opposition to President Nixon
making a mandate for universal passenger screening. So on January fifth,

(38:25):
nineteen seventy three, is the first day that you have
what we all know and love, which is your bag
gets checked, gets X rayed, and they'd check your person
to see if you're carrying any weapons or anything like
views in a hijacking. So it was pretty much in
direct response to a near miss with annihilation in Tennessee.

Speaker 1 (38:46):
Gosh, that's unbelievable, And you're right, I had never heard
that before, you know. I mean, I work in kind
of deep eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds, and I wrote
in my second book about a train robbery that happened
in the dumbest of why and the guys didn't know
what they were doing, these train robbers. But part of
this was they grew up with the Black bart you know,

(39:07):
the people riding on horseback and jumping onto trains, And
finally the government got smart and they put US marines
on all the trains who were armed, and then they
put all of the money in safes so you couldn't
just jump on a train and grab the money and leave.
So so much of the time it does seem like
that kind of intervention, how do we make it more
difficult for somebody? And I also remember the shoebomber you know,

(39:29):
who luckily didn't pull it off, and everybody complained, why
do I have to take my shoes off? And now
it's just sort of a common practice. So it's interesting
what we adapt to when these sort of events happen.

Speaker 2 (39:40):
Yeah, that's exactly right. And interestingly enough, like once they
instituted that security, like hijacking's basic dropped to zero for
that entire year. It was ultimately a fairly easy fix,
and at that point a fix that people were willing
to accept because the general public had gotten tired of
the craziness and the fear. And you know, it wasn't

(40:01):
just people going to Cuba anymore and you'd have a
nice story about being at a hotel in Havana. It
was a real sense that any flight you took in
the continent of the United States could end up with
your death, and that had become too much for passengers
to bear.

Speaker 1 (40:16):
Before we get back to Roger, what did September eleventh
change exactly what was in place before? Like I said,
I remember meeting my dad at the gate. And what
changed after September eleventh.

Speaker 2 (40:26):
The policy of total compliance with the hijackers fell by
the wayside, right because the policy of total compliance that
the airlines had adopted during this era of these frequent
hijackings was premised on the fact that like, well, these
people just wanted to negotiate, and then we kind of
learned a September eleventh, no, they don't want to negotiate.

(40:46):
They just want to crash the plane into buildings and
cause as much death and destruction as possible. So that
was the end of the policy of total compliance. I
think two is putting security in the hands of the
govern So what's interesting is that when security was instituted
in nineteen seventy three, there was a real argument between

(41:08):
the airlines and the government. The airlines thought the government
should handle all the security, that there should be what
we now have the TSA, which would mean they wouldn't
have to pay for it, and the government thought the
airline should have to hire their, you know, full time
security personnel to do all these checks. They made a compromise,
which was that the airlines would be responsible, but they

(41:29):
could hire a third party independent contractors. The problem with
that is that, as a business responsible to shareholders, you're
always looking to hire the cheapest contractors possible. And so,
you know, one of the vulnerabilities is that, you know,
the people doing security on September eleventh were people but

(41:50):
just not a lot of training, who were getting paid
minimum wage, weren't really you know, in a position or
training to stop people that had planned, you know, to
that degree. And so September eleventh came and it was
basically the government saying, Okay, what the airlines wanted in
nineteen seventy two, we're going to do. We're going to
create a federal force to handle this.

Speaker 1 (42:12):
Okay, if we go back to nineteen seventy two, now
with Roger and Kathy, they hitch their cart to the
wrong horse with Cleaver because things are not going well
for the black Panthers in Algiers. What's the next step
for Roger and Kathy? I mean, this is not Australia,
That's where they wanted to be, right.

Speaker 2 (42:30):
That's true. So essentially these panthers start to flee Algiers
towards the end of nineteen seventy two. In fact, so
many of them leave that at one point, very briefly
Roger is actually elected the head of the Black Panther
International Section. You know, just a couple people left at
that point, but eventually even they feel that they have

(42:50):
to leave, they really follow the most popular route, which
is they were able to get transportation to France. Basically,
they were able to get a car from Algiers kind
of across the desert to a port and to get
a ship that takes them to France and then go
to Paris, where there are a lot of people who

(43:10):
are sympathizers, wealthy sympathizers with the Black Panthers, and kind
of a network of people who are able to care
for them. So they really spend you know, much of
like seventy three and seventy four living in the Paris
apartments of people who support the Black Panther Party.

Speaker 1 (43:30):
But money and stability won't stop Roger from continuing to unravel.
I'm assuming, based on everything that happened in Vietnam, how
does life really go for the two of them in Paris,
for those at least for those first few years.

Speaker 2 (43:43):
Yeah, So one thing is that you're correct, and that
Roger continues to have serious mental health issues and so
kind of a dynamic of the relationship changes, which I
think is so interesting, and that clearly in the early
months of their relationship, you know, Roger is the one
who makes the hijacking plans, and Kathy's kind of a
lot more along for the ride. As his mental condition deteriorates.

(44:05):
During this time in Paris, it really becomes Kathy who's
the one leading the relationship, who's caring for Roger, who's
able to function. She learns French very very quickly, becomes
pretty much fluent by nineteen seventy five, and she really
takes the lead in the relationship, but also starts to
forge relationships of her own with people in Parisian society,

(44:27):
and so over time is less and less of a
presence in Roger's life at a time when he definitely
needs someone increasingly to care for him.

Speaker 1 (44:35):
So they split up at some point.

Speaker 2 (44:37):
They actually don't split up until nineteen seventy seven is
the last time that they're together. And I should backtrack
a little bit to say something really dramatic happens in
January nineteen seventy five is that Roger is stopped by
the Parisian police and he doesn't have a passport or
anything like that, and they essentially figure out pretty quickly

(45:00):
who he is, and so both him and Kathy are
arrested and are brought to court, and of course the
United States makes an extradition request to bring them back
to the US to put them on trial for hijacking,
and actually their case becomes a cause celebra in Paris.
This is a time, of course, when public attitudes in

(45:20):
France are very anti American, a lot of it around
the Vietnam War and public opposition to the Vietnam War.
There's a very strong, like leftist political element that lionizes
Kathy and Roger. Basically, they get a very good attorney
who makes the argument that this hijacking was fundamentally political
in nature, that it was a protest against the Vietnam War.

(45:43):
You cannot be extradited for crimes in which you might
be persecuted for political beliefs if returned to the country
of origin, and so ultimately the court in France rules
that they will not be extradited. They continue to live
in France. They're just cited for or entry into France
without a visa, but they're allowed to live there without

(46:05):
threat of extradition anymore.

Speaker 1 (46:07):
What's the next step for Roger and Kathy. He is
continuing to have mental health struggles. She seems to be flourishing,
and what is she's in her mid twenties by now,
later twenties.

Speaker 2 (46:18):
Yeah, so she's twenty in nineteen seventy two, you're right.
So they basically become quite well known in Paris after
this case. They kind of hobnob with high society. They're
hanging out with like Jean Paul Sartre. They have a
very wealthy benefactor who's a part of French nobility, who
has a chateau in Normandy where they go and spend

(46:39):
time with Joem Bias. Also, you're right. Roger continues to unravel.
He spends actually time in a hospital for his mental
health issues, and Kathy is increasingly less interested in spending
time with him. She is spending time with her wealthy,
fancy friends. She has other boyfriends. She's not exclusive with
Roger at all. She's more like a caretaker this point,

(47:01):
and in nineteen seventy seven she shows up. They're actually
living separately at this point. He shows up at the
apartment where he's living and he's just working odd jobs.
He's like a bouncer at a bar and stuff like that,
and she shows up and gives him a watch, which
is kind of understood to be a parting gift, and
then he never sees her again.

Speaker 1 (47:20):
Well, how does he get along without her? With these
mental health struggles.

Speaker 2 (47:24):
It's very difficult for him. So he does have you know,
wealthy benefactor who provides him with an apartment. He works
odd jobs. He often lives off women. He's kind of
a jigglow. He's a very good looking, charismatic guy. So
he has girlfriends who will take care of him and
devil with the relationships don't work out because of his struggles.

(47:45):
He does go in and out of some mental institutions
during this time. But yeah, it's a very difficult time
for him. And he does actually at one point go
to an associated press bureau in Paris and say he
very much wants to come back to the US, but
that he's obviously scared of being prosecuted.

Speaker 1 (48:04):
Is it because he just feels alone or uncomfortable even
though he's been there for years, it's still the he
needs to be closer to people.

Speaker 2 (48:12):
Or what I think part of it is he wants
to see his family. I neglected to say this early
on our conversation, but he actually had from a high
school girlfriend, twin daughters that he really had played no
role in their lives. He obviously went to Vietnam after
their birth. He had aging parents, siblings, and he just

(48:33):
had a really difficult situation in Paris. What had been
glamorous and great written really soured and those years for
him are very difficult in the late seventies and early eighties.

Speaker 1 (48:43):
So he finally realizes that his family is important, and
as he's unraveling, he wants that stability. He wants to
see his twin girls, he wants to see his parents,
so he ultimately decides to go back to the United States.

Speaker 2 (48:56):
Yeah, that's exactly right. So in nineteen eighty four, he
just voluntarily gets on a flight and flies back to
JFK Airport in New York and is arrested the second
he gets off the plane. And if you knew that
was going to happen, but at that point it's what
he wanted. He does get really effective legal representation, there's
mitigating circumstances around his mental health issues, around his military service.

(49:18):
And this shocks people when I say this, but he
ends up only spending three years in prison. He gets
out in nineteen eighty seven and moves back to San
Diego where his family is, and really lives out his
days there.

Speaker 1 (49:30):
Well, So does he move in with his daughters or
his parents or how does he end up being taken
care of?

Speaker 2 (49:35):
He does not. He actually ends up in a long
term relationship with an older woman who had five children
from an earlier relationship, and they are together for many years.
And so when I did interview Roger at length for
this book, it was done in the apartment, the studio
apartment they shared in San Diego.

Speaker 1 (49:56):
Did he reconnect with his daughters?

Speaker 2 (49:58):
He did reconnect with his daughter. It's a somewhat strained
relationship as I understand it, but he was He did
have relationship with his families, with his family members after
his return.

Speaker 1 (50:08):
Yes, did he finally get the mental health that he
obviously needed?

Speaker 2 (50:12):
He did. He did get help through the VA. It
was always hard for him to work in the US. Definitely,
his common law wife took really good care of him.
You know, I had wonderful conversations with him. A really engaging, charismatic,
funny guy with incredible stories, but also someone who made

(50:32):
some extremely puzzling and terrible decisions in his life that
really affected people's lives very negatively. So an extremely complex character.

Speaker 1 (50:41):
This story really does bring home to me. You meet
one person and they just change everything in your life,
and then it falls apart, and then it comes back
together and you're living in Paris, and then it falls apart,
and then you end up with this wonderful person who has,
you know, love and empathy for you, and he ends up.
It sounds like having a good afterlife here. So just

(51:04):
I mean two women who made a very drastic difference
in this man's life, and obviously he changed their lives
for better or her worse.

Speaker 2 (51:12):
Yeah, and I think he certainly achieved some measure of
peace with his common law wife. I often wonder about
the situation with Kathy and that I think in some
ways he provided something that she was looking for, which
is just the most radical act of reinvention. And this
is a woman from a small town who clearly wanted

(51:33):
something different out of life, and I think was just
looking for a way to make the sharpest break possible
with who she was, and he provided it for her.

Speaker 1 (51:42):
Well. I'm certainly curious to see where Kathy, who came
from this small town in America and turned into sort
of a French social lighte headed. But one last question
about Roger, So was he still alive as far as
you know.

Speaker 2 (51:55):
No, he's unfortunately passed away right before the book came out,
passed away in twenty twelve. So I discussed this in
the book. He was ill. He was a heavy smoker,
I should say, he basically changed smoke pall Mall's the
entire time that we were talking in his studio apartment.
He unfortunately had a lot of physiological health issues, and
he unfortunately passed away before the book came out.

Speaker 1 (52:18):
So now let's go back to Kathy. He left in
eighty four, even though you know they had broken up
years before that. Where does she in depth? Last time
we heard from her, she's in her mid twenties heading
into late twenties in Paris.

Speaker 2 (52:33):
The last time we really know what happened to her
is that she crossed the border into Switzerland to go
to the embassy in Switzerland, and she got a new passport,
not in her real name probably, but she was able
to get new documentation, a new passport. And that's the

(52:56):
last time that anyone really knows what happened to her.
She is in fact a wanted fugitive to this day
by the FBI. Every once in a while you'll see
her poster come up. The FBI contacted me after the
book came out and asked me if I had any
information about her whereabouts. So really, once she was able
to get a new documentation, she might have been able

(53:17):
she could have done a lot of things with that.
She might have been able to get French citizenship or
papers in France, or travel elsewhere. So she's very much
in the wind to this day. And you know, the
FBI is still working on this. You know, they worked
on this pretty intensely throughout the nineteen eighties. They kept
on contacting family members of hers back in Oregon and

(53:38):
Washington State, and they concluded that she never contacted any
of them, that she never contacted her family again. So
it is a mystery. Perhaps she died young, Perhaps she
was making some poor choices and living a high risk lifestyle.
She was definitely running in fast circles. Or maybe she
settled down with one of her boyfriends and just reinvented

(53:58):
herself completely, just discarded her in her old self.

Speaker 1 (54:02):
Well, and she absolutely could still be alive right, she
would be at seventy four, seventy five at this point.

Speaker 2 (54:07):
Yeah, yeah, not that old, So it's very possible. So
a big piece of me always fantasizes about getting that
phone call from her that I'm saying I read the
book and I want to let you know that I
know where I am or something like that, But hasn't
happened yet, unfortunately.

Speaker 1 (54:22):
And Roger never heard from her again after she gave
him that watch.

Speaker 2 (54:25):
No, Roger never heard from her again.

Speaker 1 (54:27):
So Roger in eighty four only gets three years for
hijacking this plane. What would Cathy get? Now? Do you
think what would the intention of the FBI be if
she did pop up somewhere.

Speaker 2 (54:38):
I would think that she would probably be treated more
harshly than Roger was. Obviously, you would be construed in
a post nine to eleven world as a pretty terrifying
example of polical violence. So it's very hard for me
to imagine, you know, just getting a slap on the
wrist given the circumstances.

Speaker 1 (54:56):
It's interesting, you know, you've written this book that I
find fast about hostages and hijackers and the political you know,
the way that this was used in politics as sort
of a weaponization of it. And then really what it
comes down to the characters, at least the way I
see it in your story is you're right, this rapid change,
this need to just completely redefine themselves, which I think

(55:19):
a lot of people want, and very few people are
able to do because they're scared or you know, they
don't want to lose things. And I'm certainly not lionizing
these people, but it's interesting that they were able to
just make a switch and adapt and ended up actually
on the better end of it essentially, which is disturbing also.

Speaker 2 (55:37):
Well, to me, it's a really American story because I
think the fundamental promise of America is the promise of reinvention,
but it's obviously far more complicated in practice than in
the ideal. And I'm also fascinated by people who pursue
this fundamentally American promise by leaving America. That's really one
of the themes of the book, that they were able

(55:58):
to achieve this radical reinvention by leaving behind everything they knew,
including their families. And so I'm very fascinated by the
tension of achieving this dream of reinventing oneself with the
American promise, but it also means there's a price to
be paid, is all. I can say that you leave
behind people who are scarred and hurt by the abandonment.

(56:19):
I can't imagine that doesn't weigh heavily on them at
points in their lives.

Speaker 1 (56:34):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked and American Sherlock and Don't Forget. There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast, Tenfold More
Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and
give them a listen if you haven't already. This has
been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis Mrosi.

(56:58):
Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed
by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer, artwork by
Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and
Danielle Kramer. Listen to Wicked Words on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow Wicked

(57:19):
Words on Instagram at tenfold More Wicked, and on Facebook
at Wicked Words pod