Introduction

Some fifty-four years ago, on June 23, 1972, McNally hijacked American Airlines Flight 119 from St. Louis to Tulsa. He boarded under the name Robert Wilson. He was carrying a $30 wig, rubber gloves, a .45 caliber submachine gun, and a plan inspired by skyjacker D.B. Cooper. Showing zero regard for human life, he skyjacked a plane and coldly demanded $502,500, parachutes, a collapsible shovel, and a way out.

Then, in the dark, over Peru, Indiana, with no real parachuting experience, he stepped onto the aft stairs of a Boeing 727 and leapt into the darkness carrying more than half a million dollars in ransom.

The Boeing 727 was traveling roughly 320 miles per hour. Civilian skydivers almost never jump from aircraft moving anywhere near that speed, much less at night, with a heavy load, over unfamiliar terrain. Every variable was working against him. When he let go, there was a split second of weightlessness and near silence. He was falling peacefully. Then the roar of high-speed wind, the relentless pull of gravity, spun him thru the darkness.  

Most people would have died. Improbably, McNally lived.

But the fantasy evaporated when the bag of money detached from his body. Five days later, the FBI arrested him at his house in Wyandotte, Michigan. He would spend the next nearly four decades in federal prison.

“I sold my entire life for going after half a million dollars,” he told me. “My future was gone. Poof! Like that.”

Wyandotte, Before the Fall

Before he became one of the most famous skyjackers in American history, Martin Joseph McNally was a regular civilian in Southeast Michigan.

He was born March 16, 1944, in Trenton, Michigan. His father was from Scranton, Pennsylvania. His mother was from Wyandotte. His father, Walter, ran McNally Shoes. Years later, Martin’s sister Claire would buy the McNally Shoes location on Park Avenue in Allen Park. She also owns the strudel shop on Park Avenue.

McNally was the third of eight children. He had an older brother, an older sister, then came Marty, then the rest.

Initially, the family lived near Biddle and Northline, across from the old cemetery. In 1952, when Martin was in third grade, they moved to 2019 Davis Street at 21st Street in Wyandotte.

He grew up Catholic. He was a good singer. He attended St. Patrick’s High School in Wyandotte until one fateful day.

On the first day of eleventh grade in 1961, according to McNally, a nun bluntly informed him that he had failed religion and would have to retake tenth grade religion.

“The fucking bitch failed me,” he said. “I was so mad, I wanted to smash her fat penguin face in.”

The classroom was on the third floor. McNally walked out, flipped off the classroom, went down to the principal’s office, got the number for the Navy recruiter from the phone operator, and called.

“I’m seventeen,” he told them. “My brother Pat is in the Navy. I want to join right now.”

He went home. His father tried talking him into switching schools, maybe Roosevelt High School. But Marty’s stubborn mind was made up.

“Going into the Navy was the best decision I ever made,” he said. “Here I am, I have a pension, full medical benefits.”

From 1961 to 1964, he served in the U.S. Navy, including time at Great Lakes Naval Station and in an aviation squadron. The Navy gave him benefits, identity, structure. But after the Navy, it was the beginning of a long fall.

McNally was restless. Curious. Adventurous. He wanted money.

On August 27, 1966, he broke into Cook’s Sportland in Monroe. There were other break-ins. In 1969 or 1970, he met with Joe Louisell, the famous Detroit Mafia criminal attorney, for advice on how to skirt the law.

He also had scams. One involved copper slugs.

He had a device that could make fake quarters. He would go to Detroit, get copper sheets, turn three sheets into about $500 worth of copper slugs, then go to laundromats, drop them into machines, and get money back.

It was small-time crime. Then D.B. Cooper upped the ante.

The Ghost of D.B. Cooper

In November 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper boarded a Northwest Orient flight in Portland, Oregon, demanded $200,000 and parachutes, then jumped from the rear stairs of a Boeing 727 into the night and vanished.

A newspaper mistake turned him into D.B. Cooper.

The name stuck. To this day, the man’s real identity has never been discovered.

The myth exploded immediately across the popular consciousness.

McNally remembered exactly when he heard about it. He was driving down Southfield Road toward Plymouth Road. It was around 10 a.m. The radio was talking about aircraft piracy and D.B. Cooper.

“I laughed like hell,” McNally said. “I thought, that’s a helluva way to make a score! Extortion note. Ticket. Weapons. Plane. Parachute. Money. Bam! Then you vanish, like a ghost.”

To McNally, it seemed not only possible but achievable. He was caught in the gravitational pull of a dangerous fantasy. That tenuous line between fantasy and reality blurred and he got sucked in.   

Yet, America in the early 1970s made it possible. This was the golden age of hijacking, when commercial aviation still carried some of the old glamour and almost none of the modern security. People could walk right onto planes on the tarmac with little scrutiny. Between 1961 and 1973, roughly 150 commercial planes were hijacked. In 1972 alone, there were about fifteen D.B. Cooper copycats.

McNally became one of them.

Before the hijacking, he was working at a Shell gas station at Five Mile and Beech Daly in Redford with his business associate Jim Petty.

He had “too many idiot friends,” he says now. One of them, Walter Petlikowsky of Ecorse, gave him the submachine gun. McNally bought the wig for $30 on Telegraph Road.

Looking back, he does not romanticize the plan.

“My heist was stupid, insane, I should’ve known better,” he said. “It was a ridiculous stunt.”

But in June 1972, he still believed he could do it.

American Flight 119

On June 23, 1972, Martin McNally boarded American Airlines Flight 119 in St. Louis.

He was twenty-eight years old.

The flight was headed to Tulsa. There were about 94 people aboard. McNally carried a submachine gun and notes. He had modeled the crime on D.B. Cooper, but he wanted more money. Cooper had asked for $200,000. McNally demanded $502,500.

He forced the plane back to St. Louis.

The scene quickly became tense and surreal. The airline frantically gathered the money. Authorities scrambled. Then, as the plane was readying for takeoff, one of the strangest details in American crime history unfolded: a man who had been drinking at a local bar and heard the story on the radio, hopped in his Cadillac Eldorado, drove thru an airport fence and rammed the landing gear in an attempt to stop the hijacking, damaging the plane and forcing everyone to change aircraft.

McNally was eventually given the money and parachutes.

But there was something wrong with the parachutes.

“They brought those reserve parachutes onboard,” McNally told me. “Sharon the stewardess said she knew they were trying to kill me.”

Reserve chutes were not what he needed for a safe jump from a commercial jet going 320 MPH. But by then, the machinery of the crime was already moving. The plane was in the air. The engines roared. The aft stairs wobbled open into darkness.

McNally had half a million dollars in cash.

A collapsible shovel.

A parachute.

An ever-intensifying fantasy.

Then he jumped.

The Boeing 727 was moving around 320 miles per hour. Normal parachutists often jump at roughly 90 to 115 miles per hour. McNally was thrown into the night with terrible force.

Somehow, he survived.

But the money did not stay strapped to his body.

The bag tore away and disappeared into the dark Indiana farmland below.

A soybean farmer later saw an American Airlines bag. His grandson recognized what it might be.

“This is the money they gave that skyjacker!” the grandson said.

By then, the story was worldwide news.

McNally had pulled off the impossible part. He had hijacked the jet. He had gotten the ransom. He had jumped from the 727 and lived.

But without the money, the plan was a failure.

His next plan, he says now, was to immediately get another disguise, find another airport, and do it all over again.

Fortunately, he never got the chance.

Arrested in Wyandotte

Five days after the hijacking, McNally was arrested at his house at 4682 16^th Street in Wyandotte.

The FBI took him to its office in downtown Detroit. The next day, Barbara Walters was talking about it on television.

He was charged with federal aircraft piracy. He tried to delay the trial by filing a motion for a competency evaluation. His trial took place in St. Louis in December 1972. He was convicted.

In May 1973, he received two life sentences.

He was twenty-nine years old.

The judge’s gavel came down. In the shockwaves of that thud, McNally’s life changed forever.

Leavenworth, Marion, Atlanta, Terre Haute, Atwater

McNally did time in a string of serious federal prisons: Leavenworth, Atlanta, Marion, Terre Haute, and Atwater.

He spent nineteen years at Marion, his longest stretch anywhere, inside one of the USA’s most violent federal prisons.

USP Marion, Illinois, was the end of the line for inmates considered too dangerous, too disruptive, too uncontrollable. It was a psychological pressure cooker of searing racial tension, profound isolation, grisly stabbings, and killings.

McNally remembers 350 men in the compound.

He remembers the furrowed indentations of human fingernails on the walls.

He remembers the welding shop.

In July 1973, he was working in CMS Welding. A man said they needed 40-50 weapons. They stamped blanks out of stainless steel sheets. The weapons were passed to A Block, B Block, D Block.

On July 31, 1973, a riot broke out. A guard was killed in A Block. McNally was in B Block when it happened during lunch.

In September 1974, a friend of his named Gypsy (Willie Adams) killed a guard in B Block, stabbing him more than 100 times with a fourteen-inch, sixteen-gauge stainless steel custom shiv McNally says were made in the welding shop. Gypsy later ended up in the Marion control unit and hanged himself.

In 1975, McNally was charged with attacking a guard and cutting up his face. He beat the case on September 18, 1975, in federal court in Topeka, Kansas.

“The jury deliberated five minutes,” he said. “Not guilty.”

Freedom

In 2016, parole officers came to his apartment in St. Louis with his friend, local reporter, Danny Wicentowski.

“Mac, good news,” they said. “You’re off parole.”

He was free in a way he had not been free since before the hijacking.

Free, but carrying Marion, Leavenworth, Atlanta, Atwater, Springfield, the helicopter, the jump, the lost money, the dead bodies, the guards, the law books, the duffel bag, the ghost of the young man who laughed about D.B. Cooper.

Coming Home to Michigan

In November 2019, McNally moved from St. Louis to Melvindale, Michigan.

He was being evicted from his four-apartment building because the landlord had sold it. He looked into housing in Michigan and found a $33,000 place in Lincoln Park, but with taxes and utilities, he still needed something cheaper.

His sister Claire had a property in Melvindale.

So he came home.

Melvindale is about 15 minutes north of Wyandotte, where he used to live.

Close enough to feel the old map, walking down Biddle Avenue. Close enough to remember a simpler time before his identity became skyjacker and ex-con.  

Violence, Regret, and the Line He Crossed

When I asked him about the hijacking itself, McNally did not feign innocence or say he was harmless.

During the hijacking, he said, he was not going to initiate the violence. But he was prepared to kill everyone who got in his way, if he needed to.

That sentence lands heavily. It should. It cuts through the myth. It prevents the story from becoming too stylish, too cinematic, too easy.

There were people on that plane. Stewardesses. Passengers. Pilots. Families. Innocent people who had no idea that a deranged man with a gun and a fantasy had decided to turn their flight into his escape plan.

McNally wanted the half million dollars to invest in businesses.

He imagined a future.

Instead, he traded freedom for a lifetime in prison.

“I sold my entire life for going after half a million dollars.”

There is no redemption arc here. No clean neat ‘everything gets wrapped up nicely’ Hollywood ending. McNally’s crime set in motion a lifetime of suffering. For himself, for the passengers he terrorized, and for countless others whose lives were touched by his choices.

If you had been on that plane, would you forgive Martin McNally?

The Long Road Home

The strange thing about sitting with Martin McNally is not that he once hijacked a plane. It is that he is still here.

He is here after the jump.

Here after the FBI.

Here after the multiple life sentences.

Here after Marion.

Here after Trapnell.

Here after Barbara Oswald.

Here after the control unit.

Here after Atwater.

Here after the halfway house, parole.

Here after the documentary cameras.

Here in Melvindale, Michigan, telling the story in the same state where it all began.

A boy from Wyandotte leapt from a Boeing 727 into the dark.

An inmate spent decades in the belly of the beast.

Improbably, an old man came home.

Seduced by the myth of easy money, Martin McNally traded brief exhilaration for years of confinement. Instead of the ransom, he became inmate # 20400-175. In the end, the greatest price McNally paid wasn’t in dollars but in decades of unrecoverable, irreplaceable lost time.

Martin McNally fell from the sky.

Somehow, he lived long enough to explain what the fall cost him. And in many ways, he never stopped falling.