Skyjacking!: How Peru became the center of a manhunt 50 years ago

Jun. 23—PERU — Lowell Elliott stood on a small hill surveying his son-in-law's bean field located a few miles southeast of Peru when he saw what looked like a groundhog about 150 feet away.

But it wasn't an animal. It was a small mail bag with American Airlines written on it and stacks of bills inside totaling $502,000.

Elliott, a 61-year-old farmer, wasn't too surprised by the half-a-million-dollar find, though.

After all, more than 150 FBI agents and state police officers had also been scouring the countryside around Peru for two days looking for the money.

But the real target of their search was the guy who dropped it after he parachuted out of an American Airlines plane cruising at 350 mph while holding a machine gun.

The guy's name was Martin McNally. The date was Saturday, June 24, 1972.

What happened next in Peru 50 years ago thrust the city into the national headlines as the feds launched an all-out manhunt to find the audacious 28-year-old who hijacked a Boeing 727 plane, demanded $502,500 in ransom and then jumped out with the loot over Miami County.

'YOU'RE NOT GOING TO BELIEVE THIS'

It all started the day before, when McNally, operating under the alias Robert Wilson, purchased a half-fare military ticket for American Airlines flight 94 in St. Louis.

McNally was a high-school dropout who had joined the Navy. He was divorced and unemployed when he boarded the plane wearing purple-tinted sunglasses and hefting a trombone case.

The glasses hid a pockmark-disguised face. The trombone case carried a .45 caliber sub-machine gun. Airport security was lax 50 years ago, and McNally walked onto the plane, no questions asked.

Once in flight, he opened the instrument case and showed a flight attendant the gun from his seat at the rear of the plane.

"You're not going to believe this, but we're being hijacked," the flight attendant informed the pilots.

It wasn't the first time someone had attempted air piracy for personal gain. Just seven months before, the mysterious D.B. Cooper had commandeered a Boeing 727, demanded $200,000 in ransom and parachuted somewhere between Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, with the loot. He was never seen again.

Fifteen people tried similar stunts the next year. McNally was the ninth.

Taking his cues from Cooper's playbook, McNally told the flight crew to return the plane to St. Louis, where he demanded authorities give him $502,500 in ransom money, a few parachutes and instructions on how to use them.

As the plane refueled, McNally let all but 14 male passengers go in exchange for the cash. Authorities delivered it in the American Airlines flight bag, and the plane took off heading to Fort Worth, Texas.

Then, in an inexplicable move, McNally demanded the plane to turn around and go back to St. Louis. They did as he said, and the crew and passengers were back on the runway there at 9:30 p.m. Friday.

Soon, the skyjacking became even more bizarre. As the plane was preparing to take off again at around 12:30 a.m., a man drove through a security fence and sped down the runway, making a beeline for the plane at 80 mph.

The driver was David Hanley, a 30-year-old father who owned an invention management company. He had been sitting at a bar inside the St. Louis airport throwing back drinks and watching the scene unfold on a TV.

After three hours of listening to reports of the hijacking, Hanley got angry. He left the bar and climbed into his Cadillac convertible, smashed through the fence and careened into the jet. Hanley sustained serious injuries and authorities transported him to a local hospital. Later, he told police he had no memory of the incident.

In the end, however, Hanley's attempt to stop the hijacking by crippling the airplane didn't deter McNally.

Hiding behind a male hostage to avoid FBI sharpshooters, McNally boarded a different Boeing 727 with the cash. A new crew followed behind, and the plane took off heading toward New York.

MANHUNT!

At 2:50 a.m., McNally made his escape and bailed out from an access door in the rear of the plane, parachuting into darkness from 10,000 feet. He thought the plane was over his home state of Michigan when he jumped. Instead, it was rural Miami County.

Around 20 minutes later, the Peru Police Department received a call from state police with the news: a skyjacker had jumped out over the city with half-a-million dollars.

The manhunt was on.

By 4:45 a.m., the entire police department was deployed to set up roadblocks all around the city. Law enforcement and FBI agents from all across north-central Indiana saturated the area looking for McNally. Police even stopped a Norfolk and Western train heading east out of Largo at around 9:15 a.m. to check if McNally had hopped on board.

Agents continued to look for him all day Saturday, but the search proved fruitless. No one saw hide nor hair of the skyjacker.

Police began scouring the countryside. Agents searched from helicopters and planes, and they went cross-country on horseback and foot. Their efforts concentrated on the Mississinewa Reservoir, where officials believed McNally may have landed and drowned.

Charles Smith, who lived north of Peru and was 19 when the incident happened, told the Tribune last week he recalled that the FBI and state police set up one in their headquarters not too far from his place inside the former Butler Township school.

But Smith really became invested in the case when Elliot found the bag full of cash in the field. After all, Elliot was Smith's first cousin once removed.

"It was pretty exciting for that family," he said. "And since my dad knew him, I paid attention to that."

The first big break in the search came Sunday afternoon, when a county resident mowing his lawn near Indiana 19 and 250 East drove over a fully-loaded pistol. The weapon had landed just 150 feet from his house.

The next day, Lowell Elliott stumbled across the $502,000 in his son-in-law's field.

As it happened, American Airlines tried to give Elliot and his wife an all-expenses-paid trip and a $10,000 reward for returning the money, but Elliott turned down both offers. He said he didn't like to fly, and thought the airline should give him $25,000 for finding the loot. He ended up getting nothing.

About five hours after Elliott found the money bag, another area farmer, Ronald Miller, unearthed McNally's sub machine gun while applying nitrogen to his muddy cornfield on 570 South, about two-and-a-half miles southwest from where the cash was found.

Throughout the manhunt, other items the skyjacker lost during his jump sporadically turned up. A Galveston farmer discovered a pair of pants. A 15-year-old found another pair of pants in his family's pumpkin patch. A gun clip was also handed over by an unidentified resident.

Officials had plenty of clues to help in the investigation, but the real question remained unanswered: What happened to the skyjacker?

HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT

As it turned out, McNally was right under the noses of FBI agents the entire time.

After bailing out of the plane Saturday, McNally managed to deploy his parachute but lost his grip on the money bag and machine gun. He landed in a soybean field about 6 miles south of Peru.

For the rest of the day Saturday, McNally sat in the field, wrapped in the parachute, recuperating from the presumably rough landing that left scratches and bruises all over his body. His pockmarked-face disguise had come off during the fall.

As evening neared, he hid the parachute in some brush and began walking. Eventually, he came upon Indiana 19.

That's where Peru Police Chief Dick Blair and his wife saw McNally while out for an evening drive. Blair had no inkling the man asking them for a ride into Peru might be the skyjacker, despite the hundreds of law enforcement agents who had just descended on the area that morning.

The police chief described the hitchhiker as a "nice-looking young kid," and was happy to give him a lift into downtown Peru. McNally told the chief one of his relatives near the city had thrown him out of the house and he was heading back up to Michigan.

Blair ended up dropping McNally off across the street from the police station, in front of the now-demolished Peru Motor Lodge. Peru City Hall stands on the site today. With few other options, McNally walked into the motel and checked in.

"Hi. You're not the skyjacker, are you?" asked Amy Martin, the night clerk working the desk, who noticed the scratches and bruises on his face. She asked him what happened.

McNally just grinned, handed the clerk his credit card and told her he'd been in a fight with his brother.

"He wasn't the least bit nervous," Martin told reporters later on. "In fact, he was as cool as a cucumber."

McNally was given the keys to his second-floor room. He headed up the stairs, passing two FBI agents coming down to the lobby. Once inside, he had a clear view of the police station across the street. FBI agents slept just a few rooms down the hallway.

And that's where McNally stayed undetected and unsuspected for three nights.

He eventually called Wayne Petlikowsky, an acquaintance from Michigan, and asked for a ride home. Petlikowsky arrived in Peru on Tuesday morning. McNally hopped in his car and was back at his house in Wyandotte, Michigan, just outside Detroit, by Tuesday afternoon.

By that time, though, FBI agents were hot on McNally's trail. All the evidence found scattered across Miami County had been sent to a crime lab for testing, where agents were able to pull a fingerprint. The FBI also had been doing an extensive investigation into the skyjacking in Michigan, Illinois and Missouri. Testimony and evidence found there all pointed to McNally.

Just before midnight on Wednesday, June 28, 1972, a small army of officers and agents swarmed his house. They found him walking down the street nearby. The man who had just been the recipient of half-a-million dollars only had $13 in his pocket when officers arrested him.

The next day, the search continued in Peru. Agents found the parachute hidden in some brush. Up in Detroit, Petlikowsky turned himself in to police and admitted to transporting McNally back to Michigan.

Peru native Smith recalled watching in shock as all the events unfolded on TV. Although he lived north of Peru, the whole experience hit home since he knew Elliott as well as the man who found the machine gun in his field.

"It was five days of pretty much suspense-filled action," Smith said.

What shocked him the most, though, was how closely the nation followed the story surrounding his small hometown in Indiana. Smith said he joined the Air Force in October. When he told people he was from Peru, everyone asked him about the skyjacking.

"Everybody from basic training to tech school and on, when you told them you were from Peru, everybody had heard of this skyjacking in Peru, Indiana," Smith said. "And these were people from all over the United States."

McNally faced a jury trial for two counts of aircraft piracy in December 1972. His lawyers argued it was impossible to jump out of jet cruising 350 mph at 10,000 feet and survive. The jury didn't buy it. McNally was sentenced to two concurrent life sentences with a chance for parole after 19 years.

Rather than serve out his sentence quietly, he attempted a prison break in 1978. An inmate he befriended had his girlfriend hijack a helicopter and attempt to pick them up from the prison yard. The helicopter pilot shot the girlfriend. Prison guards apprehended the would-be escapees.

When McNally finally stepped out of a California prison on Jan. 27, 2010, as a free man, he was 67 years old. He eventually settled into an apartment in St. Louis living off disability benefits linked to an old Navy injury.

(Note: All the facts, dates and quotes in this story come from archived copies of the Peru Daily Tribune and St. Louis Post-Dispatch, unless otherwise noted.)

Carson Gerber can be reached at 765-854-6739, carson.gerber@kokomotribune.com or on Twitter @carsongerber1.