She Asked Her Boyfriend What To Wear To A Hijacking Before Stealing A Plane And Vanishing In Paris

Catherine Marie Kerkow was born in Coos Bay, a tiny town in Oregon, on October 6th, 1951. She had four younger siblings and was nicknamed Cathy.

She was a track star back in high school and the definition of an all-American girl. Not long after she graduated, she moved to San Diego and landed a job in a massage parlor.

One day in January 1972, a meet-cute happened for Cathy when a handsome Vietnam vet named Willie Roger Holder knocked on her apartment door, looking for her roommate.

Cathy hopped out of the shower, threw on a bathrobe, and rushed to answer the door. She still had soap in her eyes when she found Willie on the doorstep, and Willie was smitten with her.

On their first date, Cathy and Willie made the connection that they had crossed paths as kids back in Coos Bay. Willie's dad was in the Navy and had been stationed there for a brief amount of time, but after encountering an overwhelming amount of discrimination, they moved.

Willie was convinced that because he and Cathy had run into one another when they were younger, it was some kind of a divine sign that they were not only meant to be together, but they were meant to do something important.

To give you a bit of background on Willie, he did four tours in the Army, served in Vietnam before going AWOL, and saw horrific combat while deployed.

Upon being discharged, Willie struggled with trauma from the war, his mental health, and feeling disillusioned by the government. He and Cathy were both rebels looking for a cause and became enthralled with the counterculture movement.

As they fell madly in love with one another, Willie came up with an absolutely insane plan he deemed Operation Sisyphus: steal a plane, swoop in to save Angela Davis, a UCLA professor who had been accused of murder, conspiracy, and kidnapping, and jet off to North Vietnam to let Angela go before running off into the sunset.

FBI - pictured above are two photos of Cathy

After filling Cathy in, she asked Willie, "So what do I wear to a hijacking?"

On June 2nd, 1972, Operation Sisyphus was set into motion when Cathy and Willie boarded Western Airlines Flight 701 in Los Angeles, which was destined for Seattle. They sat down in aisle seats with four rows between them.

Willie passed two notes to a flight attendant and cracked open the briefcase he was carrying, which appeared to contain a bomb, yet nobody knew it was fake.

Upon landing in San Francisco, $500,000 in ransom money was delivered to Willie and Cathy, and they were given a bigger plane to fly overseas with.

So, they allowed half of the people on board to get off and kept the rest as hostages, whom they later released when they stopped in New York to refuel before changing course and flying to Algiers.

As they grew closer to their destination, Willie made a request for asylum and for a Black Panther named Eldridge Cleaver to meet them at the airport. Eldridge fled the United States with a charge of attempted murder and was granted asylum in Algiers.

The government considered their request, but took back the ransom money and returned it to the airline. They then left Willie and Cathy with the Black Panthers, who called them heroes.

Eventually, Willie and Cathy traveled to Paris, and attempts to extradite them failed as they basically became celebrities who garnered letters of support from influential people. In time, Willie and Cathy's love story fell apart.

Willie landed in a psychiatric institute and, after being released, met an older woman who had been divorced six times, whom he went on to marry before returning to the United States in 1985.

He was arrested and given four years in jail, hardly serving half his sentence before getting out. On February 6th, 2012, he passed away from an aneurysm. He was 62.

As for Cathy, she remains at large to this day and has been on the run for more than five decades. The last anyone heard of her, she had infiltrated the elite social circles of Paris, secured some rich boyfriends, and disappeared forever in 1978.

The FBI is still searching for Cathy.

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