Hijacked

Belleview resident Sharon Matiyow recalls the harrowing ordeal of Flight 119. The details of that fateful day remain etched in her mind.

By Richard Anguiano

It was supposed to be the last flight of the day for Sharon Matiyow, “one more little hop” for American Airlines Flight 119 from St. Louis to Tulsa on June 23, 1972.

Her workday began at 6am with a round trip between New York and Toronto before her crew headed west. Matiyow—then Sharon Wetherley—was 22 and three months out of flight attendant school.

Sharon Matiyow

About 3pm, with the Boeing 727 about to descend into Tulsa, Matiyow approached Jane Furlong, a fellow rookie flight attendant, as Furlong strode toward the cockpit carrying a note. “She was looking at me and giving me these facial expressions,” recalls Matiyow, now 69 and living in Belleview. “I didn’t understand why she was going up the aisle with this very determined walk.” Matiyow didn’t know it yet, but she was in the midst of a hijacking, one that would prove to be, arguably, the most bizarre case during the heyday of air piracy.

She passed Furlong on her way back toward the galley in coach and spotted a man wearing a wig and sunglasses, his hands covered in clear surgical gloves and cradling a submachine gun. Matiyow walked past the man into the galley. “I didn’t want him to know I saw him,” she says, “so I took all the Saran Wrap off a new tray of sandwiches and I went back up the aisle.”

Moments later, Matiyow recalls, the voice of Capt. Ted Kovalenko came over the intercom, in the soothing tone airline pilots use to address passengers: “Ladies and gentlemen, we have a guest on board today who has invited us back to St. Louis, so we are going with his request.” “I walked back up the aisle and told people, ‘It’s all right. There’s just a man back there with a gun.’”

Matiyow and her flight attendant school classmates prepared for hijacking scenarios with good reason. Hijackers—called “skyjackers” in news reports of the day—commandeered more than 130 flights in the U.S. alone between 1968 and 1972.

The hijacker of American Flight 119 was Martin J. McNally, a jobless 28-year-old Navy veteran from the Detroit area, traveling under the alias Robert Wilson.

While the turbulent politics of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s inspired many hijackers, McNally was the ninth copycat following the example of a mysterious air pirate, known in lore as D.B. Cooper, who hijacked Northwest Orient Flight 305 in 1971. The hijacker parachuted somewhere between Seattle and Reno from the 727’s built-in rear staircase with a ransom of $200,000. He hasn’t been seen since.

A year and a half later, aboard American Flight 119, Martin McNally demanded more than double the Cooper ransom: $500,000 cash, $2,500 in a separate pouch, parachutes, and other supplies. He wanted bills in larger denominations to keep the cargo light, remembers Matiyow.

McNally soon set up a command post in the back row of coach and kept Matiyow and Furlong close, using one flight attendant to relay his instructions and the other to sit in the row ahead as a hostage.

“He wanted all the women and children toward the front of the plane and the men behind,” she says. “We were breaking up families.” McNally also demanded the film from anyone aboard with a camera.

“You were so scared at first,” Matiyow says. “If somebody had a camera and we didn’t give him the film, was he going to shoot them? So I remember taking a few canisters back and he just exposed them.”

Matiyow recalls a “very quiet” plane after the hijacker took over. “Nobody was screaming or crying out loud or anything,” she says. “I think we were all in a state of shock. I do remember a lady handing me her Bible, and I remember telling her to hold on to it.”

At around 3:45pm, Flight 119 prepared for another landing in St. Louis—this one unscheduled.

Back on the ground in a remote area of Lambert-St. Louis International Airport, McNally allowed women and children passengers, as well as some men, to exit the plane using an emergency slide. That left about 25 men aboard, according to Matiyow, who says the pilot got McNally to agree to another release. “The captain announced, ‘Any man who has a heart condition or takes medication may also leave,’” she says. “They all got up. And [McNally] goes, ‘Get some of them back here!’ I remember running [and calling after the men], ‘Some of you guys gotta stay!’” Eventually 13 men remained. Matiyow recalls some were older passengers unable to beat younger men to the exit.

Meanwhile, getting any money from a bank on a Friday evening— let alone a ransom of more than $500,000—was complicated in 1972. Banks put their vaults on timers and they were closing for the weekend.

McNally ordered the flight crew to take the plane back up and circle the airport while airline and bank officials negotiated the massive withdrawal. As the plane flew in circles, Matiyow, sitting in the row ahead, heard the hijacker’s voice. “He said, ‘Miss?’ and I turned around,” she recalls. “He said, ‘Would you like to sit back here and keep me company?’ and I said, ‘Not really.’”

Nonetheless, Matiyow went back and took the right window seat. In the chair between her and McNally was the case in which he’d smuggled the gun. She recalls McNally being “polite” but refusing to talk about himself, as she and Furlong attempted to lighten the mood.

“We were just trying to talk to him,” she says, “because he wasn’t much older than us.”

McNally allowed Matiyow and Furlong to check on the passengers as the plane circled. None wanted food or drink. By now, the flight attendants had developed enough of a rapport with the hijacker to kneel on the seats in the row ahead and banter with him over the chair backs.

“We were trying to keep him happy and we didn’t want to die,” she says. “I remember saying things like, ‘Are we going to go somewhere really fun and exciting?’ and ‘We really could use the overtime.’”

Originally, American Airlines officials told the crew they had the money waiting in Dallas, so the flight began to change course. Then airline officials ordered the plane back to St. Louis, where they now had the cash and other items McNally demanded, including the parachutes.

Matiyow recalls McNally growing “antsier” as Flight 119 began to make its descent into St. Louis a third time at about 9:30pm. The hijacker ordered all the window shades pulled down. “He was afraid somebody was going to spot him through the window and shoot him,” she says.

Meanwhile, Matiyow felt claustrophobic, wedged between the armed hijacker and his case and the window seat with the shade drawn.

“It was very scary,” she recalls. “Because you know they’re going to get him on the ground, if they’re going to get him.”

Flight 119 landed and a station wagon pulled up. McNally selected a passenger. “The man was probably in his fifties,” Matiyow recalls. “And he had on bright red polyester pants. This was in 1972. I bet he never wore those again.

“Jane said to him, ‘You, sir, are the chosen one,’” Matiyow continues. “She put her hand on his shoulder and she said the blood drained from his face. She told him, ‘He wants you to bring the parachutes and the money, but don’t look at him.’”

After the man brought everything, McNally freed the men except for one. “The one hostage actually volunteered,” Matiyow says. “He worked for American Airlines in Tulsa. He was about the hijacker’s age. In fact, [McNally] even said, ‘Well, that was nice of him to volunteer.’”

Then McNally discovered he had problems. For one, officials had produced the $2,500 in smaller bills. “It was in denominations of $1 and $10 [bills],” Matiyow says. “He got very mad and he threw it at me. He says, ‘What am I going to do with this?’”

Also, the hijacker did not know how to put on a parachute. McNally allowed on the plane a man the pilot told him was the airport’s “parachute expert.” Matiyow later learned the “expert” was an FBI agent.

During the discussion of parachutes, something caught Matiyow’s eye.

“About a year before I became a flight attendant, I did parachute one time,” she says, “so I knew when they brought him the parachutes that they gave him a reserve chute. They didn’t give him a good back chute. But I wasn’t going to tell him.”

Now McNally was ready to send the refueled plane back up. Because the flight crew had been working since early that morning, the hijacker allowed a crew change. Matiyow says she learned later that two chief pilots from Chicago and an FBI agent took the cockpit.

McNally also gave an order to the four flight attendants—Matiyow and Furlong and Jennifer Dumanois and Diana Rash who worked in first-class. “He said, ‘I just want two of you girls. Talk amongst yourselves,’” Matiyow recalls. The attendants in first-class had seniority and Dumanois had high rank.

“Well, Jane and I were brand-new, so Jennifer says, ‘You two get off here,’” Matiyow says. The two rookie flight attendants headed for the stairs with wads of small bills McNally had rejected. Matiyow says she had about $1,300 and Furlong about $200, which they each turned in.

“Oh, when we got to the top of the stairs, just feeling that cool air, I can remember that and it was like, ‘We are safe,’” she said. “It was bitter- sweet because we had left Diana and Jennifer behind.

“We went down and it was pitch dark,” Matiyow continues. “There were the stairs and I remember saying to Jane, ‘Where do we go?’” Soon, the flight attendants saw headlights. “A guy zoomed up and he said, ‘FBI. Hop in.’”

The hijacking took a bizarre turn after Matiyow and Furlong were off the jet. A man named David J. Hanley, angered as he watched TV coverage in a nearby lounge, hopped in his Cadillac, smashed through an airport fence, roared up the runway, and crashed into the 727, critically injuring himself. Hanley survived, claimed no memory of the incident and according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, announced a candidacy for president in 1976.

Matiyow says she and Furlong were with FBI agents in another building, putting together a composite sketch of the hijacker, when they learned of the collision.

According to a report in The New York Times, one of the new pilots managed to assure McNally that the crash was not an attempt by law enforcement to foil the hijacking, to which McNally replied, “That guy must be crazier than I am.”

The hijacker demanded and got another 727. McNally ordered the crew to fly to Toronto and just before 4:00am, he ordered them into the cockpit, opened the rear stairwell of the 727, and parachuted over northern Indiana. The jump separated McNally from the pouch with the $500,000 and he landed in a field near the town of Peru. A farmer later discovered the money and turned it in.

A hitchhiking McNally got a lift from none other than Peru’s police chief and his wife. The chief later told reporters McNally did not fit the description of the hijacker, and McNally was able to make his way back home to Wyandotte, Michigan. Eventually, investigators matched a fingerprint on the ransom note to a print in McNally’s military records, according to a June 30, 1972, New York Times report of McNally’s arrest on air piracy charges.

Matiyow recalls her mouth breaking out in canker sores the day after the ordeal. She says American gave her two weeks off and she went home to Ojai, California, to visit her parents. In December 1972, she returned to St. Louis to testify in McNally’s trial. She recalls seeing him sitting with his attorneys.

“He seemed very white from not being out in the sun,” she says. “I had to say, ‘Yeah, that’s him’ and point him out.”

A jury convicted McNally and he received a life sentence. In 1978, McNally, another convicted hijacker, and a third inmate tried unsuccessfully to escape federal prison in Marion, Illinois, via a helicopter hijacked from the outside.

McNally received sentencing that would have given him a release date of 2082. However, an appeals court acquitted McNally of the most serious charges in that case. Authorities granted McNally parole and released him in 2010. Recent interviews indicate he returned to St. Louis to make his home.

Matiyow worked for American Airlines—once playing cards with O.J. Simpson on a cross-country flight— until October 1982 when she opted to stay home and raise a family. In 1975, she met her husband-to-be—Randy Matiyow, who traveled the world in a career in private security—after an early spring blizzard snowed in their flight in Chicago.

“We talked all night in the coffee shop,” Randy Matiyow recalls. “I thought I’d met Wonder Woman because she talked about the hijacking, how she jumped out of airplanes.”

Sharon and Randy Matiyow

Randy Matiyow told his future wife he had a connection to the hijacking of Flight 119. In 1972, he worked in the vault of Brink’s security in his hometown of Detroit. The supervisor of the vault bought a submachine gun and fired it in the Brink’s basement range. The supervisor eventually sold it to someone, who sold it to someone else, who sold it to McNally, Randy Matiyow says.

“After [the] hijacking, in about July or August,” he says, “the FBI traces the gun, comes into our vaults and starts questioning everybody.”

The Matiyows moved to Belleview from Viera in 2014 to be closer to daughter Stacey Ansley, her husband Jason, and their son Jackson, 8, who live in the Ocala area.

Sharon Matiyow says she keeps in touch with Furlong, the rookie flight attendant with whom she shared that harrowing flight in 1972, but has lost touch with Dumanois and Rash, the other stewardesses. Matiyow said Furlong visited her in Belleview on the 45th anniversary of the hijacking in 2017.

“I’ve always said I would like to meet McNally again,” Matiyow says. “Jane doesn’t want to.”

When asked what she would discuss with the hijacker, she says, laughing, “Well, we do have one thing in common—we’ve both parachuted. I jumped from a Cessna and he jumped from a 727. We could see if my jump from 3,000 feet was any smoother than his from 10,000.”

Editor’s Note: Pegalo Pictures Of California is developing a documentary titled “The Final Flight of Martin McNally.” Matiyow says the producer has interviewed her for a “teaser” the film company is shopping. Look for a GoodStart item once Ocala’s Good Life learns more.