Mr. Wright’s trail had all but dried up by 2002, when a regional task force was formed to find fugitives from New York and New Jersey. It included the United States Marshals Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and it took up Mr. Wright’s case, eventually following clues that pointed to Portugal. Mr. Wright’s fingerprints, on file in this country from when he was arrested for murder in New Jersey in 1962, matched Mr. Jorge dos Santos’s prints in a Portuguese database.

Mr. Wright had been convicted of shooting a gas station owner, Walter Patterson, a decorated World War II veteran. Mr. Wright, who got away with $70, was eventually sentenced to 15 to 30 years.

In August 1970, he and three other men escaped from what is now Bayside State Prison in Leesburg, N.J.

Mr. Wright ended up in Detroit in a commune-like house on Manistique Street where it appeared the residents had practiced their own brand of religion. There was a mound of dirt in the living room, and in the center, a doll that had been stabbed with a knife. There were also a Bible and what the police said were astrological signs. The house is gone and it is now an empty, overgrown lot.

In 1972, Mr. Wright, dressed as a priest, was at the center of the group that hijacked Captain May’s plane, Delta Flight 841, and demanded $1 million, according to the F.B.I. The hijackers also demanded that the plane be flown to Algeria, where they were counting on asylum.

“He said, ‘You tell ’em this’ and ‘You tell ’em that,’ ” Captain May recalled on Wednesday. “I said, ‘You tell ’em,’ and I handed him the mike. He said, ‘If that money is not here by 2 o’clock, I’m going to start throwing a dead body out the door every minute after 2 o’clock.’ I really thought that was an empty threat, but you can’t be sure, and I didn’t know two of them were escaped cons in for murder. I’d have been a lot nicer if I’d known that. We had some pretty tough conversations going on. Then the F.B.I. guy said the money’s on the way.”