William Mulqueeney had just beaten a man to death with a fire extinguisher.

“Either one man or three of us were going to die; what would you have done?” he asked a Toronto Star reporter.

What indeed. Mulqueeney was piloting a chartered four-seater aircraft when the passenger suddenly went berserk, turning on him and his friend, Irwin Davis. They were 2,000 feet up as the altercation escalated into a life-and-death struggle.

“My God, I wish I could take those blows back. It’s all so terrible I hardly know what happened,” the 33-year-old pilot told reporters just hours after the violent incident in Toronto skies on Sept. 16, 1935.

The dead man was Len Koenecke, a 31-year-old baseball star and outfielder with the Brooklyn Dodgers, husband and father of a young child. The previous season he had set a major league fielding record of .994 but an arm injury and faltering performance was threatening to end his career.

Following the Sept. 16 Dodgers’ game with the St. Louis Cardinals, which Koenecke watched from the dugout, he was told he was being sent to the minors.

That night the ballplayer with a reputed rebellious streak boarded a commercial flight to New York. But he was turfed from the plane during an unscheduled stop in Detroit for being drunk and aggressive.

At the airport there, he approached Mulqueeney about chartering a Stinson Junior monoplane to continue his journey east but balked at the $175 fare. They agreed on $60 to fly as far as Buffalo.

“He seemed to have a hangover, but otherwise was quite steady and sober,” Mulqueeney said of Koenecke’s demeanour in the airport waiting room.

Davis, a 25-year-old licensed pilot, stunt flyer and friend of Mulqueeney’s, decided to go along for the ride and the trio set off around 10 p.m.

Within minutes, things got ugly in the cabin as Koenecke demanded the veteran airman perform flying stunts. When Mulqueeney refused, Koenecke tried to grab the controls.

“It looked as if he wanted to try to fly the plane himself,” the pilot recalled. He and Davis managed to force Koenecke, who appeared “completely demented,” into the back seat where promises of liquor in Buffalo pacified him between bouts of belligerence for a couple of hours.

But as they approached Long Branch in the south-west of Toronto, the passenger tried again to take charge of the plane.

Davis wrestled him to the floor, suffering several bites as the powerful athlete kept “grinding his teeth” and pawing at him while Davis struck back with his fists, he testified later.

With Koenecke bumping against the controls and the plane flying erratically, Mulqueeney realized that “we would all come down dead if we didn’t knock Koenecke out,” he told the Star.

“I grabbed the fire extinguisher and struck out,” he said, but the first blow hit Davis by mistake.

“I left the controls of the machine and turned around. I could see the side of Koenecke’s head. I hit him. The handle of the fire extinguisher came out. I hit him again. I hit him until he stopped fighting …”

In his account to newsmen, he said he hit Koenecke as many as 10 times.

“The ship was going up and down and all over the place,” Mulqueeney said, describing how he used his “seventh sense” to fly, doing 200 km/h as they zoomed as low as 200 feet.

In the moonlight, the disoriented pilot could see the outline of Long Branch race track at Kipling and Evans Aves. — a safe spot to land and “get away from that frightful nightmare,” he explained.

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The chaos in the sky caught eyes and ears on the ground below.

“While the fight for life was taking place, the aeroplane zoomed low and then climbed high, dozens of times, as it followed an erratic course along the lake shore awakening and puzzling residents of the towns from the Humber to Port Credit,” coroner Dr. Warren Snyder later told the newspaper.

Local councillor S.B. Douglas spotted the plane as he returned home from a late meeting.

“It crossed the track from north to south several times. It appeared to be going quite fast and was very apparently in distress,” he said.

The plane finally landed just after 1 a.m. in the infield of the race track, slightly damaged and splattered with blood inside. Koenecke was huddled in the rear seat.

“I saw his face and saw the blood he had lost and said ‘he’s gone,’ ” a police constable told the Star.

Koenecke died of his injuries before the plane landed, Snyder concluded.

“If Koenecke’s dead, I guess I killed him,” Mulqueeney said, adding he didn’t remember much after hitting the deranged man. “It was either him or all of us. It’s terrible.”

Mulqueeney and Davis were immediately charged with manslaughter but the charges were dismissed three days later when the jury at a preliminary hearing ruled they acted in self-defence.

Koenecke had become “demented” after being discharged from the Dodgers then kicked off the flight to New York, defence counsel E.J. Murphy told the jury.

The despondent man “wanted to die a spectacular death — a sane man would never have attempted to grab the controls of an aeroplane,” Murphy stated.

Magistrate William Keith believed the two flyers had little choice but to defend themselves.

However, the men “may have used a little more force than necessary,” he added.

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