They had a “meet cute” moment worthy of a Hollywood romcom -- if Alfred Hitchcock made romantic comedies.

“I was looking for another girl, and when I knocked at the door she answered with soap in her eyes,” Willie Roger Holder recalled in August 1972.

On that fateful day, Holder ogled the girl with soap in her eyes, her figure barely wrapped in a wet bathrobe. He liked what he saw. Catherine Kerkow, a Coos Bay native recently relocated to San Diego, returned the former soldier’s suggestive smile.

Holder offered this reminiscence in a phone interview with The Oregonian just over a month after he and Kerkow had hijacked a commercial airliner out of Los Angeles. They steered the plane overseas, eventually landing it in Algiers, making theirs the longest-distance U.S. skyjacking ever.

The couple joined a community of expatriate revolutionaries in Algeria, including Black Panther Party leader Eldridge Cleaver. But they didn’t find peace among their fellow radicals.

“We expect to be killed off any day, Catherine and I,” Holder said in the phone interview with the newspaper. “They’ve got the guns, and they’ve got the money.”

He was talking about shadowy Establishment forces he believed were targeting the revolutionaries, forces supposedly brutal and all-seeing.

But Holder and Kerkow managed to avoid assassination. In fact, they would successfully stay on the lam together for half-a-dozen years, a drama-filled period that included friendships with French movie stars, the threat of capture, and high-profile court battles.

Eventually Holder returned to the U.S. The FBI arrested him as he deplaned in New York.

As for Kerkow, the first Oregonian ever charged with air piracy?

She disappeared.

***

On June 2, 1972, Roger Holder and Cathy Kerkow boarded Western Airlines Flight 701. His mother had taken the couple to the airport. Roger, wearing his Army dress uniform, told his mom they were going to Coos Bay to meet Cathy’s parents.

They never made it to Oregon. Instead, Roger gave a hand-written note to a stewardess. “Success through Death,” it stated, using capitalization as emphasis. “Everyone, Except the Captain, will leave the Cabin. There are four of us and two bombs. Do as you’re told and No shooting will take place.”

After showing off a briefcase that had wires ominously sticking out of it, the shell-shocked Vietnam War veteran seemed to have second thoughts. It was all so much bother.

“Should’ve blown it up on takeoff,” he muttered to himself. “Just blown it up. We’re all gonna die anyway.”

Roger demanded $500,000 in ransom from the airline and the release of Angela Davis, a UCLA professor and black militant who was on trial for murder. He received the money but not the professor. (Davis would be acquitted two days after the skyjacking.)

Law enforcement later described Roger as “bright, smooth and very confident,” yet as the crime unfolded, the skyjackers didn’t seem to know what they were doing, journalist Brendan Koerner points out in “The Skies Belong to Us,” his lauded 2013 book about the “golden age of hijacking.” For starters, the couple struggled to decide where they wanted to go. North Vietnam was the original destination, but, mid-hijacking, the plan switched to Algiers.

After releasing the flight’s passengers in New York and directing the Boeing 727 to take off again, Roger and Cathy decided they needed to relax, to dull the day’s rough edges. They lit joints and got stoned in coach, now empty except for them. Then Cathy pulled up the armrests along one of the rows, leaned back and “shimmied out of her purple slacks as Holder dropped his Army dress pants to the floor.”

With Roger’s supposedly bomb-laden briefcase pushed out of the way, they joined the Mile-High Club.

***

No one in Coos Bay could believe Cathy Kerkow would hijack a plane -- or, just as shocking, become romantically involved with a black man.

Her former high-school teachers described the 20-year-old as a good student, “quiet and unobtrusive.” Others in town invariably called her “an all-American girl.” They pointed out that she regularly attended church. A friend said she was “a good, solid person.”

“I can’t imagine Catherine taking any part in planning something like this,” her mother, Patricia Kerkow, declared shortly after the skyjacking. “It must have been an impulsive act on the other person’s part.”

In fact, she wondered if her daughter was even on the plane, noting that news reports described the female hijacker as a blonde.

“My Cathy has dark hair,” she said.

The skyjackers’ phone conversation with The Oregonian ended any lingering doubts about Cathy’s participation in the crime. Growing up in Coos Bay had kept her in the dark about what was happening in the country, she insisted. That quickly changed when she moved to San Diego.

“Living in the city, you find things out fast,” Cathy said. After connecting with Roger, she “decided she wanted to do something about the mess the world’s in rather than wait.”

Cathy insisted her decision to take part in the skyjacking hadn’t been spur-of-the-moment or prompted by the turbulent emotions of new love.

“Would you jump into something like that without doing a lot of thinking?” she challenged Bill Keller, the Oregonian reporter who reached her by phone in Algiers. “I had a lot of people to think about, a lot of consequences to worry about.”

Roger returned to the long-distance conversation, declaring that his girlfriend and co-conspirator had “her eyes wide open. She wasn’t just coming along for the ride because she loves me. That’s life imprisonment, man!”

Added Cathy: “We’re working to finish what we started, working with the Panthers and other groups here and around the world.”

Cathy did indeed seem animated by revolutionary fervor, but at the same time she also appeared to struggle with doubts about her actions.

“What would your parents say if you did what I did?” she wondered during the phone interview.

Keller, who years later would become the New York Times’ executive editor, asked Cathy if she was “glad she did it.”

“There’s a lot of different sides to that,” she replied.

He asked if she would do it again.

Silence on the line. Then: “I couldn’t say.”

***

Catherine Kerkow stumbled into a revolutionary’s life.

She’d grown up in Coos Bay with three younger brothers and, for most of her childhood, without a father, who divorced Patricia and moved to Seattle. Cathy held various part-time jobs through her teens and became a star hurdler on the Marshfield High School track team -- though she wasn’t destined for the Olympics like her friend and teammate, the late running legend Steve Prefontaine.

Needing a change of scenery after graduation, Cathy climbed into her beat-up Volkswagen Beetle and drove to Southern California, thinking she’d like to be a professional singer.

The FBI's wanted poster for Catherine Kerkow. (FBI)

But the pretty, formerly church-going Coos Bay girl found big-city life challenging. Landing in San Diego, she took a job at a low-rent massage parlor, where she was talked into using her incipient skills as a masseuse to sexually satisfy regular customers.

Then Roger Holder, a charismatic 23-year-old energized by the Black Power movement, knocked on the door to her apartment one day in January 1972, looking for her roommate.

They fell hard for one another -- and quickly became inseparable. “They were a real nice couple,” remembered Edward Ford, the manager of a San Diego apartment complex where Roger and Cathy briefly stayed together.

The real nice couple soon realized they had met before Cathy answered her door in a sopping bathrobe -- years before. As children, they had lived just a few blocks apart for a short time. They’d even had a brief conversation, ages 11 and 8, about hunting salamanders at a popular fishing spot in Coos Bay. It was the kind of coincidence young lovers might latch onto as definitive proof of kismet.

Those long-gone Coos Bay days were hardly halcyon, however. Roger’s father, Seavenes, a career Navy man, was posted to Coos Head Naval Facility in 1959. The Coos Bay World reported just weeks later that the Holders, one of only two black families in town, were suffering regular harassment, with neighbors “jeering” and threatening them as they came and went from their rented house on Schoneman Street. Housewives spat on Roger’s mother at the grocery. Then kids at school severely beat one of Roger’s brothers, sparking more newspaper coverage. The family’s treatment shocked some members of the community, and a group of them tried to convince the Holders that the situation would improve, now that a light had been shined on it. But the Navy gave Seavenes a new posting, and the family hastily left town.

FBI agents escort Willie Roger Holder from an Air France flight, July 26, 1986, at New York's Kennedy Airport. (AP Photo/David Bookstaver)AP

Roger Holder would later insist that his experience in Coos Bay showed him that black people in the U.S. were oppressed, taking him down the path that led to Western Airlines Flight 701. Cathy, mesmerized by her good-looking new boyfriend, enthusiastically followed him along that path.

“He told her it was their destiny,” Koerner says of Roger’s criminal plan. “He said they were going to make their mark in history.”

In the days after the young couple hijacked the Boeing airliner, one Coos Bay resident decided it couldn’t be a coincidence that Roger Holder took a white local girl with him when he commandeered the flight and escaped to a Black Power Valhalla.

“You could almost say he got even with Coos Bay,” the man told a reporter.

***

Eldridge Cleaver brought Roger into the Black Panthers’ Algiers-based international operation, even though he was irked that the skyjacker wasn’t able to hold onto the half-mil he’d scored from Western Airlines. (Algeria’s military dictatorship confiscated the cash.)

Still, even with Cleaver’s beneficence, Roger and Cathy worried constantly about their safety -- psychological as well as physical. “It’s so easy to slip into darkness here,” Cathy wrote to a Coos Bay friend shortly after the hijacking.

In 1974, with the political atmosphere in Algeria suddenly turning against the Panthers, Roger and Cathy traveled to Paris using false passports. They settled into a new life as Leavy and Janice Forte, but Roger, struggling with severe anxiety sparked by his Vietnam combat experiences, couldn’t hold onto his cover story. They were arrested on Jan. 24, 1975.

In court, Cathy denied that her partner was a member of the Black Panthers.

“He is just a black,” she testified in fluent French. “And like all blacks in the United States he is oppressed.”

The court convicted the couple of using fake passports but allowed them to stay in the country, ruling that the political nature of their skyjacking meant the crime didn’t qualify for extradition.

By now they had become celebrities. The aging intellectual icon Jean-Paul Sartre, entranced by Cathy’s slinky sexuality, became a vocal proponent of their freedom. Cathy became close friends with Maria Schneider, the French actress who starred with Marlon Brando in the controversial erotic film “Last Tango in Paris.”

This life seemed glamorous, but the two Americans knew it couldn’t last.

Roger walked into the Associated Press’ Paris office in 1977. He told a reporter he was willing to go back to the U.S. and face justice.

“He said it had been over a month since he saw his girlfriend, 25-year-old Catherine Kerkow of North Bend, Ore., and that he was worried about her,” the news service reported. “He also said he felt the French police and others were conspiring against him and he feared for his own life.”

Do you know this woman? Help the #FBI find Catherine Marie Kerkow #WantedWednesday https://t.co/tSeGxhC4wP — FBI (@FBI) December 16, 2015

A later psychiatric evaluation would diagnose Roger as “a paranoid schizophrenic,” but he had good reason to be worried about Cathy. Though she still tried to take care of him, she had matured during her five years on the run and begun to strike out on her own. Finally, she told him she was going to Switzerland to acquire new fake documents. He never saw her again.

Roger, feeling increasingly isolated in Paris, returned to the U.S. in 1986. He spent two years in prison, after which he struggled to find a place in society, mostly working as a day laborer. He died in 2012 at 62.

Cathy, for her part, never resurfaced.

***

Catherine Kerkow’s transformation from mindless wannabe singer to determined international fugitive certainly does have all the hallmarks of a Hollywood movie -- a thriller as well as a romcom.

Yet the mystery surrounding what happened to her -- unlike that of D.B. Cooper, the nom de skyjacking of the man who famously hijacked a flight out of Portland shortly before Roger and Cathy’s crime -- hasn’t generated much media heat over the past three decades. Cathy mostly has been forgotten, even in Coos Bay. Perhaps especially in Coos Bay.

When Brendan Koerner went to the southwest Oregon town in 2011 to learn about Catherine Kerkow, he had trouble finding residents, including old-timers, who had anything to say about her. “It really was a repressed memory there in some ways,” the author says.

This was true most of all in the Kerkow family. Cathy’s mother Patricia, who died in 2016, never spoke of her only daughter -- and her sons followed suit. Some of Cathy’s adult nieces and nephews didn’t know they had an aunt.

Koerner loves the idea of Cathy “reading the book and contacting me, telling me what I got wrong,” but he doesn’t expect it to ever happen. Whether she’s dead or alive, she’s long gone.

The FBI is still looking for her anyway, 40 years after her disappearance. Her wanted poster states she “should be considered armed and dangerous.”

-- Douglas Perry

@douglasmperry

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