On Thursday, June 4, 1970, a 49-year-old man from Phoenix hijacked TWA Flight 486 somewhere over New Mexico and demanded $100 million in ransom. He wanted it paid by the U.S. Supreme Court.
His name was Arthur G. Barkley, and the whole thing came down to a $471.78 tax bill. Some retellings say the government owed him that money. It was the reverse. He owed it, and he had refused to pay.
It ended that night on a runway at Dulles International Airport, with police marksmen firing deer rifles at the jet’s tires, a relief pilot tossed a gun with no bullets in it, and the plane’s captain shot in the stomach.
A $471.78 tax bill
Barkley had been a driver-salesman for a bakery company in Phoenix (the Washington Post called it the Hostess Cake Co.). According to the Post, his troubles started when the company denied him 19 days of sick leave after his hearing was damaged in 1962, and the Teamsters didn’t back him up. He lost the job in 1963.
So he stopped paying part of his taxes. On his 1964 return, according to the U.S. Tax Court, he attached a note saying he would “hold all the money that I am making as collateral” until he got justice.
The IRS said he owed $471.78. He lost in Tax Court in 1967 and lost again at the federal appeals court in 1969, where the judges asked him to “consider the chaos that would be created if each citizen were to withhold his obligations to the Government.”
In March 1970, the Supreme Court refused to hear his case. About three months later, Barkley told his wife, Sue, as TIME reported it, “I’m going to settle the tax case today.”
Over Las Vegas, New Mexico
Flight 486 left Phoenix that morning bound for Washington’s National Airport, with a scheduled stop in St. Louis. Less than an hour in, over Las Vegas, New Mexico, Barkley followed a stewardess into the cockpit as she served coffee to the crew, according to the Post.
He had a pistol in one hand and an open straight razor in the other, and a can of what the crew took to be gasoline behind him.
For the next eight hours, until it ended at Dulles that night, he held the other 50 passengers and the crew. He took over the radio, rambling at President Nixon, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, the Treasury and the Supreme Court justices, whom he called “unfit to rule.”
The plane skipped St. Louis. It landed instead at Dulles, at about 3:40 that afternoon.
The first landing at Dulles
Neither of the 727’s two pilots, Capt. Dale C. Hupe and his co-pilot, was qualified to fly overseas, and TWA was worried Barkley might order the jet out of the country. So it flew in a relief pilot, Capt. Billy N. Williams, its senior international pilot, from New York.
Williams had been through this before. Seven months earlier, in October 1969, he had helped fly a hijacked TWA jet, Flight 85, all the way to Rome.
Barkley wanted his money. On short notice, officials rounded up all they could: $100,750 from a Virginia bank, three-fourths of it from its Leesburg branch and the rest from its branch at the airport, according to the Post.
Airport manager Daniel Mahaney, FBI agents and TWA officials dropped it in a canvas bag on the east runway. Williams arrived on a small twin-engine plane, which picked up the bag and taxied over to the hijacked jet, and Williams carried the money aboard.
It was about a thousandth of what Barkley wanted. As TIME quoted Williams:
“He was very much upset when he opened the bag and saw it wasn’t $100 million. The money was all over the cockpit floor – he was wading in it. It was like a carpet.”
Just before the jet took off again, with all the passengers still aboard, Barkley radioed a message for Washington. The Post reported it this way: “Tell the President and the State Department you don’t know how to count and you don’t even know the rules of law.” The Associated Press heard “the rules of war.”
Back to Dulles
The jet headed north, toward Canada. Near Elmira, New York, it turned back, when Barkley seemed satisfied that his bigger demand would be met, the Post reported. The Chicago Tribune later reported that two armed Air Force F-106 interceptors had shadowed the hijacked jet for almost three hours.
This time Barkley wanted the full $100 million, in sacks of big bills, laid out on the runway. The sacks were there when the plane came in for its second landing, a little after 7 p.m. Officials had stuffed them with torn-up newspaper. His plan was to land past them, taxi back, have the money loaded, refuel and take off again.
The people on the ground had already decided that wasn’t going to happen.
Deer rifles and an empty gun
Dulles had a deer problem. Here’s how the Washington Post’s Bernard D. Nossiter explained what happened next, in a story the paper ran on June 6, 1970:
“So Dulles is one of the nation’s few airports where police are armed with hunting rifles and each year they bag several score deer.”
As the jet came to a stop, Barkley sent Williams and the flight engineer to the door to bring in the money. They had just opened it, Williams told the Post, when “we heard shots and heard the tires go flat.”
Two airport police marksmen, P. J. Farnham and George C. Armitage Jr., had ridden up behind the jet on a foam fire truck and shot out its tires. Barkley “never heard the shots from the high-powered hunting rifles because the plane’s engines had been revved up on his orders for another takeoff,” Nossiter wrote. The fire truck then pulled in to block the runway.
Williams later remembered what Barkley had threatened:
“He said he was going to destroy the money, destroy the aircraft and all the people on board . . . this was going to be the price and the people were going to have to pay for it.”
With Barkley waiting on the money, most of the passengers got out. They opened the doors and wing exits, slid down the chutes or walked out on the wings and jumped, and took cover behind the fire trucks.
Williams signaled for a weapon, and Mahaney, the airport manager, tossed him a .38 revolver. Williams came back to the door and flipped open the cylinder to show Mahaney it was empty, according to Nossiter, and Mahaney threw up a second, loaded gun. Williams never got to use it.
Shots in the cockpit
FBI agents under John McDermott, head of the bureau’s Alexandria office, hoisted the smallest agent up on their shoulders to the open front door, nearly nine feet off the ground. Shooting broke out inside. By the Tribune’s count, Barkley and the agents fired a dozen or so shots.
Captain Hupe was shot in the stomach. In the first confusion, the Post wrote that “it was not clear who fired the bullet that wounded Hupe.” Hupe himself later said it came from Barkley’s gun. At a hospital news conference on June 12, as the Associated Press reported, he described the moment he jumped Barkley:
“When I jumped him he was firing into the cabin, and as I left my seat, he turned and fired at me – and that was the best feeling I ever had.”
Barkley was wounded in the right thumb and wrestled down by the crew and the agents. Not a passenger was hurt.
He didn’t go out screaming. An airport policeman told UPI that Barkley went down the stairs “nodding and smiling,” saying “Hello, there, hi there” to each officer he passed.
The Rev. Charles Sumners Jr. asked him how he felt. “Okay,” Barkley said, according to the Post. Then: “I was a minister, too. That’s before I broke down. I was driven to this by agents.”
“A national hero”
Hupe, a pilot with 23 years of airline experience, had flown C-47s as a Marine in the Solomon Islands during World War II. He survived about three hours of surgery at Fairfax Hospital.
The next day, President Nixon called the hospital. According to the White House, Nixon, then a Navy officer, had been assigned to Hupe’s Marine air group in the Pacific. The Chicago Tribune reported that Nixon said:
“I served with Capt. Hupe at Guadalcanal in World War II … He went thru the entire war without a scratch and it’s too bad he has to be hurt in this way. Tell him he’s a national hero.”
What happened to Arthur Barkley
On November 16, 1971, a Fairfax County court found Barkley not guilty by reason of insanity on charges of abduction, maiming and robbery. He went to Southwestern State Hospital in Marion, Virginia, and that’s where he stayed.
What happened next is its own strange story, laid out in a 1995 Fairfax County court opinion. In 1975, the hospital’s director reported that Barkley had recovered and asked the court to release him, then withdrew the request after Barkley refused to talk to the court’s psychiatrists.
In 1982, a later director said he could be released without substantial danger to the public. Again Barkley wouldn’t talk to the court’s examiners, and he stayed.
For 24 years, the court never entered a formal order committing him, and no judge reviewed his case. Virginia didn’t require automatic review hearings until 1992, and, in the opinion’s words, “before the hearing held on August 16, 1995, Mr. Barkley did not have any review hearings.”
That fall, Fairfax Circuit Judge Marcus D. Williams found Barkley mentally ill and dangerous, and yearly hearings followed. At one in January 2006, his doctors, Colin Barrom and Robert K. Guthrie, told the court that in 1998 he had put a ceramic mug in a sock and tried to attack a psychiatrist. Barkley was in his 80s by then.
The county’s prosecutor, Robert Horan, told the judge, as Connection Newspapers reported:
“The remarkable thing about this defendant is his mental situation hasn’t changed in 35 years.”
Barkley spoke up for himself, too: “I would like to know when this court made a law that a man can’t stand up and protect his family.” The court kept him in the hospital.
Why this hijacking mattered
Barkley’s was one of 134 hijackings and attempted hijackings of U.S. airliners from 1968 through 1972, by the FAA’s count. Before him, American hijackers almost always wanted a ride somewhere. Barkley was one of the first who wanted money instead, a year and a half before D.B. Cooper made the ransom hijacking famous.
He had also walked right past the answer. According to an Associated Press item in the Chicago Tribune, the metal detector at the Phoenix boarding gate “was not in use” when Barkley went by it.
Beginning January 5, 1973, the FAA required airlines to inspect every carry-on bag and to screen every passenger with a metal detector or a hand search. There were 27 hijackings and attempts on U.S. airliners in 1972, by the FAA’s count, and one in 1973. The hijacking wave had collapsed.
So the next time you’re in the security line at Dulles, emptying your pockets into a gray bin, you can think of the bread truck driver from Phoenix and his $471.78.
We dug this one up with help from AI and checked it against the original records below. Here’s how we use AI.
On the AtlasNewSee where this happenedDulles International Airport38.9523° N · 77.4535° W
