Hunting Down Mr. Wright

0:00Music

0:08Wow. House has definitely seen better days. This is the window I stood in when I waved goodbye to my dad the last time. Growing up, my mother never talked about the fear she felt while trying to raise her family. She remained strong for us. I had this little two-wheeler. I ended up down there. In the road? Almost in the road. And I said, Daddy, where were you? And he said, you did it. My grandfather, Walter Patterson, was murdered. One of the people who is responsible for doing it is still not paying for what he has done.

0:49For 17 years, I worked on a case involving a fugitive named George Wright.

0:59My father was brutally beaten and shot in a robbery of his gas station. It haunts me to this day. It all started right there in 1962, when Mr. Walter Patterson was closing up his gas station.

1:22Mr. Patterson was a war hero, combat veteran, World War II, received the Bronze Star. The ironic thing was that he came through the war only to have this happen to him. The night of the incident, two young men came right through that door with loaded weapons. George Wright and his partner said, this is a robbery, get him up. Walter Patterson put up a heck of a fight. He was beaten so severely that he was unrecognizable.

2:04George Wright was caught two days later. The guy gets convicted, sentenced to prison. You would think the case would be closed. But he escapes from prison, he hijacks an airplane, he threatens to kill people. A Delta Airlines jet was taken over by... Fled the country, became a fugitive. George Wright has been on a run for 41 years. Essentially, he just vanished. Wright has an uncanny ability to escape.

2:38I hope he's looking over his shoulder, wondering who's a few steps behind him. My partners and I are determined to be the ones that apprehend George Wright. And keep working his case until he's back behind bars in the state of New Jersey. I got a phone call that it's 100 % your guy.

3:10We had photos. We had fingerprints. We knew that he had false teeth. We knew he had scars. You could see a scar on the forehead. That's this right here. That's correct. Our job, our responsibility is to find this man. He is a very smart adversary. From old photos to artist sketches. You have no idea which of these looks the most like George Wright. No. This is very creepy. Even to a lifelike plaster bust they created. That is an age-enhanced bust. It's almost as if the fugitive George Wright himself were watching them. That's how he got away. Taunting the three-man task force that's been on a manhunt to find him.

3:56Around the world. And across the decades. This is what this person would look like 40 years later. That's correct. For R.J. Gallagher, recently retired from the FBI, Rick Cope of the U.S. Marshals, and Dan Klotz of the New Jersey Department of Corrections, The saga begins with Wright's involvement in the murder of war hero Walter Patterson in 1962. And right here, there was a big tree, and next to it, Daddy had built us a sandbox. He hurt his family. He's got to pay for what he did. The crime is senseless. There are triggers throughout the year. His birthday, the day he got shot, the day he died.

4:43This is the house that I grew up in, spent my early years here. Today, a lot of her past is boarded up and paved over. And for decades, Walter Patterson's daughter, Ann, tried to keep it that way. That was fun. It's not me! It's not me! Her daughters, Terry and Jackie, never actually knew their grandfather and never knew why. It was never spoken of in the house at all. We knew it was a quiet subject for a reason and not to bring it up. Fifty years after his murder... I welcome Ann Patterson, who along with her family have suffered irreparable harm from the brutal violence committed against her beloved father by George Wright.

5:36Walter Patterson's granddaughters are spearheading their mother's fight to finally bring George Wright to justice. My father was robbed, brutally beaten, and shot in his gas station in Wall Township, New Jersey. I was 14 years old. The nightmare was just beginning. Her whole timeline of her life just shifted. Ann was born in 1947. Her father, Walter, served on the front lines in World War II, coming home with a bronze star. Back in New Jersey, he opened a small gas station, abandoned but still standing today. After dinner on November 23, 1962, he left home and headed back to work. And I did what I always did.

6:25I stood in the window and I went like this and he waved to me. That was the last time I saw him alive. After spending 17 of his 25 years at the FBI on this case, R.J. Gallagher knows every detail of what happened next. It was a simple robbery of a gas station. Just after 9 p.m., a black-and-white sedan pulled into Patterson Station.

6:59Two men went inside. A pair of short-order cooks named Walter McGee, then.22. I had a gun. I had it in my waist, a.32. And George Wright, 19. Wright had a sawed-off.22 rifle. They demanded Walter Patterson's money, all$70 of it. Here's a guy that fought for his country. Now somebody's coming in and trying to take his piece of America, that's what he fought for. And he put up a hell of a fight this time, too. According to RJ Gallagher, the gunman beat Patterson savagely. Walter Patterson made a launch for me. We got to tussling. And they started hitting him about the head with their weapons. They knocked him to the ground.

7:50And I pulled up my gun.

7:57Nobody was thinking about going there to shoot nobody. You know, I think my mind just froze up on me. In his decades as a fugitive, George Wright has been as elusive to reporters as to authorities, though he did speak to Mike Finkel for a GQ magazine exclusive titled Uncatchable. Finkel taped the interview in which Wright paints himself as an almost innocent bystander. And you probably just for standing there with my mouth open probably. Did you remember seeing any blood or anything like that? No, I didn't even look at the guy to tell you the truth. I was shaking like crazy. And McGee also, he had shot the guy, didn't know whether it had killed him or not.

8:43Police found bullets and casings, but couldn't say for sure how many shots were fired or by whom. For Walter Patterson, it didn't matter. It went into his abdomen. It went through his kidney and his liver, and the bullet never exited. The robbers fled. Minutes later, Ann's daughter Terri says passing motorists found Patterson, barely conscious. He was beaten so severely. And then it took like, what, 10 or 12, like numerous hours to try to piece together his skull. Two days later, Walter Patterson died, but not before describing his attackers and their car. It's amazing that he could give that much information.

9:35He definitely helped to solve his own homicide. Police soon found the car, and within 48 hours, they had the driver along with the two gunmen, Walter McGee and George Wright. To avoid the death penalty, both Wright and McGee pled no contest to murder. The fatal bullet matched Walter McGee's gun. He got life. George Wright got 15 to 30 years. I felt safe then because then they were in jail. That night in jail, the reality of it hit me. Minimum 15, maximum 30 years in New Jersey State Prison. You're saying that the end of the world.

10:22For Ann Patterson, too, it felt like the end of the world. You look at the clock and write, Daddy should be coming home. And he's not coming home. And you've got to remind yourself of that. You still call him Daddy? He will always be my Daddy. Because there's a part of me that's still 14 years old. I probably was like a little soldier or a zombie all through high school. I don't have a lot of memories of it. I just did what I had to do and immersed myself in my schoolwork. And there's school pictures and so forth. After that point, the pictures kind of stop. The family did stop. Her family ended at that point.

11:03Living moment to moment, she struggled through high school and gave up any hope of college. Then one August day, nearly eight years after the murder, Ann's past caught up with her. And my aunt Jenny called me up and said, Ann, George Wright has escaped. She said, lock your doors. And that was only the beginning. Prison breaks, hijackings, fleeing from country to country to country. It's a roller coaster ride. You know, you just wonder what's next. What's the next twist? What's the next turn?

11:50It's not just that one person gets shot. That shot reverberates through everybody else. My grandfather never got to see his daughters grow up. He never got to see them get married. He never got to watch them have their children. and that was because of George Wright. By the summer of 1970, George Wright had served nearly eight years of his 15 - to 30-year sentence for his involvement in Walter Patterson's murder. When I walked into the jail and they closed them doors behind me, just saying like that, I was closed off from the world. Despite his crimes in those GQ magazine tapes, Wright portrays himself as a victim of society.

12:38and a champion of social justice. Society would say, hey, you did that, it's against the law. But people all through history that have been struggling against the power structure have always been called criminals or outlaws. So, at that time, it looks like George Wright is going to be in prison at least 15 years. Correct. But Wright had a very different plan. After serving part of his time in a maximum security facility, George Wright was transferred to a minimum security prison here in southern New Jersey. At the time, there were no bars, no razor wire, and no problem with simply walking away.

13:23Just after the 11 p.m. bed check on August 22, 1970, that's exactly what he and three others did. We walked off in the night. There were guards around. Armed with a few tools and an audacious plan, they weren't on foot for long. They decided to take the warden's car and flee to Atlantic City. They hot-wired the warden's car. Yes. I read that you stole the warden's car. Is that true? I don't make no comment on that. I think that that is funny. I bet he didn't. Police found the car and quickly recaptured two of the men, but George Wright and the fourth inmate had vanished. These people are walking the streets.

14:10You don't know where they're going to go. As the years turned to decades, with George Wright still on the loose, Ann Patterson lost hope that authorities ever would find him. So she was shocked when, 24 years after the prison escape, FBI agent R.J. Gallagher called to introduce himself. He was genuinely interested in my father's case. What reassurances could you give her at that point? I said I would work as hard as we could and do what we could to find this guy. He told her it was a long shot. The Bureau had destroyed the Patterson case file long ago, and Gallagher didn't even know if Wright was still alive.

14:51So where do you start? Friends, acquaintances, relatives. We checked phones, we checked emails. There was nothing that was off the table. Suspecting Wright was overseas, Gallagher sent Interpol the fingerprints taken at his 1962 arrest. He also digitally age-enhanced Wright's mugshot to show what he might look like years later. About halfway through this, the U.S. Marshals and the Department of Corrections joined, and we formed a nice team. It was the perfect storm of investigators. Rick Cope and Dan Klotz were on a fugitive task force also looking at the case when they teamed up with Gallagher in 2002.

15:33So we only had very, very minimal information on the actual original crime. Following the smallest of leads, often working nights and weekends. Nine o 'clock at night, ten o 'clock at night. Hey, look at this, look at that. They learned that after his escape, George Wright spent time in Atlantic City, then New York, once working as, of all things for a fugitive, a male model. Until I realized what I was doing, because I was on the run at the time. I didn't have any picture taken. That was the end of my modeling career. He made his way to this house in Detroit. And there was a bunch of people living there.

16:09It was like a family, so to speak. It was in Detroit that we became affiliated with the Black Panthers.

16:18The Panthers had burst onto the scene in 1966 with a radical philosophy for the time, revolution through militant action. Wright, along with four others, hatched a plan to leave white America behind. At the time, we wanted to become more active in the struggles so that people would see that we were for real. and make an outrageous statement in the process. A Delta Airlines jet from Detroit to Miami was taken over by eight passengers. July 31, 1972. Delta Airlines Flight 841 was boarding passengers in Detroit, headed for Miami. Captain William May remembers seeing a priest. He gestured towards me with his Bible.

17:10As he went back towards his seat, I said, well, a priest, nice to have him aboard. He won't have any trouble with him. He won't have any trouble with this guy. That Bible was hollowed out with a handgun inside, undetected by the lax security of the day. Mid-flight, Captain May came out of the lavatory to find a passenger pointing a gun at him. And back in the cockpit was a second gunman. that innocent-looking priest. The priest had this girl, flight attendant, around like this with a pistol pointed to her head, and the pistol was cocked. And I said, look, uncock that gun, we can talk. I said, now what do you want?

17:53He says, we want a million dollars, and we want to go to Algiers. I said, Algiers? I said, where the hell is Algiers? I said, this airplane won't fly to Algiers. At 41, May was still a junior pilot. He'd never even flown all the way across the ocean. The plane taxi to a remote area of Miami International Airport, one of the men was dressed as a priest. Investigators soon identified the priest as George Wright. Fueled by a mixture of radical politics and rage against the system, George Wright was about to become one of the most wanted fugitives in America. Captain May made the announcement. That's when people started screaming.

18:37He terrorized people on that plane. You don't bring a gun on an airplane and expect something good to happen.

19:12There was another airplane hijacking today. A Delta Airlines jet from Detroit to Miami was taken over by eight passengers. The hijackers are described as three men, two women, and three children. One of the men was dressed as a priest. When I saw the hijacking on TV, I thought, oh, those poor passengers. Ann Patterson was watching the news that July day in 1972 and soon found out who the lead hijacker was. I remember how afraid I was the night that my father was shot. So I wondered if they were going to come out of it alive themselves. else. When Delta 841 from Detroit landed in Miami, the gun-toting Priest made the hijackers' demands crystal clear.

19:59CBS News cameras were there. The hijackers demanded$1 million in small bills, the largest amount ever in an airplane ransom. You now understand that this is deadly serious? Yes. They really seemed that determined. Determination you can hear on the cockpit recordings Captain William May identifies as from that day. He told me, uh, the instructions got called extensively as a timeline that's going to keep somebody. Okay, now, just be cool. He's going to get the money. Okay, it's a bomb, I take three more. More than 40 years later, May returned with us to the Miami airport and recalled how hard it was to be cool.

20:46What did they say would happen if you didn't go ahead and do what they said? That's when he said he would start throwing a body out the door every minute at two o 'clock. And you've got 15 minutes. Whatever we're going to do, I'm not jiving. Adding to the surreal atmosphere, Wright's team of hijackers insisted that an FBI agent deliver the million dollars to the plane. And that he be naked. So they want to make sure that the FBI agent who's giving the money has no weapon. No weapon, exactly. Captain May thought that was a bit much and helped convince Wright and the others to let the agent at least wear a bathing suit.

21:26We didn't want violence. And with short pants, we would ensure that they had no weapons. And that's exactly why we did it. What happened when the money came to the plane? They brought it up by rope. I think it was$500 ,000 the first time. Passengers were terrified. People were definitely panicking. Once the money was transferred, the hijackers released the 86 passengers unharmed, including 25-year-old Elaine Otiver. Well, when we got off the plane, we were all standing out, like in the middle of the runway. People were crying, and it was very emotional because now we're off, but they're on to their next phase of this ordeal.

22:08We didn't know if they would ever make it alive. Did the hijackers say where they wanted to go? Did you talk with them at all? No, uh-uh. The stewardess said they wanted to go to Algiers.

22:22Algeria. At the time, it was a haven for exiled Black Panthers and other militants. The hijackers were now frantic to get there, with a million dollars in cash and seven Delta crew members in tow. The buses drove away, and Wright, he kept... he would put that pistol right in my neck and said, get going, get going.

22:48But before they got underway to Algeria, the plane had to stop in Boston for extra fuel and a navigator. They made him strip down as well. More than 50 FBI agents and state police were staked out at the Boston airport. George Wright kept a gun on Captain May and ordered him to take off again. So the plane headed out over the dark Atlantic Ocean for a flight into the unknown. Did you have any extensive conversations with any of them? Not at that point. So we're done talking now. We're done talking. We're going to Algiers now. Before landing, the captain tried to reason with George Wright one last time.

23:36I said, look down there. I said, I don't know how bad things were in Detroit, but I said, you're not going to like it here, I can tell you that. As he taxied to a stop, Captain May remembers he wasn't too crazy about it himself. All these guys sprang out of the bushes with rifles, pointed at the cockpit. I thought, hmm, whose side are they on here? Algerian officials granted asylum to the hijackers, who promptly held a press conference with George Wright center stage. The Algerians soon returned the plane and the million dollars. Wright and Company disappeared into the sprawling city. This is like the beginning of terrorism.

24:17I remember the shock. I mean, everybody was shocked of this. Shocked especially, Ann Patterson remembers, because she just assumed that once Wright's identity was known, he'd be caught. Period. I thought, they're going to get him now. They're finally going to catch him, and this is going to be it. The others were caught and imprisoned about four years later in France. But George Wright would remain uncatchable for four more decades. It's crazy. It's just one thing after another that he got away with. It was a game for him. In part, by hiding in the last place on earth anyone would think to look.

24:57And by living an extraordinary double life. Could this be the same person? It just doesn't seem fathomable.