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On the ground, TWA and FAA officials had reached the same conclusion as did the 727's crew about Barkley's murderous intent. Convinced that this was no hijacker to be humored, TWA President Forwood C. Wiser Jr. spoke with Dulles Airport Manager Dan Mahaney and ordered: "Don't let that plane get off the ground again. Stop them." Said FAA Administrator John Shaffer: "It was our moment of truth. I guess we had been talking about it so long by then that we decided to do what we did."
Officials at Dulles lined mail sacks filled with newspapers along the runway. When the 727 landed, two airport police shot out the tires. Unaware of what had happened, Barkley ordered Williams and the flight engineer back in the cabin to open the door in preparation for picking up the money sacks. But the passengers had decided to desert the craft and were already pouring out of the emergency exits. Williams went to one of the exits, where Mahaney tossed him a .38 police special. He walked back up the aisle fully intending to shoot Barkley as the only way to save the crew. But before he could act, FBI men were on the plane.
Seeing them coming, Barkley opened fire. The FBI men shot back. "I saw his gun go off, and we jumped him immediately," said Copilot Donald Salmonson. "Captain Hupe hit him low and I hit him high." In the scuffle, Hupe was hit in the abdomen by a bullet before Barkley was disarmed by the pilots with the aid of the FBI. Removed to a hospital, Hupe underwent successful abdominal surgery.
Runaround. What caused Barkley, a family man with two sons, to go berserk? According to his wife, Barkley's life began turning sour in 1963, when he lost his job as a driver-salesman with Continental Baking Co. William McCord, the bakery supervisor, said Barkley was dismissed "for failure to perform his work properly," but others say a fistfight with a competitor was the reason. Four years later, the Internal Revenue Service further added to Barkley's woes by suing him for $471 in back income taxes plus a penalty. He took the case to the Court of Appeals and lost, then prepared and filed his own blockbuster—a $100 million suit against IRS. Last year, after months in the courts, the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal. "They gave him a runaround," his wife said. "They wouldn't even listen to him. He did it [the hijacking] to draw attention to his cause. They are letting us sit here and starve to death." Two late-model Cadillacs, however, registered to the Barkleys, were parked outside the house even as she was speaking.