"That poor Houston ticket clerk never had a chance," Dallas Psychiatrist David Hubbard said last week. "He defied the first rule in dealing with a paranoiac—never crowd him or move at him suddenly—and got an instant, deadly education."
Hubbard was talking about Airline Agent Stanley Hubbard,* who was killed last week attempting to stop four armed skyjackers from boarding an Eastern Airlines jet (see THE NATION). If airline employees and passengers —and Government agencies, too—are properly educated about skyjackers. Psychiatrist Hubbard believes, tragedies like the one in Houston can be avoided. Skyjackers, says Hubbard, are not normal men who can be dealt with as if they were ordinary criminals; in most cases they are paranoid, suicidal schizophrenics to whom the threat of death is not a deterrent but a stimulus to crime. Thus Hubbard believes that the Federal Government is endangering air travelers by pursuing its belligerent policy toward skyjackers. In fact, he says, each time the Government escalates its response to aerial piracy, it excites the interest of "mutations," new types of psychopaths with ever more dangerous tendencies toward violence.
Women's Underclothes. Hubbard speaks with some authority. He is the only U.S. psychiatrist who has studied the skyjacking phenomenon. Supported by a $200,000 grant from a private Dallas foundation, Hubbard in the past 3½ years has taped hundreds of hours of interviews with 50 imprisoned skyjackers, worked with airline crews to develop techniques for handling piracy, and outlined his ideas in a 1971 book called The Skyjacker: His Flights of Fantasy (Macmillan; $5.95). Hubbard's go-easy approach is anathema to get-tough FBI officials and many pilots. But there is some evidence that it works: Hubbard has personally stage-managed the peaceful surrender of three hijackers.
The principal characters in the Houston skyjacking and in an unsuccessful attempt two days later at New York City's Kennedy Airport seem to give Hubbard's theories even more credence. Charles Tuller, who led the band that took over the Eastern jet, could not sustain his marriage, hated his exwife, and was said to be awkward and uncomfortable around women. The man who was subdued before he could hijack a National Airlines jet in New York was discovered to be wearing women's underclothes. What is known about both men seems to confirm Hubbard's belief that skyjackers are emotionally disturbed. In his experience, they are not strong, masculine supermen but weak, longtime losers, men who have failed at life and love. They tend to be passive, effeminate, latently homosexual, and afraid of their eldest sisters and mothers.
"I never dated. I didn't know how to ask," many skyjackers have confessed to Hubbard. When a skyjacker gets married, it is usually to a woman who "seduced him first and proposed later." Adds Hubbard about the skyjackers he knows: "Almost without exception, the men were reviled by their wives, strove to placate them and were often cuckolded." One betrayed skyjacker's wife told her husband that he had "never pleased her sexually, had a tiny penis, and not the least idea in the world about what to do with it."