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The situation reached crisis point early Tuesday afternoon as the gunmen awaited permission from Syrian authorities for the Achille Lauro to dock at Tartus. The hijackers had asked by radio to be put in touch with the Italian and American ambassadors in Damascus, hoping to negotiate the release of their 50 comrades in Israel. A Lebanese radio station monitored the chilling sequence of threats by one of the gunmen. At 12:30 p.m. Tuesday: "Any delay in the arrival of the ambassadors will be damaging." At 12:32 p.m.: "There is no time to lose, and the first ultimatum set for 4 p.m. has been brought forward to 1 p.m." At 12:58 p.m.: "We are not willing to wait any longer, and the first passenger will be killed at 1 p.m. We will communicate the name and nationality of the passenger." At 1:26 p.m.: "What is new at Tartus? We will immediately kill the second. There is no shortage of passengers to kill." Another monitor in Lebanon reported a hijacker's saying, "We threw the first body into the water after shooting him in the head. His wife is wailing about it."
At exactly what point these sadistic threats became reality is not known. But in a now familiar ritual of terrorism, the hijackers had decided to underscore their seriousness by taking a sacrifice. First they separated Leon Klinghoffer from his wife. "No," said one gunman to the wheelchair-bound passenger. "You stay. She goes." Marilyn Klinghoffer never saw her husband again. For the next 24 hours she and her friends were consumed by anxiety. When the hijacking was finally over, they looked all through the ship for him, though they expected the worst. Some passengers had noted that the trousers and shoes of one of the hijackers had been covered with blood. And besides, as one recalled, "We had heard gunshots and a splash." Giovanni Migliuolo, the Italian Ambassador to Egypt, later chillingly reconstructed the event: "The hijackers pushed (Klinghoffer) in his chair and dragged him to the side of the ship, where, in cold blood, they fired a shot to the forehead. Then they dumped the body into the sea, together with the wheelchair."
Shortly after the murder, the gunman with the bloodstained clothing appeared on the bridge, told Captain De Rosa what had happened and ordered him to advise the Syrian authorities in Tartus. He also said that the second victim would be "Miss Mildred," evidently referring to Mildred Hodes, but he did not follow through on that threat. For a while, some passengers and crew members thought the gunmen might also have murdered an Austrian woman, Anna Hoerangner, who was missing. Eventually it was discovered that though she had been knocked down a flight of stairs by a hijacker at the time of the takeover, she had managed to make her way to an unlocked cabin. There she remained in hiding for two days, huddled under a bed or locked in a toilet.