(George Wright) Telling the Story of 41 Years on the Run

[alp227]

Source: NYT

George Wright, the fugitive murderer who was captured in Portugal last month, 39 years after hijacking a jetliner and demanding a $1 million ransom, said he figured authorities in the United States had given up the chase long ago. But, he said, he never stopped worrying that they would come knocking.

“Knowing the Americans, I always feared that they had their antennas up,” he said in a two-hour interview in this village outside Lisbon where he was arrested last month. Sitting at his kitchen table, he wore sweat pants, plastic sandals and the ankle bracelet ordered by a Portuguese judge who moved him from a Lisbon jail to house arrest while he fights extradition to the United States.

Mr. Wright, 68, was convicted in a 1962 murder in New Jersey — an armed robbery that netted him $70 but left Walter Patterson, a gas station owner and decorated World War II veteran with two daughters, dead. He escaped from a state prison in 1970, and in 1972, dressed as a priest, he, with four others, hijacked a Miami-bound jetliner and demanded it be flown to Algeria. He pulled a gun from a hollowed-out Bible he had carried aboard and held it to a flight attendant’s head.

The interview provided an account of his odyssey since the hijacking. Mr. Wright — who is fighting extradition under his assumed Portuguese identity of José Luís Jorge dos Santos — talked about how he had married a Portuguese woman he met at a nightclub more than 30 years ago and done odd jobs, working as a teacher in Western Africa and more recently decorating houses, as well as selling chicken and handicraft in Portugal. Mr. Wright said he lifted weights and rode an exercise bicycle before breakfast most days, and read the Bible — “I got rebaptized in 2002,” he said.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/29/nyregion/george-wright-tells-story-of-hijacking-from-portugal.html

[Hassin Bin Sober]

1. Interesting.

[provis99]

2. typical sick psychopath. Everybody's to blame but him.