There’s a jailbreak in Owl Dreams, which involves a rather likable murderer jumping out of a courtroom window and changing into a disguise during the fall. If you think that sounds a little wild, take a look at a double jail escape attempt that happened in real life.

On December 21, 1978, a pretty seventeen-year-old girl walked into a Louisville Ky airport and bought a ticket on TWA flight 541 to Kansas City. When the plane was in the air she showed the crew what looked like three sticks of dynamite hidden underneath her jacket. She poised her finger over a switch and promised to blow the plane and its 83 passengers to Kingdom Come if they didn’t fly her to Williamson County Airport and wait there while authorities released an inmate from Marion Federal Prison.

Garrett Brock Trapnell was serving time for a serial robbery and air piracy. According to Robin, he’d seen the error of his ways and wanted one last chance lo live his life as a free man. She was willing to commit suicide and murder to see he got it.

Robin didn’t succeed, of course, mainly because her three sticks of dynamite were actually road flares and her detonating device was a modified doorbell, and the best she could hope for with a rig like that was a couple of really nasty burns.

Garrett Trapnell was 40 when Robin tried to spring him, easily old enough to be her father. Some younger women have a thing for older men—and lots of older men have a thing for younger women. I figured Robin started as Trapnell’s pen pal and fell under his evil influence, the way girls do sometimes with inmate boyfriends. I was wrong. Breaking Trapnell out of prison was more of a family affair.

Barbara Ann Oswald, Robin’s mother, was living in the suburbs of St. Louis and working on a master’s degree in human relations at Webster College when she got interested in Garrett Trapnell. The inmate was a former bank robber who had hijacked a TWA commercial flight in 1972. He demanded $306,800.00 (the exact amount of money he’d lost in a previous court case)

and the release of activist Angela Davis (remember her), and clemency granted by then President Richard Nixon. The FBI captured Trapnell at the airport. He used the insanity defense to stay out of jail for a while, but finally they convicted him.

After exchanging letters with Garrett Trapnell (armed robber, hijacker and self proclaimed mad man) Barbara decided she’d found Mr. Right. On May 24, 1978 she boarded a helicopter at the St. Louis Downtown Heliport and forced the pilot at gunpoint to fly her to Marion Federal Penitentiary. As they were landing inside the fence, the pilot let go of the controls for about twenty seconds, grabbed Barbara’s 44 caliber pistol and fired, “until I saw her fall over.”

That was the end of Barbara Ann, but seven months later, her daughter was trying it again.

Most men who are reading about this double—if unsuccessful—escape attempt are wondering exactly how Garrett Trapnell convinced these two women to put their lives at risk? We can’t ask him. The inmate died of emphysema in 1993 at the age of 55. He was a life long smoker.

If it’s any consolation, his girlfriends probably paid for his cigarettes.