Life Detonated Read online

  Life Detonated

  The True Story of a Widow and a Hijacker

  Kathleen Murray Moran

  Amberjack Publishing

  New York | Idaho

  Amberjack Publishing

  228 Park Avenue S #89611

  New York, NY 10003-1502

  http://amberjackpublishing.com

  This is a work of creative nonfiction. It is nonficction in that this is a true story based on the author’s memories, and creative in that the author has expanded on her memory to build a richer narrative. The events contained herein are accurate to the best of the author’s memory. Minor details which do not impact the story have been changed as necessary to protect the privacy of those involved.

  Copyright © 2017 by Kathleen Murray Moran

  Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, in part or in whole, in any form whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

  Names: Moran, Kathleen Murray, author.

  Title: Life detonated : the true story of a widow and a hijacker / by Kathleen Murray Moran.

  Description: New York, NY: Amberjack Publishing, 2017. Identi ers: ISBN 978-1-944995-32-4 (Hardcover) | 978-1-944995-45-4 (pbk.) | 978-1-944995-36-2 (ebook) | LCCN 2017934572 Subjects: LCSH Moran, Kathleen Murray. | Police spouses--Family relationships--United States. | Police--Family relationships--United States. | Terrorism--New York (State)--New York--History. | Police- -New York (State)--New York--History. | Bombings--United States- -Personal Narratives. | Hijacking of aircraft--United States--Personal narratives. | Police--Violence against--New York (State)--New York. | BISAC BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Law Enforcement Classi cation: LCC HV7921 .M672 2017 | DDC 301.42--dc23

  Cover Design: Black Kat Creative

  Jacket Image: Deconstructed Sphere, 2005 (acrylic) by Lincoln Seligman / Bridgeman Images

  Author’s Note

  Life Detonated is a true story of the events of September 11, 1976. Some information has been reprinted from newspapers. The hijacker, Julie Busic, has consented to the use of her letters.

  The names of my siblings have been changed to protect their anonymity, but all other names are accurate.

  Writing a memoir requires re-imagination. It is not possible to perceive reality directly without filtering or embellishment, without which this book would be flat and uninteresting.

  I don’t remember everything about my past. No one does. But I do remember the run in my mother’s nylon stockings as she walked out of the kitchen without addressing the cast on my broken arm. I remember watching her smoke a cigarette on my back porch, shivering as she smashed the red tip into the wooden railing, knowing she longed for a place of her own.

  All of what I write in this book is the truth as I remember it. That doesn’t mean someone else will read the same passage and say it didn’t happen that way. That’s the beauty of memoir. It is truth reimagined. The stories are as I reimagine them. I never cross the line and make up stories, but I do embellish details, and added dialogue that obviously could not have been word-for-word, but is close enough.

  Most of what I write about the hijacker has been taken from her letters and some information from her book. All of it is true, but it is the truth as I know it.

  The stories about my family tell an emotional truth, how I felt, and what I remember happening right in front of me. But these memories, too, can be tricky, if only because they happened a half century ago. I could not have gotten it all straight, so I went for the impact of how it felt.

  Mimi Schwartz, who writes on memoir, said, “The subconscious is remembering.” And that’s where the memories were stored before I tried to bring them to the page. Subconscious was all I had to rely on, and I wrote my story to the best of my re-imagination.

  Prologue

  They say the grief that comes with death doubles back on you and makes you mourn again all those past disappointments and tiny deaths you never had the chance to fully reconcile. But what I’ve come to wonder is if death might be a birthing room, or a gift. It is a sad and heartbreaking gift, and yet the aftermath of death allows us to understand the tenacity and fortitude of the human spirit. It may be true to say we are presented again and again with small deaths—hijackings perhaps—chances to either lie down and surrender, or be reborn again. And to lift ourselves out of those frequent small deaths, or out of something as horrifying as a bomb exploding in the middle of the night, or a terrorist attack on a passenger plane, we must come to understand that we really do have the strength to make the choice to live again.

  Do not go gentle into that good night.

  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

  — Dylan Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

  We Lost Him

  September 11, 1976

  I was lying perfectly still in a lavender-scented bath thinking about the man who would slip into bed with me in another hour, run his hand down my back until I turned around, show me that sheepish grin, and kiss me with those lips that tasted like Lucky Strikes and smelled like the night air. I traced the constellation of freckles along my chest that he would outline with his fingers after we made love. We were trying for a girl. We had been hoping for a girl since our second son was born two years before.

  “This is a special report from CBS News. TWA flight 355 to Chicago carrying eighty-six passengers and seven crew members has been hijacked.” I opened my eyes to hear the eleven o’clock news coming from our bedroom. “Shortly after takeoff from New York’s LaGuardia Airport at 8:00 p.m., the aircraft was commandeered by Zvonko and Julie Busic, a Croatian and his American wife. They claim to have a bomb on board the plane and a second device located in New York City.” I stood up, grabbed a towel, and ran into the bedroom.

  The camera left Walter Cronkite and panned Grand Central Station, and the most familiar face in the world to me came into focus: my husband Brian in a Kevlar vest, “Bomb Squad” written on the back. Bath water dripped onto the rug as I stared at the tiny black-and-white TV. The scene panned across a row of twenty-five cent luggage lockers, the doors torn off their hinges, to Brian lifting a shopping bag from inside one of the lockers. The white Macy’s bag looked harmless. NYPD uniforms crowded around as Brian placed the bag on top of the bomb blanket and clipped the ends together. I watched as he and Hank Dworkin threaded a long pole into the blanket’s loops and balanced it across their shoulders. The camera followed them to the disposal truck parked outside Grand Central where they disappeared from my view.

  Backing away from the TV, I sat on the bed holding the towel in a tight ball. Croatia? Where was it—Yugoslavia? Stay calm, I told myself. Brian worked hundreds of bomb cases. All of them were dangerous. He always assured me he never took risks. Don’t panic. I had dipped chicken in breadcrumbs that afternoon and made potato salad for our picnic at the beach tomorrow. Wait for him to call. But, without knowing why, this time felt different.

  Down the hall, in the glow of the tiny nightlight, our four-year-old son Keith slept, his sheets tangled around his legs, his forehead damp from the heat that our ceiling fan did little to ease. It was so hot the blacktop stuck to his sneakers, Brian told me that afternoon before he left for work. Chris, the baby, was snuggled at the top of his crib, his hands under his chin as though in prayer. I stood in the doorway watching them sleep, and listening to them breathe.

  Back in the bedroom I dropped the towel and pu
lled a nightgown from the dresser drawer. The hijacking was still unfolding on the TV. It was almost midnight. The news should have been over. Brian should have been on his way home. I crawled into bed, shivering despite the day’s heat, and reminded myself the bomb squad had lost two men in its entire history, and that was back in ‘39 at the World’s Fair.

  Still, there was LaGuardia last December, when a bomb detonated in a luggage locker. Twenty-five sticks of dynamite shattered the TWA terminal, killing eleven people, injuring hundreds. A makeshift morgue was set up in the airport, and Brian waited all night as the medical examiner extracted pieces of the bomb from the dead. The case remained unsolved. TWA. LaGuardia. Coincidence?

  I looked over at the dress shirts in Brian’s closet, lined up like mock military soldiers, his wing tips polished, waiting for their rotation. “Come home,” I whispered into the dark. When I closed my eyes, I saw that Macy’s shopping bag with its cheerful red star.

  I woke to red lights flashing off our bedroom walls. I could almost feel them crawling across my face. I thought I heard the swishing of clothes, the soft drop of rubber-soled shoes. The clock said 4:00 a.m.

  When I pulled back the curtains, I saw police cars scattered along the street below, doors left ajar. Red lights moved in unrelenting slow circles. The doorbell echoed up the stairs—a hesitant sound, like the person standing at the door really didn’t mean to ring it. I felt I might be sick. This isn’t happening. I looked back at the unmade bed. If I just crawl back in bed and bring the boys with me . . . But the doorbell rang again—this time it was persistent—and I was propelled to the stairs which loomed menacingly below me.

  I’d left a lamp on for Brian in the foyer. Under it, a frame held a photo of us the day he graduated from the police academy. His crooked smile matched the tilt of his police hat.

  On the way home from work that afternoon I picked up more pictures of Brian from our camping trip the week before. At twenty-seven he still looked like a happy kid in his cut-offs and sneakers.

  I heard the doorknob rattle and looked down at my nightgown, one reserved for Brian. I leaned against the wall, knowing I could not walk up the stairs for a robe, and let the wall support me as I inched toward the door.

  “Kathy, it’s Charlie. Open the door, please.” He sounded like he had been asking for a long time.

  The doorknob didn’t seem to work, and I wasn’t sure which way to turn the lock. When I finally opened it, I found Charlie standing in front of two men in police uniform. His blue eyes reminded me of Brian’s. “You two look like brothers,” I had told him when they were assigned to the bomb squad together. Shadows shifted under the porch light, and Charlie looked down to study the flagstones. When he looked up, his eyes were haunted, terrified.

  “We lost him.”

  I shivered uncontrollably. NO. I shook my head. NO. My legs wouldn’t work. NO. I looked past Charlie into the street ringed with flashing lights and uniforms.

  Charlie tried to lead me to the living room, but I found myself climbing the stairs in a body that felt borrowed from someone else.

  Upstairs, the boys’ room was still dark. The weight of Chris’s sleeping body was almost too heavy to lift, and I sank to the floor with him in my lap. He smelled of baby shampoo and boy sweat. He slept, completely unaware his tiny world would never be the same. Across the room, the nightlight illuminated Keith’s deep red hair. I watched his face until he woke up. Sliding off his bed, he sat on the floor beside us. With my free arm I pulled him to my side.

  “What’s the matter, Mommy?” He had Brian’s eyes—those dark, feathery lashes.

  “Daddy went to heaven.” I didn’t recognize my voice.

  “How did he get there?”

  “God came to get him.”

  “Can we go see him?”

  “Not for a long time, honey.” I didn’t trust myself to say more.

  __________

  The sun was beginning to rise, its red glow sliding over blue sailboat wallpaper. It was going to be another hot day. The milk bottles had to go out. Library books were due. My husband just died, I would tell the librarian, and thought she might forgive the fine.

  Chris woke and blinked sleepily at me. His hair was almost white from the summer sun, his deep green eyes—like mine—were set in a face that called for blue, the difference striking. He put his arms around my neck and buried his face in my shoulder, as though he knew something was wrong.

  Keith leaned against me. “Can we have our breakfast now, Mommy?”

  The smell of coffee drifted up the stairs as though Brian were in the kitchen, as though it were a normal morning.

  A policewoman I had not noticed before was standing in the doorway, and when I rose, she placed a robe over my short nightgown. Chris, big for a two-year-old, slipped from my arms, and she took him from me. Together we made our way down those dizzying stairs to a house full of NYPD.

  Cigarette smoke hung in the air. Charlie was sitting in the kitchen, and he stood when he saw me, a cup of black coffee on the table in front of him. Brian’s cup. “Hey, Buddy,” Charlie called to Keith, who ran into his arms, thinking this an ordinary day, the room full of Daddy’s friends.

  I felt surrounded by the bombshell I had been handed, disoriented, unable to process the full extent of what happened. The kitchen felt like foreign territory. I fumbled around, looking for Fruit Loops, and poured them into Keith and Chris’s My Pop’s a Cop cereal bowls I made in ceramics class. I told Keith he wouldn’t be going to school, that I would call his teacher, and thought of the little nursery classroom we had visited, Brian silly on the tot-sized chair.

  “Can I still wear my policeman shirt?” he’d asked.

  I looked at Charlie. “Croatians?”

  “Yeah. The wife is American, but the cause is for Croatia.”

  Outside a car door slammed. When I looked out, I saw my mother walking up the driveway, a police officer holding her arm. Her mismatched outfit was out of character for her, as though she had pulled clothes from the closet without looking, her hair slept on. As soon as she was in the door, she called my name, more a sob than a word. She told me once she loved Brian more than me, and I thought of that as she made her way through the living room into the kitchen, where I stood frozen. And then she pulled me into her arms. These are my mother’s arms around me, I told myself. Her tears are for me.

  She put her hand on the back of my head. “It will be okay. I’m here.” Except that my mother hadn’t ever really been there. Growing up, I felt I was just another mouth to feed. Still, as I smelled her Oil of Olay and heard her whisper my name, I let myself collapse into her, and for the first time since Charlie told me Brian had been killed, I cried.

  I wanted to know you moved and

  breathed in the same world with me.

  — F. Scott Fitzgerald, Benediction

  Kathy From The Bronx

  1968

  McGuinness’s on Flatbush was packed, even for a Friday night, the air heavy with cigarette smoke and body heat. Fiona and I squeezed our way through our Brooklyn hangout. It was a dirty old man’s bar by day that livened up after work when the Flatbush crowd stopped by for a beer. I had been there when it was near empty and noticed the dirty wood and old Rheingold Beer signs, split leather stools, and mop streaks on worn tiles. It was one of those places that smelled from a lifetime of spilled beer and cigarette smoke, but somehow, when glasses clinked and the jukebox began to pulse, no one seemed to notice.

  “Two Dewar’s and soda.” Fiona flipped her pretty blonde hair and winked at the bartender.

  I set my wet wool coat over the back of the stool she was sitting on and leaned against the brass rail. “Hey Jude” blasted through the jukebox, and I thought of Gracie. “Better, Better, Better.” I felt the wet snow melting down my back and closed my eyes to send up a silent prayer that my sister, two months free from jail, stayed off drugs, away
from Hunts Point and the South Bronx neighborhood that would drag her back down.

  “Hey Brian,” Fiona shouted over the music. I opened my eyes to see a guy with crazy beautiful eyes staring at me. “Where’ve you been?”

  Brian slowly shifted his eyes from mine to look at her. “How’s it going, Fiona?” His navy pea coat was blackened on the shoulders with wet snow.

  “I haven’t seen you for a long time.” Fiona’s cheeks, still bright from the cold, flushed even deeper.

  “Just home from ’Nam.” He glanced at me and then studied his cigarette.

  “Welcome home.” Fiona leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “I’m glad you made it back.” She sipped her drink.

  “What are you having?” He nodded at my glass.

  “Dewar’s and soda,” Fiona said. “This is Kathy, my friend from work. She’s from the Bronx.”

  Brian raised his eyebrows, but he didn’t wisecrack about the borough war Dodgers’ fans held onto. Instead, his voice was polite, almost formal, “It’s nice to meet you Kathy from the Bronx. Did you have a nice Christmas?” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Fiona turn on her stool to talk to Mike O’Leary.

  “It was all right.” I fidgeted with the buttons of my blouse, glad I had chosen the soft blue satin, part of my working wardrobe that I paired with a short black skirt and three inch heels. I had been a tall, skinny kid, and now I was a tall, slim woman. My hair curled naturally when it was damp, the color a deep red that had once been the brunt of clown jokes but now turned heads.

  “Were you home for Christmas?”

  He rubbed his cigarette into the bar ashtray with his thumb, the unfiltered paper reduced to a nub. “For the first time in years.” He gave me a half-smile. “And it was great.” His body was quiet, exuding a stillness that felt calming.

  “How do you know Fiona?” I couldn’t look at those eyes, so I studied my red nail polish, shiny in the dim light.