On July 14, 1954, 21-year-old Edmund Andrew Marmur (1932-2014) boards a Douglas DC-3 at Sea-Tac International Airport, demands to be flown to Africa, and fires two shots near a frightened flight attendant. The incident is often overlooked, with D. B. Cooper’s 1971 case frequently miscredited as the first hijacking or attempted hijacking involving Sea-Tac. Cooper’s case – the only unsolved hijacking in U.S. history – did lead to the formation of the Port of Seattle Police Department and other safety protocols. Marmur’s case faded into obscurity, and he died at age 81 in Pierce County, his longtime home.
Unusual Event
For years before the 1954 hijacking attempt, flights had come and gone from Sea-Tac Airport without problems. An airport groundbreaking ceremony was held on January 2, 1943, and Sea-Tac was dedicated with a ceremonial landing by a United Airlines DC-3 on October 31, 1944. The first scheduled flight came three years later on September 1, 1947, and Sea-Tac’s central terminal was dedicated July 9, 1949.
The first attempted hijacking happened on a Wednesday afternoon, and accounts vary on what exactly transpired. According to a recollection written by Chet Clausen, a Port of Seattle officer engineer who wrote of the airport’s early history, pilot J. R. Davidson was alone in the cockpit of a Trans-Canada DC-3, parked on the airport’s tarmac waiting to start a return trip to Vancouver, British Columbia. Marmur boarded the plane, shoved a .45 caliber handgun against Davidson’s neck and said, "I want you to fly me to Africa, I want to live in the jungle like Tarzan" ("Seattle-Tacoma International Airport History …"). According to Clausen’s account, as Davidson was explaining that the plane wouldn’t hold enough fuel to reach Africa, flight attendant Isabel Abrahams boarded the plane. Marmur turned and fired the gun, narrowly missing Abrahams and shooting a hole through the side of the plane. Recalled Clausen:
"I heard the shot from Les Hall's office and at first I thought it was a plane backfiring. Marvin Stansel, Chief of the Security Guards (as they were called then), called the State Patrol and the Sheriffs Office and he went out on the apron and pushed a movable set of boarding steps up to the side of the plane, concealing himself behind it. He finally talked Tarzan into throwing out his gun and surrendering. He was sent to Steilacoom (Western State). Les and I watched the whole incident from his office window" ("Seattle-Tacoma International Airport History …").
That afternoon’s edition of The Seattle Times reported that Marmur, a Tacoma weightlifter, fired two shots at 1:45 p.m. and that he told officers he was going to live in the jungle. Marmur told officers he wasn’t aiming for the flight attendant. He bought the pistol the day before in Tacoma, then boarded the 12:30 bus to the airport the day of the attempted hijacking, and loaded the pistol in woods near the airport before climbing aboard through the airplane’s open door. By Marmur’s account, told in the next morning’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the plane was empty when he walked on. "(I) was waiting for the pilot to get in," Marmur said after his arrest. "I wanted to go to Africa and live out in the jungles. While I was waiting, the stewardess came in and saw me. She turned and ran out. I fired two shots through the plane to make her stop, but she kept on going. I intended to hold her in the plane until the pilot came. I heard someone say, 'Throw out the gun,' and I came out" ("Husky Tacoma Farm Hand …").
After Marmur fired, heavily armed State Patrol troopers and Sheriff’s deputies led by Patrol Sgt. A. K. Ekern surrounded the plane. A third shot discharged when the gun Marmur threw hit the runway, and the pistol landed at the feet of deputy Ira Wilber.
"I Thought He Had Me"
Marmur, who was born in Minnesota, was taken first to the King County Jail in downtown Seattle. He was front-page news the next morning when the Post-Intelligencer ran a photo of the shirtless 5-foot-11, 180-pound Marmur holding a copy of Ernest Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa under the sub-headline: "Brain Food for Muscle Man." The photo caption described how Marmur posed with the book for P-I photographer Jack Huff, and how he hoped that by living in the jungle he could escape the draft. Also on the P-I’s front page was a photo of Abraham, the 24-year-old flight attendant whom the newspaper said had a relieved smile. P-I reporter Charles Russell wrote that Abraham was alone in the plane for a few minutes before its scheduled departure and emerged from a lavatory she’d been inspecting when she found the unshaven Marmur sitting in a front seat. "He told me to sit down," said Abraham. "Instead, I ran down the aisle. Don’t ask me how I did it. Just as I founded the last seat, he fired the first shot. I think I felt the bullet whistle by. I thought he had me" ("Husky Tacoma Farm Hand …”).
The account from the Tacoma News Tribune, which ran a front-page story and photos that Friday, said Marmur initially mumbled something at the flight attendant before pulling the heavy pistol from his pocket. The P-I account said the slug pierced the interior door and tore into the baggage compartment near the plane’s tail. Abraham was running down the steps from the cabin door when Marmur fired the second shot. That bullet ripped through the plane’s fuselage. However, emergency patchwork repaired the 28-passenger plane, and after a two-hour delay it took off for British Columbia.
Tragedy at Home
Marmur was charged the following day with second-degree assault. King County Sheriff’s Office Detective Jack F. Appel wrote the certification for determination of probable cause, and Justice William Hoar approved the charges. A Times account explained that Marmur’s brother, Frank, was killed as a 20-year-old infantryman in New Guinea during World War II. Eddie Marmur said that he was classified 3-A in the Korean War draft, believed he would be reclassified to 1A, and thought that the Army wouldn’t get him if he went to Africa. "Every guy I know who went in the service didn’t come back right," he said the day of his arrest ("Farmhand Prefers …"). Marmur, who lived on a farm with his mother about three miles from Puyallup, told the Times that five months earlier he’d built a tree hut in four cottonwood trees and entered it by climbing a chain – a hut he planned to replicate after the hijacking.
Mary Marmo, his mother who immigrated from Warsaw, Poland, told the Tacoma News Tribune the attempted hijacking was another tragedy in her life. The first was her oldest son's death in New Guinea in 1942. Another son drowned in Surprise Lake – a 28-acre lake on the southeast edge of King County near Milton – in 1947. Her second husband had died years before Marmur’s attempted hijacking. Mary Marmo told the newspaper how her son often talked of Africa, and how his brother never came home. Marmur’s room was filled with adventure and weightlifting magazines and a leather jacket he rarely wore. Just before the attempted hijacking, his mother told the reporter Marmur was interested by a news account of a boy in Cleveland who was shot while trying to commandeer a plane. She spoke in broken English. "Eddie was always a good boy," she told reporter Denny MacGougan, noting he was always in bed by 8:30 – except for the night he was arrested. "He never in trouble before. Has idea he doesn’t want to be in draft, but that because of his brother" ("Boy’s Actions …").
Court Case
Details of specifically how Marmur’s case resolved are not clear. The King County Superior Court Clerk’s Office, which records felony case filings, transferred its bound criminal index for the years 1951-1961 to microfilm, and pages 240-263 are missing. That means there isn’t a way to find the case numbers for people with last names starting with "L" through "Ma" for that timeframe – and that includes Marmur’s case. While the case court files would be on microfilm, clerk’s office staff said there is not another way to find the case number to retrieve those if it’s not listed in newspaper accounts from the time. While newspaper accounts did not specify the case number, Clausen’s account said Marmur was taken to Western State, a state-owned psychiatric hospital in Lakewood, Pierce County. Because of federal patient privacy laws, which also cover past cases, accounts of Marmur’s time at Western State are not accessible.
A note about an initial resolution on the assault case came in a September 7, 1956, news account in the Tacoma News Tribune. It noted that Eddie Marmur, then 23, was arrested on a warrant sent by the chief of police at San Francisco charging him with armed robbery. The account noted that Marmur was also being held for the Washington State Patrol Board, having been given a three-year deferred sentence in July 1954, on an assault charge. In 1962, Marmur appears in two newspaper mentions about the State Board of Prison Terms setting a 7.5-year minimum in a King County assault case. Local newspapers don’t mention if the San Francisco case moved forward or was resolved. Marmur appears infrequently in local news accounts afterward. In 1984, his name appeared in his mother’s obituary listing Edmund as one of two surviving sons and five surviving daughters. Marmur was married on June 8, 1973, in Pierce County. And on June 7, 2014, he died in Pierce County at age 81. Marmur is buried at Woodbine Cemetery in Puyallup.
Sea-Tac Security Protocols
During Sea-Tac’s first decades, the airport relied on guides for both security and customer service, which was the norm at domestic airports then. The guides in green uniforms and ranger-style caps would keep unauthorized people off the loading ramps, check on building lights, man vehicles and two-way radio contact with the control tower, and help reunite lost children. In the winter of 1971 – after the D. B. Cooper hijacking – it became clear a Port of Seattle Police force was needed. The airport-specific department was authorized by port commissioners on December 14, 1971, at the request of Aviation Director Donald G. Shay. Port Legal Officer Richard Ford told the commissioners that initial transformation into a police department "will mean only a change of officers’ badges," because the 27 men deputized to work at the airport by the King County Director of Public Safety were already funded by the Port.
It was February 1972 before handheld metal detectors were used routinely at Sea-Tac. On Feb. 6, 1972, the Federal Aviation Administration made pre-boarding screening procedures mandatory for all airlines. However, the magnetometers were not required – they were a tool Sea-Tac chose to use along with about 40 percent of major airports across the nation, according to The New York Times. In addition to the pre-boarding requirements, the FAA devised a behavioral profile which they said would screen out potential skyjackers. "I like to make my presence felt," a marshal with a U.S. Customs security badge told the P-I, "and even intimidate passengers" ("Airport Tightens …").
Airlines started putting guards on flights in 1968, though that didn’t do much to stop the skyjackings, and reporters called them. In 1969 alone, there were 87 hijackings worldwide, including 40 in the United States. By summer of 1972, The Seattle Times reported there were nearly 200 hijackings of American airlines over the previous 11 years. On July 17, 1970, New Orleans International Airport became the first airport to use magnetometers to detect weapons or metal objects carried by passengers. Other major airports didn’t quickly follow suit. It was Friday, January 5, 1973, when all four Sea-Tac concourses had walk-through metal detectors, ordered by the federal government. The C concourse – then the busiest at the airport – and B concourse added the walk-through metal detectors that January 5 while the A and D concourses installed them on December 27, 1972.
Other Sea-Tac Hijackings
The Cooper case is by far the most recognized. It was the day before Thanksgiving, November 24, 1971, when a man in a black suit and tie approached an airport counter in Portland and paid $20 cash for a one-way ticket to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. He seemed like any normal passenger in his 40s at the time, signing his name in red ink and sitting alone awaiting the short flight. He drank a bourbon and soda in the flight’s last row and passed a flight attendant a handwritten note. She figured it was a pickup attempt until the man in horn-rimmed sunglasses told her to read it. The note said he had a bomb, and he showed the attendant a mass of wires and red sticks in his briefcase. After getting $200,000 and four parachutes, he jumped from the back staircase likely somewhere over Southwestern Washington.
More than a half century later, that remains the nation’s only unsolved airplane hijacking. The name on his ticket read Dan Cooper. But when the United Press International wire service was rushing to move the story, the hijacker was mistakenly listed as D. B. Cooper. The FBI corrected it the next day in a news release, but by that time the error had already traveled around the world, and the D. B. moniker stuck. While Cooper’s hijacking is the best known, there were others involving Sea-Tac that have been nearly forgotten:
- On June 3, 1972, a Western Airlines Boeing 727 enroute from Los Angeles to Seattle was hijacked by a California man and his female companion from Coos Bay, Oregon. The plane refueled at Sea-Tac, and the hijackers demanded they fly to San Francisco, where they were given $500,000 in ransom before being flown on a larger plane to Algeria, where they eventually were granted political asylum. The pair were later arrested in 1975 on FBI warrants in Paris.
- Two months later, on August 19, 1972, an unemployed commercial charter pilot rode a bicycle with an Army carbine (a long gun with a shortened barrel) to a United Airlines 727 at Reno’s airport. He boarded the plane, demanded $2 million cash and 15 40-ounce gold bars. The hijacker ordered the plane to fly to Vancouver, British Columbia, then to Sea-Tac, where he was shot and captured by FBI agents. The hijacker survived and received a 30-year federal prison sentence for air piracy.
- On March 13, 1978, a 27-year-old California man hijacked a Boeing 727 (United Flight 696) flying from San Francisco to Seattle and demanded to be flown to Cuba. When the plane made a stop in Denver, three Seattle-based crewmen leaped from the cockpit. Pilot Al Grout, of Kent, survived with a fractured leg, and Bellevue-based co-pilot Jack Bard suffered a fractured left heel. The passengers had previously been released uninjured. The flight bag that the hijacker said was carrying a bomb was actually full of papers, books, and a lollipop.
- On July 11, 1980, a 17-year-old tried to hijack a Northwest Airlines flight that was scheduled to leave Sea-Tac for Portland. demanded between $100,000 and $600,000 and also wanted a parachute, but later settled for a fast rental car that FBI agents put at the bottom of the passenger ramp. The teen was overtaken when he exited the plane. All passengers had been released during a 9 1/2-hour standoff, and the briefcase that he used to hold the pilots hostage did not actually contain a bomb.
