Hunting Down Mr. Wright

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Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 3 House has definitely seen better days. This is the window I stood in when I waved goodbye to my dad the last time.

Speaker 3 Growing up, my mother never talked about the fear she felt while trying to raise her family. She remained strong for us.
I had this little two-wheeler. I ended up down there.
In the road?

Speaker 3 Almost in the road. And I said, Daddy, where were you? And he said, You did it.
My grandfather, Walter Patterson, was murdered.

Speaker 3 One of the people who is responsible for doing it is still not paying for what he has done.

Speaker 5 For 17 years, I've worked on a case involving a fugitive named George Wright.

Speaker 3 My father was brutally beaten and shot in a robbery of his gas station.

Speaker 3 It haunts me to this day.

Speaker 6 It all started right there in 1962

Speaker 6 when Mr. Walter Patterson was closing up his gas station.

Speaker 7 Mr. Patterson was a war hero, combat veteran, World War II, received the Bronze Star.

Speaker 3 The ironic thing was that he came through the war only to have this happen to him.

Speaker 7 The night of the incident, two young men came right through that door with loaded weapons.

Speaker 5 George Wright and his partner said, This is a robbery, get him up.

Speaker 5 Walter Patterson put up a heck of a fight.

Speaker 3 He was beaten so severely that he was unrecognizable.

Speaker 5 George Wright was caught two days later.

Speaker 9 The guy gets convicted, sentenced to prison.

Speaker 7 You would think the case would be closed,

Speaker 6 but he escapes from prison, he hijacks an airplane, he threatens to kill people.

Speaker 3 A Delta Airlines jet was taken over by eight passengers, fled the country, became a fugitive.

Speaker 11 George Wright has been on a run for 41 years.

Speaker 4 Essentially, he just vanished.

Speaker 5 Wright has an uncanny ability to escape.

Speaker 3 I hope he's looking over his shoulder, wondering who's a few steps behind him.

Speaker 7 My partners and I are determined to be the ones to apprehend George Wright.

Speaker 4 And keep working his case until he's back behind bars in the state of New Jersey.

Speaker 4 I've got a phone call that it's 100% your guy.

Speaker 7 We had photos, we had fingerprints.

Speaker 4 We knew that he had false teeth, we knew he had scars.

Speaker 7 You could see a scar on the forehead.

Speaker 3 That's this right here. That's correct.

Speaker 4 Our job, our responsibility, is to find this man.

Speaker 5 He is a very smart adversary.

Speaker 3 From old photos to artist sketches. You have no idea which of these looks the most like George Wright.
Oh, this is very creepy. Even to a lifelight plaster bust they created.

Speaker 7 That is an age-enhanced bust.

Speaker 3 It's almost as if the fugitive George Wright himself were watching them.

Speaker 13 That's how he got away,

Speaker 3 taunting the three-man task force that's been on a manhunt to find him

Speaker 10 around the world

Speaker 3 and across the decades. This is what this person would look like 40 years later.

Speaker 13 That's correct.

Speaker 3 For R.J. Gallagher, recently retired from the FBI, Rick Cope of the U.S.

Speaker 3 Marshals, and Dan Klotz of the New Jersey Department of Corrections, the saga begins with Wright's involvement in the murder of war hero Walter Patterson in 1962.

Speaker 3 And right here, there was a big tree, and next to it, Daddy had built us a sandbox.

Speaker 4 He hurt his family. He's got to pay for what he did.

Speaker 3 The crime is senseless. There are triggers throughout the year.
His birthday, the day he got shot, the day he died.

Speaker 3 This is the house that I grew up in, spent my early years here.

Speaker 3 Today, a lot of her past is boarded up and paved over.

Speaker 3 And for decades, Walter Patterson's daughter, Ann, tried to keep it that way.

Speaker 3 Her daughters,

Speaker 3 Terry and Jackie,

Speaker 3 never actually knew their grandfather and never knew why.

Speaker 3 It was never spoken of in the house at all. We knew it was a quiet subject for a reason and not to bring it up.
50 years after his murder,

Speaker 6 I welcome Ann Patterson, who along with her family have suffered irreparable harm from the brutal violence committed against her beloved father by George Wright.

Speaker 3 Walter Patterson's granddaughters are spearheading their mother's fight to finally bring George Wright to justice.

Speaker 3 My father was robbed, brutally beaten, and shot in his gas station in Wall Township, New Jersey. I was 14 years old.
The nightmare was just beginning. Her whole timeline of her life just shifted.

Speaker 3 Ann was born in 1947. Her father, Walter, served on the front lines in World War II,

Speaker 3 coming home with a bronze star. Back in New Jersey, he opened a small gas station, abandoned but still standing today.
After dinner on November 23, 1962, he left home and headed back to work.

Speaker 3 And I did what I always did. I stood in the window and I went like this, and he waved to me.
That was the last time I saw him alive.

Speaker 3 After spending 17 of his 25 years at the FBI on this case, R.J. Gallagher knows every detail of what happened next.

Speaker 5 It was a simple robbery of a gas station.

Speaker 3 Just after 9 p.m., a black and white sedan pulled into Patterson Station.

Speaker 3 Two men went inside.

Speaker 3 A pair of short-order cooks named Walter McGee, then 22.

Speaker 11 I had a gun. I had it in my waist of 32.

Speaker 3 And George Wright, 19. Wright had a sawed-off 22 rifle.

Speaker 3 They demanded Walter Patterson's money, all $70 of it.

Speaker 5 Here's a guy that fought for his country. Now somebody's coming in and trying to take his piece of America.
That's what he fought for.

Speaker 3 And he put up a hell of a fight this time, too. According to R.J.
Gallagher, the gunmen beat Patterson savagely.

Speaker 16 Walter Patterson made a launch for me. We got to tussling.

Speaker 5 And they started hitting him about the head with their weapons. They knocked him to the ground.

Speaker 17 And I pulled up my gun.

Speaker 15 Nobody was thinking about going there to shoot nobody. You know, I think my mind just froze up on me.

Speaker 3 In his decades as a fugitive, George Wright has been as elusive to reporters as to authorities. Though he did speak to Mike Finkel for a GQ magazine exclusive titled Uncatchable.

Speaker 3 Finkel taped the interview, in which Wright paints himself as an almost innocent bystander.

Speaker 15 And you probably just were standing there just like with my mouth open, probably.

Speaker 14 Do you remember seeing any blood or anything like that?

Speaker 15 No, I didn't even look at the guy, tell you the truth. I was shaking like crazy.
Then McGee also, he had shot the guy, didn't know whether it had killed him or not.

Speaker 3 Police found bullets and casings, but couldn't say for sure how many shots were fired or by whom. For Walter Patterson, it didn't matter.

Speaker 5 It went into his abdomen. It went through his kidney and his liver, and the bullet never exited.

Speaker 3 The robbers fled. Minutes later, Ann's daughter Terry says passing motorists found Patterson barely conscious.
He was beaten so severely

Speaker 3 and then it took

Speaker 3 like what 10 or 12 like numerous hours to try to piece together his skull.

Speaker 3 Two days later, Walter Patterson died, but not before describing his attackers and their car. It's amazing that he could give that much information.

Speaker 5 He definitely helped to solve his own homicide.

Speaker 3 Police soon found the car, and within 48 hours, they had the driver along with the two gunmen, Walter McGee and George Wright.

Speaker 3 To avoid the death penalty, both Wright and McGee pled no contest to murder.

Speaker 3 The fatal bullet matched Walter McGee's gun. He got life.

Speaker 3 George Wright got 15 to 30 years.

Speaker 3 I felt safe then because then they were in jail.

Speaker 15 That night in jail,

Speaker 15 the reality of it hit me. Minimum 15, maximum 30 years in New Jersey State Prison.
Just ain't like the end of the world.

Speaker 3 For Ann Patterson II, it felt like the end of the world.

Speaker 3 You look at the clock and write, daddy should be coming home. And he's not coming home.
And you've got to remind yourself of that. You still call him Daddy.

Speaker 3 He will always be my daddy because there's a part of me that's still 14 years old.

Speaker 3 I probably was like a little soldier or a zombie all through high school. I don't have a lot of memories of it.
I just did what I had to do and immersed myself in my schoolwork.

Speaker 3 And there's school pictures and so forth. After that point, the pictures kind of stop.
The family did stop. Her family ended at that point.

Speaker 3 Living moment to moment, she struggled through high school and gave up any hope of college. Then one August day, nearly eight years after the murder, Ann's past caught up with her.

Speaker 3 And my aunt, Jenny, called me up and said, Ann, George Wright has escaped. She said, lock your doors.
And that was only the beginning.

Speaker 3 Prison breaks, hijackings, fleeing from country to country to country. It's a roller coaster ride.
You know, you just wonder what's next, what's the next twist, what's the next turn.

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Speaker 3 It's not just that one person gets shot.

Speaker 3 That shot reverberates through everybody else.

Speaker 3 My grandfather never got to see his daughters grow up. He never got to see them get married.
He never got to watch them have their children. And that was because of George Wright.

Speaker 3 By the summer of 1970, George Wright had served nearly eight years of his 15 to 30 year sentence for his involvement in Walter Patterson's murder.

Speaker 15 When I walked into this jail and they closed them doors behind me, it just seemed like that door. I was closed off from the world.

Speaker 3 Despite his crimes in those GQ magazine tapes, Wright portrays himself as a victim of society. and a champion of social justice.

Speaker 15 Society would say, hey, you did that against the law. But people all through history that have been struggling against the power structure have always been called criminals or outlaws.

Speaker 3 So at that time, it looks like George Wright is going to be in prison at least 15 years.

Speaker 10 Correct.

Speaker 3 But Wright had a very different plan.

Speaker 3 After serving part of his time in a maximum security facility, George Wright was transferred to a minimum security prison here in southern New Jersey.

Speaker 3 At At the time, there were no bars, no razor wire, and no problem with simply walking away.

Speaker 3 Just after the 11 p.m. bed check on August 22nd, 1970, that's exactly what he and three others did.

Speaker 10 We walked off in midnight.

Speaker 7 There were guards around.

Speaker 3 Armed with a few tools and an audacious plan, they weren't on foot for long.

Speaker 4 They decided to take the warden's car and flee to Atlantic City.

Speaker 3 They hotwired the warden's car.

Speaker 10 Yes.

Speaker 14 I read that you stole the warden's car. Is that true?

Speaker 15 I don't make no comment on that.

Speaker 15 I think that that is funny. I bet he didn't.

Speaker 3 Police found the car and quickly recaptured two of the men. But George Wright and the fourth inmate had vanished.
These people are walking the streets. You don't know where they're going to go.

Speaker 3 As the years turned to decades, with George Wright still on the loose, Ann Patterson lost hope that authorities ever would find him.

Speaker 3 So she was shocked when, 24 years after the prison escape, FBI agent R.J. Gallagher called to introduce himself.
He was genuinely interested in my father's case.

Speaker 3 What reassurances could you give her at that point?

Speaker 5 I said I would work as hard as we could and do what we could to find this guy.

Speaker 3 He told her it was a long shot. The Bureau had destroyed the Patterson case file long ago, and Gallagher didn't even know if Wright was still alive.
So where do you start?

Speaker 5 Friends, acquaintances, relatives. We checked phones, we checked emails.
There was nothing that was off the table.

Speaker 3 Suspecting Wright was overseas, Gallagher sent Interpol the fingerprints taken at his 1962 arrest. He also digitally age-enhanced Wright's mugshot to show what he might look like years later.

Speaker 5 About halfway through this, the U.S. Marshals and the Department of Corrections joined and we formed a nice team.
It was the perfect storm of investigators.

Speaker 3 Rick Cope and Dan Klotz were on a fugitive task force also looking at the case when they teamed up with Gallagher in 2002.

Speaker 7 So we only had very, very minimal information on the actual original crime.

Speaker 3 Following the smallest of leads, often working nights and weekends.

Speaker 7 9 o'clock at night, 10 o'clock at night.

Speaker 4 Hey, look at this, look at that.

Speaker 3 They learned that after his escape, George Wright spent time in Atlantic City, then New York, once working as of all things for a fugitive, a male model.

Speaker 15 Until I realized what I was doing because I was on the run at the time. And having your picture taken.
That was the end of my modeling career.

Speaker 3 He made his way to this house in Detroit.

Speaker 4 And there was a bunch of people living there. It was like a family, so to speak.

Speaker 15 And it was in Detroit that we became affiliated with the Black Panthers.

Speaker 3 The Panthers had burst onto the scene in 1966 with a radical philosophy for the time. Revolution through militant action.
Action speaks how it works!

Speaker 3 Wright, along with four others, hatched a plan to leave white America behind.

Speaker 3 At the time, we wanted to become more active and destroyed so that people would see that we were for real and make an outrageous statement in the process.

Speaker 3 A Delta Airlines jet from Detroit to Miami was taken over by eight passengers.

Speaker 3 July 31st, 1972, Delta Airlines Flight 841 was boarding passengers in Detroit headed for Miami. Captain William May remembers seeing a priest.

Speaker 13 He gestured towards me with his Bible as he went back towards his seat. I said, well, a priest, nice to have him aboard.

Speaker 10 Won't have any trouble

Speaker 13 with this guy.

Speaker 3 That Bible was hollowed out with a handgun inside, undetected by the lax security of the day. Mid-flight, Captain May came out of the lavatory to find a passenger pointing a gun at him.

Speaker 3 And back in the cockpit was a second gunman, that innocent-looking priest.

Speaker 13 The priest had this girl, flight attendant, around like this this with a pistol pointed to her head, and the pistol was cocked. And I said, look, uncock that gun and we can talk.

Speaker 13 I said, now, what do you want? He says, we want a million dollars and we want to go to Algiers. I said, Algiers? I said, where the hell is Algiers?

Speaker 13 I said, this airplane won't fly to Algiers.

Speaker 3 At 41, May was still a junior pilot. He'd never even flown all the way across the ocean.
The plane taxied to a remote area of Miami Miami International Airport. One of the men was dressed as a priest.

Speaker 3 Investigators soon identified the priest as George Wright.

Speaker 3 Fueled by a mixture of radical politics and rage against the system, George Wright was about to become one of the most wanted fugitives in America. Captain May made the announcement.

Speaker 3 That's when people start screaming.

Speaker 14 He terrorized the people on that plane.

Speaker 7 You don't bring a gun on an airplane and expect something good to happen.

Speaker 8 There was another airplane hijacking today. today.

Speaker 3 A Delta Airlines jet from Detroit to Miami was taken over by eight passengers. The hijackers are described as three men, two women, and three children.
One of the men was dressed as a priest.

Speaker 3 When I saw the hijacking on TV, I thought, oh, those poor passengers. Ann Patterson was watching the news that July day in 1972 and soon found out who the lead hijacker was.

Speaker 3 I remember how afraid I was the night that my father was shot, so I wondered if they were going to come out of it alive themselves.

Speaker 3 When Delta 841 from Detroit landed in Miami, the gun-toting priest made the hijackers' demands crystal clear. CBS News cameras were there.

Speaker 8 The hijackers demanded $1 million in small bills, the largest amount ever in an airplane ransom.

Speaker 3 You now understand that this is deadly serious.

Speaker 13 Yes, they really seem that determined.

Speaker 3 Determination you can hear on the cockpit recordings. Captain William May identifies as from that day.

Speaker 3 More than 40 years later, May returned with us to the Miami airport and recalled how hard it was to be cool. What did they say would happen if you didn't go ahead and do what they said?

Speaker 13 That's when he said he would start throwing a body out the door every minute after two o'clock.

Speaker 3 Adding to the surreal atmosphere, Wright's team of hijackers insisted that an FBI agent deliver the million dollars to the plane and that he be naked.

Speaker 3 So they want to make sure sure that the FBI agent who's giving the money has no weapon.

Speaker 5 No weapon, exactly.

Speaker 3 Captain May thought that was a bit much and helped convince Wright and the others to let the agent at least wear a bathing suit.

Speaker 15 We didn't want violence and that with short pants we would ensure that they had no weapons and that's exactly why we did it.

Speaker 6 What happened when the money came to the plane?

Speaker 3 They brought it up by rope. Paid us $500,000 the first time that we were supposed to have passengers were terrified.
People were definitely definitely panicking.

Speaker 3 Once the money was transferred, the hijackers released the 86 passengers unharmed, including 25-year-old Elaine Ataver.

Speaker 3 Well, when we got off the plane, we were all standing out, like in the middle of the runway.

Speaker 3 People were crying, and it was very emotional because now we're off, but they're on to their next phase of this ordeal. We didn't know if they would ever make it alive.

Speaker 6 Didn't hijackers say where they wanted to go? Did you talk with them at all? No.

Speaker 3 Stewardess said they wanted to go to Algiers.

Speaker 3 Algeria. At the time, it was a haven for exiled Black Panthers and other militants.
The hijackers were now frantic to get there with a million dollars in cash and seven Delta crew members in tow.

Speaker 13 The buses drove away, and right he kept,

Speaker 13 he would put that pistol right at my neck, said, get going, get going.

Speaker 3 But before they got underway to Algeria, the plane had to stop in Boston for extra fuel and a navigator. They made him strip down as well.

Speaker 8 More than 50 FBI agents and state police were staked out at the Boston airport.

Speaker 3 George Wright kept a gun on Captain May and ordered him to take off again.

Speaker 3 So the plane headed out over the dark Atlantic Ocean for a flight into the unknown. Did you have any extensive conversations with any of them on this?

Speaker 13 Not at that point.

Speaker 3 So we're done talking now.

Speaker 13 We're done talking. We're going to Algiers now.

Speaker 3 Before landing, the captain tried to reason with George Wright one last time.

Speaker 13 I said, look down there. I said, I don't know how bad things were in Detroit, but I said, you're not going to like it here, I can tell you that.

Speaker 3 As he taxied to a stop, Captain May remembers he wasn't too crazy about it himself.

Speaker 13 All these guys sprang out of the bushes with rifles pointed at the cockpit. I thought, hmm, whose side are they on here?

Speaker 3 Algerian officials granted asylum to the hijackers, who promptly held a press conference with George Wright center stage. The Algerians soon returned the plane and the million dollars.

Speaker 3 Wright and company disappeared into the sprawling city. This is like the beginning of terrorism.
I remember the shock. I mean, everybody was shocked of this.

Speaker 3 Shocked, especially, Ann Patterson remembers, because she just assumed that once Wright's identity was known, he'd be caught. Period.
I thought, they're going to get him now.

Speaker 3 They're finally going to catch him, and this is going to be it.

Speaker 3 The others were caught and imprisoned about four years later in France. But George Wright would remain uncatchable for four more decades.

Speaker 3 It's crazy, it's just one thing after another that he got away with. It was a game for him,

Speaker 3 in part by hiding in the last place on earth anyone would think to look

Speaker 3 and by living an extraordinary double life.

Speaker 18 Could this be the same person? It just

Speaker 18 doesn't seem fathomable.

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Speaker 3 A Delta Airlines Jeff from Detroit to Miami was taken over by England.

Speaker 10 The hijackers demanded $1 million in small bills.

Speaker 5 He was brazen and intelligent.

Speaker 4 He was intelligent.

Speaker 3 George Wright left Algeria not long after the hijacking and became the invisible man.

Speaker 5 He's a bad criminal. I don't know how he keeps ducking.

Speaker 3 Successfully ducking by drifting around France, Germany, and Portugal, his pursuers say, until he found the perfect place to hide.

Speaker 3 Investigators now know that in the early 1980s, George Wright left Western Europe and came here to the tiny West African country of Guinea-Bissau.

Speaker 3 Believe it or not, he appears to have come to do good deeds and help the poor.

Speaker 15 I began to get into the scheme of things after I met people. I was invited to their homes, to their parties, and stuff like that, and I began to know people.

Speaker 18 Doesn't seem favourable.

Speaker 3 When aid worker Curtis Reed arrived in 1989, he says Wright was helping dig wells for villagers in Guinea-Bissau, whose Marxist government was then decidedly sympathetic to revolutionary ideas.

Speaker 3 How did he say he had come to be in Guinea-Bissau?

Speaker 18 That this was a place that he wanted to be. And

Speaker 3 humanitarian that he was.

Speaker 18 There was nothing to contradict that.

Speaker 4 He fooled a lot of people.

Speaker 15 Working in Guinea was fun.

Speaker 10 I had a lot of fun.

Speaker 15 I didn't even consider it working.

Speaker 3 Reed says Wright made himself indispensable.

Speaker 18 He was the fixer, the facilitator, the person to go to if you needed an extra propane gas bottle, find a plumber or an electrician.

Speaker 3 You called him a model citizen.

Speaker 18 For my money, you know, he was that.

Speaker 3 A model citizen who married the daughter of an influential Portuguese general and had two kids.

Speaker 18 He was a very dedicated father and spouse.

Speaker 18 A very strong family man. I was totally floored by the revelations that he had been involved with a murder, that he had hijacked a plane, that he was on the lamb.

Speaker 10 It was

Speaker 18 inconceivable.

Speaker 12 I knew that there was this robbery. I knew that a person got killed.
I knew that he felt guilty. I met him in 89.

Speaker 3 Hannes Stegeman, a German who ran a local development project, claims George Wright's criminal past was an open secret in Guinea-Bissau.

Speaker 3 Wright lived there for 13 years, eventually getting citizenship under a different name.

Speaker 12 He was always the black American who found asylum in Guinea-Bissau and he was seen as a kind of hero.

Speaker 3 Apparently doing good works.

Speaker 13 Very good, very good.

Speaker 3 This video, taken when Wright was a fugitive in Africa, shows him on the job Stegman hired him for. a project to help fishermen bring their catch to this market.

Speaker 8 Everybody knew George Wright.

Speaker 9 He seemed a very pleasant, nice young man.

Speaker 3 Everybody, including John Blacken, who was U.S. Ambassador to Guinea-Bissau from 1986 to 1989.

Speaker 17 I would suspect that I invited him to the Fourth of July party.

Speaker 3 Are you a little appalled by that today?

Speaker 17 Well, it's hard to be appalled by somebody that seemed to have a good reputation locally and you had no inkling of what his past was.

Speaker 3 Even 30 years later, it isn't hard finding people here who have nice things to say about George Wright.

Speaker 3 He lived right here.

Speaker 3 Do you know who that is?

Speaker 13 Yes, he's George Wright, my friend.

Speaker 12 He did a lot of basketball training, and kids admired him.

Speaker 3 So, this is where you play. Pedro Delmana says the American he knew as Jack taught youngsters in the area a lot about basketball and about life.
And did you go over to his house a lot as a kid?

Speaker 10 Every day?

Speaker 14 I think the people of Guinea-Bissau that feel that he was a good man, they were fooled. They didn't really realize what he was capable of doing.

Speaker 7 The real George Wright, in our opinion, is a George Wright who acted so violently here.

Speaker 3 George Wright left Guinea-Bissau in 1993. At the time, investigators had no idea he'd ever been there to begin with.
He did help the people in Africa, and that's great for them.

Speaker 3 But so what, says Anne Patterson's daughter, Terry. That doesn't change what he did to my mother and her family.
What he did, say Terry and Jackie, makes their mother fearful to this day.

Speaker 3 She says she doesn't go to gas stations.

Speaker 3 She doesn't. She doesn't go to hospitals.

Speaker 10 She does not.

Speaker 3 My mother has 12 grandchildren and did not go to the hospital for the births of any of them. She physically is unable to step foot into a hospital.
The room starts spinning.

Speaker 3 The smell of the hospital brings her back to that time when she was 14 years old, that there is a price to pay for what he's done. You can't start over until you pay your debt.
The client is census.

Speaker 3 Then in the fall of 2011, Ann Patterson learned it might be payback time. RJ said to me, just stick around the house for the next couple of weeks.
He said we might be on to something.

Speaker 3 RJ Gallagher, Rick Cope, and Dan Klotz had been locked in this cat and mouse game for more than a decade.

Speaker 4 Put yourself in this situation. It was your father.
You would hope that there's people out there that will never give up.

Speaker 3 When, almost 50 years after Walter Patterson's murder, the trio tracking George Wright finally hit pay dirt.

Speaker 4 Got a phone call that it's 100% your guy.

Speaker 5 The police started following him from his residence. They got him to this location.
That's when they approached him.

Speaker 3 Tell me what unfolded here.

Speaker 5 This is where the Portuguese police arrested George Wright.

Speaker 3 On September 26, 2011, George Wright's life as an international fugitive came to an unceremonious end.

Speaker 20 An American fugitive is captured overseas after...

Speaker 3 When police cornered him in this cafe near Lisbon.

Speaker 15 I walk out of the door. These guys surrounds me.

Speaker 5 How many?

Speaker 15 About six or seven of them. Call me by my name.

Speaker 3 He'd come to Portugal in 1993 from Africa, where he had changed his name to José Luis Jorge dos Santos. Now 68, a handyman and painter, living with his family in this tiny coastal town.

Speaker 3 He even had a Facebook page. So a print from his original arrest matches a print that the Portuguese have on file.
Yes. But in terms of what led you to ask the Portuguese to match this print?

Speaker 5 Good teamwork.

Speaker 3 Phone taps, those things?

Speaker 7 We can't discuss it. I'd love to tell you, we just can't do it.

Speaker 10 Can't tell you. He is not going to go there.
We're not going to go there.

Speaker 3 After 17 years on the case, R.J. Gallagher had retired just six weeks before the arrest.

Speaker 3 But Rick Cope and Dan Klotz were at the Portuguese police station when Wright was brought in for questioning.

Speaker 3 So he walked by you.

Speaker 3 You looked at this guy that you've been looking for for almost a decade. What went through your mind?

Speaker 7 He looked very angry,

Speaker 15 which was very rewarding to me personally.

Speaker 15 One of the questions was, where had I been before I came here? I told them I'm getting himself. And where have you been before that? I sent him France.
Then they asked me, what about Algiers?

Speaker 15 And I said, okay, let's put the cards on the table.

Speaker 3 He readily admitted he was George Wright.

Speaker 11 I did not kill anyone.

Speaker 3 And soon asked for a lawyer.

Speaker 3 Back in New Jersey, FBI agents gave Ann Patterson the news she thought she might never hear. I was outside hanging up clothes and this car pulled in and I thought, this is it.

Speaker 3 And he said, Ann, we got him. We got him.

Speaker 3 It's shock. I mean, it's just shock.
It is relief.

Speaker 3 But the Pattersons' relief quickly turned to outrage and astonishment when, incredibly, after more than 40 years as a fugitive, George Wright was set free.

Speaker 10 Oh, man.

Speaker 3 Just days after his arrest.

Speaker 6 Do you think you should be further punished for anything you've done? What do you think?

Speaker 15 No, no punishment, so

Speaker 15 fashion.

Speaker 3 The Portuguese courts twice dismissed American demands for extradition, ruling that despite his phony identification, Wright was in fact a Portuguese citizen now.

Speaker 3 And by their law, they were not obligated to turn him over.

Speaker 3 I did not understand how it could be possible nothing was going to get done legally. That little smile on his face and all those pictures in the newspaper, that doesn't cut it for me.
It's crazy.

Speaker 3 He's pretty much getting away with all of it. He did tell me about being in jail.
First, I thought it was just, you know, pulling my leg.

Speaker 3 Wright's wife says her husband is well-liked and known for his devotion to charity and to the church. She spoke to AP Television in the picturesque village they now call home.

Speaker 3 He regrets the choices he has made.

Speaker 15 I asked God to forgive me for even being involved.

Speaker 15 And I think God has forgiven me.

Speaker 4 I really don't think a leper changes his spots.

Speaker 3 If he wasn't a killer, he never would have picked up the weapon and gone in there. So as far as you're concerned, George Wright is as guilty of murder as the guy who actually fired that bullet.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Because at any point he could have turned away.

Speaker 15 I accompanied someone that committed a crime, and they sentenced me on that particular aspect.

Speaker 3 Though he disputes some of the details of that night, George Wright does express remorse for what he did.

Speaker 15 I would like to apologize to her, and hopefully she would forgive me.

Speaker 15 He did, really, I would.

Speaker 3 But he still insists that Anne is blaming him for what he didn't do.

Speaker 15 I really, I cannot understand why she would be so angry with me today, with me personally.

Speaker 15 I didn't kill the guy.

Speaker 3 Like Wright, the man whose bullet did kill Patterson disputes authorities' account of the crime. But Walter McGee is decidedly not apologetic.

Speaker 16 Well, I'm not apologizing for nothing that happened.

Speaker 9 50, 40, 50 years ago.

Speaker 3 After nearly 15 years in prison, McGee is out on parole today and thinks Wright beat the rap.

Speaker 16 If George Wright was sitting there right now, I would punch him in his face. His gun didn't kill him, but he was standing right in there with me.

Speaker 3 Under U.S. law, Wright's as guilty as if he'd fired the shot.

Speaker 3 Last summer, with no obvious way to bring him to justice, three generations of Pattersons made an appeal on Capitol Hill.

Speaker 10 How are you?

Speaker 3 R.J. Gallagher at their side.
The failure of extradition makes a mockery of the crime against my father. He would never be able to walk his daughters down the aisle on their wedding day

Speaker 3 or enjoy the births of their children.

Speaker 9 This is unjust. This is a travesty.

Speaker 3 This is. A former State Department official shocked the hearing by suggesting a radical solution.

Speaker 9 Such a snatching right as he's going about his day-to-day business and then bringing him to the United States to face justice.

Speaker 10 Well, he ended up in a very nice part of the world.

Speaker 3 The growing attention since his arrest apparently has spooked George Wright.

Speaker 3 Yes, I'm trying to reach George Wright, please.

Speaker 3 My name is Susan Spencer. I'm from CBS.

Speaker 3 Susan Spencer from CBS?

Speaker 3 Thank you, but no, Mr. Bye-bye.
Can you at least just talk to me?

Speaker 3 Over a period of 10 days, we kept watch on his house. Seems pretty deserted.

Speaker 3 And realized that remarkably,

Speaker 3 George Wright had vanished again.

Speaker 3 He appears to have gone back into hiding ever since the hearing in Washington.

Speaker 5 Ah, I think that he might have gotten frightened.

Speaker 3 Retired FBI agent RJ Gallagher, whom we brought to Portugal, says if they they can't get him back, the idea of George Wright running scared is fine with him.

Speaker 5 Living on a lamb again, and he's looking over his shoulder, he's waiting for the shoe to drop. I don't think he should feel comfortable ever.

Speaker 3 Whether or not the past still haunts George Wright, Ann Patterson refuses to let the past haunt her anymore. A lot of times I would think, what would daddy want me to do?

Speaker 3 He would not want me to sit in the corner crying until death overtook me. Where's your doubtless?

Speaker 3 If I had life, I should live it and live it the best way that I can.

Speaker 3 If your father had lived, he would be

Speaker 3 92 years old. What do you think he would think as far as how you've all turned out?

Speaker 3 I think he'd be proud of us.

Speaker 3 And specifically of you?

Speaker 3 I hope so.

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