Below ground, Cantwell was searched and escorted to a room strewn with ammunition and half-empty liquor bottles. A special agent trained in hostage negotiations arrived from El Paso.
Just before 5:30 p.m., he took the long ride down to the underground cafeteria.īy now, the authorities were congregating on the surface. I’ll guarantee your life.” The FBI hesitated to let Cantwell into the cave, but the journalist was game. We want to tell the world exactly what we need. “Get your ass down here,” Dennis Mark told Cantwell “They’re screwing us around. But when he attempted to call from the surface, the men refused to talk. Ned Cantwell, editor and publisher of the local newspaper, The Carlsbad Current-Argus, arrived ready to report. Less than an hour and a half after the first hostage was taken, authorities met the third of the requirements. The terrorists’ demands were simple: they wanted a million dollars, a flight to Brazil, and a reporter to record their words. Forty years ago the number was twice that. These days Carlsbad Caverns, designated a National Park in 1930 for its spectacular 250-million-year-old underground cave system, receives around 400,000 visitors annually. was likely to grab the attention of the national media. The crowd would be stuck there, holed up in 56-degree temperatures, for the next five hours.Įven today no one knows why the men - three of whom hailed from Odessa, Texas, and the fourth from Riesel, Texas - chose to terrorize the iconic cave besides the fact that not much in this rural corner of the southwestern U.S. None of assailants were aware that over a hundred people were still trapped nearby in the Big Room Cave, Carlsbad’s massive underground heart. Soon it was just the men - two white, two Native American, all Texan - and the 24-year-old Phillips. They forced the women off the elevator at gunpoint, fired off some shots, and demanded that the others clear out. They had two hostages in tow, Celia Valdez, the elevator operator, and Linda Phillips, a seasonal park technician. By 3 p.m., drunk and carrying guns and fifths of whisky, four men entered Carlsbad Caverns National Park, rode the elevator 750 feet underground, and took the cave hostage.Ībout 200 tourists and National Park Service employees were in the cavern’s underground cafeteria on July 10, 1979, when Dennis Mark, David Kuczynski, Eugene Hiram Meroney, and William Charles Lovejoy got off the elevator.
The drinking began the night before and carried on well into that afternoon.
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