Weekend of Terror 1970

A nun returning from a sabbatical is met at a bus station by two of her colleagues. On their way to the convent, their car breaks down on a remote desert road, so they flag down a passing motorist. Meanwhile, two escaped convicts abduct a local businessman’s niece with a scheme to collect a ransom, only to have the woman die while attempting to flee the abandoned house they are holed up in.

Eddie, Robert Conrad, the kidnapper under whose watch the victim died, passes the nuns in their disabled Plymouth Belvedere and decides to stop. The nuns mistake him for a helpful motorist and he tows them with his Volkswagen Type II to his hideout (in the opposite direction from Victorville, California, where repair facilities would be accessible). The nuns soon learn their fate and are held hostage in a locked room with boards nailed over the windows.

The kidnappers devise a plan to get the ransom money from the rich uncle (who is unaware his niece is dead) by having one of the nuns pose as the dead girl. Eddie orders accomplice Larry Lee Majors to take Sister Ellen Lois Nettleton to a wig shop, then to a phone booth where she can call her convent and give false information to explain their not showing up. Larry is somewhat an unwitting party, not wishing to commit further crimes.

Larry tells the hostages to hide and tells Eddie they have escaped.

Eventually the captives are discovered hiding in a closet by Eddie, after which a commotion occurs and he is killed by his own gun. Larry, fearing the worst, makes a desperate move to flee by stealing a light aircraft, but before he can get away there is a climactic scene on the runway.