MASS MURDER IN THE SKY:
The Bombing of Flight 629
Historical True Crime Short
By R. Barri Flowers
Copyright 2011 by R. Barri Flowers at Smashwords. All rights reserved.
Cover Image Copyright 2011 by Two Double J
Used under license from http://www.shutterstock.com
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Mass Murder in the Sky: The Bombing of Flight 629
Ian Brady and Myra Hindley - Bonus Short Story
The Sex Slave Murders - Bonus Excerpts
DEDICATION
In memory of the victims of all terrorist attacks and to the continued efforts to keep America and the rest of the world safe from terrorism and criminality.
And to my better half, who keeps me doing what I do best in writing books and short material to give my fans quality reading.
* * *
MASS MURDER IN THE SKY: The Bombing of Flight 629
As a literary criminologist for more than thirty years, I have studied and written about many of the most infamous crimes and criminals in U.S. history. One that has always remained with me is a pre 9/11 era bombing of an airliner in flight over Denver, killing all aboard. Though this is stunning and tragic enough, the circumstances and motivation of the mass murderer are even more shocking.
In this true crime short, I revisit this frightening case of mass murder in the sky as part of our dark history and a forerunner to similar acts of terrorism in modern times.
* * *
Jack Gilbert Graham has a unique place in American aviation history. He was not a pilot. Nor was he a passenger on that fateful day in the fall of 1955. Graham's impact was that of a mass murderer. He planted a dynamite bomb in luggage belonging to his mother, who was taking a flight from Denver, Colorado to Portland, Oregon, with her ultimate destination being Alaska to visit her daughter.
Graham's mother never made it to her destination, nor did the other passengers and crew. The plane exploded shortly after takeoff, killing all forty-four aboard instantly. And so began one of our nation's most shocking acts of terrorism.
Jack Graham's motivation was apparently to collect insurance on his mother's death, though some believe it was a difficult relationship between Graham and his mother that led to the tragedy. Either way, the massive explosion not only cost many others their lives, but has also played on the collective psyches of Americans ever since.
Graham's mass murder did not go unpunished. He received the same fate as his mother and the other passengers aboard the ill-fated airliner, when he was executed in Colorado's gas chamber less than two years later.
Now the chilling story of Jack Graham and his date with infamy...
* * *
The evening of November 1, 1955 must have seemed pretty routine for those making their way through Denver, Colorado's Stapleton Airfield, which later became Stapleton Airport. This was likely just as true for the thirty-nine passengers who boarded Flight 629 bound for Portland, Oregon, as well as the five crew members. After all, there was nothing particularly unusual that would have tipped their hand that this was anything but an ordinary flight, much less one for which no one would arrive safely at their destination.
Flight 629 was a United Air Lines four-engine prop Douglas DC-6B airliner. Originating from New York City's LaGuardia Airport, it had made a stop in Chicago before flying to Denver without incident. Piloting the plane was a World War II veteran with extensive experience in the cockpit named Lee Hall.
At 6:52 p.m., Flight 629 took off smoothly for the 1,029 mile trip to Portland, nicknamed the Rose City. It took only minutes before the plane was cruising at 4,000 feet under good visibility. The crew, which included Hall, a copilot, and three stewardesses, went about their respective duties in anticipation of a nice, routine flight that would take them and their passengers over Colorado, Wyoming, and Idaho.
The passengers, taking note of the signs that gave them the green light to unbuckle their seatbelts and smoke if they so desired, likely took advantage of the opportunity. They were ready to relax, receive refreshments, and otherwise enjoy the rest of the journey.
It was a flight that was supposed to take about three hours to complete. With the weather clear and the wind calm, there seemed to be no cause for concern as the aircraft passed over Longmont, a city in northern Colorado, thirty-one miles from Denver and thirty miles from Wyoming.
Then disaster struck. Eleven minutes into the flight, the plane exploded, sending flaming wreckage hurling down onto fields of sugar beets and farmland near Longmont.
Everyone aboard United Air Lines Flight 629 was killed instantly, including an infant traveling with his mother to visit the child's father who was in the military and assigned to a post in the South Pacific; and a passenger named Daisie King, who had hoped to visit her daughter in Alaska, but never made it for reasons that would shock the nation.1
* * *
John "Jack" Gilbert Graham was born in Denver, Colorado on January 23, 1932. He was only three years of age when his father, William Graham, passed away without warning. Graham ended up in an orphanage because his mother, Daisie, was not able to adequately care for him. He was in a series of foster homes till age thirteen when it appeared as though his life was changing for the better.
It was then that Daisie, who had married a man named John Earl King in 1941, took Jack out of the orphanage and they moved to a nice sized ranch in northeastern Colorado. However, life was anything but easy for the family as financial difficulties plagued them, forcing King to sell off his land, a little at a time, till the entire ranch was sold by 1950.
The family relocated to Yampa, a tiny town about a hundred miles from Denver. Daisie King proved to be a shrewd businesswoman, finding success in real estate and a drive-in restaurant at 581 South Federal Boulevard in Denver, among other ventures. In the following years, the relationship between Graham and his mother would grow strained, with money or lack of it often at the core. Pent up animosities and greed would later play a role in an unthinkable disaster in the sky.
* * *
According to an article titled, "Sabotage: The Downing of Flight 629," Captain Lee Hall's initial indication that something was very wrong was the sound of a loud noise that appeared to come from underneath the airplane. After the plane shook violently for a few seconds, Hall's seat became unhinged and slammed into the cockpit's metal ceiling. Beneath the pilot, the airliner, moving at "several hundred miles per hour...erupted into one gigantic blast[, ripping] the fuselage apart into a thousand pieces [and] sending debris, luggage and passengers tumbling into space. Both engines separated from the wings and the propellers continued turn[ing] as they began their long, spinning descent to the ground below."2
Wreckage stretched far and wide, covering more than two miles of Weld County's flat ground. The whole tail section of the plane had broken apart from the main fuselage, with huge sharp pieces spread across farmland as if to illustrate the magnitude of the deafening explosion.
The locals were horrified and in disbelief. According to farmer Conrad Hopp, who was working his fields just outside of Longmont, "It sounded like a bomb went off.... I turned around and it blew up in the air!"3
Twenty-two-year-old Kenneth Hopp, who was the first person on the scene, said he "ran out of the house and saw the burning plane...nosing toward the ground all on fire, with sparks trailing!"4
Another witness, Bud Lang, told the Denver Post, it "looked like a shooting star;" while farmer Arlo Boda noted that pieces of the plane were "all over these farms." He recalled later digging up "part of the engine manifold."5
Under such violent and instantaneous circumstances, survival for any of the forty-four passengers and crew would have been all but impossible. This, it turned out, was the intended purpose of the bombing, though targeting one person, in particular.
* * *
In 1948, Jack Graham joined the U.S. Coast Guard, receiving an honorable discharge the following year, in spite of a less than satisfactory record in the service. He was reported AWOL sixty-three days during his short stint with the Coast Guard. Records show that Graham was stationed last at the Coast Guard's Groton, Connecticut installation, where he held the rank of motorman third class when he was discharged.
Upon returning to Denver, Graham worked a number of jobs. In 1951, while working for a manufacturing plant as a payroll clerk, he stole a number of payroll checks, cashing them for thousands of dollars after forging the company president's name on checks.
He bought a new convertible with his stolen funds and left the state as authorities gathered evidence for theft and forgery charges, issuing an arrest warrant against him.
On September 1, 1951, a policeman sought to arrest Graham outside of Lubbock, Texas for transporting alcohol in his vehicle, but Graham fled. Following a police chase in which Graham managed to evade the law for a while, he was finally captured after crashing into a roadblock set up by police and faced multiple related charges. A .44 caliber pistol was found inside his car on the floor in front.
After being returned to Colorado on the forgery charges, Graham's mother, Daisie King, repaid the funds stolen from the company and he received probation. The relative harmony between mother and son would not last for long.
* * *
After the remains of the passengers of Flight 629 were recovered, they were put in a temporary morgue at the National Guard Amory in Greeley, Colorado. Federal Bureau of Investigation fingerprint experts arrived from Washington, DC to help identify the victims.
Nine of the dead had already been identified by family and friends or personal items recovered. The other thirty-five victims were fingerprinted and twenty-one were positively identified as a result of having fingerprints on file with the FBI's civil section for one reason or another. United Air Lines supplied the FBI with fingerprints of the Flight 629 crew.
The remaining fourteen passengers--twelve women and two men--who were not identified by fingerprints were ultimately identified through their relatives or personal items.
As the victim identification process went on, the Civil Aeronautics Board was investigating the incident in cooperation with FBI agents from the Denver Field Office and United Air Lines personnel. During the initial stages of the investigation, a "minute and detailed examination of all parts of the wreckage was also made by engineers of United Air Lines, the Douglas Aircraft Corporation, and other private manufacturing concerns."6 However, they were unable to connect the explosion to a breakdown of any area of the aircraft.
On November 7, 1955, the Civil Aeronautics Board's chief of investigations reported that there were signs that United Air Lines Flight 629 had been sabotaged. The FBI was asked to launch an official criminal investigation into this act of terrorism in the air that had taken the lives of forty-four people.
By the following day, the FBI dispatched agents to put the investigation front and center, where their mission was to compare information gathered from those who witnessed the explosion and crash and workers on the plane before it exploded; trace every piece of cargo, baggage, and mail that was on the aircraft; carry out background investigations on the plane's crew and passengers; and oversee and conduct searches of Flight 629's wreckage, recovered luggage, and personal belongings for potential evidence and any possible leads into the investigation.
FBI agents collected information that had been gathered by Civil Aeronautics Board and United Air Lines personnel in the preceding days on approximately two hundred people in a one hundred forty square mile area around the crash scene. Signed statements by thirty-seven of those interviewed were considered most relevant for possible leads in the bombing, which appeared to have caused an initial explosion of "tremendous force" while the aircraft was operating routinely, resulting in "fiery streamers" falling from it. Another explosion was believed to have followed, likely of "one or more fuel tanks...when the engines and forward compartment of the plane struck the ground."7
A Stapleton Airfield control tower operator would say later that he had noticed the "flash of light" at precisely 7:03 p.m. on November 1, 1955. Officials from the Civil Aeronautics Board put the explosion's location at "approximately eight miles east of Longmont, Colorado and at a calculated altitude of 10,800 feet above sea level or 5,782 feet above the terrain."8
The U.S. Postal Service was given the assignment of retrieving mail from amongst the debris of Flight 629, collecting more than four hundred pounds of post that was "spread out over an area eight and a half miles long and four miles wide."9 The pattern of the mail--or what was left of it--furthered speculation that there was an onboard explosion that had brought down the aircraft. A postal official was quoted by the Denver Post to this effect, stating: "Things appear out of the ordinary.... We are investigating the possibility of sabotage."10
* * *
In 1953, Jack Gilbert Graham got married. He and his wife, Gloria, went on to have two children. The family lived with Graham's mother in East Denver in a big house on Mississippi Avenue. Graham was employed as manager of the drive-in restaurant his mother owned.
Things grew sour between Graham and his mother when he was forced to pay back the money she had put up to keep him from going to jail. She also insisted that he pay rent to live in her house. Witnesses noted that the mother and son were arguing constantly over money issues. It was also rumored that Graham was up to his old tricks, this time pilfering from his mother's business.
In the early part of 1955, Graham's Chevy truck was hit by a train outside of Denver. It appeared as though the vehicle had been abandoned inexplicably, though it was never reported as stolen by Graham. While the case went unsolved, Graham filed an insurance claim for the loss of his truck, receiving a few thousand dollars. Some of this was handed over to his mother to repay debt, which was nearly paid in full by October of that year.
Tension continued to remain high between Graham and Daisie King.
* * *
The recovered wreckage from the central section of Flight 629, along with cargo, baggage, and personal items were brought to a vast, guarded warehouse at the airport. The mail was given to postal inspectors, thought it was kept accessible should it be needed for additional scrutiny. The plane sections were wired to a full size "mock-up" of the plane's central portion, constructed of wood and wire netting, as if a "giant jigsaw puzzle." Based on this, it was concluded by the Structure Investigating Committee of the Civil Aeronautics Board chairman and an engineer with the Douglas Aircraft Corporation that there was an explosion "at station 718 in the rear cargo pit, designated as cargo pit number four."11
The explosion was thought to have taken place right "across the cargo compartment from the cargo loading door," because the "stringers at this point had failed in outward bending and pieces of heavy fuselage skin recovered and fitted into the area had been shattered into small pieces."12 Further indication that a powerful explosion had happened was the finding in this area of pieces of material "embedded in shoes contained in luggage and in air freight known to have been carried in cargo pit number four."13 There were gray soot type deposits on a number of skin fragments next to or inside the station 718 area, as well as the central part of the floor over the cargo pit on the aft side, but none were found on the forward side.
The investigation of freight shipments on the doomed airliner revealed that there were no explosive or flammable items amongst the shipments. Moreover, it was discovered that after arriving in Denver, the cargo and freight from pit four had been transferred to the forward cargo pit. As such, when Flight 629 took off bound for Portland, there was only baggage originating from Denver and loaded from other flights in pit four.
In searching the area of the wreckage, five small pieces of sheet metal were discovered. These were not like any parts of the airplane, nor could they be linked to any identified contents within the cargo. The pieces were burned badly and covered with gray soot residue typically associated with an explosion. One piece was red on one side and contained the letters "HO" in blue. Ultimately, it would be discovered that this piece was part of a six-volt battery's metal side and served as the detonating device for the bomb that brought down Flight 629.