Crime
Flight 629 was using a Douglas DC-6B airliner that took off from Denver, Colorado's Stapleton Airfield (later changed to Stapleton Airport), bound for Portland, Oregon with continuing service to Seattle, Washington, on the evening of November 1, 1955. The flight had originated at New York City's LaGuardia Airport, making a stop in Chicago before continuing to Denver. The pilot was Lee Hall, a World War II veteran. Minutes after the plane's departure from Denver, the DC-6B exploded and the flaming wreckage fell to earth over tracts of farmland and sugar beet fields near Longmont, Colorado. There were no survivors.
Graham's mother, Daisie King, a passenger on Flight 629, was traveling to Alaska to visit her daughter. It was believed that Graham's motive for the bombing was to claim $37,500 worth of life insurance money from policies Graham had purchased in the airport terminal just before the aircraft's departure. (Flight insurance could be routinely purchased in vending machines at airports into the 1980s).
After Graham's conviction, Denver radio station KDEN owner Gene Amole and Rocky Mountain News photographer Morey Engle arranged to sneak a camera into the old Denver County Jail on West Colfax for an interview of Graham during a reunion with his wife Gloria.
"I loved my mother very much," Graham told Amole. "She meant a lot to me. It's very hard for me to tell exactly how I feel. She left so much of herself behind." When Amole asked him why he had signed a confession, he said the FBI had threatened to point out inconsistencies in statements made by his wife Gloria when she was interviewed by the authorities. "I was not about to let them touch her in any way, shape or form," he said.
None of the Denver TV stations would agree to air the film, however. Amole said he believed it was because they feared it "might engender pretrial sympathy for Graham. The FBI, United Airlines and the district attorney wanted Graham tried, found guilty, and executed promptly as a deterrent to others who might plan copycat murders," Amole wrote in a column published in the Rocky Mountain News on Sunday, October 29, 1995. Decades later, the footage was eventually aired on one of Denver's local PBS stations in a documentary called "Murder in Midair" produced by Don Kinney.
Read more about this topic: Jack Gilbert Graham
Famous quotes containing the word crime:
“Has anyone ever told you that you overplay your various roles rather severely, Mr. Kaplan? First you’re the outraged Madison Avenue man who claims he’s been mistaken for someone else. Then you play the fugitive from justice, supposedly trying to clear his name of a crime he knows he didn’t commit. And now you play the peevish lover stung by jealously and betrayal. It seems to me you fellows could stand a little less training from the FBI and a little more from the Actors Studio.”
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