Original subtitles

[ Airplane passing overhead ]

[ Explosion ]

[ Loud crash ]

[ Fire crackling ]

Woman: That was almost 60 years ago,

and I remember it like it was yesterday.

At first, I didn't understand what I was looking at.

I'd never seen an airplane seat up close before.

But that fiery thing that came hurling out of the evening sky,

that was the first sign of something terrible to come.

We wouldn't have described ourselves as innocent then,

but looking back,

we were as trusting as newborn babes.

[ Indistinct conversations ]

In 1955, in Longmont, Colorado,

an airplane fell from the sky.

It was nighttime before anyone could get there.

It seemed like all of the men in town

had turned out to help.

Some of these men had stormed the beaches at Normandy,

but none of them had seen the likes of this.

There was not a single person for miles and miles

who was not aware of this explosion

because of the fact that it was so massive.

People had debris cascading onto their property.

Seats with people in them were falling from the sky,

huge pieces of metal, luggage.

It was very, very dark,

and the primary illumination was as the pieces hit the ground,

big, huge pits filled with fire from the engines.

Those fires burned for hours and hours.

It became very evident early on

that there were not gonna be any survivors.

As they would find bodies,

they would station a man with a flashlight

to indicate where a body was.

And pretty soon,

this entire field was filled with little points of light.

The flight had 44 people on board.

It had 39 passengers and 5 crew.

Everyone was killed, all 44 were killed.

Field: United Airlines, at that time,

was running a series of commercials that said,

"Compare the fare, you'll go by air!"

And they were trying to lure people away from train travel.

And United Flight 629 had several people on it

for whom this was their very first flight.

Some of the passengers were stewardesses

who were traveling for pleasure on their own.

One of them, Sally Scofield,

was a young stewardess from here in Denver.

Raine: There was also Don White,

who was a co-pilot brought in at the last minute

because there had been a union dispute.

Eisenhower's Deputy Secretary for the Public Health

was on that flight.

Many of the passengers were traveling

to visit friends and family.

There was a woman on board the aircraft named Daisie King,

and she was traveling to Alaska

to spend Thanksgiving with her daughter

and to see her grandchildren.

The list of names in the newspaper seemed endless.

There were husbands and wives,

businessmen and students...

Patricia Lipke, from Pittsburgh,

she was on a vacation trip to Portland.

Thomas Crouch --

he was about to start a brand-new job in Seattle.

Field: There was a woman with a young son who was traveling,

the only child who died on the aircraft,

James Fitzpatrick II.

That little boy's mother, Helen Fitzpatrick,

she was taking him to meet his father for the first time.

He was stationed in Okinawa.

Tamm: In 1955, most people who traveled

essentially wore what we would describe at that time

as your Sunday best.

And you always traveled to look your best,

not to be comfortable.

Man: Ladies and gentlemen, 629 is about to depart.

It was a very special occasion.

[ Projector whirring ]

Narrator: The grim task of removing the dead,

all on board, 44, perished.

Wreckage was scattered over a wide area,

mute testimony to the horror

that plunged out of a night sky.

[ Indistinct conversations ]

Woman: The Weld County Coroner

had to relocate his morgue over to Greeley Armory

to handle all the dead.

The last time I'd been there was for the USO dances.

My husband was out all night

helping the firemen and policemen.

He said he didn't want to stop moving

because then he'd have to start thinking about what he'd seen.

Jenkins: If a plane loses its power,

it's going to crash into the ground intact.

Now, the crash itself obviously will scatter the debris,

but it will be a relatively tight area,

whereas when a plane explodes in air,

then the debris is going to be scattered over a broader area.

The primary debris field was approximately 6 square miles.

The distribution of the debris on the ground

really conforms to that of an explosion in the air.

It's 6 miles. Everything's gonna be gridded.

Everything out there filmed, photographed,

and it'll be tagged.

Field: The Civil Aeronautics Board

used a method of reconstruction of the aircraft,

which at that time was very new.

And they divided the crash site

into 1,000-foot by 1,000-foot squares,

and they assigned each square a number

and would gather the debris from each square.

It would be loaded onto a flatbed truck,

and they used a large airplane hangar

to reconstruct the aircraft.

Jenkins: So, then you begin to look for causes inside the plane.

Was the explosion caused by a fuel tank?

At the time, aircraft were powered by aviation gasoline,

which was a much more volatile type of fuel.

An explosion will rend metal,

rip metal outward,

and by close examination of the metal...

...can we begin

to gradually narrow the origins so that we can say,

"This explosion occurred

precisely in this portion of the aircraft?"

Tamm: So, they realized after six or seven days

of examining the debris

that this was not something that was caused by fuel,

that the explosion occurred in the number-4 cargo hold.

Now the question becomes, is this an accident?

Investigators hypothesized

there could have been a volatile substance

that had been negligently packed.

There was no examination of luggage at all.

It was only evaluated for weight.

There had been an incident in the 1930s

where a United Plane had exploded

because a sharpshooter who was traveling

liked to make his own ammunition,

and he used Nitroglycerin.

F301.

F301.

And so they gathered all the pieces

of that luggage compartment for examination.

What about...

Do you smell that?

Smells like sulfur.

A lot of people described it as a firecracker-like smell

that they could detect on the metal.

The FBI forensic chemists

determined that it had to be dynamite.

They also found bits of copper wire

that were not part of the airplane.

This was the ignition source to set off the dynamite.

The plane had been purposely bombed.

Jenkins: This was not an accident.

This was an act of sabotage.

Sargent: A commercial airliner had been bombed,

blown up, and killed everybody on board.

People just couldn't believe

that anyone would do such a thing.

It was completely unheard of.

It was the first time it had happened in the United States.

Tamm: There was no apparent reason for this.

It was a commercial airline with normal people.

There wasn't anybody particularly special on board,

except to their own families,

and they're all killed.

It was beyond anything anyone could imagine.

Everyone out here at the farms, everyone in town,

and every newspaper I saw

kept asking the same question...

Jenkins: Who could deliberately set out to kill not one person,

but scores of people randomly?

Who can do that?

That's in a different category.

That is the incarnation of evil.

[ Telephone rings ]

Do you have any reason to believe

that he had any negative feelings toward the airline?

Woman: Everyone was in shock.

I mean, we were no strangers to loss.

It was 1955, after all.

The Korean War had just ended,

and World War II just before that.

But this kind of thing happening in peacetime,

it made no sense.

Once they had determined that the plane had been bombed,

you next would go to determining why would it be bombed.

[ Indistinct conversations ]

The first thing that occurred to everyone was the unions.

There had been a lot in the papers

about strikes lately.

Field: Colorado, sadly,

has a very long history of extraordinary union violence.

Could it be the possibility of an inside job?

Do we have somebody

that is getting even with the airline itself?

Field: The union had been making some rather provocative statements

about having scabs cross the line.

On this particular night, the flight engineer was a pilot

who had crossed the picket line at Stapleton Airport.

So, while considering the union as the source of the problem,

at the same time, almost simultaneously...

Hello.

Hi. Special Agent Roy Moore with the FBI.

Sorry for your loss, sir.

Thank you.

We just have a few questions about your wife.

...they'd have to investigate

whether somebody wanted to kill somebody on board the aircraft.

And so, to do that, you investigate the background

of all 44 people who were killed.

I'm sorry about the loss of your mother.

I appreciate that.

Just bear with us.

They're just routine questions we have to ask.

FBI Field Agents were dispatched from literally every state

to interview relatives, associates,

anybody who knew people on the aircraft.

So, how well did you know your cousin?

Uh, not that well.

Field: They asked all sorts of questions

about marital difficulties, suicidal tendencies,

business failures.

Tamm: Did they have criminal records,

or would they potentially have enemies?

Were they in a business where it was highly competitive

that you'd have somebody want to kill you?

Were they in difficult family relationships?

Jenkins: One looks at each passenger.

Who would benefit?

Who would benefit materially?

Financial gain by the death of this person

or by this plane coming down.

Are there an unusual number of purchases of insurance?

Did somebody have a huge policy taken out

that became effective on the very day of the crash?

Field: And so, one of the first things that the FBI did

was contact the insurance companies

that ran the kiosks in the airport

and asked them to pull all of the policies

that had issued on the day.

In those days, you could buy a life-insurance policy

from a vending machine in the airport.

I always thought it sounded a little like a wishing well.

If you toss in your coins, down here on the ground,

you might just buy yourself a little extra luck

up in the air.

Field: The way it would work is,

you would put your quarter in the machine,

you would get your insurance documents,

sign the documents,

and then there was a place to deposit the signed documents.

Because, if the plane were to go down,

the policy couldn't be recovered.

Sargent: In 1955, for many people, flying was new,

and there was a lack of trust that flying was safe.

Many of the passengers on this plane

had bought flight-insurance policies.

But when they looked through all those policies

deposited in the kiosk,

they didn't find anything that stood out.

There was the minimum for individuals,

and larger amounts for couples with children.

I don't mean to be grim,

but if there was no way to tell which passenger was the target,

well, then they were going to have to figure out

who put that bomb on the plane in the first place.

Jenkins: So, if we think that the device was in an individual's luggage,

can we determine who owns that suitcase?

The FBI interviewed

all the airline employees who handled luggage,

and not a one seemed suspicious.

But they did discover the most amazing coincidence

involving a set of keys in Chicago.

The FBI caught a lucky break.

The baggage handlers in Denver were able to tell them

precisely what had been loaded in cargo pit number 4

because the flight came in from Chicago,

and one of the baggage handlers there

had lost his keys inside there.

So, when the plane landed in Denver,

they unloaded all of the luggage from the number-4 cargo hold,

moved it into other areas of the plane.

They never did find the keys.

But, as a consequence,

only items originating from Denver

were loaded into the number-4 cargo hold.

The FBI learned

that only three passengers in Denver checked luggage,

and only one of those checked the bag

that was very heavy

and capable of having a bomb inside

that would blow up an airplane,

and that was a woman by the name of Daisie King.

Daisie King,

the woman on her way to see her grandkids.

Well, why would she blow up her own plane?

[ Indistinct conversations ]

Woman: Some towns get hit by tornadoes.

Some get flooded.

In Longmont, Colorado,

44 people had taken off in an airplane,

and then 20 minutes later,

they had all fallen out of the sky.

It was a disaster, certainly, but it wasn't natural.

Once the FBI realized that only one Denver passenger

had checked luggage in that cargo hold

with the capability to blow up an airplane,

they started to focus on Daisie King.

All: Three, two, one!

[ Cheering ]

Jenkins: The FBI agents learned

that the family had a drive-in restaurant business

on South Federal Boulevard.

Hamburgers, hot dogs, that type of thing,

initially with car hops.

This was the 1950s.

Cruising was a very popular activity.

Going to the drive-in.

You were all living together now, Mr. Graham,

in this house, with your mother, is that right?

Yeah, that's right.

Tamm: The FBI dispatched two agents

to interview Jack Graham and Helen Hablutzel.

These were Daisie King's two children

from different marriages.

The daughter had come to Denver after the accident, from Alaska.

Could you just tell me a little bit more

about what things were like growing up with Daisie?

Uh, well, it was hard.

[ Film projector whirring ]

Raine: Jack and Helen talk about

the difficult financial circumstances

that they were brought up with as children.

Field: At the time, her husband had died.

In the 1930s,

it was during the depths of the depression,

and she had no means to support her children.

And so, she had put her daughter

in what was essentially a religious prep school.

And Daisie had placed her son in an orphanage in Denver

so that she was able to work,

and he spent his childhood in the orphanage.

It was a terrible time.

It tore families apart,

forced people to do things they didn't want to do.

I mean, send your kids away or have them starve?

That's not much of a choice.

Some people could never get over it.

And then Earl King,

he was Daisie's third husband, and he died a few years ago.

After Daisie King's third husband died in the mid 1950s,

she was now in a good situation.

And she decided to buy a house for Jack,

who now has his own family.

And create a basement apartment for herself,

perhaps she was trying to undo something from the past

that would make her feel better.

Is that when you started, what is it, the, uh --

the Crown-A. The Crown-A.

Yeah, that's right.

Daisie thought that it might be a good idea

to open a restaurant, and I'd manage it.

Raine: When Daisie came into money,

she was trying to make reparations.

She was in a position to be able to put the family together

in a way she was never able to do before.

But she was in a bad place,

like really struggling, you know?

When Helen is talking to the FBI about her mother,

she's describing a woman

who really could never be happy with things in life,

even when things were going well.

She couldn't take enjoyment from those moments,

and Helen's mother is a woman who you could never hug.

You couldn't really call her "Mom."

She always wanted to be called "Daisie."

And Helen, at that point, shocked the FBI

and says that her mother was a woman who had mood swings,

and that on one occasion she had attempted suicide.

All right, I want to hear everything Daisie did that day.

Uh, Daisie came upstairs with her bag.

Jack told the FBI agents that his mother was very quirky

when it came to packing her case.

Only she was to pack her items.

She didn't want any help from anyone.

I wanted to loan her a sweater,

but I had to give it straight to her.

Field: And Gloria chimed in and said,

"Oh, yeah, that's the way she was.

She packed her own luggage."

And had you seen what she was packing?

Uh, well, uh, ammunition.

She was real excited about the caribou season.

Tamm: The sister confirmed that her mother intended to hunt

when she was in Alaska.

[ Engine turns over ]

Jack, we're going to be late!

I know, I know, I'm going as fast as I can!

[ Engine revs ]

[ Sighs ]

At this point,

Daisie was starting to get irritated with him

because he was running late.

[ Indistinct shouting ]

Raine: They then walked towards the departure area,

and Daisie wants to buy flight insurance.

So she gives Jack several quarters,

and he buys three life-insurance policies.

One is listed in his name, the other policy is for Helen,

and the third policy is for Daisie's sister.

Each was for the lowest amount possible.

Then she goes to the ticketing agent.

Hello, there.

Woman: Hello!

And what is our destination today?

Seattle, then Anchorage.

And are you checking any bags?

Yes.

Ooph, that is a heavy one!

Jenkins: Would this person have reason for suicide?

From the investigator's perspective,

things begin to converge.

Raine: In the case of Daisie,

they knew that she had volatile moods.

They knew that she had previously attempted suicide.

She also had talked about the idea

that there could be a flight disaster.

She talked about the fact that this plane may just blow up

and she may be killed.

We have a number of cases that were suicide insurance scams.

They may have wanted to provide

for the surviving members of their family.

Raine: And she had insisted on taking out life insurance

on her life just before the flight.

At that point,

exploration really becomes case construction.

And, uh, these are the last two.

That's it?

So the FBI looked deeper,

and it turned out this wasn't the first time

a bomb had exploded around Daisie King.

Field: In September of 1955,

the Crown-A drive-in had a large fire.

Glass had blown out into the street.

Tamm: That restaurant had

had an explosion occur inside from a gas leak,

and they had received an insurance settlement

for that damage.

Woman: When the FBI got wind of this explosion happening

just two months before the plane blew up,

they knew it was time to take a closer look

at what was going on at that drive-in.

Was Daisie behind it all, or was someone trying to hurt her?

Jack!

What are we gonna do about this?

Don't worry about it.

Field: The business was losing money and she blamed Jack,

and she started making noises

about wanting to sell the business.

You've got to learn.

Daisie controlled all the financial aspects

of the business.

Field: If the restaurant was sold,

Jack Graham would've been out of a job,

and all of the money would've gone to his mother.

Raine: So, the FBI looked with greater scrutiny

at the financial effect of Daisie's death on that plane.

The approximate value of Daisie's estate in today's money

would be nearly a million dollars.

Who would that go to?

Daisie's children, Helen and Jack.

Well, now it seemed like maybe Jack had reason

to want to get rid of his mother.

Jack, can you get these?

Those FBI men took a closer look at that Jack Graham.

The FBI discovered that Jack Graham previously had, in fact,

himself worked at the same insurance company

that had been insuring the drive-in restaurant.

All: Three, two, one!

[ Cheering ]

Field: It was an incredibly mercurial relationship

between Jack and Daisie.

They would often be screaming at each other

in front of the employees.

Different people reached out to the FBI

and said, "You oughta look at Jack Graham."

"He had something to do with this explosion

at the Crown-A drive-in."

It fit?

Let's see what we got.

Here.

At that point,

they identified a few personal effects of Daisie King's.

What is it?

Jesus.

And the FBI found a faded newspaper clipping from 1951

that indicated that Jack Graham had been involved

in a check-forging scheme.

Daisie helped pay some of the restitution

to try to persuade the judge to go easy on him,

and ultimately, he was placed on probation.

Mr. Graham.

Afternoon. How are you?

I'm well.

We, uh, we recovered some personal effects

that may have been your mother's.

But writing bad checks is a far cry

from blowing up an airplane and killing 44 people.

Besides, it seems like Daisie

was cleaning up after Jack's messes.

Why would he cut the apron strings?

Yeah, I'd love to have them.

[ Coughing ]

I'm sorry, can I trouble you for a glass of water?

Uh, yeah, my wife's inside.

Man: Here's another one.

Yeah, th-this.

Is Jack coming in?

Mm.

They'll just be a few more minutes.

Do you mind if I just ask you one thing?

There must be some little part of that day that you remember

that slipped Jack's mind.

No.

Field: When the FBI agents interviewed Gloria Graham,

she corroborated Jack's timeline of the day.

You know, there was one thing.

And it's sad

because Jack was doing something nice for his mother

and she'll never know.

Raine: She saw Jack carrying a wrapped present.

And this, she thought, was the present

that he had talked to her about giving to his mother.

Thank you very much, Mrs. Graham.

Field: A few days later, FBI agents searched his house.

And the agents found, hidden behind a piece of furniture,

a insurance policy that had issued

from one of the insurance kiosks at the airport

for over $30,000 with Jack Graham as the beneficiary,

which was far in excess of Jack Graham's claim

that he had just bought the minimal policy.

B456.

They found spools of copper wire

similar to the wire that was recovered at the crash site.

And they located a hardware store

in the town of Kremmling, Colorado,

and the owner of the hardware store,

and he picked Graham out

as the person he'd sold the dynamite to.

Jack, we just wanted to ask you a few more questions.

We searched your house, and we found a few items in it

that don't match up with what you told us.

Okay.

Yeah, whatever I can do to help.

Man: We found an insurance policy,

but it wasn't the insurance policy that you said.

It was for $37,000.

I -- I don't know what to tell you about that.

That doesn't sound quite right.

And we found some copper wire down in the garage.

Well, we -- we use copper wiring at the restaurant, um...

It's the same copper wire

that matched the detonating device on the aircraft.

And what Jack Graham told the FBI -- it was unbelievable.

We couldn't have imagined it in our wildest nightmares.

Man: What do you have to say, Jack?

Woman: 44 people died when United 629 exploded in the sky

over Longmont, Colorado.

Just 12 days later, the FBI got Jack Graham to talk.

Well, it all started at the restaurant.

Daisie was raising hell again.

And I'd had enough.

It's pretty simple.

Tamm: Used a six-volt battery and electric caps

to explode the dynamite,

and he had to find a timer that would give him enough time

to get the bag onboard and blow up.

Now, different than in this digital age,

back then, you would just have had an analog timer.

He used an appliance timer, had 60 minutes on it.

Jack, we're going to be late!

Don't worry about it, Daisie.

So that's why he took his mother to the airport

at the last moment to get her on the aircraft.

[ Indistinct shouting ]

And are you checking any bags?

Daisie: Yes.

Ooph, that is a heavy one!

I'm afraid it's about 30 pounds overweight.

Oh?

You'll have to pay $27.82,

or you can unpack some things and send it by freight.

We have a freight office in the airport.

Jack, come here!

What?

My bag's overweight.

It's $27, and the girl says I can unpack it

and then ship some of it by freight.

What should I do?

You don't want to do that.

I mean, the last thing you want to do

is get all the way there

and realize that the one thing you need,

you left here.

Who knows how long the freight's gonna take?

There are four people having a conversation

about whether or not to open this suitcase

while there's a bomb inside with a timer ticking down,

and he knows that that bomb

is the first thing that they're gonna see

when they open that bag, and he is very insistent --

pay the extra, don't open the bag.

[ Ticking ]

Yeah, you're right.

I'll pay.

Woman: Will that be cash or personal check?

And so, she paid extra

to take the 30-something extra pounds of luggage.

If Daisie had been a little cheaper,

if she'd been a little more inquisitive,

this never would've happened

because they came very close to opening that suitcase.

It turned out Jack hated his mother

more than anyone had imagined.

Raine: Why did Jack do this?

At the age of 10,

when his mother remarried in the 1940s,

he thought, "This is it.

"I'm going to be free of the foster home."

But no, Jack is sent back.

He has a mother who can now afford to have him in the home,

but she just doesn't want him.

Field: A few years after that,

this woman who had abandoned him now comes back into his life,

and now his mother is his landlord

because she helps him buy the house

and she's living down in the basement.

And she also builds a restaurant and has him manage it.

So now she's his boss and his landlord

and his downstairs tenant --

just a very smothering presence in his life.

There's two contrasting options here.

On the one hand, if Daisie lives,

then the business is going to be sold,

Jack is without a job,

and he has a wife and two children to look after.

On the other hand, if Daisie were to die,

then Jack inherits the restaurant.

He gains the life insurance.

So given these two choices, Jack decides on the latter.

He decides to kill his mother.

Man: Put your hands on the desk, please.

Sargent: At the time of the explosion,

there were no federal laws on the books

that said blowing up a commercial airline is a crime.

No one had done it before.

No one had even envisioned it.

Field: The District Attorney for Denver at that time

made a decision that he would file

a single charge of intentional and deliberate murder,

with Daisie King as the victim.

Raine: At the end,

Jack Graham was found guilty of murder in the first degree.

He was sentenced to death in a gas chamber.

Jenkins: He was executed in January of 1957,

so only 14 months passed between the time of the crime

and the resolution with the execution of Graham.

Sargent: Just a few weeks after Jack Graham was found guilty,

on July 14, 1956, Dwight D. Eisenhower,

President of the United States at that time,

signed a bill into law

prohibiting the intentional bombing of a commercial airline.

Jack Graham became the stuff of nightmares,

someone unimaginable before all of this.

What kind of monster could wait in that room

and lay eyes on all those people,

a life ahead of each and every one of them,

knowing he was about to kill them all?

Raine: He has a personality which is psychopathic.

He lacks a sense of guilt.

Getting that money mattered far more to him

than the lives

of those 44 innocent men, women, and children.

This man really changed the psychological mentality

of people in the mid-1950s.

It's almost like technology meeting evil.

Man on P.A.: Ladies and gentlemen,

629 is about to depart.

Jenkins: Daisie King curiously somehow arouses less sympathy.

We're not saying the woman deserved to die,

but we can connect her as the target with the perpetrator.

The other people are random victims,

and the randomness affects us differently.

It causes greater fear because we more easily

can put ourselves into the seats on that airplane.

Sargent: America lost its innocence to some extent.

It shook the country to its core.

For the first time, people were vulnerable in the sky

[ Dog barking in distance ]

in a way they had never been before.

? Oh, bury me beneath the willow ?

? Under the weeping willow tree ?

Woman: I was so sad for those people and their families.

So much loss.

But I was also sad for myself and my husband

and for my two children because the world was changing,

things I couldn't even imagine yet.

And I thought about how much we have to trust each other,

and I thought about

how when just one person breaks that faith,

no one is safe.

[ Airplane engine roars ]

? So she may know where I am sleeping ?

? And perhaps she'll weep for me ?

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