Review by Ed Quillen
Colorado History – January 2006 – Colorado Central Magazine
Mainliner Denver – The Bombing of Flight 629
by Andrew J. Field
Published in 2005 by Johnson Books
ISBN 1-55566-363-X
EARLY IN THE EVENING of Nov. 1, 1955, a commercial airliner exploded a few minutes after taking off from Stapleton Airfield in Denver. It was bound for Portland, Ore. It fell out of the sky over farms in Weld County a few miles east of Longmont. All 44 people aboard, including the crew of five, were dead at the fiery scene, with wreckage and bodies spread across several square miles.
This happened just before my fifth birthday. We lived near Greeley, the Weld County seat, where the armory was converted into a temporary morgue where the bodies were taken for identification. It was big news locally and nationally, and I don’t know if I remember the news of the event, or just that all the adults in my life were talking about it.
I do remember distinctly that after we moved to Kremmling in 1974, Dave Forster, who owned the gas station next to the newspaper office, told me that the Circle Supers store across the street had once been Brown’s Mercantile, and that was where John Gilbert Graham had purchased the dynamite to blow up the airliner with his mother aboard in 1955.
The bombing of Flight 629 is one of those things I’ve known about for most of my life. But I never knew the full story until I read this book. I picked it up and thumbed through it and immediately became engrossed and didn’t put the book down until I’d read it through. It’s almost an epic story, here told clearly and well.
Author Andrew J. Field starts at Stapleton as United Air Lines Flight 629 lands. The propeller-driven DC-6B airliner (jets had not yet arrived in commercial aviation) had begun in New York with a stop in Chicago. Then it went to Denver, and from there, it was supposed to go to Portland. United named its airliners — this craft was the Denver Mainliner.
Field describes the passengers and their reasons for travel. Among them was Daisie King of Denver, who planned to land in Portland en route to Spenard, Alaska, where she would visit her daughter, Helen Hablutzel, and grandchildren. Her son John, and his wife Gloria, took her to the Denver airport.
The plane was late taking off. A few minutes later, at 7:03 p.m., farmers and other witnesses saw an explosion in the sky, followed by a fiery crash. Firemen and policemen rushed to the scene, as did so many curious sight-seers that the National Guard was called out to secure the site. No survivors were found, and so much gasoline had spilled that firemen could not extinguish some blazes.
THE FBI was called in, first to use its fingerprint files to help identify the victims, and then to investigate the cause of the crash — even though, as it turned out, blowing up an airliner was not then a federal crime.
At first, they didn’t know it had blown up, and the investigation is the most fascinating part of this story (of course, I love true-crime books).
The cause of the crash had to be established. Complicating matters was a strike against United by the Flight Engineers Union, which led to suspicions and finger-pointing. Also, only a few weeks earlier, a United Flight had crashed near Medicine Bow Peak in Wyoming, an area so rugged and remote, with such severe weather during that season, that the Civil Aeronautics Board could not recover enough pieces to establish a cause.
After Flight 629 went down, United hired surveyors to lay out a grid across the six square miles that held most of the wreckage, tagged every piece with its location, hauled the pieces to a hangar in Denver, and re-assembled the airplane. The smallest pieces, apparently shattered by the force of the explosion, were from the Number 4 cargo hold. The FBI went to work on the passenger list, looking for suspicious people — one-way tickets, people who had reservations for that flight but didn’t board, people with big flight-insurance policies purchased at airport vending machines.
THAT LED THEM to John Gilbert Graham, who had removed some items from his mother’s suitcase and replaced them with 25 sticks of dynamite, two electric primers, a battery, and a timer. If the plane had taken off on time, Graham might never have been caught, for it would have exploded near Medicine Bow Peak, where the wreckage could never have been gathered.
But he was caught, and he confessed to the FBI. But since there was no relevant federal law, the feds turned prosecution over to the state. The Denver District Attorney, Burt Keating, kept matters simple. He charged Graham with only one count of first-degree murder, that of his mother, and Graham was convicted and sentenced to death in the gas chamber in Canon City. He waived his appeals and Warden Harry Tinsley carried out the sentence on Jan. 11, 1956.
Tinsley, an opponent of the death penalty, refused to identify the guard who had started the process of producing the lethal cyanide gas. “Every citizen in this state is an executioner, since this is the law,” he said afterward.
Why had Graham done it? Money was part of it, certainly, but not just the flight-insurance proceeds. Daisie King, who grew up in Buena Vista, had been dirt-poor until her third marriage, to rancher Earl King of Toponas. At the time, son John was in an orphanage in Denver — and she left him there. That rejection, psychiatrists theorized, made him hate his mother enough to kill her, and Graham was a sociopath who didn’t care at all about the other 43 victims.
Field tells that story, and puts it all in context — commercial aviation in the 1950s, Denver journalism both print and electronic then, the Colorado court system and the debate over cameras in the courtroom, and much more. He does it with a clear, plain style, and he more than sated my curiosity about an event that I’ve wondered about for most of my life.
If you’ve ever heard about Flight 629 and wanted to fill in the blanks, you’ll love this book just as I did. That also applies if you just want to read a well-told and copiously documented account of a notorious crime. This is an engaging, if sometimes gruesome, piece of work.
