Jack Gilbert Graham
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John "Jack" Gilbert Graham (January 23, 1932 – January 11, 1957) was a mass murderer who killed 44 people by planting a dynamite bomb in his mother's suitcase that was subsequently loaded aboard United Airlines Flight 629.
Flight 629 was utilizing a Douglas DC-6B airliner that took off from Denver, Colorado's Stapleton Airport, bound for Portland, Oregon, on the evening of November 1, 1955. Its pilot was Lee Hall, a World War II veteran. Minutes after the plane's departure from Denver, the DC-6B exploded in flight and the flaming wreckage fell to earth over tracts of farmland near Longmont, Colorado. There were no survivors.
Graham's mother, Mrs. Daisie King, was a passenger on board the plane and was traveling to Alaska to visit a daughter. Initially, it was believed that Graham's motive for the bombing was to claim $37,500 worth of life insurance money, from policies Graham had bought in the airport terminal just before the aircraft's departure (flight insurance could be routinely purchased in convenient vending machines at airports back in the 1950s). Graham's true motive was revenge for the way his mother had treated him as a small child.
The sensational trial that followed resulted in Colorado becoming the first state to officially sanction the use of television cameras to broadcast criminal trials.
Jack Gilbert Graham was executed by lethal gas in the Colorado State Penitentiary gas chamber on January 11, 1957.
A book about the Graham case was published on the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing: "Mainliner Denver: The Bombing of Flight 629" by Andrew J. Field (Johnson Books, 2005). Graham is portrayed by Nick Adams in the 1959 film The FBI Story.
