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.
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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. 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 purchased in the airport terminal just before the aircraft's departure. (Flight insurance could be routinely purchased in vending machines at airports during the 1950s). However, Graham's actual motive was revenge for the way his mother had treated him as a small child.
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.
The trial that followed resulted in Colorado becoming the first state to officially sanction the use of television cameras to broadcast criminal trials. There was no federal statute on the books at the time that made it a crime to blow up an airplane. Therefore, on the day after Graham's confession, the Colorado district attorney moved swiftly to prosecute Graham via the simplest possible route: premeditated murder committed against a single victim - his mother, Mrs King. Thus, despite the number of victims killed on Flight 629 along with Mrs King, Graham was charged with only one count of first degree murder.
As the case progressed, Graham quickly recanted his confession, but at his 1956 trial his defense was unable to counter the massive amount of evidence presented by the prosecution. In February 1956 he attempted suicide in his cell, and was thereafter put under 24 hour surveillance.[1] He was convicted of the murder of his mother on May 5, 1956, and was executed in the Colorado State Penitentiary gas chamber on January 11, 1957. Before his execution, he said about the bombing, "as far as feeling remorse for these people, I don't. I can't help it. Everybody pays their way and takes their chances. That's just the way it goes."
The story was the basis for Lenny Bruce's 1958 routine "non Skeddo Flies Again." The act starts with the words "I talk about a John Graham. He blew up a plane with forty people and his mother and for that the States sent him to the Gas Chamber proving, actually, that the American people are losing their sense of humor... You just think about it, anybody who blows up a plane with forty people and his mother can't be all bad."
In 1959, Graham was portrayed by actor Nick Adams in the Warner Bros. film The FBI Story, starring James Stewart, Murray Hamilton and Vera Miles.
In 2005, 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).