Jack Gilbert Graham

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Jack Graham
Born Jack Gilbert Graham
(1932-01-23)January 23, 1932
Died January 11, 1957(1957-01-11) (aged 24)
Colorado State Penitentiary
Cause of death
 Execution
Nationality American
Spouse(s) Gloria Graham
Parents Daisie King
Motive Life insurance money
Killings
Date November 1, 1955
7:02 p.m.
Location(s) Longmont, Colorado
Target(s) Mother and passengers
Killed 44
Weapon(s) Dynamite bomb
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.

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.[1]

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 arrest, 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 Avenue 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.

Trial and execution

Graham as seen on TV in the courtroom.

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.[2] 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."

Fictional portrayals

The story was the basis for Lenny Bruce's 1958 routine "Non Skeddo Flies Again": "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."

Graham was portrayed by Nick Adams in The FBI Story.

The case was the basis for the "Fire in the Sky" episode of M Squad.

The book Mainliner Denver: The Bombing of Flight 629 by Andrew J. Field (Johnson Books, 2005) was published on the 50th anniversary of the bombing.

The case is the subject of an episode of the 2013 Investigation Discovery miniseries A Crime to Remember. [3]

See also

References

  1. ↑ FBI.gov: Jack Gilbert Graham
  2. ↑ FBI.gov: Jack Gilbert Graham
  3. ↑ "A Crime to Remember: Time Bomb" Discovery Communications Retrieved December 3, 2013

External links

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