Jack Gilbert Graham: The Denver Dynamite Fiend

I’m your host, Cosmic Horror Madman Eric Malachite, and you’re watching Biographics. Special thanks to Ben Adelman for writing what is sure to be a wild ride for all of you in the audience.

In 1955, flying in an airplane was still considered a glamorous activity. Men and women dressed in their finest clothes before heading to the airport. Air travel was just starting to take off in the U.S., with more routes being added, fares being lowered, and aircraft that were faster, more comfortable, and above all, safer than their predecessors. The very idea that anyone would want to blow up a plane was the furthest thought from anyone’s mind. Yet, that is exactly what happened on the night of November 1st, 1955, just outside of Denver, Colorado. A United Airlines plane was blown out of the sky by a bomb, sending 44 men, women, and children plummeting to their deaths. It was the first confirmed case of midair sabotage in U.S. history, requiring investigators to develop new techniques to solve the case—techniques that are still being used today.

The bombing sent shockwaves around the country, as did the identity of the perpetrator: Jack Gilbert Graham, a young man who hated his mother so much that he put a bomb in her luggage to blow her out of the sky, showing absolutely no remorse for anyone else he killed at the same time. As a result, Colorado ensured he faced the ultimate price for his evil deed: death in the state’s gas chamber. This is the true story of the downing of United Airlines Flight 629, a groundbreaking case that created laws, changed long-standing customs, and gripped the nation from start to finish.

For those of us accustomed to the tightly controlled, highly regulated post-9/11 world, the way air travel worked in 1955 would be a completely foreign concept. In those days, anyone could walk into an airport, whether they had a ticket or not. It was not unusual for friends or relatives of passengers to accompany them right up to the gate just before they boarded the airplane. There were no jetways; passengers had to physically go outside and climb a set of stairs to board. Security was practically non-existent—there were no metal detectors, no equipment to screen passengers’ luggage, and few, if any, security guards.

The 1950s was the period when air travel really began to catch on with the American public. The introduction of pressurized cabins meant that aircraft could fly higher above the turbulence and bad weather that had made air travel so uncomfortable in the past. Airlines were adding more routes all the time and lowering ticket prices. One United advertisement from the period proclaimed, “Compare the fare; you’ll go by air,” showcasing that air travel was no longer just for the wealthy.

Another selling point was that after a rough first few decades, air travel was beginning to be accepted as safe. Planes still crashed occasionally, but nowhere near as much as they used to. A unique feature at airports of this period were vending machines that sold trip life insurance policies. For as little as $25, you could buy a policy that would cover you for the duration of your trip, paying out if something happened to the plane you were on. As morbid as it sounds, it was actually touted as a marker of how safe air travel was.

It was in this atmosphere of optimism and good cheer that a group of passengers gathered in the terminal of Denver’s Stapleton Airport on the evening of November 1st, 1955. They were awaiting the arrival of United Airlines Flight 629, a DC-6 aircraft. Flight 629 had begun in New York earlier that day, made a stopover in Chicago, and was now landing in Denver as part of a cross-country journey that would also include a stop in Portland, Oregon, before ending in Seattle.

The plane took off at 6:52 p.m., and for 11 minutes, everything seemed normal. Then, at 7:03, when the aircraft was above the northern Denver suburb of Longmont, disaster struck. A bright flash could be seen in the sky for miles, and Longmont residents heard the sound of a tremendous explosion overhead, looking up to see a bright orange fireball plummeting to the Earth. The mainliner Denver had blown up in midair, sending wreckage back down from an altitude of 5,800 feet over an area that stretched for a mile and a half.

The main body of the aircraft landed in a sugar beet field, setting off another explosion as the fuel tank ignited. Police, firefighters, and the National Guard quickly arrived on the scene, along with a small army of reporters and gawking civilians. But it soon became apparent that there was no one to rescue; all 44 people on board Flight 629 had been killed. Fortunately, no one on the ground was injured from the falling debris. The only thing that could be done was to collect the bodies and wait for investigators from the Civil Aeronautics Board to arrive.

This agency was tasked with investigating airplane crashes at the time. Airplane crash investigation was in its infancy; there were no flight recorders, commonly known as black boxes, installed on planes to leave a record of a flight before it crashed. All investigators had was the wreckage of the aircraft to tell them the story, which is why it was treated like a crime scene even before they knew a crime had been committed.

The sheer size of the debris field indicated that the plane had broken up in midair, confirming eyewitness accounts of an explosion. Investigators decided to reassemble the wreckage of the airplane in a hangar back at the airport. Before moving anything, they hired a surveying team to plot out the wreck site, carefully recording where each piece of wreckage was found. They determined that the explosion had occurred in the number four cargo compartment at the back of the plane, next to the tail. There were no fuel lines or any hazardous cargo in that area that might have explained the blast; it had to have come from a passenger’s luggage.

For the first time, investigators began to suspect that the explosion had come from a bomb. This was confirmed by FBI forensic specialists who found traces of chemicals consistent with a dynamite explosion on pieces of wreckage. Flight 629 had been deliberately sabotaged, and the 44 people on board had been the victims of what was, at the time, the worst mass murder in American history.

The obvious question was: who would want to do such a monstrous thing? The people on Flight 629 were ordinary citizens; no one high-profile or particularly controversial was on board. An initial suspect was a disgruntled United employee, as the airline’s flight engineers were on strike at the time and had been replaced with scabs who were off-duty pilots. However, this was quickly ruled out when baggage handlers reported that no one unusual had approached the plane on the ground in Denver.

They also reported something else that narrowed down the suspect pool: all the bags that had been in cargo hold number four before the plane landed in Denver had been removed and put into another compartment while the handlers looked for a set of lost keys. Therefore, the only bags that were in the hold when it took off had to be from passengers that boarded the plane at Stapleton.

The FBI began to believe that the bomber had been targeting one of the passengers as part of a scheme to collect life insurance money. There had been a precedent set six years earlier across the border in Canada. In 1949, Canadian Pacific Airlines Flight 108 had been destroyed by a bomb just after taking off from Montreal, killing 23 people. Police discovered that a man named Albert Guay had put the bomb on the plane to kill his wife, both to collect a large insurance policy and to get her out of the way so he could marry his mistress. Guay and two accomplices were convicted of the crime and hanged.

There was only one passenger on Flight 629 who boarded the plane in Denver and was also a Denver resident: a woman named Daisy King. King was a 53-year-old widow traveling to Alaska to spend time with her daughter. She was an eccentric woman by any standard, particularly by 1955 standards, and a relatively successful businesswoman. She traveled extensively and loved the outdoors. One of the things she was most looking forward to in Alaska was caribou hunting. Her children were not allowed to call her “mother,” but instead referred to her as “Daisy.”

Most people the FBI interviewed about Daisy King told them she was a nice lady, and they couldn’t think of anyone who would want to harm her. Most insurance-related murders occur close to home, which is why the FBI soon focused on King’s son, 23-year-old John Gilbert Graham, known to everyone as Jack.

Jack Graham was already a familiar figure to law enforcement. He had skipped town back in 1951 in a car bought with forged checks from the company he worked for and was finally arrested in Texas after leading police on a wild chase. He had also been kicked out of the Coast Guard as a teenager for lying about his age and going AWOL. Still, these could be overlooked as the ramblings of a wild youth. Graham seemed to have settled down in recent years, having started a family with his wife, Gloria, and their two young children.

However, it turned out that Graham did not have the best relationship with his mother, who lived with the Graham family in a house she had purchased for them in 1954. They were frequently observed arguing with each other at the business they jointly owned, the Crown Drive-In Restaurant. Graham was also one of the primary beneficiaries of King’s estate, a considerable amount of money on its own, but even more lucrative when added to the insurance policy on King’s life that had been purchased at the airport vending machine. This policy would have paid out $37,500 in the event that she died in a plane crash. Today, that same policy would be worth over $437,000.

Money wasn’t the only motive Graham had to kill his mother. Interviews with family and friends revealed an unpleasant history that dated back to Graham’s early childhood. He had been born at the height of the Great Depression, and his parents struggled to make ends meet. When his father died in 1937, Daisy felt she was unable to care for her children any longer and sent them away. Jack ended up in a Denver orphanage. Even when her financial situation improved in 1941, when she married a wealthy ranch owner, she did not retrieve Jack, and no one is really sure why. As a result, Graham spent most of his life resenting his mother while desperately seeking a closer relationship with her—a relationship Daisy apparently did not have the capacity to give him.

The investigation into the bombing turned upon a seemingly innocent comment from one of Graham’s neighbors that it was too bad Daisy would never get to open the Christmas present her son had snuck into her luggage before the fatal flight. Then there was another comment from a baggage attendant at the airport: Daisy King’s luggage had been overweight, meaning she either had to unpack some of her things or pay an additional surcharge. King asked her son, who had taken her to the airport, what she should do, and Graham was adamant that his mother not unpack anything.

Now the FBI really focused their attention on Graham. A search of his home revealed a length of wire that matched the pieces of the bomb recovered from the wreckage. A merchant remembered selling Graham 25 sticks of dynamite and a couple of blasting caps. Another came forward and revealed he’d sold Graham a timing device together with a 6-volt battery and the wire they found—everything needed to build a time bomb.

After 12 hours of interrogation by the FBI, Graham confessed to murdering his mother. She alone had been his target; the other 43 victims were merely collateral damage. The news media across the country had a field day. Graham’s picture was splashed across the front pages of newspapers all over America. Different media outlets jockeyed for the latest scoop, not only in established newspapers and radio but also in the emerging world of television broadcasting. Interest in the case was so high that the Colorado Supreme Court overturned established rules banning cameras inside the state’s courtrooms for only the third time in U.S. history. The trial of Jack Graham would be filmed by a TV crew.

Before there could be a trial, prosecutors needed to figure out what to charge him with. U.S. attorneys were astonished to discover that there was no federal law against deliberately sabotaging an airplane. No one had ever done it before, so it simply hadn’t occurred to anyone in Congress to write such a law. This meant that Graham couldn’t be charged in federal court, so he was instead handed over to Colorado prosecutors in Denver, who could charge him with murder. In the end, Graham would only face trial for the murder of his mother to avoid potential complications that might arise from including the other victims in the indictment. It didn’t really matter in the end whether he was convicted of one murder or 100; the penalty was the same: execution.

Graham’s trial was the hottest ticket in town from the moment it began in April 1956. Hundreds of spectators waited in line for hours for a chance to be seated in the gallery, only allowed in after being searched by police officers. No one was going to take the law into their own hands by shooting Graham in the courthouse. The extensive media coverage ahead of the trial made it difficult to find impartial jurors; more than 200 prospects were dismissed before the final selection was made, many because they admitted they already believed Graham was guilty of the crime.

There had never been a trial like it before in American history. Prosecutor Berke Keady methodically laid out his case. The jury heard from forensic experts, FBI agents, mechanics, and officials from United Airlines, totaling 78 witnesses. They also viewed 174 exhibits, including pieces of the wreckage, a scale model of a DC-6 aircraft, and even two live sticks of dynamite that the witness assured the courtroom were certainly explosive. Graham’s court-appointed defense attorneys could do little against this barrage of incriminating evidence, the most damning being the confession he gave to FBI agents the night he was arrested, which he later recanted, claiming it had been coerced. The judge admitted the confession into evidence anyway.

The defense also couldn’t prove that their client was insane, as a battery of doctors had examined him prior to the trial and determined he was perfectly capable of telling right from wrong. Therefore, the result of the trial wasn’t particularly surprising. The jury only took about an hour before returning a verdict of guilty. Jack Graham was to be executed in the gas chamber of Colorado State Penitentiary in Canon City, 150 miles south of where Flight 629 crashed to Earth.

What was surprising was that Graham announced he did not want to appeal his conviction to the Colorado Supreme Court, as was routinely done in death penalty cases in the state. Apparently, he just wanted to get it over with. He tried to cheat the executioners during the trial by committing suicide in his jail cell, only to be revived by corrections officers. John Gilbert Graham was executed on January 11th, 1957, 12 days shy of his 25th birthday and just 14 months after the bombing of Flight 629.

In the years following his death, the case has largely faded from memory, though it has left its mark on American law. In response to this incident, Congress passed Public Law 84-79, which made it a federal crime to sabotage or destroy an aircraft and prescribes the death penalty as punishment if such an act results in the death of someone else. Airport security was slow to follow this change in the law; however, measures such as passenger metal detectors and baggage screening were not made mandatory at U.S. airports until 1972. The airline industry continued to fight against further security measures until the September 11th attacks, claiming that such measures were expensive and only served to alarm passengers.

Colorado passed its own law in the wake of the tragedy, banning all flight insurance vending machines from the state’s airports. Between 1957 and 1962, three American airplanes were bombed by suicidal passengers who had purchased flight insurance to benefit their families from a vending machine, resulting in the deaths of 80 people. The machines persisted, even in spite of opposition from many airline pilots, only disappearing when credit card companies began offering insurance policies to customers who bought airline tickets.

Today, airline travel in the U.S. looks much different from back in 1955. The jets today are much larger and fly faster and higher than their 1950s counterparts. Smoking has been banned for years, and flight attendants are no longer required to be unmarried women weighing less than 136 pounds.

However, the biggest difference between then and now, aside from the situation with Boeing and United, is how safe air travel is—statistically the safest form of public transportation in the world. Part of the reason air travel is so safe today is because of the lessons learned from tragedies like United Flight 629 and from men like Jack Gilbert Graham, whose hatred and greed were so destructive to so many.

I certainly hope you enjoyed that video and my many side comments. If you did, be sure to do all that algorithmic jazz and keep it tuned here to Biographics for more like this. I’m Eric Malachite. Be sure to check the links in the description, and I’ll see you next time, Space Cowboys!