November 1, 1955 Jack Gilbert Graham placed a bomb in his mother's suitcase and killed 44 people that day.
Daisy Walker was on her way on a much needed vacation and decided to book a flight to Alaska to visit her daughter. Before her so drove her to the airport, Jack decided to place a bomb in her suitcase.
He thought he planned the perfect murder, as he set the timer on the bomb to go off once she was in the air far away from their city. Once he was at the airport, he bought life insurance on his mother's life, kissed her goodbye and watched her load onto the plane with many other innocent souls.
Buying life insurance by passengers was pretty common during the early days of commercial flights. They were readily available in vending machines.
The plane departed from New York, landed in Chicago, continued on to Denver picking up more people on the way. The next stop was going to be Seattle but it never arrived as it exploded soon after leaving Denver.... Read story
It killed every single person on board, 44 people total.
The FBI, Police and United Airlines all teamed together for extensive investigation! It all lead them to the same conclusion once they found explosive debris in a passenger's luggage. Putting all the pieces together on who the passenger could be, soon lead them all to her son. He was notorious for using these same methods, in other situations, to collect funds to pay off his debts. He blew up his bar and he left his truck on some tracks. He was also wanted for embezzlement and forgery.
When he was arrested and officially charged, all they could charge him with was one murder. The premeditated murder of his mother after confession. In 1955, none of the federal laws or books had anything saying it was against the law to blow up an airplane. So what he did wasn't actually a crime.
Even though his actions killed 44 people, he could not be convicted of murdering them because using a bomb on a plane was not a crime. It would've been called an accident and nothing more. So his confession and conviction of his mother's murder is the only thing that lead to his execution, by gas chamber on Jan, 1957.
November 1, 1955 Jack Gilbert Graham placed a bomb in his mother's suitcase and killed 44 people that day.
Daisy Walker was on her way on a much needed vacation and decided to book a flight to Alaska to visit her daughter. Before her so drove her to the airport, Jack decided to place a bomb in her suitcase.
He thought he planned the perfect murder, as he set the timer on the bomb to go off once she was in the air far away from their city. Once he was at the airport, he bought life insurance on his mother's life, kissed her goodbye and watched her load onto the plane with many other innocent souls.
Buying life insurance by passengers was pretty common during the early days of commercial flights. They were readily available in vending machines.
The plane departed from New York, landed in Chicago, continued on to Denver picking up more people on the way. The next stop was going to be Seattle but it never arrived as it exploded soon after leaving Denver.... Read story
It killed every single person on board, 44 people total.
The FBI, Police and United Airlines all teamed together for extensive investigation! It all lead them to the same conclusion once they found explosive debris in a passenger's luggage. Putting all the pieces together on who the passenger could be, soon lead them all to her son. He was notorious for using these same methods, in other situations, to collect funds to pay off his debts. He blew up his bar and he left his truck on some tracks. He was also wanted for embezzlement and forgery.
When he was arrested and officially charged, all they could charge him with was one murder. The premeditated murder of his mother after confession. In 1955, none of the federal laws or books had anything saying it was against the law to blow up an airplane. So what he did wasn't actually a crime.
Even though his actions killed 44 people, he could not be convicted of murdering them because using a bomb on a plane was not a crime. It would've been called an accident and nothing more. So his confession and conviction of his mother's murder is the only thing that lead to his execution, by gas chamber on Jan, 1957.
Read the full story
In August of 1938, a single mother applied to leave her six-year-old son, Jack Gilbert Graham, in the care of an orphanage in Denver, Colorado. Daisie E. Graham had been separated from Jack’s father, William, long before his death from pneumonia the previous year; she’d been struggling to support both her 15-year-old daughter, Helen, and her own terminally ill mother. William’s sudden death had left Jack fatherless, and officially an “orphan.”
The Clayton College for Boys, built with funds donated by merchant and philanthropist George Washington Clayton, was founded in 1911 as a refuge for “poor white male orphans … born of reputable parents.” The substantial, ornate two-story building of gray stone and rose-colored brick still stands on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, a few blocks north of the Denver Zoo; with its terracotta tiled roof, iron door lanterns and plate glass windows, the 112-year-old building gives the impression of a church. It looks a bit out of place—or out of time—in the midst of the SUVs in the parking lot and modern buildings nearby.
In the weeks after Daisie climbed the stone steps of Clayton College to apply for Jack’s admittance, he was screened for illness and family history thereof, and declared free of tuberculosis, syphilis, epilepsy, insanity. Letters of character reference for both Daisie and little Jack were sent to the College by friends and neighbors to help his application along.
“I know Mrs. Graham to be working at the Telephone Company to support her son and help her mother,” wrote L.R. McLean, D.D.S. “I believe her boy Jackie to be a first class little fellow.” Daisie’s employer testified to the great burden Daisie was under, including constant financial hardship. Her supervisor wrote that “the demands of her mother’s illness result in an unsatisfactory environment for raising children.” Having met all the requirements for admission, Jack entered the orphanage the following month, in September.
“The Will under which we operate requires that we only serve boys who are needy, and it is upon this assumption that Jack is accepted,” Superintendent Alvin R. Jackson wrote to Daisie. “Should your circumstances change…you will be expected to inform us and ask for the return of your boy.”
And so it was that young Jack began a new, strange chapter of his bleak childhood. He would call the orphanage home for the next five years.
In the application, Daisie had described Jack as liking school, and having a particular interest in machinery and music. “He is not hard to handle,” she wrote. But in early 1943, as the Second World War raged, Jack befriended a young girl working as a housekeeper in the neighborhood. After showing Jack where her employers hid the key to their family home, Jack used the key to enter the house, each time stealing money; a total of $2.15 (about $40 today) on two separate visits. He was just eleven years old.
Superintendent Jackson sent a letter to Daisie, who was by then married to John Earl King, and living on King’s ranch in Toponas, Colorado.
“The third time, he was caught in the kitchen by the lady of the house,” he wrote. “It appears that instead of things getting better with Jack, they are getting worse.” The superintendent noted, too, that Jack had run away from the institution several times. He suggested Jack leave the orphanage.
On the torn and tattered summary of Jack’s file at Clayton College, he was given a Dishonorable Discharge in March 1943. His file included the note: “Constantly in trouble. Discharged to mother.”
Daisie sent Jack to live with relatives. When he turned 16—the war over, America victorious and entering a new period of optimism—he hit the road and joined the Coast Guard using forged ID papers. A year later he was discharged as a minor after having been AWOL for forty-three days; he drifted from Colorado to the frontier territory of Alaska to stay with his half-sister, Helen. He found work at Elmendorf Air Force base.
When Jack returned to Colorado in 1951, though not yet twenty, he embarked on a life of crime.
According to Mainliner Denver, Andrew J. Field’s authoritative account of Jack’s crimes and trials, Jack forged and cashed some forty bad checks while working at the Timpte Brothers Automobile Company and skipped town, becoming one of the Denver District Attorney’s six most wanted men that year. He bought a convertible and drove around the country, ducking warrants for theft and forgery, visiting Salt Lake City, Seattle, Kansas City, Saint Louis.
In Lubbock, Texas, police tried to pull Jack over for a traffic stop. He led them on a wild car chase, crashing through a roadblock and careening into a ditch. He surrendered only after officers opened fire on his battered convertible. In the car, police found cases of bootlegged whiskey—contraband he’d been smuggling into a “dry” Texas county—and a .44 caliber handgun.
Jack spent sixty days in a Texas jail before being extradited to Colorado, where he pled guilty to forgery charges. At the sentencing hearing Daisie repaid some of the stolen money to Jack’s employer and asked the judge to go easy on her son. A probation officer’s report described Jack as showing “very little concern” over the offense, and Daisie as “overprotective” of her son. Jack was put on probation. Briefly on the straight and narrow, he somehow was cleared to work for the Atomic Energy Commission. He made restitution payments, and met a woman he wanted to marry.
By December 1953 Jack, his wife Gloria, and their two small children had moved into a house in Grand Junction, Colorado, bought with a down payment from Jack’s mother; Daisie’s only condition was that she have her own living quarters in the basement she could use when visiting.
Just a few months later, Daisie became a widow for the second time, and inherited a small fortune. Hoping, perhaps, to make amends with her troubled son, she proposed opening a drive-thru restaurant that Jack could manage. He agreed, becoming wholly dependent on his mother. But it wasn’t long before Jack found a new way to make money.
Early one morning in spring 1955, Jack parked his new Chevrolet pickup truck on a set of train tracks outside Denver, and stole away. A freight train plowed through the vehicle, destroying it, and netting Jack several thousand dollars in insurance money. He was on to something.
In September 1955, a gas explosion destroyed part of Daisie’s newly-opened Crown-A restaurant, where Jack was working as manager. The insurance company flagged the explosion as suspicious but couldn’t prove malfeasance. Jack filed an insurance claim, which paid out. There were murmurs among neighbors and friends that Jack, known for his checkered past and tense relationship with his mother, was the saboteur behind the destruction of both the truck and restaurant.
One month later, as Daisie prepared for a trip to Anchorage to visit her daughter Helen, Jack hatched a new plan. A plan that would remove from his life the two things that he believed were keeping him down—a lack of money, and his mother—no matter the cost.
After buying the requisite tools and equipment, Jack sat down in the basement of his family home and got to work. He assembled twenty-five sticks of dynamite, a timing device, an Eveready six-volt “Hot Shot” battery and two dynamite caps into a compact time bomb. He wrapped the bomb up, packed it inside Daisie’s heavy Samsonite suitcase, and loaded the case into the trunk of her ‘55 Chevrolet sedan. Then Jack and Gloria drove Daisie to the airport. It was November 1, 1955.
After saying goodbye to Daisie at the gate, Jack and Gloria stopped for a snack at the airport coffee shop—but not before Jack bought an insurance policy on Daisie’s life from a vending machine at the terminal, a common practice in a time marked by frequent air crashes.
The Douglas DC-6B, piloted by WWII veteran Lee Hall, exploded in midair minutes after takeoff, creating a nightmarish fireball in the open night sky. One witness described the fiery explosion as being “like a shooting star.” Another witness, Norman Flores, happened to step outside on the porch of his rural home near Longmont, Colorado just before the bomb detonated.
“It was a real nice moonlight night, just as pretty as could be,” he recounted. “And I saw this airplane. Lights were flickering on it. Then all of a sudden there was an explosion, and it was so terrific it shook the house… When it hit the ground, a big orange mushroomed affair went up, and from then on it just burned.” Another witness described the burning wreckage of the plane as looking “like an atom bomb.”
All forty-four people on board United Flight 629, including Daisie, were killed. It was the first-ever act of sabotage against a commercial airliner in the United States.
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