Jack Graham wanted his mother dead and her life insurance money in his pocket, and he did not much care who else was on the plane. He packed a dynamite time bomb into his mother Daisie King’s checked luggage before she boarded United Airlines Flight 629 out of Denver on the evening of 1 November 1955, bound for Alaska. Minutes after takeoff the Douglas DC-6B exploded over farmland near Longmont, Colorado, killing all 44 people aboard.
Investigators who pieced together the wreckage traced the blast to luggage in the cargo hold, and found Graham had form: he had collected an insurance payout earlier that year after his mother’s restaurant was destroyed in a suspicious gas explosion. He confessed, then recanted at trial, claiming he had only admitted guilt to stop the FBI pressuring his wife. Since no federal law at the time made it a crime to destroy an aircraft, prosecutors charged him simply with his mother’s murder. Convicted in 1956, he was executed in the gas chamber at Colorado State Penitentiary on 11 January 1957.
Graham showed no remorse to the end, telling a reporter: “Everybody pays their way and takes their chances. That’s just the way it goes.”
