Mystery Aboard the Iowa

A few days after a 16-in. gun turret blew up on April 19 during practice firing on the battleship U.S.S. Iowa, the Navy presented one of the heroes of | the disaster at a press conference: Gunner’s Mate Third Class Kendall Truitt, 21, who had been sacking powder in a lower-level magazine when the blast took 47 lives. A bespectacled sailor with a mild manner, Truitt calmly recounted his escape from the burning turret. Last week the Navy’s inconclusive probe of the explosion took a bizarre twist, and Truitt was shoved front and center again — but hardly as a hero. Investigators said Truitt might have set off the explosion to kill a shipmate and collect $100,000 in life insurance. At the same time, they said it was also possible that the other sailor, Gunner’s Mate Second Class Clayton Hartwig, 25, intentionally caused the blast to kill himself.

These competing theories surfaced as the Naval Investigative Service conceded it has failed, in its review of the training, equipment and gunpowder involved, to find a technical explanation for the explosion. The idea that the blast was no accident arose largely from a report that Truitt and Hartwig had been such close friends that in 1987 each had made the other the beneficiary of a life insurance policy for $50,000, with double indemnity in case of accidental death. According to Hartwig’s sister Kathleen Kubicina, 36, of Cleveland, the friendship ended last year when Truitt married. While Truitt last week denied he had bought such a policy, Hartwig certainly did, and had not scratched Truitt as beneficiary when he died.

Government sources denied a story in New York Newsday that a search of Truitt’s Norfolk, Va., apartment after the Iowa explosion had netted detonating caps and a copy of the book How to Get Even Without Going to Jail. According to the newspaper, another copy of the book and a detonating device supposedly were found in Hartwig’s car.

Truitt, on leave from the Iowa, flatly denied that he or Hartwig was a culprit. At a press conference with his wife last week, he claimed that the rumors proved that the Navy was “at a loss” to explain the tragedy. Said the sailor: “They’re just looking for a scapegoat.”

When investigators asked, Truitt denied that he had a homosexual relationship with Hartwig. He said they were best friends, who, as teetotalers, did not mingle with the hard-drinking sailors and as a result got “razzed” a bit. Kubicina similarly denied that her brother was homosexual or had ever shown signs of any suicidal despair. Said she: “My brother died a hero. Now they’re making him out to be a homicidal, suicidal maniac. It’s incredible, these bizarre tales.”

While Hartwig’s letters showed he had been saddened when he lost Truitt as a pal, she said his spirits had soon picked up when he found out his next assignment would be as a driver at the U.S. embassy in London. In a letter written three days before the explosion, she said, he was “totally up.”