CRIME: The Christmas Present

The young man was very attentive to his mother. He lugged her heavy suitcases to the counter at Denver’s Stapleton Airfield, and stood by while she checked in on United Air Lines Flight 629, bound for Portland, Ore. The three bags, a bulky, battered suitcase secured by two web straps, a briefcase and a smaller suitcase, weighed 87 Lbs. -37 Lbs. over the limit allowed each passenger. When the ticket agent told her she would have to pay $27 for the excess baggage, the mother, Mrs. Daisie King, turned to her son and said, “Thirty-seven Lbs. -do you think I’ll need all this?” Replied the son, Jack Graham: “Yes, Mother, I’m ‘sure you will need it.” Mrs. King was going to Alaska to visit her married daughter, and she would need a lot of warm clothes.

For a moment she seemed half disposed to unpack then and there, and leave some of the excess baggage behind, but she finally took her son’s advice. “I’ve packed enough stuff to last me a year,” she sighed, as she paid the fee.

Delay in Take-Off. According to Gloria Graham, Jack’s wife, Mrs. King then turned to her son and handed him $3.50, instructing him to get three air-travel insurance policies on her life -one for Jack, one for his half-sister in Alaska, and one for his mother’s sister in Missouri. When Flight 629 arrived from Chicago ten minutes later, Mrs. King said goodbye to the Grahams and their 22-month-old son Al len, kissed them affectionately and boarded the plane. The take-off was delayed another 12 minutes while the plane waited for a late passenger.

The Grahams went to the airport coffee shop for dinner. Jack Graham was quite fidgety -he had been feeling queasy all day -and in the midst of the meal he. became nauseated. After a trip to the men’s room, he felt a lot better. Later, as they were leaving the restaurant, the Grahams overheard someone saying that a plane had crashed. Unable to get any detailed information at the airport, they drove home. The radio confirmed their apprehensions: Flight 629 had crashed 32 miles north of Denver. Mrs. King and all 43 others aboard the DC-6B were dead. “We finally heard his mother’s name on the radio,” Gloria reported, “and Jack just collapsed completely.”

From the night of the crash, Nov. 1, Civil Aeronautics Board investigators were suspicious. Eyewitnesses said the plane had seemed to explode in midair. “We got the chores done a little after dark,” recalled Beet Farmer Conrad Hopp Jr.. “and me and the kids and the missus had just set down to eat when we heard an explosion and seen a flash of light in the sky out through the window. I run out into the yard, and there was another explosion. It looked like a haystack on fire in the sky.”

Shredded bits of carpeting, an acrid smell around the wreckage -like burned-out fireworks -and a greyish residue on some of the bits of the plane all indicated high explosives. Technicians from the FBI and the Douglas Aircraft Co. were summoned, and a crew of 40 men was dispatched to pick up every fragment of the plane, and cart it all back to Denver. There, in a warehouse near the airport, the experts began the painstaking job of fitting the fragments together again.

As the scraps were fitted onto a mockup, the evidence showed that the explosion had occurred in the rear cargo pit, in an area where there were no fuel lines or electric wires that might have caused an accidental explosion. The investigators concluded that the plane had been deliberately blown up by someone who had put a time bomb in the passengers’ luggage. If so, it would be the first known case of successful sabotage in the history of U.S. commercial aviation.

The Emerging Murderer. Having reconstructed the plane and the crime, the investigators set about reconstructing the criminal. The FBI turned loose some 200 agents on the case. Combing the crash area, the G-men found a cog from a clock that might have been the timing device on the bomb. Other agents interviewed relatives of the crash victims all over the U.S., carefully sifted through a hundred pasts for clues. Even before United Air Lines offered a $25,000 reward for information, tipsters began to come forward. Bit by bit, the figure of the murderer began to emerge. Last week, 13 days after the crash, the FBI arrested Jack Graham, the attentive son.

John Gilbert Graham is a tall, husky man (6 ft. 1 in., 190 Lbs.) with a shock of dark hair in a butch haircut, pouting lips and a perpetual hangdog look. At 23, he has an impressive criminal record and a reputation for secretiveness. He was born in Denver in 1932, the second child (by her second husband) of Daisie Walker, a politician’s daughter from Steamboat Springs, Colo. When Jack was two, his father died, and Daisie was left penniless. She farmed out the boy and his older half-sister, Helen. Jack went to a Denver orphanage. In 1940, when his mother married John Earl King, a prosperous rancher, she gathered her family together again.

Jack was a good student and had a better-than-average I.Q. (115), but his classmates called him “Abigail” because “he was so different.” He liked to hunt and fish, and his mechanical aptitude, ac cording to Dr. Earl G. Miller, the family physician, “bordered on genius.” After one year of high school, Jack went off to Anchorage, Alaska, to stay with Helen and her husband, a construction worker. After a few months, however, he joined the Coast Guard, lying about his age (he was 16). After nine months, including 63 days AWOL, he was discharged as a minor. In January 1950, he was back in Denver. The next year he went to work for a manufacturer of trailer-truck equipment as a $200-a-month payroll clerk. A month later, Graham stole a batch of company checks, forged the name of an official on them, and cashed $4,200 worth in three days. Then he left on a five-state joy ride in a new convertible. Eight months later, he was arrested in Lubbock, Texas, in a shower of bullets, when he attempted to ram through a roadblock. He was sentenced to 60 days in jail for bootlegging, was later handed over to the Denver police to face the forgery charges. But when his family offered $2,500 in partial restitution on the stolen $4,200 and promised that Jack would repay the rest, the boy was put on probation.

“He shows very little concern over this offense,” said a 1951 probation report. “For the past couple of years he led a wild life -spent most of his money on drinking parties and women. His mother appears to be a type that has overprotected her son.” Yet Jack Graham seemed to mend his ways. Three years ago he married Gloria Elson, a Denver girl, and settled down to raise a family. Last year, when her third husband died, Daisie King bought the Crown-A, a drive-in hamburger stand in West Denver, for $35,000, put Jack in charge (he also had a job as a mechanic at the local Hertz Drive-Ur-Self agency). She also made a down payment on a small home for the Grahams.

“Anything for Money.” Jack worked hard, made regular payments on his forgery debt (by last week he had reduced the balance to $105.34), and seemed to be an exemplary family man. In his business he was erratic and clench-fisted, but he had a weakness for children, often selling 10¢ ice-cream cones to the local kids for a nickel. There were other inconsistencies in the picture. Not long ago, Jack stalled a pickup truck in the path of an oncoming train, collected from his insurance company. Last Labor Day a mysterious gas explosion damaged the Crown-A; the insurance company realized that it had been staged, but reluctantly paid Jack’s claim. “He was an average personality but with some strange ideas,” said Elvin West, a neighbor. “He once said to me, ‘I’d do anything for money.’ ” And Jack knew that his mother had money -well over $100,000.

Last month, when Daisie King packed her belongings for her trip to Alaska, Jack told his wife about a little surprise he had in mind. Daisie’s hobby was making costume jewelry out of shells, and Jack had decided to buy her a small drill, of the type used in making shell jewelry, as a Christmas gift. He planned to sneak it into Daisie’s suitcase, so mother would be surprised when she got to Alaska.

By the time FBI agents began to question Jack Graham last week, they already knew most of the answers. Graham had purchased six insurance policies at the airport, and only two -one in the amount of $37,500 made out to Jack Graham -had been signed by Mrs. King. The only Denver resident who boarded the plane in Denver (and therefore the most likely to have a time bomb planted in her luggage) was Daisie King. Graham’s actions after the tragedy had been suspicious; on the morning after the crash, he resigned his job at the Hertz agency, although his boss had offered him a three-week compassionate leave. A Kremmling, Colo, merchant, who had known Jack Graham when he was a boy, said that he was “pretty sure” that Graham had purchased 20 sticks of dynamite from him just three days before the fatal explosion.

After an overnight grilling. Jack Graham broke down, signed a statement (which he later repudiated) admitting that he had sneaked his surprise Christmas present into his mother’s suitcase. It was no drill for shell jewelry. According to the investigators, Jack’s Christmas present was a 14-lb. bundle of dynamite sticks, wired to two blasting caps and a timing device (probably a Westclox traveler’s alarm clock) set for explosion in 90 minutes. This week there was speculation in Denver that if one passenger had not been late to his appointment with death, and Flight 629 had departed on schedule, the explosion might easily have occurred over the Wyoming Rockies not far from the place where another United Air Lines plane had crashed three weeks earlier (TIME, Oct. 17), and detection of sabotage would have been a great deal more difficult, if not impossible.