Jack Gilbert Graham
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John "Jack" Gilbert Graham (January 23, 1932 – January 11, 1957) was a mass murderer who killed 44 people by planting a dynamite bomb in his mother's suitcase that was subsequently loaded aboard United Airlines Flight 629.
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[edit] Crime
Flight 629 was utilizing a Douglas DC-6B airliner that took off from Denver, Colorado's Stapleton Airport, bound for Portland, Oregon with continuing service to Seattle, Washington, on the evening of November 1, 1955. The flight had originated at New York City's La Guardia Airport and made a scheduled stop in Chicago before continuing on to Denver. Its pilot was Lee Hall, a World War II veteran. Minutes after the plane's departure from Denver, the DC-6B exploded in flight and the flaming wreckage fell to earth over tracts of farmland and sugar beet fields near Longmont, Colorado. There were no survivors.
Graham's mother, Mrs. Daisie King, was a passenger on board the plane and was traveling to Alaska to visit her daughter. Initially, it was believed that Graham's motive for the bombing was to claim $37,500 worth of life insurance money, from policies Graham had bought in the airport terminal just before the aircraft's departure (flight insurance could be routinely purchased in convenient vending machines at airports back in the 1950s). Graham's true motive was revenge for the way his mother had treated him as a small child.
[edit] Trial and execution
The sensational trial that followed resulted in Colorado becoming the first state to officially sanction the use of television cameras to broadcast criminal trials.
Jack Gilbert Graham was executed by lethal gas in the Colorado State Penitentiary gas chamber, at Cañon City, Colorado, on January 11, 1957.
[edit] Fictional portrayals
The story was the basis for Lenny Bruce's 1958 routine "non Skeddo Flies Again." The act starts with the words "I talk about a John Graham. He blew up a plane with forty people and his mother and for that the States sent him to the Gas Chamber proving, actually, that the American people are losing their sense of humor... You just think about it, anybody who blows up a plane with forty people can't be all bad."
In 1959, Graham was portrayed by actor Nick Adams in the Warner Bros. film The FBI Story, starring James Stewart, Murray Hamilton and Vera Miles.
In 2005, a book about the Graham case was published on the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing: Mainliner Denver: The Bombing of Flight 629 by Andrew J. Field (Johnson Books, 2005).
