Before there was James Eagan Holmes, there was John Gilbert Graham.
Sixty years ago, Nov. 1, 1955, on a moonlit night with Thanksgiving just weeks away, Graham, 23, with his wife and young son along with him, took his mother, Daisie Eldora King, 53, to what was then known as Stapleton Airfield in Denver, Colorado, and kissed her goodbye as she boarded United Airlines Flight 629.
The Douglas DC-6B aircraft, nicknamed “Mainliner Denver,” had started the day at New York City’s La Guardia Airport and made a stop in Chicago before continuing on to Denver. From Denver it was to carry 39 passengers, including King, and five crew members on to Portland, Oregon, and then Seattle, Washington. King was ultimately traveling to Alaska to see her daughter and grandchildren
In King’s luggage, which Graham had brought with him when he met his mother to pick her up to take her to the airport, was a wrapped Christmas present from her son: 25 sticks of commercial dynamite, two blaster caps, a timer and a small battery.
Eleven minutes after the plane took off, at 7:03 p.m., over farm fields southwest of Johnstown near the intersection of Weld County Road 13 and Colorado Highway 66, the plane exploded.
Several miles away to the northeast, along Weld County Road 15, Janet (Leinweber) Liniger, then 15, and her 9-year-old sister, Joyce, were getting ready as Joyce said this week, “to go visiting neighbors, that’s what you did back then,” with their parents.
Janet remembers the windows rattling.
Her father, who was sitting by the window, said he saw an explosion in the sky.
Thinking at first the explosion was the home of a neighbor the family jumped in their vehicle and headed out. In the night sky as they drove they could see two flares slowly drifting toward the earth.
The flares were the last airborne remnants of Flight 629, used by airplanes if they had an emergency to illuminate a possible landing spot. The debris of the plane and the bodies of the passengers had already crashed to the earth, where it and they lay in burning and twisted wreckage over six square miles of Weld County farmland.
Joyce and Janet and their parents were among the first of a group of nearby farm families who had either seen the explosion, or heard it, and who rushed to the scene. No police, no firefighters, were yet there. Joyce walked over the uneven ground, which was used for growing sugar beets, in the darkness with her mother. Janet looped her fingers through her father’s belt as they made their way across the field.
All around them they could see fires burning, and Joyce recalls, in front of them a huge crater-like hole in the ground.
She also remembers seeing a man, in a uniform she says, still strapped in his seat.
Janet remembers her and her father coming upon a woman, her body on fire, and her father throwing dirt onto her trying to put out the flames.
“It was just surreal,” Janet said. “I remember the moon was bright, and looking up into the sky and seeing these clouds floating by, and there we are, stumbling around out there.”
“Mom turned us around and took me back to the car,” Joyce said.
As first responders began to show up on the scene they left, and both sisters laugh now at the recollection, almost as surreal as the scene that night; they went ahead and went visiting.
Neither remembers any of the conversation the adults may have had.
“I was 15. I did what I guess you’d expect a 15-year-old girl to do,” Janet said. “I called my friends.”
Joyce said she doesn’t remember much of what she did that night.
“But after that,” she said quietly, sitting Tuesday night at her sister’s kitchen table with her big sister looking on as only a big sister can, “every time I’d hear a plane I’d run outside and watch it and try to keep it in the sky. And for a long time, I drew pictures of planes with people lying on the ground.”
By the next morning the FBI already had agents from Washington, D.C. on their way to the site and to the National Guard Armory, which still stands along 8th Street in downtown Greeley, where the bodies had been taken as a makeshift morgue. Through its vast archive of fingerprints the FBI was able to begin to identify victims. Meanwhile, agents along with other law enforcement and personnel from United Air Lines and the Civil Aeronautics Board began the process of going through the wreckage.
Bringing in surveyors to establish a grid pattern in the fields, officials took painstaking notes as to where each piece of wreckage had been found and then had it trucked to a hangar at Stapleton where it was laid out in the same configuration and then put back together.
It became quickly obvious that the plane had been brought down by an explosion, residue of which was found on pieces of wreckage that had made up one of the plane’s cargo holds. Ruling out from flight manifests the possibility that something explosive or flammable was being transported on the plane, the FBI began looking at the flight insurance policies that had been taken out prior to the plane’s departure – a common thing back in that time when airports literally had vending machines in the terminal.
Within days suspicion began to fall on John Gilbert Graham, who had taken out three policies on his mother, one for $37,500 with him as the beneficiary. Agents also learned that Graham stood to inherit a large amount of money upon his mother’s death.
Agents also learned that Graham had tried to collect on insurance following an explosion at a restaurant owned by his mother in Denver that he ran, as well as on a truck he claimed had stalled on railroad tracks. Several years prior, he had also been convicted of forgery and “bootlegging.”
As the investigation continued the authorities would also find perhaps a darker reason for the murder: When Graham was three years old his father had died and for a time the family faced severe financial hardships. So severe that Graham’s mother had been forced to place him in an “orphanage.” When his mother remarried, and those financial conditions improved, she had not sought to have him returned to her care.
After several interviews with agents, on Nov. 14, Graham confessed to the bombing and was charged with sabotage. Several days later, he was charged with the murder of his mother. While prosecutors chose to only charge Graham with the one killing, at the time the bombing of Flight 629 was the worst single incident of mass murder in the country’s history.
Graham would plead not guilty by reason of insanity and would later recant his confession. He was eventually ruled sane and his trial would be the first in the nation to be broadcast on television.
On May 5, 1956, after being out of the courtroom for deliberation for 69 minutes, the jury found Graham guilty of murder in the first degree and recommended the penalty of death.
Graham was executed in the gas chamber at the Colorado State Penitentiary on Jan. 11, 1957. Before his execution, he said to reporters about the bombing, “as far as feeling remorse for these people, I don’t. I can’t help it. Everybody pays their way and takes their chances. That’s just the way it goes.”
Andrew J. Field would write in his book “Mainliner Denver the Bombing of Flight 629,” which was published on the 50th anniversary of the event, “The execution had taken eleven minutes – the same length of time Flight 629 was in the air before the bomb exploded.”
Janet Liniger said she remembers staying up and listening to news reports of the execution on the radio. She also remembers it was shortly after the execution that she had a dream one night.
“You know how they always talk about how whether we dream in black and white or Technicolor?” she said. “I remember this one was in color. I don’t remember much of it, but what I do remember was this red sky.”
Joyce, who would eventually marry local farmer Ron Klein, who also witnessed the explosion as he was working at a nearby farm, remarks like a true farm wife that she thinks about that night 60 years ago every time she drives by the crash site, and often wonders how long it took for that field where the flaming debris landed to again become useable as farm land; how long it was before that place of winter death was again a place for new spring life.
Field would write in his book: “…The tragedy left an indelible impression on the land... Literally. The following spring, a farmer who planted alfalfa in a field where several of the victims had landed noticed that the seed would not take hold in the areas of earth that had been compressed by the falling bodies. The phenomenon caused the crop to grow in eerie outlines of the deceased … “
The sisters say they never talked much about that night, if at all. It was only after Ron read the Field book, Joyce said, that she even discussed that night when she was a little girl with her own children. Janet said she only recently herself talked about it with her kids.
“I guess we just put it away and just processed it,” Janet said with a sad smile, looking at her sister, who looked back and smiled herself as the two fell silent for a moment, perhaps in their minds leaving the comfort of the kitchen table and going back to that night when they were young and found themselves in that field. “I guess we’re still processing it.”
Johnstown resident Rick Tittle was instrumental in providing resource material and background information for this story, including the Andrew J. Field book and also a copy of the 1959 Warner Bros. film “The FBI Story” starring James Stewart which opens with a recreation of the bombing and the investigation. Information (as well as this photo) was also taken from the John Gilbert Graham page on the website www.murderpedia.org.
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