The Man Who Killed 44 People and Broke the Lawbook

On November 1, 1955, United Airlines Flight 629 took off from LaGuardia Airport in New York, on a multi-leg flight to Seattle via Chicago, Denver, and Portland. (Yes, three stop-overs.) There were 44 people — 39 passengers and five crew members — on the plane for the Denver to Portland leg, but they didn’t arrive safely at their destination. Five to ten minutes after takeoff, something exploded in the cargo area. The plane crashed into a sugar beet farm, killing all on board. This wasn’t an ordinary crash — as the Wikipedia entry for the flight notes, “the fires were so intense that despite efforts to extinguish them they continued to burn for three days.” Something was amiss — and the FBI began investigating.

It was the first confirmed midair bombing of a commercial U.S. aircraft. And it didn’t take long for authorities to find their man. Or get a confession. But getting a conviction? That proved more difficult than expected.

The man behind the crime was Jack Gilbert Graham. His father died when he was just five years old, and his mother, Daisie Eldora Graham, was destitute, so she sent him to live in an orphanage. Daisie Graham ended up marrying a man named Earl King a few years later, who died shortly thereafter. The newly minted Daisie King received a significant inheritance, but left Jack at the orphanage. He, understandably, held a grudge — and the two didn’t reconcile until 1954, when Jack Graham was 22 years old.

He probably wasn’t looking to truly reconcile, though. The next year, Graham took his mom to the Denver airport — she was on her way to visit her daughter in Alaska. At the time, people were still very afraid of flying, and as the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum explains, “nervous flyers were given the option of buying additional travel insurance. Flight insurance became so popular that vending machines were installed in airports around the country to dispense insurance policies.” That gave Jack Graham an idea. Shortly after King’s flight boarded, he forked over $1.50 to purchase a life insurance policy in the amount of $37,500 (just under $500,000 today, accounting for inflation) in case something were to happen to his mom. And, not-so-coincidentally, something, in fact, did happen.

It didn’t take long for authorities to identify Graham as a top suspect — his mother had been carrying newspaper clippings recounting his previous arrest for passing forged checks. The FBI was able to determine that some of the baggage on board contained explosives, and when they investigated Graham’s home, they found evidence (including the insurance policy) linking him to the crime. He confessed less than two weeks after the bombing.

It was an open and shut case — 44 victims and one confessed murderer. But there was a small problem. When the federal government went to try him for his crime, they realized they couldn’t. As the Denver Gazette explains, “in 1955, there was no federal law which prohibited targeting a civilian aircraft” — it was a federal crime if you blew up a ship or a train, but not a plane. That didn’t get Graham off the hook, though. The state of Colorado had plenty of evidence to secure a conviction against Graham for the premeditated murder of his mother, and on January 11, 1957, he was executed for his crime. The murder charges could only attach to a specific victim, not the broader act, so technically, Graham was never convicted of killing the other 43 people on the flight. That detail, though, didn’t ultimately keep him out of the gas chamber.

Congress ultimately (and quickly, for Congress!) fixed the loophole that Graham accidentally discovered. As of July 14, 1956, it’s a federal crime to blow up a plane.

Bonus fact: In 2023, Universal Pictures released a movie titled “Cocaine Bear,” about a bear that does a lot of drugs and goes on a rampage. It’s based on a true story from 1985. As the New York Times reported at the time, a drug smuggler named Andrew Thornton was flying his contraband over Georgia one day when the whole lot of it fell out. Sometime later, someone came across a dead 175-pound black bear — and “40 opened plastic containers with traces of cocaine.” The bear died of a massive drug overdose. (Unlike the movie, it didn’t go on a murder spree beforehand.)

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