Whipped Cream Difficulties

70 years ago today, United Flight 629 (a DC-6B) disintegrated near Longmont, Colorado. There were no survivors among the 44 passengers and crew.

I am being slightly misleading when I say the plane “disintegrated”: it did disintegrate, but it did so because someone had planted a bomb on board.

By dint of dogged, unrelenting work by the police and FBI, it was determined that John Gilbert Graham (also known as “Jack”) had placed the bomb in his mother’s luggage and taken out insurance on her before the flight. Graham confessed on November 13th.

I remember a line from “Law and Order” back in the good old days: “A psychotic believes his doorman is sending him signals through a radio in his teeth. A psychopath believes the way to stop the signals is to kill his doorman…and six other people as well.”

Graham was a psychopath. His mother put him in an orphanage when he was five years old (after the death of his father). She never bothered to get him out: they were estranged until he was 22, and he remained angry at her. It seems like she tried to make it up to him with material things. I’ve seen in some sources that she bought him a restaurant (other sources say it was her restaurant, and she just made him manager). The restaurant was destroyed by a gas explosion in 1955. I’ve also seen reports that she bought him a new pickup truck. which was destroyed by a train shortly after the purchase. Graham collected insurance money on both the restaurant and the truck. He also served time in prison for check forgery and “illegal transport of whiskey”.

Graham’s confessions gave details about the bomb that matched the evidence from the plane’s wreckage. He also told prison doctors that he “realized that there were about 50 or 60 people carried on a DC6, but the number of people to be killed made no difference to me; it could have been a thousand. When their time comes, there is nothing they can do about it.”

United 629 was only the second plane blown up by a bomb in the United States. (The first was United Flight 23, on October 10, 1933.) There is a general belief that Graham was inspired by a 1949 Canadian aircraft bombing, Canadian Pacific Air Lines Flight 108.

It is a curious and interesting fact that, at the time, there was no Federal law making blowing up an aircraft in flight a crime. But murder is always a crime, and the local authorities in Colorado decided to prosecute Graham for the first degree murder of his mother. If they had missed, I guess they would have had 43 other chances.

But they didn’t miss. He was convicted on May 5, 1956, and sentenced to death.

Graham was executed in the gas chamber on January 11, 1957, one year and 72 days after the crime.

One source has his final words being “Thanks, Warden”, after Warden Tinsley patted him on the shoulder. TIME magazine quoted a lengthier statement, “As far as feeling remorse for those people, I don’t. I can’t help it. Everybody pays their way and takes their chances. That’s just the way it goes.”

“Famous Cases and Criminals: Jack Gilbert Graham” from the FBI.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 1st, 2025 at 7:00 am and is filed under Cops, Explosives, FBI, History, Law, Planes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.