Eleven Minutes

Eleven Minutes

The Sabotage of Flight 629

Edward C. Davenport

Cover design by Donna Casey

Editing provided by FJ Rocca

Photos as labeled, courtesy of Denver Public Library, Western History, Rocky Mountain News Collection.

ISBN 9781329298019

© Copyright 2015 by Edward C. Davenport, All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without express permission from the author.

In loving memory of Lucy Wharton-Detig Charles County, Maryland Public Schools

1951 – 2012

For Marjorie Zimmermann, Calvert County Maryland Adult Education Coordinator, Sue Allison, Brenda Ortiz, Mrs. Jean Van Hart, Jennifer Youngerman, who practically harassed me to write, and particularly, Sally Combs. A sweeter, more wonderful woman never walked the face of the earth.

Acknowledgements

All of the people who shared their stories with the author in the days before self-publishing eliminated the wait, hope, pray from publishing a book have been lost to that great thief, time. They are remembered here: Lloyd Hashman and his wife of many years, Jean Mills Hashman, Roy Mischke, Roy Moore, Mrs. Grace Scott, Ann Matlack, and Helen Hablutzel.

A debt of gratitude is owed the late Mr. Forrest H. Coulter for the donation of his unpublished manuscript to the Denver Public Library. Mr. Coulter was employed by the Civil Aeronautics Administration in the days when the DC-6 was a familiar sight in the nation’s skies, and compiled a formidable collection of newspaper accounts and government reports, which were the backbone of this book.

The staff of the Denver Public Library, particularly Janice Prater, Jennifer Callaway and the downright indefatigable Coi Drummond-Gehrig of the photo department; Sarah Everhart of the Colorado Historical Society, Sue McPheason and Nancy Thompson of the Museum Of Colorado Prisons, Michelle Pointon of Visual Image Presentations in Silver Spring, Maryland, and the staff of the Denver Post for access to the paper’s Buckner files. Gary Johnson of the Library of Congress is gratefully acknowledged for his contributions. Matthew Lutz of the Associated Press and Diane Saccoccio are to be thanked, as well. Walter Seifert is acknowledged for the benefit of his wisdom and Patty Meador for her multitudinous contributions. Honey Winters is thanked for her Photoshop skills, as are Sandy Anderson, FJ Rocca and Carla Humphries-Dudley for their willing advice, consideration, formatting and editing. Thanks are extended also to Mr. Mark Mueller for identifying all of the trial participants and witnesses featured in the Dick Davis collection.

The staff of the Prince Frederick, Maryland Public Library are thanked, most notably, Marcia Hammett, Kate Troutman, Patty McConnell, Linda Buckley, Rachel Hummel, Sara Avant, Joe Gatton and Robert Boward. Mary Jenkins and Rich and Judy Granzow are thanked for their friendship, and Clinton H. Groves and Michel Sparkman for coming through against a very tight deadline.

Brenda Wiard of 2Neat Magazines in Colorado is acknowledged for locating and scanning the Life magazine photos used throughout section one of the book. Last, but certainly not least, Reverend Julie Wizorek and Mary Ellen Boynton of St. Paul's Episcopal Church are thanked for their kindness and hospitality during the blizzard of 2009, and Father Peter J. Daly and Mary and Joseph Zaversnick of St. John Vianney Catholic Church and Tyrone and Diane King for their unstinting generosity.

About the Photos Used in this Book

It should be noted that this book was made possible only because of an event sadly beyond the author’s control. In 2009, the Rocky Mountain News, which, since 1859, had served Colorado frontline families faithfully and well, published its final edition – its presses silenced permanently by the popularity of the internet and electronic alternatives to traditional publishing.

The News’s voluminous photographic collection is now archived at the Denver Public Library. Most of the photographs in Chapter One, and virtually all of the photos in Chapter Three of this book were culled from Rocky Mountain News negatives on file with the library in their Western History Collection.

The great majority of the courtroom scenes in this book were shot by the News’s legendary Dick Davis. There’s an apocryphal story that once, Mr. Davis was assigned to photograph a sunrise Easter service in picturesque Red Rocks. He arrived well in advance – and promptly fell asleep. By the time he awoke, the service had ended. Anxious to save face with his editors, he decided to substitute a photo from the previous years’ service. With any ordinary luck, the deception would never have been noticed, but the city desk is said to have received a phone call from a woman who opened up her paper and fainted dead away upon seeing her late husband featured in that morning’s edition. While the author must confess to having serious doubts about the veracity of some of the variables, true or not, some stories are simply too good not to share.

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter I: The Boy, The Bomb, And The Luggage............1

Chapter II: A Ruthless Hate…………………….………..74

Chapter III: The Boy Who Tells Nothing But Lies….131

Chapter IV: I Couldn’t Shoot Her………..…..……....191

Chapter V: The Ripple Effect………...………….……....215

Epilogue….……………………………..……….…….......235

Bibliography……………………………..……….…….....241

Preface

Much as he always did on a school day, 11-year-old Gerald Lipke switched on the console radio next to his bunk in the cramped bedroom he shared with his two brothers, John 7 and Robert, 9.

The three sons of Gerald and Patricia Lipke were students at St. Gabriel Catholic Church in Pittsburgh. Less than 24 hours earlier, Gerald Lipke Sr., an uncommonly foresighted and cautious man, had visited his bank to create trust funds for his three sons before leaving for the airport with Mrs. Lipke for their first – and only – plane trip.

The lead story that Wednesday morning concerned the previous night’s crash of a Portland-bound airliner near Denver. Details were as sketchy as they were meager: The plane, carrying 39 passengers and a crew of five, had originated at noon time in New York . . . It had made a stop at Chicago before continuing on to Denver . . . The crash had occurred near the town of Longmont, a gently-rolling area of ranch and farmlands located 35 miles from the airport, dotted by farmhouses, haystacks, cattle corrals and irrigation ditches . . . Puzzlingly, the giant transport had been seen by dozens of witnesses to explode in the air.

As the announcer gasped out the grim, fragmented details, a black Cadillac slowed to a halt outside the Lipke family home. A man in a priest’s cassock climbed out, and gently rapped on the entry door. Gerald, the oldest of the three siblings, answered the door on the second knock. Younger brother Robert was hunched over the toilet upstairs, puking. There was only one reason Fr. Laurence O’Connell would be making a house call in the middle of the week.

Our parents were on that plane, weren’t they? Gerald Lipke asked the haggard-faced priest, more a statement than a question. 1,448 miles away, a ‘routine’ air crash probe was about to ignite one of the biggest FBI investigations in U.S. history.

Chapter I: The Boy, The Bomb, And The Luggage

A few minutes past 7:00 p.m., the evening of November 1, 1955, Mrs. Bonnie Lang was washing the supper dishes in the kitchen of her farmhouse, located eight miles from Longmont, Colorado. At the same time, Conrad Hopp, a sugar beet farmer, had just finished his chores for the day and was headed toward the house where his wife would be serving dinner. From the southeast sky, came the drone of United Airlines Flight 629. At this point, it was only eleven minutes into the 1,075 mile final stretch of its daily route from New York to Portland, via Chicago and Denver. The noise of the plane’s four engines grew louder as it approached the foothills of the Rockies.

In the dimly lit cabin of the DC-6B, passengers lit cigarettes and loosened their seatbelts, as they settled in for the three hour flight over Colorado, Wyoming and Oregon. One of them, Mrs. Alma Winsor, had just put the finishing touches on a letter to a son-in-law stricken with polio. Her postscript read, My sincere prayer for you. Anna.

Seated near Mrs. Winsor was Dr. Harold Sanstead, an official of the U.S. Health Department and an advisor to President Dwight Eisenhower. Dr. Sanstead had been the last passenger to board the plane, and his tardy arrival had thrown Flight 629 behind schedule, as pilot Lee Hall, a World War II veteran, pushed back his departure from 6:44 p.m. to nearly 7:00 p.m. With Sanstead safely on board, Hall gunned his four mighty Pratt & Whitney engines, released the wheel brake and opened up his throttles. It was precisely 6:52 p.m. when the nose rose slowly into the night sky.

Air travel in the 1950’s was still the province of people with expense accounts and the privileged few, and the United Airlines DC-6Bs offered unparalleled service. The lounges and galleys on these flights were reversed, with the galley situated behind the cockpit and the lounge aft, for maximum passenger comfort. A slightly longer, pressurized version of the DC-4, the DC-6B could cruise above the weather. Its R-2800 engines set new standards for reliability, and passengers appreciated its quietness, smoothness and comfort.

Staring out the cabin window into the darkness, one passenger could think only of death – his own. James Dorey, a factory inspector from Whitman, Massachusetts and his wife, Sara, had chosen to fly because Dorey’s doctors did not believe he would survive a journey by rail. The condition of Dorey’s arteries was so bad that he could literally die at any moment. Keenly aware of his own mortality, Dorey wanted to spend time with a married son, George, in Portland. Mrs. Dorey had accompanied her husband out of a sense of duty, but had confided in her family, Somehow or other, I have a premonition something bad is going to happen.

Three of Flight 629’s passengers shouldn’t have been on board at all. Horace (‘Brad’) Bynum, a geologist for Sinclair Oil, and his expectant wife, Carol, were returning from their first wedding anniversary in Amarillo, Texas. The Bynums had been booked on a flight leaving October 26, but the flight had been cancelled because of a strike called against United by the Flight Engineers Union. Like the pilot, Bynum was himself a war hero, who had flown 74 combat missions against the Nazis.

James Straud, a G.M. executive, was another unexpected addition to the flight manifest. He customarily flew home to his wife and children in Michigan on Friday, but with a sales meeting coming up in Oregon, this Tuesday he had decided to save time and fly directly to Portland.

Also aboard the plane were Mrs. Lela McClain, at 81 the oldest passenger, who had resisted relatives’ urgent invitation to remain in Glastonbury, Connecticut through Thanksgiving, and Helen Fitzpatrick of Batavia, New York, on route to Okinawa, Japan for a long-awaited reunion with her husband James, a Lt. Colonel in Army Intelligence.  Sleeping soundly in her arms was the small figure of Jimmy Fitzpatrick, 14 months, the only child aboard Flight 629. Jimmy’s father had been transferred overseas when Jimmy was one day old. The homecoming would be their first time together as a family.

Hall wasn’t planning on making many more flights as a commercial pilot; as he nosed his aircraft out of the airspace over Denver, his thoughts were rooted firmly on his new life as a sporting goods store owner in Illinois. Co-pilot Donald White hadn’t been scheduled to work this flight, but with no one else available, he had agreed to fill in. For several weeks, White’s wife, Maxine, had been plagued by a premonition, but he had scoffed at her woman’s intuition. Seated behind Hall and White at the flight engineer’s station, was a third pilot, Samuel Arthur. Eight days earlier, the union representing the flight engineers had called a strike against the airline. At issue was job security.

That morning, a full page ad in newspapers across the country had congratulated the line’s president William A. (Pat) Patterson on his purchase order for 28 Douglas DC-8 jetliners. Sleek, racy and twice as fast as the fastest piston-engine aircraft, the handwriting was on the wall for the nation’s fleet of prop liners, and the union wanted assurances that their members would be assigned to the new jets Patterson had just contracted to buy. Less than 58 feet from the three men, as they sipped their coffee and checked their instruments, nestled in a battered brown suitcase with pink tags designating it for Alaska, was enough dynamite to blow away a small mountain.

The sound of a deafening explosion, accompanied by a brilliant flash of light, had an earsplitting closeness to it, and Mrs. Lang’s first thought was of her 20-year-old son, Bud, who was in the shed tinkering with the engine of his old jalopy. As she ran out of the farmhouse, she would tell investigators later, tiny particles of metal pelted her like rice at a wedding. A piece of the airliner later identified as a part of the galley used for storing food trays, crashed to the ground within ten feet of her front gate. Across the road from the gate, a shredded seat unit landed right side up, minus one cushion. Running from the shed, Bud Lang watched aghast as a burning airliner hurtled through the sky, reminding him of a shooting star coming down. A mile to the north, something heavy plunged into the field owned by Jake Heil and managed by his son, Harold, with a bone-jarring impact that rattled windows and dishes in every direction. For five terrifying minutes, a bright red flame hovered directly over the Lang farm. A flare ignited, and drifted silently down to illuminate the fields below, now burning furiously with eerie white light, rendering the landscape stark and otherworldly.

Hopp, his wife and children were gathered around the dinner table when an explosion shook the house. Running outside, Hopp could see a sphere of flames over the cattle corral. Hopp yelled to his wife to call the police and an ambulance, and then went inside to take over the phone. As he was giving directions, his 18 year-old son, Conrad Dale, ran inside to inform him that a plane had crashed in the field adjacent to the house.

Hopp climbed into his pickup truck and drove into the field, looking for someone who needed help, but everyone I came to was dead. Hopp’s two sons, Conrad Dale, and 22-year-old Kenneth, jumped into Kenneth’s ’54 Chevy and traversed the fields, using the glow of their headlights to search for survivors. They found none. As the piercing cold began to set in, Conrad Dale turned toward the Chevy for a jacket. There, directly in his path, still strapped to a seat, was one of the victims. Decades later Hopp would tell an interviewer Picking up bodies was like picking up Jell-O. My stomach hit the ground. While most of the victims landed on their backs, at least one woman impacted head-first into the frozen ground.

Unwilling to take a chance that there might be survivors lying horribly injured in the fields, farmers streamed from their homes, toting portable lights of every description, including kerosene lanterns. Some, like Conrad Dale’s sweetheart and future wife, Martha Borgmann, used the headlights on their family beet trucks to slice through the darkness. Near the St. Vrain creek, searchers found the unburned bodies of two men who had been hurled from the plane’s lounge. The men had struck the ground with such force that they had gouged holes over a foot deep in the beet field.

Mrs. Lang, her voice breaking, telephoned the Colorado State Troopers. Within minutes, every available patrol car and nearly two dozen ambulances were racing to the Heil farm. Then, almost as an afterthought, the dispatcher located a phone number posted in plain sight in every emergency response center – the number for the Accident Investigation Division of the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) in Washington, D.C. The call was transferred to the home of the agency’s director, William K. Andrews, who hurriedly began scribbling notes.

Less than a month earlier, a United DC-4 had veered into the 12,000 foot mountainside of Medicine Bow Peak in Centennial, Wyoming, instantly killing the 63 passengers and crew of three. Theories on the cause of the tragedy had ranged from a faulty altimeter which had tricked the pilots into believing they were higher than they actually were, to crew incapacitation caused by carbon monoxide from a faulty heater, cloud obscuration, and sudden, violent downdrafts. The wreckage had been scattered over the Continental Divide, making recovery of the bodies difficult and a detailed examination of the wreckage impossible.

As Andrews began dialing his investigators, additional details about the latest crash began to emerge. Flying conditions had been ideal, with only a few scattered