70 years ago, a Colorado man plotted to kill his mother. How he carried it out shocked the nation.

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The sugar beet harvest in Colorado can be a race against time. The crop is planted in the spring and not harvested until late October, when an early snowstorm can leave farmers with a fraction of the yield they planned. 

So on Nov. 1, 1955, Conrad Hopp and his family were working feverishly on their Weld County farm to take out the beet crop. When the clock struck 7 that evening, the crop was all in and Conrad was hungrily devouring dinner in their farmhouse. 

Three minutes later Hopp’s life changed forever.

“We heard this loud explosion that shook all the windows in the house,” Hopp told Denver7 years later. “We looked outside, and we could hear the roar of the engines — that’s how you knew it was a plane — and the ball of fire coming through the air.”

That ball of fire was United Air Lines Flight 629, known as Mainliner Denver, which had taken off from Stapleton Airfield just 11 minutes prior, en route to Portland, Oregon. Now the 91,746-pound DC-6B, brimming with 3,400 gallons of fuel, was plummeting toward the Hopp family farm 8 miles east of Longmont.

Scrambling outside, Conrad and his brother Kenneth jumped in a car and drove across a field toward the crash, swerving around debris, until an irrigation ditch stopped them. Conrad remembers parking the car, its headlights focused on the back of an airline seat sitting alone in the field. The brothers got out and walked to a fence, which Kenneth climbed and then ran toward the fiery crash site, yelling back at Conrad to get them coats to ward off the night’s cold.

When Conrad turned to get the coats from the truck, he saw the front of the airline seat — and the lifeless body held securely in it by the seatbelt. Conrad was stunned: “My stomach hit the ground.”

Daisy Brubaker and her husband, tenants on the nearby Heil Farm, also were eating dinner at the time of the explosion. The view from their window was terrifying. “It looked like the main part of the plane was going to hit our house,” Daisy told the Rocky Mountain News. “We just stood there scared to death. It landed a few yards away.”

The Hopps and Brubakers weren’t the only ones who heard the explosion the News reported “lit up the eastern skies for miles.” Callers by the hundreds were dialing the Longmont Police Department. Scores of others, some from as far as 50 miles away, made a beeline to the crash site.

Longmont police chief Keith Cunningham alerted the Colorado State Patrol and dispatched every available police officer, firefighter and ambulance to the scene. The severity of the moment became clear, the News reported, when a patrolman on site radioed that no ambulances were necessary — all 44 on board had died. A helicopter from Lowry Air Force Base soon arrived to train its searchlight on the dark field below to support the recovery of bodies while throngs of onlookers, including families who brought along young children, clogged the surrounding roads.

Meanwhile, 23-year-old John Gilbert Graham, his wife, Gloria, 22, and 20-month-old son, Allen, were dining in a Stapleton Airfield coffee shop. They had just seen off John’s mother, Daisie King, on the Mainliner Denver. 

“As we were leaving, I heard the cashier say that there had been a wreck of an airplane about 40 miles from Denver,” Graham would say afterward. “Later on that evening, after my wife and I had returned home, we heard over the radio that all the passengers aboard had been killed.”

Prior crashes led to quick response

Commercial air travel today is largely a model of safety and reliability — in 2024 it safely delivered a staggering 1.1 billion U.S. passengers to their destinations — in part because of the unreliability of air travel in the 1950s. The 1956 midair collision of a TWA Super Constellation and a United Air Lines DC-7 over the Grand Canyon, which killed all 128 in the planes and rained debris on the canyon that remains to this day, was a prime example that while air traffic had more than doubled since the end of World War II, regulation of that traffic had not kept up. 

Which is not to say no one was minding the skies. The Bureau of Air Commerce, created in 1934, took over the first air traffic control centers created by the airlines in 1936 and continued to expand their number. The Civil Aeronautics Board, CAB, was created in 1940 to oversee economic regulation, safety rulemaking and investigation of civil aviation accidents. 

And so it wasn’t long before CAB investigators arrived at the Mainliner crash site near Longmont. Evidence was plentiful, but it also was dispersed over 6 square miles. The largely intact tail of the plane was nearly a mile away from the main crash site. The enormous amount of fuel in the tanks meant that flames persisted at the site for three days, defying efforts to douse them, much less investigate that part of the plane.

One thing quickly became apparent to CAB investigators. “An explosion had occurred of such great intensity that it would have been unusual for it to have been caused by any system or component of the aircraft,” its report would note. “This awareness was strengthened by smudge marks and odor characteristic of an explosive that persisted on fragmentized wreckage known to be part of the fuselage structure in the area of the No. 4 baggage compartment.”

On Monday, Nov. 7, the CAB delivered its report to the Denver office of the FBI so that the “apparent criminal aspects involved could be pursued.” The investigation swung into action on multiple fronts, including the painstaking job undertaken by the CAB, United and manufacturer Douglas Aircraft to reassemble the shattered plane in a hangar near Stapleton — the first time ever for such a procedure. Technicians soon confirmed the CAB finding that a “dynamite-type explosion had occurred within the No. 4 baggage compartment.” 

The No. 4 compartment had been emptied after the plane arrived from Chicago, owing to a call from a Windy City baggage handler who thought he had lost his keys in the compartment. Denver workers didn’t find the keys but, crucially, reloaded that luggage in compartments 1, 2 and 3. As a result, all mail, luggage and cargo originating in Denver was loaded into No. 4.

The FBI was combing through more than wreckage: Agents did exhaustive outreach and background checks on the 44 victims, surviving family members, relatives and friends. The legwork soon yielded a suspect: John Gilbert Graham, the man who brought his family to see off his mother, Daisie King. 

An agent learned that Graham had purchased $37,500 in flight insurance (nearly $450,000 in today’s dollars) for his mother. The policy signed by King named Graham as the beneficiary. Suspicions grew when another agent turned up Graham’s criminal record, which included forgery, theft, illegal alcohol transport and, pointedly, suspected insurance fraud. 

The act of sabotage was confirmed Nov. 7. “The sidewalls of the baggage hold were pushed out, and the floor was in pieces. It is a bomb-type explosion,” CAB investigation division chief James Peyton told the Rocky Mountain News.

(While the flight would prove the deadliest case of air sabotage to date, it was not the first. United Air Lines Flight 23 exploded and crashed in Indiana on Oct. 10, 1933, killing all seven aboard. While investigators confirmed a bomb caused the crash, no suspect was ever identified.)

Peyton added that luggage in the baggage hold smelled “like gunpowder, or an exploding firecracker.” While he would not confirm to the press the precise location of the blast, the investigator stressed “there still has been no evidence of malfunction and the rumors of metal fatigue being responsible for the accident are not true.”

A hunter’s unexpected find added to the evidence pointing at Graham. “We didn’t bag a single pheasant. Never even flushed one bird,” John Martin, who was hunting four days after the crash with friends on a farm near Brighton, told The Denver Post. But Martin bagged a trophy of a different kind. “I stopped to rest next to this bush and there it was.” 

“It” was a folded ticket from the downed United flight that clung, neatly folded and undamaged, to a bush some 15 miles from the crash site. “And not another piece of paper anywhere in that field,” Martin told the Post. Understanding it might have value (“I collect any damned thing,” the Denverite said), he stuffed it in his pocket. 

The following Monday, Nov. 7, Martin gave the FBI the ticket. It wasn’t just anyone’s ticket: It was Daisie King’s. Handwritten on the ticket was her itinerary (Denver, Portland, Seattle, Anchorage) and a charge of $27.82 for 37 pounds of excess luggage. Investigators had to wonder: Was the luggage overweight because it was loaded with explosives? If so, could her son — the beneficiary of her flight insurance policy — have put it there? 

A shocking confession

“Where do you want me to start?”

It was 12:07 a.m. on Monday, Nov. 14, when John Gilbert Graham posed that question to FBI agent Roy Moore. The query ended a game of cat and mouse that started at 1 p.m. Sunday, when Graham and his wife, Gloria, arrived at FBI offices to identify Daisie King’s luggage. 

Gloria was excused after that task. Graham was asked to stay for a few more questions, which continued all afternoon. Just past 6:30 p.m., after comparing the answers Graham had given an agent three nights prior to his responses on Sunday, Moore felt like he had his man.

“There were so many discrepancies we decided to tell Graham he was a suspect,” Moore told The Denver Post. “I informed Graham of his constitutional rights, told him he could use the phone to call an attorney, said the door would be left open and he could leave at any time and that he didn’t have to say anything and that anything he did say could be used against him. I then said, ‘Jack, I accuse you of blowing up the plane.’ ”

Not only did Graham deny Moore’s charge and decline the services of an attorney, but he also signed waivers allowing the search of his home, car, the Crown A Drive-In restaurant he co-owned with his mother, and other locations. Meanwhile, questioning continued, with agents shuttling in and out of the room. Shortly after midnight, Moore confronted Graham again.

“You’ve been lying to us all night,” the agent said. “We are going to charge you with this crime. Why not make it easy for us?”

Graham finally relented, giving a 15-minute oral confession. The FBI then called in a stenographer to take a written confession. Just before 3 a.m., Graham reviewed, approved and signed the confession, then was examined by a physician to confirm he had not been physically harmed during the interrogation. 

So what did he confess? David Stolberg wrote it this way in the Rocky Mountain News: “The tall, muscular youth told how he fashioned a dynamite bomb, maneuvering his family so he could hide the device in his mother’s suitcase, and of how he dawdled over dinner at Stapleton Field until word of the crash came.”

Graham told investigators he collected the parts and built the bomb Oct. 18-19. The device included 25 sticks of dynamite, a timing device, an Eveready 6-volt dry cell Hotshot battery and two dynamite caps, each connected to about 8 feet of wire. On the day of the flight, Daisie King went ahead to the Denver Motor Hotel, where she was leaving her car while she was in Alaska to visit her daughter Helen Hablutzel. That allowed Graham to put the homemade bomb in her luggage before picking up his mother, wife and child en route to the airport. Once there, he carried the luggage for Daisie. “After my mother checked in,” he told the FBI, “my wife and I went with her to the passenger gate where we told her goodbye and watched her board.”

That’s right: Graham brought his family to bid bon voyage to his mother and, by extension, the other 43 innocent victims on the doomed flight. And then the family retreated to an airport coffee shop for dinner, where Graham waited long enough to hear that the plane had crashed.

His confession completed at 3 a.m., Graham was arrested, photographed and fingerprinted. That morning he had a preliminary hearing on federal sabotage charges, but Graham would never stand trial on those charges. The reason? At that time, the lone federal statute for airline sabotage had a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $100,000 fine. There was a federal statute that made sabotage of a train punishable by death, but nothing similar existed for planes.

A Post story would later note that in 1953 the “Department of Justice tried to have the federal train wreck law amended to cover killings in the air. But the bill did not get out of committee. Apparently, the nation’s lawmakers felt there was no danger of someone committing a crime by blowing up an airplane. But now we know that such a thing can happen.”

U.S. Sen. Gordon Allott, a Colorado Republican, swiftly announced plans to advance a federal legislative solution. And eight months later, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed Public Law 709, which authorized capital punishment for acts of aircraft sabotage resulting in death. But that was of no help in the Mainliner case, so federal authorities transferred Graham’s case to the state of Colorado and on Nov. 15, 1955, District Attorney Bert Keating charged Graham with his mother’s murder. 

Keating pledged to pursue the case as soon as possible and vowed to “push for the maximum penalty — death in the state gas chamber.”

Making a murder case

Graham’s confession was a breakthrough, but now an investigation had to develop the evidence and motive required for a conviction. Significant resources were aimed at the task, including the FBI. And another group of investigators joined the hunt: newspaper reporters. 

Denver’s population of close to 420,000 in the mid-1950s was watching TV news in growing numbers. KFEL (Channel 2), the first Denver station to sign on in 1952, had been joined by KBTV (Channel 9), KLZ-TV (Channel 7) and KOA-TV (Channel 4). But The Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News had far more reporters, which led to breakthroughs in the ensuing mornings (News) and afternoons (Post). 

Days after the Nov. 16 confession the News broke the story of Graham’s “chance remark” about a gift for his mother. After the crash Graham told relatives, including his mother in law Christine Elson, that on the day of the flight he purchased Daisie King a jewelry making tool she had coveted and hid it in her luggage as a surprise for her upon reaching Alaska. Elson, after much soul searching, reached out to FBI agents Nov. 9 to share the story, including that “Graham claimed he had a premonition of his mother’s death before word of the explosion reached him.” The FBI already had strong reason to suspect Graham; the revelation that he had opened King’s luggage to insert the gift cemented that suspicion.

Post reporter Ed Olsen detailed Nov. 19 how Graham bought the timer used for the bomb. Ryall Electric Supply Co. salesman Joseph T. Grande recalled how the accused, who identified himself as an employee for the fictitious Texas Colorado Pump Co., decided the first timer he had ordered wasn’t the right one and had Grande order a second — only to ultimately buy the first timer. Grande called the FBI when he saw a photo of Graham after his confession.

The News followed that on Nov. 20 with the story that Graham bought 25 sticks of dynamite and two detonating caps for $2.60 three days before the flight at the Brown Bros. Super Sav-R Shopping Center in Kremmling. Owner Lyman Brown, who said the accused bomber “didn’t seem to know much about the stuff,” remembered Graham from when he was younger and living on a ranch near Yampa with his mother and her husband John King. “He didn’t talk much,” Brown said of the encounter. “I assumed he was prospecting and asked if he wanted the dynamite for open ground (above ground) work … He said ‘Yes.’”

Then came a Nov. 21 News report that Graham worked briefly at Ward Electric Co. to learn “electric fundamentals” that could have helped him build the fatal time bomb. Owner Damon Ward thought it “peculiar” Graham would want the job after learning he owned a restaurant. But Graham explained he had “motors and fans in the restaurant which occasionally needed repairs.” More significantly, Graham asked about timing devices; when Ward showed him some, the suspect said he wasn’t interested because they required an outside source of electricity and he wanted a timer that didn’t need an outside source — just like the timer ultimately used in the sabotage.

News reporter Al Nakkula scored the first jailhouse interview with Graham, who denied his confession and claimed it was obtained under duress. “Yes, I signed a statement,” he told Nakkula. “But it’s not true. They told me they were going to put my wife in jail and I’d better get it straightened out myself.” 

U.S. Attorney Donald E. Kelley was emphatic in his reply to the News: “Agents working on the case would not allow Graham to sign the confession until he told them it was made voluntarily and that he understood it might be used against him.”

Establishing motive

The investigation also began to shed light on motive. Conflict between mother and son may have started the day Daisie sent her 6-year-old son to the Clayton College of Denver orphanage after she was widowed and unable to afford his upbringing. Not only was the boy unhappy at the orphanage, often disciplined for his behavior, Daisie kept him there long after her subsequent marriage to Earl King, a wealthy rancher who could support his care.

Graham’s desire for money (“I’d do anything for money,” he once told his neighbor Elvin West) could have played a role. After Daisie reclaimed her son from the orphanage, he engaged in a series of criminal acts focused on money. Graham was convicted of check forgery at a Denver job; that earned him probation. He later served 60 days in jail in Lubbock, Texas, after a conviction for selling “illicit liquor,” according to the News. And then Graham left his pickup truck on railroad tracks south of Denver in what investigators considered a case of insurance fraud but could never prove.

The Post got further at the money motive in a story about the Crown A Drive-In. Daisie purchased the rotisserie chicken eatery on South Federal Boulevard for her son to operate, but issues arose between them over its management. “They seemed to be in financial trouble,” 18-year-old Eleanor Schrader told the Post. “They argued frequently. When the arguments started in front of the girls (employees) they would go in the back room and finish it. When Mrs. King came out you could see she had been crying.” 

Carhop Naomi Harger confirmed the animus: “He used to fly off the handle at her even if she made just the littlest mistake. He used dirty and foul language at her, too.”

Jerry Holmes owned a restaurant in Kremmling where Daisie would stop en route to a home she owned in Steamboat Springs. Holmes told the Post that Daisie came in looking “awfully tired and worried” two months before the plane explosion. “I asked how the business was doing.” Daisie responded: “Pretty good. But the kid is taking (money) out as fast as we get it.”

A few days later, in the early morning of Sept. 5, an explosion rocked the Crown A. The police report said the blast was caused by escaping gas from a “deliberately disconnected fuel line being ignited by a pilot light on a hot water tank.” A passing driver saw the fire at 1:30 a.m. and called the fire department, which extinguished the blaze, limiting the damage to just $400. Graham told investigators $3 was missing from the cash register and he suspected the thief caused the explosion. But a police investigator told the Post “burglars aren’t interested in blowing things up.” 

Insurance adjuster Richard Conley, who evaluated the blast, flashed back to the incident when he saw Daisie King’s name in the list of Flight 629 victims. “I mentioned to my wife that if this boy was nutty enough to blow up his own place of business — which we thought he did, although we couldn’t get any proof — he was a logical suspect for the plane accident,” Conley later told the Post. He didn’t call the police, as there was no report of sabotage yet, but he told the story to associates, one of whom ultimately called the FBI.

After those failed attempts at a big score, the fact that Graham stood to inherit 25% of Daisie’s estate of $150,000 might have seemed like a quick way to make money; the flight insurance payout would be a bonus. But Graham never cited money as the driving force of his actions.

While awaiting trial in February of 1956, Graham unsuccessfully attempted suicide in his jail cell. Guards found him unconscious, and he was placed under closer surveillance. Was that a sign of mental illness? Defense lawyers later would order a psychiatric examination, but doctors declined to diagnose him as insane.

Still, it’s hard not to wonder about the mental state of someone who condemned the other 43 passengers on Flight 629 to death. Graham later told Time Magazine: “As far as feeling remorse for those people (on the plane), I don’t. I can’t help it. Everybody pays their way and takes their chances. That’s just the way it goes.”

The ordeal of jury selection

Colorado law protects jurors’ safety by restricting what information about them is available to the public. But during jury selection for the trial, the Rocky Mountain News and Denver Post listed the names, addresses and (often) occupations of every potential and selected juror.

And it was an enormous list. The News noted it took screening 68 jurors in the first two days of the trial for defense and prosecution lawyers to agree on 12 jurors and an alternate. But then “one side or the other exercised a peremptory challenge (to dismiss a juror) and the search for a substitute was on again.” 

By day four they had surpassed the Colorado record of 114 jurors called during the 1954 trial of accused murderer Leroy Leick, with the News reporting that only five of the original 13 remained. Their reward if they made the jury: $6 a day for serving on the trial, for which they would be sequestered. (That said, a News story did report the jurors would “live it up” one night on a chartered bus to Mount Vernon Country Club for dinner followed by “a ride through the Idaho Springs area.”)

After day six, 216 jurors had been called. Of those, the News reported 88 had been excused for opposing the death penalty, 68 for holding fixed opinions concerning guilt or innocence, and 25 owing to personal hardship. On the latter, the Post reported that Nick Ursini was suffering from an “acute anxiety reaction” resulting in severe abdominal pain. The chief resident at Denver General, Dr. Donald Hanna, told the court it was imperative that Ursini, a butcher, be excused because his “condition will tend to increase as the emotional tension increases.”

There also was levity. The News cited “a breath of fresh air” in the courtroom when the judge asked Mrs. Virgil S. Pankey if there was “anything personal that would keep her from being an attentive juror.” Pankey responded: “Well, I’m having a party at my house tonight.” Once the laughter subsided, Pankey was excused after she stated her opposition to the death penalty, which the story noted gave her a “chance to attend her party.”

After nearly seven days the News reported that the final jury of seven men and five women “come from all walks of life and live in north, east, southeast and southwest Denver.” These everyday Denverites included housewives and bachelors, with jobs ranging from sales to civil engineer, truck driver to lithographer. Ralph W. Bonar, assistant to the president of the American Film Co., was the only remaining juror from the original 13 chosen. 

News reporter Jack Gaskie explained the daunting job ahead for jurors: “Wipe your mind clean. You’ve never heard of John Gilbert Graham. You know nothing of the burst of light in the night air over Longmont on Nov. 1. Is that difficult, impossible? This is what the jurors must do.”

Working the insurance angle

No one had reason to suspect John Gilbert Graham was up to no good at the airport Nov. 1 when he started pumping quarters into a Mutual of Omaha flight insurance vending machine. After all, The Denver Post reported, 13 other passengers bought insurance policies totaling $655,000. They had reason to buy: Just weeks earlier on Oct. 7, United Flight 409 had crashed into Medicine Bow Peak west of Laramie, killing 66 people in what was then the worst air disaster in U.S. history. 

That said, the safety record wasn’t so bad that the insurance industry wasn’t willing to bet on it. Starting in the late 1940s, insurers began underwriting flight insurance. But unlike today’s trip insurance, which reimburses you for unused flights or hotel stays, these policies offered protection against accidental death or injury during a flight.

Sales boomed with the arrival of vending machines made by Tele-Trip Insurance Co. that enabled policy purchases at the airport. The News reported that Mutual of Omaha, which bought Tele-Trip in 1955, had machines in 86 airports and “in one month … sells as many as 100,000 policies across the country.” The Post reported that in 1955 passengers could deposit up to $2.50 in the coin-operated machines at a cost of 4 cents per $1,000 of insurance, with a maximum of $62,500.

Graham bought six policies at the airport, according to evidence sent by Mutual of Omaha to District Attorney Bert Keating. The first two policies were blank. (In a jailhouse interview with the Post, Graham explained that happened “because we just didn’t know how to work the machine.”) Of the remaining four, two were to pay beneficiaries $37,500 and two were to pay out $6,250 each.

While there was uncertainty about who filled out each form, Keating said that the signatures appeared to be of Graham’s mother, Daisie King. 

News coverage echoed the times

The story of United Flight 629 is an enormous tragedy of betrayal and murder. At any time in history, journalists would have delivered wall-to-wall coverage. But in 1955 many of the guardrails in place today — anonymity for jurors, the accused rarely (if ever) giving interviews — were not the norm. The result was a reporting free-for-all between the Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post that delivered news beat after news beat, a “diary” written by Graham about a day in the life of the accused murderer, and even the imagined conversations of those involved.

All of it was delivered in punchy prose that veered toward florid. A private eye “gumshoed” for the defense, the accused is “dark and handsome,” the president of United Air Lines “paces like a tiger,” and personalities are “magnetic.” If new details were slow to develop, reporters found ways to generate drama in stories such as:

• The News story “Death for 44 cost Mrs. King 27 dollars” described how Daisie King “had to pay the freight for her own death and that of 43 others” when she was charged extra for her overweight luggage; 
• The breathless Associated Press yarn that began: “This is a drama of the kind Hollywood feeds on. Forty-four persons are thrown together by chance in a 4-engined airliner high above mid-America … Unbeknown to each of them, the 44 are winging together to a common destination — violent death.”

Then there was potential jurist Elva Prouty, described in the Post as an “attractive and shapely wife.” The story highlighted her beauty queen career in the “flapper era” — which included a second-place finish in the Denver Post-American Theater beauty contest, earning her the sobriquet “Queen of Pulchritude.” It also reported her three marriages (and one that was annulled after she discovered her intended was still married) and past role as a “worthy high priestess of Damascus, Shrine No. 1, orders of the White Shrine of Jerusalem.” Whatever Prouty’s history, when the final jury was seated, she was among the 12.

Some of the journalists working then are lost to time, but News reporters Al Nakkula and Walter “Dusty” Saunders were still plying their trade from the Colfax Avenue newsroom of the Rocky into the 1980s (and Dusty well beyond that). Robert Chase, a respected reporter who later became the paper’s managing editor, had married News reporter Mary Chase, better known as the playwright who created “Harvey,” which was adapted into a 1950 movie starring Jimmy Stewart.

Pasquale “Pocky” Marranzino Sr. of the News might have been the most flamboyant of all. It was Pocky who convinced Graham to write a diary about a day in his life. It was Pocky who interviewed that pacing tiger of a United president after the FBI had “collared” Graham to end “one of the most bloodcurdling chapters in American aviation history.”

Marranzino often wrote in the first person. For one story, the reporter approached the accused between court sessions and described their exchange, which he starts by asking:

“How’s it going?” Graham answers: “Fine.”

“How can you say you are fine? How can you do it, Graham? They got you up for murder and the jury over there is being asked if you live or die?”

“Yeah,” the 24-year old says, “I guess that would make a man think.”

“He says it cool and composed as if we are talking about the weather,” Pocky concluded.

Drama, but few surprises

It’s inaccurate to say the trial that started April 16, 1956, lacked drama — every day it attracted large crowds and intense media coverage by outlets across the country. 

But it was hardly a surprising proceeding, since virtually all of its evidence already had played out in the press. Readers would have known about the fractious nature of the relationship between Daisie King and her son, Graham’s previous attempts at insurance fraud, the location of the stores where he bought the dynamite and bomb timer, and that the accused freely authorized the searches that turned up the initial evidence against him.

On top of all that: Graham had confessed! When the defense put Graham on the stand to contest that the confession was given willingly, the end result found the accused agreeing with the prosecution that, indeed, it had been a willing confession.

There was one novel twist: a TV camera was allowed into a courtroom for the first time in state history. (The first use ever of a TV camera in court happened over four days in April of 1955, when KWTX in Waco, Texas, did a live broadcast of a murder trial.) In Colorado, courts had long abided by American Bar Association rules that prohibited photography in the courtroom. Given the massive public interest, news organizations led by KLZ-TV united to successfully protest the prohibition to the Colorado Supreme Court. 

Justice Otto Moore — who once told a reporter “I may be wrong, but I’m never in doubt” — wrote the decision that reversed the ban. It opened with a backhand swipe at those who would attend a trial: “Generally only idle people pursuing ‘idle curiosity’ have time to visit courtrooms in person.”

Once he got that off his chest, Moore continued: “What harm could result in portraying by photo, film, radio, and screen to the business, professional, and rural leadership of a community, as well as to the average citizen regularly employed, the true picture of the administration of justice? Has anyone been heard to complain that the employment of photographs, radio and television upon the solemn occasion of the last presidential inauguration or the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II was to satisfy an “idle curiosity?” … The answer (is) obvious. That which is carried out with dignity will not be undignified because more people will be able to see and hear it.”

In the wake of the ruling, Judge Joseph M. McDonald approved still photography and allowed television station KLZ to place a camera in a small wooden booth at the back of the courtroom. The proceedings would not be broadcast live, but the film could be shown later on news broadcasts. The judge had a remote switch to cut off the cameras as needed and decreed that if anyone objected to being photographed, their wishes would be respected. 

Only one person objected: John Gilbert Graham. 

A verdict, and resignation

The Mainliner Denver trial of John Gilbert Graham started on April 16, 1956, and concluded 20 days later on May 5, 1956, when the jury was sent out to deliberate just before 10 a.m.

The verdict didn’t take long: slightly before 11 a.m. news came that a decision had been reached on the first ballot. Once the jury had settled in the box, Judge Joseph M. McDonald asked if they had reached a verdict. Jury Foreman Ralph Bonar delivered a folded sheet of paper to the bailiff, who brought it to the judge.

“We the jury,” McDonald read, “find the defendant, John Gilbert Graham, guilty of murder in the first degree and find that he acted with premeditation and a specific intent to take life as charged in the information herein, and fix the penalty at death.” Press reports said Graham showed no emotion at the verdict.

Today that verdict would launch a series of appeals by the defendant that could continue for years. But a few days after the verdict Graham wrote a letter to Judge McDonald. “I don’t desire my attorneys to file a motion for a new trial,” he wrote. “It is not my intention to appeal my conviction to the Supreme Court of Colorado or any federal court. I accept the verdict of the jury and desire that it be carried out with all convenient speed.”

Despite the request, defense attorneys launched one appeal, which was rejected by the state Supreme Court on Oct. 22, 1956. On the same day at the Colorado State Penitentiary in Cañon City, prisoner John Gilbert Graham was informed that his execution in the gas chamber had been set for the week ending Jan. 12, 1957. 

On Jan. 6, Graham’s wife, Gloria, made her last visit. She later told a reporter in her home: “Naturally he’s frightened, but he didn’t break down.” She looked over at her infant children, Allen and Suzanne, then back to the reporter and said, “Someday I’ll have to tell them.”

Graham made no request for his last meal, though prison officials brought him steak, fried potatoes, tossed salad, fruit cocktail and ice cream. He ate only the ice cream.

At 7:57 p.m. on Jan. 11, 1957, a prison guard turned a handle outside the gas chamber to release two cyanide pellets into a vat of sulfuric acid below where Graham sat secured and blindfolded. At 8:08 p.m. a doctor officially pronounced him dead.

Impact, memories live on

The story of the Denver Mainliner didn’t end with the execution of John Gilbert Graham.

Public outcry at the time urged better examination of luggage and passengers on commercial flights. But those changes would wait decades owing to airline industry concern that those procedures would discourage people from flying. And the sale of trip insurance at airport vending machines? That didn’t end until the 1980s, largely because personal insurance policies increasingly covered instances such as plane crashes — not because it might prevent a similar sabotage.

It was only in recent years that Conrad Hopp, who today lives less than 2 miles from the crash site, began to shake the emotional toll of plunging into that chilling night with his brother Kenneth. In fact, the brothers could never bring themselves to discuss the horror they had faced searching for the mangled bodies of victims spread across their farm.

The impact on the victims’ families and descendants can never be precisely measured, but it certainly changed the course for each family. 

The 44 who perished on Flight 629 ranged in age from 81 to just 13 months old. United Captain Lee Hall was a veteran of World War II. John Bomelyn, superintendent of the county humane society in Seattle, was headed home from a convention. Barbara Cruse was a United flight attendant on vacation. Frank Brennan, Clarence Todd, Elton Hickok and James Purvis had just attended an Associated General Contractors meeting in Denver. Virgil and Goldie Herman were flying for the first time.

No memorial exists to mark the death of these innocent victims as we approach the 70th anniversary of the crash on Nov. 1. Michael Hesse, president of the Denver Police Museum, has led the effort to change that with the creation of a memorial at Flyteco Tower, the site of the old Stapleton International Airport control tower. Fashioned in the shape of an airplane fuselage, the memorial points northwest, the plane’s heading at takeoff. 

The memorial, which includes the names of victims and honors first responders, will be dedicated Saturday as part of a weekend commemoration in Denver of the sabotage that will bring in descendants of victims for the dedication and other events, including a panel discussion about the crash and its lingering impact. 

Hesse noted the tragedy simply can’t be lost to history.

“They were all human beings,” he said. “There were countless birthdays and anniversaries that were missed. It was this completely senseless tragedy. It breaks your heart. We want to make sure the families know that their loved ones are not forgotten.”

Type of Story: Explainer

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