In the house, with the farm work done for the day, the Hopp family of five boys and two girls had finished supper when the explosion split the country quiet, shaking them to the quick. A ball of flame seared through the sky as if their frame house was its target.
"It went down behind the outbuildings, so I never saw it hit the ground," Conrad Hopp said, recalling the tragic night of Nov. 1, 1955. Hopp, now 68, was an eyewitness when United Airlines Flight 629, en route from Denver to Portland, exploded and crashed onto the sugar beet fields of southwestern Weld County.
Walter Krueger, now 80, drove a priest eight miles east from Longmont, where Krueger was manager of the Knights of Columbus hall. Other members of the chapter had left when a telephone call came in about a crash, first reported as the wreck of a private plane.
"I'd been a tailgunner on a B-24 for 30 missions over Germany without a scratch, and I'd seen my share of dead bodies," Krueger said. "I knew that, if they don't need a bartender, they'd need a priest."
The congregating headlights lit the debris of the DC-6B airliner ripped into three large sections and strewn over the fields for at least a mile and a half. The plane's tail section sat upright on a rise, as if it had been neatly severed from the carnage and had glided to earth.
"For years afterward, when we harvested a crop like potatoes or sugar beets that grew in the ground, there would be things like eyeglass frames and luggage handles come up with them," Hopp said.
The sugar beet growers immediately recognized the distinctive odor of dynamite from working with the explosive on their farms. The acrid odor, like spent fireworks, clung to the debris, which was found as far away as Fort Lupton, 13 miles southeast.
Five crew members and 39 passengers died in the disaster, including Daisie E. King, 53. Her son, John Gilbert Graham, 23, was arrested within a week for her death in the first confirmed airplane bombing in the United States.
Graham had bought a $37,500 insurance policy on his mother's life, naming him as beneficiary, and they had said their goodbyes at Denver's Stapleton Airport.
But he also had packed 25 sticks of dynamite, weighing about 12 1/2 pounds, in her luggage and had persuaded her to pay the $27.82 excess baggage charge rather than ship the luggage separately.
John Gilbert Graham also died in 11 minutes. The door to the gas chamber at the Colorado State Penitentiary was sealed at 7:57 p.m. Jan. 11, 1957. His heart stopped beating at 8:08 p.m.
Graham's various confessions and explanations captivated Coloradans as he prepared for a sensational trial, but he never testified about what was billed as the crime of the century. His crime was the worst case of mass murder committed by one person in Colorado history, still stunning in its callousness 50 years later.
Otherwise-dignified judges jockeyed to preside at the high-profile trial. The troika of defense attorneys stopped speaking to each other as the trial progressed. The new medium of television broadcast the trial, making Graham an instantly recognizable face whose dinner menus were reported to the hungry public.
"I've never seen anyone since who killed so many people," said Dr. James Macdonald, 84, a psychiatrist who counted Graham among the more than 200 murderers he examined in his career. Macdonald was one of the team of psychiatrists who determined that Graham was mentally competent to stand trial.
Macdonald's evaluation also identified Graham's deep-seated resentment toward his mother because he felt she had rejected him as a boy. She left him in an orphanage from age 6 until he was expelled at age 11, although she had remarried a wealthy rancher who could have made a home for the boy.
Her leaving him, rather than staying for Thanksgiving with his family, "was the last time she was going to walk out on him," the psychiatrist said.
"I have told you seven or eight different stories," Graham told one of his attorneys in an afternoon visit hours before he was put to death. "I have told other people other stories concerning the case. Only I know what the truth is, and that's the way I want it."
"I'll believe he is innocent unless he is proven guilty," she is quoted as saying, vowing to remain "loyal to him, as every wife should be toward her husband."
Jug-eared and dorky in his 1950s haircut, Graham has come down through the decades as an enigma, stoic and cold. He gave no clue through bearing and temperament that he was the grandson of Gilbert Walker, one of the most prominent Coloradans of his time.
Early in the 20th century, Daisie's father, Gilbert Walker, changed careers from teacher to lawyer. Active in Republican politics, he won election as a state representative, district attorney and district court judge, moving his family from Buena Vista to Denver and to Yampa as his career advanced.
Perhaps because of the mad-dog magnitude of Graham's crime, he never joined the pantheon of Colorado's endearingly colorful murderers. They included Alfred Packer, who cannibalized three companions in the wilds of Hinsdale County; Farice King, who was once notorious as the nurse who killed her former lover while he was under her care in a hospital, and, little Jimmy Melton, who shocked Coloradans by killing his sister as they were wrapping Christmas presents.
"There are two things I remember about (Graham)," said Bob Ward, 70, of Lakewood. Ward, who was entering military service, trained Graham for a few weeks in the fall of 1955 to work in a Denver electric motor repair shop operated by Ward's late father Damon Ward.
"He was very quiet," Bob Ward said. "The other thing was that he had a shell about him, and you couldn't get to know him. He seemed likeable enough, but you couldn't get inside the shell."
When Graham said he wanted to hook up a timer for a lawn sprinkler system, Damon Ward showed him how, unknowingly teaching him the rudiments of wiring a time bomb.
Mark Mueller, 52, of Denver treasures the memento of the John Gilbert Graham trial that was given to his late father, Gregory Mueller. He was chief deputy to Denver District Attorney Bert M. Keating, the lead prosecutor.
Graham amateurishly left clues, almost as if he did not bother to obscure his link to the bombing, yet investigators and prosecutors still had to assemble the case against the young father.
Eighty witnesses testified against Graham. A store owner told how he had sold him dynamite. An FBI agent testified that wire found in Graham's shirt pocket was identical to wire from an electric dynamite cap. One witness told how Graham had, quite unexpectedly, begun describing how easily a bomb could be placed in luggage waiting to be loaded at Stapleton. A salesman for an electric wholesaler testified that Graham even left his home telephone number when he bought a timer in late October.
"Many years after the Graham case, my father told the family that, when he first encountered John Gilbert Graham, he saw a young man about the age of his own son and resolved to treat him as he would have wanted his son to be treated," recalled Paul D. Bush, who was 22, when his father, Paul E. Bush, was one of the FBI agents who interrogated Graham.
Graham's trial was the first in American history in which television cameras were present in the courtroom, leading to such national fascinations as the proceedings against O.J. Simpson.
Cameras and microphones had been banned from courts following the 1932 trial of Bruno Richard Hauptman, who was convicted of kidnapping and murdering the infant son of aviator Charles Lindbergh. Critics said the cameras and microphones had contributed to the trial's degenerating into a circus.
A coalition of Denver news media asked that the new medium of television be allowed in the courtroom. Colorado Supreme Court Justice O. Otto Moore agreed after a demonstration that cameras would not intrude upon the dignity of the court.
However, a pretrial interview that Gene Amole, the late Rocky Mountain News columnist, and Morey Engle, now 82, a one-time News photographer, filmed in the jail was not aired for fear it would influence jury selection. It was finally telecast 40 years after it would have scooped Denver's TV stations.
Segments of the interview, including Graham's conversation with his wife, were incorporated into a program titled "Murder at Midair" that was first broadcast on the 40th anniversary of the crime. It will be telecast again at 7 p.m. Nov. 1 on Channel 6.
"John Gilbert Graham played the role of the stunned and bereaved son to the hilt two hours after the plane bearing his mother and 43 others exploded in flames near Longmont."
"His voice choked with emotion when he mentioned his mother's name; he couldn't remember minor details; he pleaded for information as to whether there were any survivors.
"He was either a skillful actor, who had rehearsed his role to perfection - or else the full significance of his horrifying act had suddenly enveloped him."
Earlier in the day, Gloria Graham had talked to reporters "at the contemporary, ranch-type home of her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Roy Elson, in Lakewood," Nakkula wrote lower in the story.
"The 22-year-old wife showed the visible effects of the mental torment she has undergone since the FBI informed her at 5:10 a.m. Monday that her husband had committed one of the most shocking crimes in modern criminal history."
Gloria Graham kept a vigil with friends on the night of her husband's execution. She attended the simple ceremony at Fairmount Cemetery the next morning to bury his ashes.
Gloria Graham soon changed her name and the names of Allen and Suzanne to Elson, her maiden name, said Cliff Elson, 68, of Wheat Ridge, her brother.
"The family took Gloria and the children in," Cliff Elson said. "She was dedicated to him and to her marriage vows. She stood by him through the execution, and then she tried to build a new life."
"I think my sister had a period of happiness when her children were young," Cliff Elson said. "Our parents, outwardly, recovered fairly well, but this has had a devastating effect on our family over the years.
"Allen was curious about his father, but Suzanne went a long time without asking about her father," Elson said. "Then she wanted to find out as much as she could."
"Obviously, you wish this had never happened, and the children had grown up and been happy, but you learn to accept the cards you've been dealt," Elson said.
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