Early one morning in spring 1955, Jack parked his new Chevrolet pickup truck on a set of train tracks outside Denver, and stole away. A freight train plowed through the vehicle, destroying it, and netting Jack several thousand dollars in insurance money. He was on to something.
In September 1955, a gas explosion destroyed part of Daisie’s newly-opened Crown-A restaurant, where Jack was working as manager. The insurance company flagged the explosion as suspicious but couldn’t prove malfeasance. Jack filed an insurance claim, which paid out. There were murmurs among neighbors and friends that Jack, known for his checkered past and tense relationship with his mother, was the saboteur behind the destruction of both the truck and restaurant.
One month later, as Daisie prepared for a trip to Anchorage to visit her daughter Helen, Jack hatched a new plan. A plan that would remove from his life the two things that he believed were keeping him down—a lack of money, and his mother—no matter the cost.
After buying the requisite tools and equipment, Jack sat down in the basement of his family home and got to work. He assembled twenty-five sticks of dynamite, a timing device, an Eveready six-volt “Hot Shot” battery and two dynamite caps into a compact time bomb. He wrapped the bomb up, packed it inside Daisie’s heavy Samsonite suitcase, and loaded the case into the trunk of her ‘55 Chevrolet sedan. Then Jack and Gloria drove Daisie to the airport. It was November 1, 1955.
After saying goodbye to Daisie at the gate, Jack and Gloria stopped for a snack at the airport coffee shop—but not before Jack bought an insurance policy on Daisie’s life from a vending machine at the terminal, a common practice in a time marked by frequent air crashes.
The Douglas DC-6B, piloted by WWII veteran Lee Hall, exploded in midair minutes after takeoff, creating a nightmarish fireball in the open night sky. One witness described the fiery explosion as being “like a shooting star.” Another witness, Norman Flores, happened to step outside on the porch of his rural home near Longmont, Colorado just before the bomb detonated.
“It was a real nice moonlight night, just as pretty as could be,” he recounted. “And I saw this airplane. Lights were flickering on it. Then all of a sudden there was an explosion, and it was so terrific it shook the house… When it hit the ground, a big orange mushroomed affair went up, and from then on it just burned.” Another witness described the burning wreckage of the plane as looking “like an atom bomb.”
All forty-four people on board United Flight 629, including Daisie, were killed. It was the first-ever act of sabotage against a commercial airliner in the United States.