The young man was very attentive to his mother. He lugged her heavy suitcases to the counter at Denver's Stapleton Airfield, and stood by while she checked in on United Air Lines Flight 629, bound for Portland, Ore. The three bags, a bulky, battered suitcase secured by two web straps, a briefcase and a smaller suitcase, weighed 87 Lbs. -37 Lbs. over the limit allowed each passenger. When the ticket agent told her she would have to pay $27 for the excess baggage, the mother, Mrs. Daisie King, turned to her son and said, "Thirty-seven Lbs. -do you think I'll need all this?" Replied the son, Jack Graham: "Yes, Mother, I'm 'sure you will need it." Mrs. King was going to Alaska to visit her married daughter, and she would need a lot of warm clothes.
For a moment she seemed half disposed to unpack then and there, and leave some of the excess baggage behind, but she finally took her son's advice. "I've packed enough stuff to last me a year," she sighed, as she paid the fee.
Delay in Take-Off. According to Gloria Graham, Jack's wife, Mrs. King then turned to her son and handed him $3.50, instructing him to get three air-travel insurance policies on her life -one for Jack, one for his half-sister in Alaska, and one for his mother's sister in Missouri. When Flight 629 arrived from Chicago ten minutes later, Mrs. King said goodbye to the Grahams and their 22-month-old son Al len, kissed them affectionately and boarded the plane. The take-off was delayed another 12 minutes while the plane waited for a late passenger.
The Grahams went to the airport coffee shop for dinner. Jack Graham was quite fidgety -he had been feeling queasy all day -and in the midst of the meal he. became nauseated. After a trip to the men's room, he felt a lot better. Later, as they were leaving the restaurant, the Grahams overheard someone saying that a plane had crashed. Unable to get any detailed information at the airport, they drove home. The radio confirmed their apprehensions: Flight 629 had crashed 32 miles north of Denver. Mrs. King and all 43 others aboard the DC-6B were dead. "We finally heard his mother's name on the radio," Gloria reported, "and Jack just collapsed completely."
From the night of the crash, Nov. 1, Civil Aeronautics Board investigators were suspicious. Eyewitnesses said the plane had seemed to explode in midair. "We got the chores done a little after dark," recalled Beet Farmer Conrad Hopp Jr.. "and me and the kids and the missus had just set down to eat when we heard an explosion and seen a flash of light in the sky out through the window. I run out into the yard, and there was another explosion. It looked like a haystack on fire in the sky."
Shredded bits of carpeting, an acrid smell around the wreckage -like burned-out fireworks -and a greyish residue on some of the bits of the plane all indicated high explosives. Technicians from the FBI and the Douglas Aircraft Co. were summoned, and a crew of 40 men was dispatched to pick up every fragment of the plane, and cart it all back to Denver. There, in a warehouse near the airport, the experts began the painstaking job of fitting the fragments together again.