Flight 629: United Airlines Crash of 1955

On November 1st, 1955, United Airlines Flight 629, also known as the “Mainliner Denver,” boarded 39 passengers and 5 crew members for its scheduled flight from Denver Stapleton Field for stops in Portland and Seattle.

At 7:03 PM, less than 11 minutes into the flight, controllers at Stapleton lost the flight from their radar scopes, noting a large bright flash in the night sky, somewhere over Longmont, Colorado.

When investigators arrived at the scene of the crash, no survivors could be found amongst the strewn wreckage. One of the deceased passengers was Daisy Graham, and within days, investigators arrested her son, John Gilbert Graham, for the mass murder of the passengers and crew of Flight 629.

How Did John Gilbert Graham Take Down Flight 629?

By planting a dynamite time bomb in his mother’s checked luggage, John Graham was hoping to cash in on a life insurance policy he had purchased in the airport terminal just prior to his mother’s departure. The face value of the policy was a mere $37,500.00—which in today’s money would equal around $360,000.00—the going price, it seemed, for the lives of 44 innocent victims.

As the backstory unfolded, investigators would learn that John’s mother Daisy had given him up for adoption when her second husband and John’s father died from pneumonia. Daisy’s third husband died shortly after their marriage began, allowing the widow to open a successful restaurant when she inherited his money. While Daisy never made any attempts to collect her abandoned son from the orphanage, John and his mother reunited when he was 22 years old.

In 1955, the same year as the plane crash, a suspicious gas explosion burned Daisy’s restaurant to the ground, leading investigators to discover that John Graham had pocketed that insurance money as well. Eighteen months after the downing of Flight 629, John Gilbert Graham would be executed for the mass murder of all those aboard the ill-fated flight.