Death on No. 23

A few minutes before 4:30 p. m. one day last week at Newark Airport, United Air Lines' ten-place transport No. 23, bound for Chicago, taxied up to the passenger depot for loading. The passenger list was unusually small. There was a trim young woman who, flushed with excitement, confided in the pilot that she had missed the previous plane and had to be in Reno next morning "to visit her sister." (It turned out that she was to be married next day.) And there was a middle-aged man named Emil Smith, a retired grocer. Mr. Smith caused the Negro porter at the depot some concern. He seemed to have had too much to drink. His luggage included a smallbore rifle and cartridges. (It later developed that he was expected to compete in a shoot at Chicago's North Shore Gun Club.) And he was extraordinarily fussy about taking a brown-paper parcel into the cabin with him. The porter decided Mr. Smith's behavior was not ominous enough to warrant reporting. He slammed the cabin door shut and in a moment No. 23 roared away--a big twin-motored Boeing of the latest design--with its two passengers, its crew of two pilots and the usual attractive young stewardess. Three hours later No. 23 slid down to Cleveland on time, took off again with two added passengers: a young refrigerator salesman and a radio service man lately employed by the transport company. (The latter's wife was afraid of airplanes so he had not told her all about his new job.) No. 23 droned on, over Ohio and Indiana farmlands, true on its course of blinking beacons and whining radio signals. At 8:46 p. m. the ground station at Chicago heard the pilot's laconic "Okay.". . . A few minutes later country folk near Chesterton, Ind., 50 mi. southeast of Chicago, were frightened by a terrific explosion overhead. They ran from their houses to see No. 23 gyrating crazily in the sky. its tail broken off. With its cabin lights ablaze, the plane spun to earth, whipped off the tops of a clump of trees, crashed on its back with another earsplitting blast. Towering flames did the rest. Investigators soon discovered this was no ordinary crash. A good ship, flown in good weather by a company which had lost no passenger in six years and 40 million miles of multi-motored flying, does not simply collapse. Engines had not failed. Fuel tanks had not exploded. There was no fire in the air. The investigators found several curious points of evidence: The baggage compartment and toilet had been smashed to smithereens. The inside of the toilet door was pockmarked with bits of metal; the other side was unscathed. The tail unit had been severed just abaft the toilet and was found practically intact about a mile from the wreck. Bodies of Smith and the radio man, untouched by fire, were near the tail section. In the same vicinity lay a blanket, peppered with tiny burned holes, and parts of a bottle. These were rushed to the Crime Detection Laboratory of Northwestern University. Presently United Air Lines announced its findings: The crash was caused by a high explosive. The blast occurred probably in the lavatory cabinet where blankets were stored. Whether the explosive was a bottle of nitroglycerine or a time bomb, analysts could not say.

Department of Justice agents dismissed all thought of Passenger Smith and his parcel; they had found that harmless object in the wreckage. They dismissed a theory that friends of convicted kidnappers who had been flown to prison in a chartered United plane would seek such a fantastic revenge. They pondered the suggestion that some lunatic, worked up over United's wage dispute with its pilots, might have planted the bomb. But none of those notions seemed the real answer to the question: who could have wanted to murder any of the seven persons, or some other person who did not fly, in No. 23?

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