Flight 7 Is Missing

by Ken H. Fortenberry

  The trial had begun with testimony from William Payne’s sobbing mother, who told the court that she and her husband watched her son “march up the ramp” as he entered the Clipper.

  “He went up and waved goodbye as he always does,” she testified, wiping tears from her eyes.

  Minutes later the widow Payne’s attorney, George Lieberman, introduced a sworn statement from Pan Am counter agent Walter J. Unck, who said that he had checked a passenger named Payne onto the plane and that a pretakeoff head count showed the proper number of passengers on board.

  Judge Goodman has heard enough.

  “I cannot see any justification without some kind of proof suitable for a court of law in indulging in innuendos and suspicious contentions . . . even going so far as wanting to investigate the widow’s activities which were perfectly normal,” he scolds as he stares at insurance company investigator Russell Stiles.

  Jones, Stiles, and other insurance company representatives are stunned by the judge’s quick decision—even before they have had time to present much of a case.

  “I can understand there is perhaps a natural inclination for insurance companies to advantage themselves on what is a technical provision in a contract, but certainly I can see no reason for it in this case,” he rules.

  He orders Western Life to immediately pay Payne’s widow $20,000 and to reimburse her $1,118 for the insurance premiums she has paid since the crash. She walks out of the courtroom on Friday, December 20, 1960, with a wide smile on her face and pauses only briefly to pose for a newspaper photographer, who snaps her picture before she heads home.

  Two months later Harriet reaches an out-of-court settlement in her $300,000 wrongful-death suit against Pan Am. The airline agrees to pay the widow $71,156. She has now received over $225,000—the equivalent of more than $2 million in today’s money—as a result of the crash.

  Across the continent, in Ridgefield, Connecticut, tiny, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Bette Anne Wygant is playing outside her house and trying to remember her pilot-daddy. She’s only five years old but remembers holding onto his woolen pants legs and crying when he left for trips because she didn’t want him to leave. She remembers the smell of his leather suitcases and the identification and destination tags that hung from them.

  Suddenly she hears a plane fly overhead and grabs her toy telephone. She knows that her daddy is in heaven, and to her that means the sky. She dials the phone and talks to her daddy, telling him to please ask God to let him come back home, but her daddy doesn’t respond.

  PART THREE

  Saturday, March 28, 1964

  It is a chilly evening this Saturday before Easter, and my mother has taken us to Folly Beach, South Carolina, for a weekend getaway and a dose of Charleston history. My brothers and I are kicking along the sand and having a noisy good time when I notice my mother is dragging behind us.

  I can tell there is something very wrong.

  I turn around and walk back to her, and for the first time in nearly seven years, I see tears rolling down her face. She is so sad.

  “What’s wrong, Mom?”

  “I just miss your daddy so much. So, so much,” she says as she breaks down in front of me for the first time since California seven years earlier. “I am so lonely, Kenny. I just can’t tell you how much I still love him and miss him.”

  Her heartbroken confession momentarily stuns me.

  “I still love him and miss him too, Mom. We all do,” I say as I hug her in a feeble attempt to bring some comfort.

  I am only thirteen but feel like I have instantly become much older.

  She wipes away her tears and breaks into one of her family-famous fake smiles. For a moment she seems to forget herself and her own misery and focuses once again on the most important thing in her life: my brothers and me.

  “I’ll be OK, son. You go on with your brothers now and have fun,” she says as I hesitatingly walk away, my own heart heavy with a pain I haven’t felt since November 1957.

  It hurts to see my mother like that. I am heartbroken, angry, and determined. I look out into the ocean as the waves rumble to shore and realize that although they are thousands of miles apart, the Atlantic and the Pacific are the same water—the same water rolling onto the sand here in South Carolina may have once rolled across the Pacific, where my father’s body rests somewhere.

  I gaze into the horizon and imagine Romance of the Skies rapidly falling from the sky, closing in on the ocean, and then crashing in a thunderous, splashing roar into the sea. It disappears as I turn away, but I will see that Stratocruiser again and again every time I walk along a seashore for the rest of my life.

  Wednesday, November 20, 1965

  I was fourteen years old when I decided that I had waited long enough. I needed to know why my father’s plane had crashed eight years earlier, and I wanted to know right now. I had read and reread the 1959 Civil Aeronautics Board’s report many times in the previous six years and continued to be bothered by its conclusion:

  “The Board has insufficient tangible evidence at this time to determine the cause of the accident. Further research and investigation is in process concerning the significance of evidence of carbon monoxide in body tissue of aircraft occupants.”

  I wondered what the board’s “further research and investigation” had found. Surely after all those years there was something new to report, especially on the carbon monoxide angle, so I wrote a letter to CAB board chairman James R. Durfee and asked for some answers.

  The government’s response a few weeks later made me feel as though someone had slapped me across the face. Hard.

  That slap still burns today.

  “You are advised that the CAB file on the aircraft accident that occurred on November 8, 1957, between San Francisco and Honolulu contains no information additional to that contained in the Board’s published report, of which you apparently have a copy,” it stated.

  “We are sorry we are not able to help you in your further search for information pertinent to the death of your father.”

  “No additional information”? “We are sorry”?

  I was stunned. Unsatisfied. Hurt. Angry. Determined. Eight years after my father and forty-three other people lost their lives in an unexplained airline disaster it was clear that the bureaucrats in Washington had done nothing and that the files were simply gathering dust in the archives. No one had lifted a finger to solve the mystery.

  As it turns out, that cold letter set into motion a lifetime search for my father’s killer. I vowed that day that I would search until the day I died if that’s what it took to tell the world what had happened on November 8, 1957, and why forty-four people perished with no explanation.

  I went to work immediately, poring through yellowed, well-worn newspaper clippings my mother had saved after the crash, reading every one several times. I not only took notes about what officials claimed may have happened, but also wrote down the many unanswered questions I had in my mind.

  How in the name of God could a seventy-ton aircraft—the most sophisticated commercial plane ever built, with forty-four souls aboard—simply fall from the sky and plunge to the bottom of the ocean without an explanation?

  I wrote a letter to another government agency. And another. And another.

  I am still writing letters today.

  In addition to the carbon monoxide angle, one of the many unresolved issues that bothered me was this statement from the 1959 CAB report:

  “During the course of the investigation, and in view of the circumstances of the disappearance of the aircraft and the absence of living witnesses or crew members, an extensive investigation of personal activities and backgrounds of crew, passengers, and company ground personnel of the San Francisco base of PAWA was made by CAB and other governmental agency personnel. This investigation included personal interviews with all personnel who might have had access to the aircraft for any reason while the aircraft was on the ground on its last stopover at San Francisco from November 6,
1957, to November 8, 1957, and involved some 98 persons. This phase of the investigation disclosed that the aircraft received normal preparation for the flight and disclosed nothing relative to the character or behavior of any person that might point to sabotage in connection with the loss of the aircraft.”

  Bureaucrats have always had clever ways with words and special ways to slant them one way or the other to suit their purposes.

  The final words in that statement were a lie. A bald-faced lie.

  The Civil Aeronautics Board had been keenly aware that two people on the plane that day—purser Oliver Eugene Crosthwaite and passenger William Harrison Payne—had been the subjects of superficial investigations, and that their “character” and “behavior” were more than questionable. At this early stage in the search for my father’s killer neither the public nor I had a clue that Crosthwaite had been identified as a suspect, but Pan American had suspected him from the beginning, and Payne had been fingered publicly in newspaper reports in 1958. Why didn’t the report at least mention these two men, even with a disclaimer, rather than stating that no passengers or crew members had even raised eyebrows from San Francisco to Washington?

  Although my father had been physically present in my life for only six years, the things he did and words he said stayed on my mind as my search continued throughout my teen years. They were as much a part of me as my biological DNA. I knew right from wrong, the difference between good and bad, and had a burning desire to seek out, and stand up for, the truth. Although I drifted occasionally as a teen, my father’s goodness and character always took me back to the right place. His letters home were a moral roadmap.

  I knew my father had been abandoned as a small child, but had fought the odds and had become an educated, worldly man. I also knew he was a World War II Navy veteran who had a passionate love for the United States. He was a patriot, and not the kind of fellow to question the integrity, decency, or competency of the men and women who directed our government and its many agencies, including those involved in aviation safety—the very people I was now setting my sights on.

  We call ourselves The Monarchs. The auditorium at Roebuck Junior High is packed for our school’s annual talent show, and we tear into “Wipe Out,” my hands dancing across the piano keys to a delighted audience that applauds wildly when we finish. We take our bows and return to the stage minutes later, when we are presented with the first-place award. I am old enough to know better, but look across the audience, especially at the rear of the auditorium, for what I hope will be a glimpse of a late-arriving and surprise, special spectator.

  He never shows up. Daddy is still missing.

  Wednesday, December 3, 1952

  Frankfurt, Germany

  “Dear Mom and Boys:

  “It seems almost certain now that we will be able to leave by the end of the year, and I am pretty sure of leaving on the 20th of December. I hope I can come home for Christmas and get a few days off. If I could, I would be fishing in Florida. Someday, my love, you and I will be able to do just that if you want to and I live long enough. All things come to those who work, wait and plan.

  “It still is not cold here. It just stays coat-weather all the time. The trees have almost shed all their leaves now, but the forests are still deep, dark and very beautiful. I’m sure no place else has such beautiful forests. I suppose that is why so many beautiful stories have been written about these forests. Hansel & Gretel came from here as well as the great tales of Siegfried. This is close to the place where the Pied Piper of Hamelin led all the rats into the river and then when the city wouldn’t pay what they had promised, he led all the children away. The children were found many years later—now grown—in a valley far to the east of here. Close by, too, is the beautiful Lorelei who leads so many sailors to their deaths at the bend in the river.

  “There are parts of the old wall to the city still here. South and east of here the most beautiful and simple song of Christendom was written—‘Silent Night.’ These are a great and proud people. They are very industrious, and productive. One can hardly know them without feeling a certain amount of admiration mixed with sorrow for them; also, a little hate. The people who had the guts to defy the Roman Empire and founded Lutheranism were too weak to say no to a mustached Austrian paper-hanger. The people who created the V-2 don’t know what a shower-bath is. The people who were able to weave their language into the simple classic beauty of ‘Silent Night.’ don’t even have a word for apple pie. They have so much, and they miss and lack so much. . . .

  “It is a city of contrasts. The Sunday morning air brings to your ears the peal of church bells over a thousand years old and, it seems, the stench of the gas chambers of ten years ago. From the rubble of the old city still containing the bodies of many super men rises new modern buildings aided by the US dollar. These people have plenty to do for 20 years more. They had their ass WHIPPED this time and except for the benevolent goodness of the United States and England they would, as a people, be as extinct today as the Phoenicians. I hope we have preserved them for the good of man and the glory of God. Time will tell.

  “I love all of you, my precious babies—and am thankful that you are what you are, first, last, and always AMERICANS—and MINE!

  “Love, Daddy”

  That is where Daddy and I parted, and that unfinished, unsatisfactory CAB report was the catalyst. I love America, too, but I didn’t believe that the bureaucrats in Washington had done their jobs, and if it were up to me to do it for them and solve the mystery of Flight 7, that’s exactly what I intended to do.

  Those were the days before the internet, when a long-distance phone call wasn’t cheap, and the cost of a flight across the country to interview someone was out of the question. I spent a considerable amount of time looking through library microfilms of newspaper articles and writing countless letters, most of which received no reply. I also began my career as a newspaperman and started a family of my own. I was determined that my children would learn what happened to the grandfather they would never know.

  When I began, I had two primary theories for the crash: mechanical failure, and passenger Payne. (It was more than a decade later before I learned about Crosthwaite.) What I had to do next was to gather enough information to rule each in or out, and explore any other possibilities that might arise during the search for my father’s killer.

  I had no idea it would take me fifty years.

  Thursday, December 16, 1965

  Washington, D.C.

  Eight years have passed since Flight 7 disappeared. The headlines are long gone, yet the mystery remains. Officially, William Harrison Payne and Oliver Eugene Crosthwaite are no longer suspects, but two days earlier the Federal Aviation Agency’s chief security officer had called A. K. Bowles of the FBI’s Identification Division with an unusual request: would he run a fingerprint check on Payne to see if his prints have shown up in agency’s database during the past eight years?

  Carl F. Maisch, a former FBI agent who would later head the FAA’s first sky marshal program, followed up his phone call with a formal written request to FBI Director Hoover:

  “In conjunction with an official inquiry as to the possibility of Payne being alive and continuing to be active in the area of crimes aboard aircraft, and in view of his unconfirmed death in a fatal air crash, we would appreciate your making a comparison of the prints of the subject on file in the Deceased Fingerprint Files with known prints on file in the Identification Division, with a view toward establishing that Payne may be alive under an assumed identity.”

  The letter and the FAA inquiry were never made public, but my discovery of them years later, through a Freedom of Information request, was a bombshell.

  For reasons unknown, the FAA was concerned that Payne might still be alive somewhere hiding under an assumed name.

  That would have likely meant he was living off the insurance proceeds that he and his “widow” split after the plane crash.

  The FAA’s letter also wa
s intriguing because it raised the possibility that he was “continuing to be active in crimes aboard aircraft.”

  Someone at the FAA must have thought Payne sabotaged N90944, because the words “continuing to be active” indicated that he did something once and might be doing it again.

  An FBI note at the bottom of Maisch’s letter states this:

  “FAA is attempting to determine whether William Harrison Payne is still alive. He was listed as a passenger on the ill-fated Pan American plane crash 11/8/57 and his body was never recovered or identified. . . .

  Subsequent to the crash it was determined that Payne had taken out substantial insurance for the flight, was in financial difficulty, and allegedly had a knowledge of explosives.”

  Hoover replied to Maisch on December 22, 1965, informing him that Payne’s fingerprints (taken when he enlisted in the Navy) were being maintained in the agency’s active file.

  “The fingerprint file of Payne is appropriately marked to notify your agency in the event his fingerprints are ever received in the future. His fingerprints have not been received since November 8, 1957,” Hoover stated.

  Once again, FBI Director Hoover didn’t even bother to see if there was anything his agency could do to assist another federal agency as it considered the possibility that Payne was still alive. History will prove that Hoover didn’t mind ignoring agency rules or breaking federal laws whenever it suited his purpose, but he remained uninterested in Pan Am Flight 7.

  Did Payne actually board the airplane? Did someone conspire with him to fake his death for the insurance proceeds?

  December 30, 1976

  For years my investigation had stalled. It’s not that I had lost interest; it was just that there seemed to be no decent leads to chase down.