Flight 7 Is Missing

by Ken H. Fortenberry

  “I don’t know where I was going the next day, but I put on my skirt and I put on a sweater that was Mom’s. It was a red sweater that we would wear back and forth, and I looked a lot like my mom. So, I came out with that sweater on and he was sitting there. Woo! He was so creepy, and he said, ‘Get that sweater off right now!’ And let me tell you, I looked at him and I went back, and I got that sweater off. He was one furious character.”

  Crosthwaite’s behavior became even more bizarre in the following weeks.

  “He’s doing some crazy stuff now, and then later on, I don’t know where I was when he did this, he got all of Mama’s clothes and then they were gone. He even went in my closet and took what he thought was Mama’s, but a lot of that was mine and he left me without hardly any clothes.”

  Tania didn’t know it at the time, but the grieving Gene was chasing another woman and had given her Julia’s clothing and her expensive perfume in an attempt to win her love.

  Gene Crosthwaite was a very troubled man. Anyone who had contacted him within the final weeks of his life could tell you in a heartbeat that he was off-his-rocker nuts. One person, in addition to the Santa Cruz County juvenile officer, was convinced that he was mentally unstable.

  That person was Tamara Shankoff, a Russian girlfriend of Tania’s mother, and she telephoned first Tania and then her grandmother soon after Julia’s funeral with some very disturbing information.

  “Anyway, he used to bring Mama perfumes from France, Chanel Number 5 bottles, and all these expensive things, and he gave them away to this Russian girl. He wanted her to marry him.”

  This startling disclosure from Tania came from out of nowhere, and if true, would lend further credence to the idea that Crosthwaite was mentally imbalanced.

  “She called us and said, ‘What’s wrong with Gene?’ He showed up at her house and brought her perfume, Mama’s clothes, and stuff that he really should have given to me.”

  “Wait a minute. How soon was this after your mother died?” I asked.

  “I’ll have to think on that. Anyway, he told Tamara that he really liked Russian women and didn’t know how he could live without Julia, and he said he wanted to marry her ’cuz he wanted a Russian wife.”

  “Where did you hear this?

  “From Tamara herself. T-A-M-A-R-A. I can’t remember her last name. Anyway, she was my mama’s girlfriend.”

  “He did this soon after your mama died?”

  “That’s what shocked all of us. I told Grandma and said that Tamara just called me, and she said, ‘She talked to me, too.’ Grandma said, ‘He’s just lost his mind, Tania. He’s just beside himself. You’ll have to forgive him. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s in grief. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.’ I understood that because that’s the way I was, too.”

  “After he gave the perfume away and the clothes away, when he wasn’t there I didn’t care because I was scared of him. He was acting so crazy.

  “Anyway, she turned him down when he was asking her for marriage, and she kept saying no. He kept saying he wanted his Russian wife back, and then he was bawling and asking her for marriage. She said she felt so awful. She was so uncomfortable, and she felt he was just in a crazy state because of losing his wife and she turned him down.”

  Gene’s unwanted advances to Tamara continued for several weeks.

  “She kept telling him there’s no way and he kept pressing her. ‘Why? Why? What’s wrong with me? Why can’t you marry me?’ And I mean she said she was afraid. She said she didn’t want to bring more heartache to him, but she turned him down and she felt she had to tell us what happened. We were in such a quandary about it, and Grandma was so upset. There was so much going on. She said, ‘He’s just gone plum loco, Tania. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.’

  “Yeah, he did that, and that other thing he did, too.

  “That other thing?”

  “Our house was on a hill and we had a big round driveway and as you came up the hill like this, and it’s like, ‘Whoop,’ and he had a sprinkler on in the middle of the driveway. So Grandma is asking him, ‘Why are you watering the driveway, Gene?’ and he says, ‘You know Julia don’t like dust. She don’t like dust and I’m just making sure there’s no dust in the driveway.’”

  Tania explained to me that her mother had been a stickler for cleanliness.

  “You could eat off the floor. She did not like any kind of dirt. And then I thought, you know, well, he’s right, but I thought, ‘What difference does it make now? Mom’s not here, and when she was alive, he never watered the driveway.’ So he just left and we turned it off, ’cuz the water is running down the driveway.”

  Let’s talk about that last week, I suggested.

  “He wasn’t home.”

  That was strange, I thought, because he was not flying and had been visiting people in the Bay Area, including the juvenile officer in Santa Cruz.

  Tania said that her stepfather was away from home most of the final week of his life, and to this day she doesn’t know where he stayed. That wasn’t unusual, she said, because after her mother had died, he disappeared for days at a time with no explanation.

  “He was missing after Mama died and Grandma was in shock and I was in shock.”

  “Where do you think he was staying?”

  “Well, we don’t know where he was staying at when he wasn’t in Felton. I don’t know. He could have been at his daughter’s. Apparently, they developed a relationship.”

  Tania admitted that some things that happened after her mother’s death were now a blur, so I refreshed her memory about one strange incident that had occurred in Gene’s final week.

  I read from her sworn statement to CAB investigator Schonberger in 1957:

  “Four days before leaving on his last flight he gathered many of the papers in his desk and dresser and burned them. My grandmother, by protesting, prevented him from burning my adoption papers. . . .”

  “OK, I remember that now. Yeah, I had forgotten it because I was so stressed. But yeah, when you said that I remember Grandma grabbing stuff from him.”

  I decided to test her memory a bit more and asked her to tell me about the desk and where it was in relation to the rest of the room in which he had burned the papers.

  “It was a bright-red Chinese, a Chinese-American desk. It was in the front room in the corner.”

  She gestures: “Here’s the fireplace and here is the red desk and it was at that desk, that’s where the phone was, and, uh, I remember Grandma grabbing the papers, but, uh, he was burning stuff in the fireplace.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I don’t think I hung around, ’cuz he made me a nervous wreck.”

  “Do you remember what you told the CAB man about Gene working in his basement workshop and always tinkering around with something down there?”

  “I just remember the two days prior [to the crash], but you know, I don’t go down there. I don’t want to be around him, so I couldn’t tell you what he was doing, you know. I just figured as a man he was trying to keep busy, but I couldn’t tell you what he was doing.”

  “What about the dynamite?”

  “I do remember for some reason there was an issue with dynamite, some kind of dynamite, and he was gonna blow up some kind of stumps.”

  “What do you remember about that?”

  “I just remember that he bought it and then Grandma was scared. And Grandma said, ‘Do you know that your dad has bought dynamite?' I go, ‘Dynamite? What for?’ And she said he said he was going to blow up the stumps, and I just went, ‘Oh,’ and her and Peter were just like, ‘He don’t know anything about blowing up stumps. He could blow up half the yard,’ and I thought, ‘Well, that’s true,’ but that was it.”

  “They [investigators] couldn’t find the dynamite,” I reminded her.

  “Yeah, they went down there, but they didn’t find anything.”

  Now we were finally getting somewhere.

  I asked her to tell me
specifically what she remembered about how Gene acted the last two days before the crash.

  “He spooked me because he just would sit in that chair by the window, the bay window. He didn’t talk. He would just glare at me. So I pretty much stayed downstairs with Grandma.”

  “Did he watch TV?”

  “No, he didn’t have a TV. Grandma did. He was just very despondent. He just stared all the time. He was so gloomy. He would just sit in that chair and stare out that window, and so I figured he’s in grief and wants to be left alone.”

  It was time. Long past time to find out what I needed to know and what I hoped she really wanted to tell me.

  “Tell me about that last night and the morning he left for the flight.”

  “It was the final, final thing he said which I have thought about so much,” she said. “That last day.”

  She hesitated to go on, but once again I decided not to fill the silence with my own words. I waited.

  “And then I went to sleep that night and he was already in bed with the door closed, and I was glad. And in the morning, he, he was up, uh, getting ready and so, you know, I got up in the morning and I needed to go to the restroom real bad. So, the rules were: when Daddy’s up getting ready for work stay out of his way. He doesn’t want anybody bothering him.

  “So, I went to the restroom and as I was coming out, and he just came out of the bedroom like he was going into the bathroom and he looked at me and says, ‘Wait a minute!’ I thought, ‘Oh, Jesus!’ You know, when you hear that voice, and I stopped, and I looked at him and he says, ‘You really think you’re something.’ And I just thought, what? You know, I mean, and he points his finger at me and says, ‘You’re gonna find out some things. Some big things are gonna happen and you’re gonna be shocked.’

  “That scared me ’cause, you know, with his mean attitude. I try to figure out something that I’m going to find out bad, and I know it’s not gonna be good coming from him. That was his last words to me: ‘You really think you’re something, but you’re gonna find out big some things and you’re gonna be shocked.’ With his finger at me like that. ‘You’re gonna find out and you’re not gonna like it.’ I went into my room and just shut the door. I was shook up. He was mad again and I didn’t know why.”

  That was it. This is what Tania had kept secret for more than sixty years. Gene had told Tania that “some big things are gonna happen” and that, in effect, he was not coming home alive. How else would she have been able to “find out some things?” When his will would be opened in a few days she would learn that he had excluded her unless she complied with his demands.

  Gene would finally have control over Tania.

  I decided I’d come back to his final words in a few minutes, but first, still in a bit of shock, I wanted to know how she had learned about the plane crash.

  “I was in Santa Cruz. I think I had gone to a movie with a friend and I came back, and I was going upstairs, and I noticed the lights were on in the house. I looked in there and I saw a girlfriend of mine and her boyfriend—they were older than me—sitting there. So I come in and I said, ‘What are you guys doing here?’ ‘Oh, we came to see you,’ she said, and I said 'OK.' She said, ‘Have you heard any news?’ I said, ‘No, I’ve been at the movies. I haven’t heard anything.’ She said, ‘Well, come sit down. We’ve got some bad news,’ and she says, ‘Your dad’s been in a plane crash and they are looking for the plane. They don’t know if there are any survivors.’”

  Tania said she was shocked beyond words when told of the crash. Her mother dead. Her stepfather likely dead. What would happen now?

  Still reeling from what she had told me a few minutes earlier about her stepfather’s final words, I asked her again, to see if her story was the same.

  “He is leaving because I am still in my bathrobe. I hadn’t even gotten dressed yet. I had just brushed my teeth. He turned around and started getting his stuff and leaving. And he points his finger and he says to me, ‘You think you’re something . . .”

  She repeats the same words. They have the same meaning.

  “You know, he has to be dead for me to find out what he’s talking about.”

  I needed to know more, and the search for my father’s killer needed a conclusion.

  “Looking back at this now, do you think he could have been involved in this? Do you think he did it?”

  “Yep,” she answered without hesitation.

  “That was our secret, and Grandma said he just completely lost it. She said he was in such grief that he lost his mind. He couldn’t handle Mama’s death. She said he just wanted to be with her, and she says, ‘I believe he did it,’ and ‘Tania, don’t tell anybody, ’cause this could be big trouble. Big trouble.’”

  Big trouble is exactly what Tania and her grandmother were afraid of when CAB investigators Claude Schonberger and Charles Collar started snooping around the neighborhood in the days after Romance of the Skies crashed. With no means of financial support, reeling from two deaths in three months and with neither understanding the US law enforcement system, they were scared to death. What if they said something wrong? What if Gene really did cause the plane crash? Would the government send them back to China? Those thoughts were foremost in their minds when investigators knocked on their door and started taking the place apart in a search for evidence.

  “They took the pictures down and looked behind the pictures. I have no idea what they’re looking for, and they went through the whole house. They took the pillows off the couch and looked there. They mentioned that they had followed me, that they’ve been following me, and that they’ve been asking questions. I remember Grandma saying. ‘Do you know that there’s some kind of people in town and that they say that they’re FBI and they’re detectives and they’re asking questions about you and me and your dad and mom?’ And I don’t know; I hadn’t heard anything about that.

  “They went through the whole house. And then Grandma came, and she saw them doing this and she just wanted to know what they are searching for, and they just said they were looking. They never said what they were looking for. They just said, ‘We’re looking,’ and whatever terms they mentioned.”

  Tania said she and her grandmother stood by in stunned silence as the federal investigators (she still believes they were FBI men) went through everything in every room in the house. Upstairs. Downstairs. In the basement, especially the basement workshop where Gene had been tinkering with something in his final days and where, presumably, the missing explosives might be found.

  “You know, we were so horrified, so horrified by that, and then you know that FBI man says, ‘Now I want you to be careful, young girl. And don’t talk about this plane crash and about your dad and the FBI being here.’ He said that we could be in danger.

  “He says, ‘You’ve got to realize how many people lost their families and their children. People can do funny things, and if they have suspicions that your dad had any involvement, that could put you in danger, because they would figure, ‘Well, I lost my family and we’re going to get you.’

  “What that man said, that’s what kept me afraid all those years.”

  That was the end of the federal investigation of sabotage suspect Oliver Eugene Crosthwaite. Tania and her grandmother never saw or heard from anyone involved in the crash investigation again. The FBI never raised a finger to help solve one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in American commercial aviation history.

  Tania and her grandmother kept their little secret. They rarely talked with each other about the crash and never told anyone about the federal investigators’ search of their house. They never mentioned that Tamara had repeatedly turned the grieving Gene down for marriage and never uttered a word about that strange day when Gene watered the driveway because “Julia don’t like dust.”

  They never spoke a word about Gene’s final, chilling promise that something big was about to happen, or their belief that he caused the crash.

  “Did you ever have suspicions of y
our own that maybe Gene blew up the plane?”

  “Yeah, yeah, after I knew what happened to the plane. After they couldn’t find the plane and everything and it was missing. You know, I thought about those words. Those words have troubled me. . . . You know, that’s where I just would like to know, what did he mean? You know, I basically, like, somehow he was trying to get me by doing that will thing, you know, or was it even further than that? Boy, you know, ‘You’re going to find out something big here.’”

  I asked her this:

  “Specifically, what do you remember your grandmother saying about Gene having done it?”

  “Her words were: ‘He went crazy at your mom’s death and he went crazy. Crazy, and he’s done this.’ That’s what her words were. And I believed her because of, seeing what I saw, how he acted, the words he said, the depression, just sitting there in that chair and going to his room . . . with the thing locked, and I couldn’t stand it. I was afraid. All his behavior was very unnatural. I know he was not a happy father and that his behavior after Mom’s death was so considerably worse than he ever was.”

  And how about stepgrandfather Peter, the man who had told the investigators about the missing explosives? Did he also believe Gene destroyed the plane?

  “I do know that he was in total agreement with Grandma about that.”

  So, the three people who knew Crosthwaite best in the final months of his life—Tania, her grandmother, and her stepgrandfather—all believed he had destroyed the plane.

  “Do you really think he was capable of blowing up the plane?”

  “Yep.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of his meanness. The way he looked, and his voice. I could actually see him plotting it when he was sitting in that chair looking so gloomy.

  “Oh God, I know. I constantly put it out of my head for years because I thought, well, it made me mad, ’cuz I would think, ‘How could he do that to all those people,’ you know? But, Lord Almighty, he was that mean.”

  The conversation with Tania and her insistence that her stepfather had “changed” after he had contracted tuberculosis two years prior to the crash sent me once again back into my extensive files as soon as I returned home. How could this farm boy from Colorado have been turned into a suicidal murderer? Was the death of Gene Crosthwaite’s wife three months prior to the plane crash enough to send him off the deep end or was something else involved? Was there something in his psychology or medical history that might provide the answers?