Flight 7 Is Missing Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Table Of Contents

  Credits

  Credits

  Acknowledgments

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Strange Things Over Planet Earth

  A Perfect Day to Fly

  The Point of No Return

  A Needle in a Haystack

  Sharks and Bodies

  Fit to Fly?

  Gone to Eternal Rest

  Daddy’s Not Coming Home

  Mystery Crash, Mystery Fire

  This Means Murder

  Photo Insert

  A Violent and Vindictive Man

  The Right Hand of God

  Psychics and a Flying Princess

  Mr. X, The Man From Saturn

  Miles to Go Before I Sleep

  Confused or Lying

  Grieving Gene Goes Crazy

  Tania’s Confession

  The Probable Cause

  Addendum

  Bodies Recovered and Causes of Death

  Index

  More To Read

  Table of Contents

  Credits

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  1Strange Things Over Planet Earth

  2A Perfect Day to Fly

  3The Point of No Return

  4A Needle in a Haystack

  5Sharks and Bodies

  6Fit to Fly?

  7Gone to Eternal Rest

  8Daddy’s Not Coming Home

  9Mystery Crash, Mystery Fire

  10This Means Murder

  Photo Insert

  11A Violent and Vindictive Man

  12The Right Hand of God

  13Psychics and a Flying Princess

  14Mr. X, The Man From Saturn

  15Miles to Go Before I Sleep

  16Confused or Lying

  17Grieving Gene Goes Crazy

  18Tania’s Confession

  19The Probable Cause

  Addendum

  Bodies Recovered and Causes of Death

  Index

  More to read/About the Author

  Flight 7 is Missing

  © 2020 Ken H. Fortenberry

  All Rights Reserved.

  Reproduction in whole or in part without the author’s permission is strictly forbidden. All photos and/or copyrighted material appearing in this book remain the work of its owners.

  Book designed by Mark Karis

  Front & Back design: Mark Karis

  Edited by David Bushman

  Published in the USA by Fayetteville Mafia Press

  Columbus, Ohio

  Contact Information

  Email: [email protected]

  Website: fayettevillemafiapress.com

  Follow the Author at

  @Flight7Missing

  Follow the Publisher at

  @fmpbooks

  ISBN: 9781949024067

  eBook ISBN: 978194902407

  This work is dedicated to my father, William Holland Fortenberry, a wise and worldly man whom I adored and whose memory I treasure. His romance with the skies took him to the far corners of the earth, but he was never very far from home and the family he dearly loved.

  It is also dedicated to those innocent men, women, and children who perished on that unforgettable and dreary November day in 1957, and to their families, who are left with little more than photographs and precious memories.

  Acknowledgments

  This work would not have been possible without the advice, support, and encouragement of my partner and awesome wife, Anna Jonas Fortenberry, who has been by my side for nearly every step of the lifelong search for my father’s killer and who has patiently put up with me through all of the ups and downs. I also want to thank our five amazing children, Angela Fortenberry Payne, Jonas H. Fortenberry, Benjamin H. Fortenberry, John B. H. Fortenberry, and Leslie Fortenberry Thomas, for having faith in their old man and for their confidence in this project.

  Special words of sincere gratitude and appreciation to my colleague author/historian Dr. Gregg Herken, for his immeasurable help and loyal friendship, and to the brilliant David Pawlowski for his unflagging support and belief in both me and this project.

  Also, my most heartfelt thanks to Norma G. Clack and the Clack family for sharing their personal and poignant memories of Lee and his family; Bette Anne Wygant and her family for their spiritual encouragement (Amazing Grace, my friends); Dr. Jeff Kieliszewski for his invaluable professional input in helping to solve this mystery; my older brother, Jerry H. Fortenberry, who has grieved in silence for more than sixty years; my running buddy and little brother, Craig H. Fortenberry; the Pan American World Airways family; the Pan Am Historical Foundation; Fred Sohn; the late Frank Garcia Jr.; The Pan Am Museum Foundation; the staff of the Otto Richter Library at the University of Miami; Margaret Stiles Storm and her late father, investigator Russell Stiles; Karen Crocker Derry; Tom Crocker; Dick Ferguson; Lee Gaffrey Jr.; David Lane; Duke Hughes; Tom Hughes; Cynthia Brown Stark; Bill H. Fortenberry; Charles Hatchette; William Nowdesha; Lindsay Newton; Mark Lubiszewski; Stan Rolfsrud; Richard Grossheim; Cathy Davis; Jim Phillips; Elizabeth Blach; Bidney Bozard; Jim and Connie Martin; Brad and Shan McClain; Claudia Allen; Lani Suchicki; Fred Ellis; Kathryn Oplinger; Steve Allen; David Joyner; Harry Hawkins; Bruce Carlton; Georgia Biershenk Wall; Jackson Payne; Harris Payne; Anna Caroline Payne; Jason Payne; Isaiah Foster; Ryker H. Fortenberry; Sarah, Maddie, and Molly Thomas; Ronnie Agnew; David Bushman and Scott Ryan of Fayetteville Mafia Press for giving me the encouragement I needed to complete my search; and my Facebook friends and countless others who have contributed or helped me along the way with information or interviews. If I have forgotten someone, please understand that it is a mistake of the head, not the heart.

  Profile artwork courtesy of Mike Machat and used with permission.

  Cover photo by Bob Whelan.

  Introduction

  When I was six years old, I thought my dad hung the moon. More than sixty years later I still do.

  My father perished on November 8, 1957, when a Pan American Boeing Stratocruiser flying across the Pacific mysteriously crashed midway between San Francisco and Honolulu. The cause of the crash was never determined, and it is frequently listed as one of the top unsolved mysteries in American commercial aviation history.

  Heartbroken and full of unanswered questions, I began a lifelong journey to find my father’s killer when I was fourteen years old, and before I said my prayers and went to sleep that night in 1965, I made a promise to him and to everyone who had lost their lives on Flight 7 that I would find out how and why they died, even if it took me the rest of my life.

  As it turns out, it nearly did.

  More than six decades after the giant four-engine plane, nicknamed Romance of the Skies, plunged to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, this book finally answers some troubling questions about the crash. It puts together many pieces of a puzzle that was left unsolved by Washington bureaucrats including Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover, who seemed to be more interested in saving face and protecting his agency’s image than in helping to solve the mystery.

  The search for my father’s killer has taken many twists and turns through the years and has been a journey of emotions throughout my childhood and into my senior years. From the first “low” in 1965, when my letter to the Civil Aeronautics Board was dismissed by a low-level bureaucrat, to a recent “high” when documents I had been trying to obtain for more than forty years finally were released, I have never given up the search. Through countless frustrating and often fruitless Freedom of Information requests to agencies including the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Nationa
l Security Agency, I kept opening doors. As soon as one was slammed in my face and I was told there were no more records in their files, I would find another door to push open, and I would keep looking.

  All the time, the central questions remained: How and why did the plane crash? Three words were always in the back of my mind: possible, plausible, and probable. There is a huge difference. Even if it was possible to bring the plane down by one means, I still had to ask the next question: was that angle plausible? In other words, was that theory believable? Was it credible? And once I determined that the cause was plausible, was it probable? I am neither an aviation scientist nor a psychologist, and only you will be able to decide if my final probable cause is worthy of believability.

  As you read this book you will wonder if Romance of the Skies was brought down by a mechanical failure, as some federal investigators hinted, and crashed because penny-pinchers at Pan American had cut corners and failed to properly maintain and inspect the plane before it took off on its ill-fated journey.

  You will consider if the largest, most luxurious airliner in the world was somehow sabotaged by a crewmember who changed his will the morning of the flight and thought Pan Am was out to get him.

  Strange as it may seem, you will consider whether Romance of the Skies lost power and simply fell from the sky because of electromagnetic interference from an unidentified flying object.

  Perhaps even stranger is the remote possibility that the plane had been targeted by the Communist Chinese as payback for a CIA-foiled plot to assassinate Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in a plane blown out of the sky by a time bomb.

  Finally, was Romance of the Skies destroyed by a former Navy frogman and explosives expert who scraped together enough money to buy a one-way ticket to Honolulu and purchased three huge life insurance policies in the days before the crash?

  I wrestled with many theories through the years and chased down every lead, no matter how inconsequential it may have seemed. Every time I convinced myself that the plane had crashed because of mechanical failure, the nagging notion that my father and others on the plane had been murdered forced me to reexamine my findings.

  Every event in this book is real. No names have been changed. None of the characters have been invented, but in order to tell the story about some of the events I have occasionally created dialogue based on interviews, sworn testimony, documents obtained from federal government agencies, various company records, newspaper reports, and my own research and knowledge of events and circumstances.

  Nearly fifty years as a newspaper editor and investigative reporter have taught me many important lessons, not the least of which is to tell the truth and to trust my gut. This story is the truth, and my gut has been gnawing at me for a very long time.

  The search for my father’s killer begins. . . .

  PART ONE

  It was an ordinary day that went straight to hell in a heartbeat.

  Two miles high in a cloudless late-afternoon sky over the Pacific Ocean, the navigator and copilot of Pan American Flight 7 to Honolulu senses that the end may be near, and his perfect world has suddenly been flipped upside down.

  The hair on his skin bristles and he is overwhelmed by a feeling of impending doom, a sensation that briefly numbs the veteran aviator before he regains his senses. Bill Fortenberry tosses his plastic whiz-wheel flight navigation computer onto the floor, tightens his headset and glances to his right, where the normally calm Boeing Stratocruiser cockpit has been transformed into a frantic scene that looks as if it has been plucked straight out of a Hollywood aviation disaster movie.

  But this is no movie, and Fortenberry shakes his head in horrified disbelief, as if that will somehow miraculously end the terrifying scene unfolding all around him.

  “What the hell was that? What’s going on?” he shouts.

  On the flight deck a few feet away, pilot Gordon H. Brown and first officer William P. Wygant wrestle with the controls of the huge four-engine plane and struggle to keep it from plunging into the vast, unforgiving ocean that seems to fill the cockpit windows as the plane begins to lose altitude. Tiny wisps of smoke seep under the closed cockpit door, and the Stratocruiser dips sharply to the left and vibrates violently from cockpit to tail. Their heads shake back and forth as the vibration intensifies, and the groaning sound of bending and stressed metal fills the flight deck.

  The blindsided pilots are losing control, and any hope for a successful water ditching is fading fast, but the experienced, war-veteran professionals are not about to give up without a fight—a fight for their very lives and for everyone aboard Romance of the Skies.

  “Zero 2 fuel flow! Zero 2 fuel flow! Coordinate!” Captain Brown orders. “What about 3 Engine?”

  Flight engineer Albert Pinataro is stone-cold stunned. His eyes nervously dart left and right, up and down at the maze of intricate gauges and instruments in front of him. He doesn’t have time to wonder what has caused the sudden emergency; he tries to focus on what he can— what he must—do now to help keep the engines running and the plane in the air.

  The waves of the Pacific Ocean are closing in at a quickening pace, and Romance of the Skies is 10,000 feet high and careening crazily out of control.

  Soon, it will all be over.

  Just moments earlier the seventy-ton airliner had been cruising across the Pacific and had radioed a nearby Coast Guard vessel that everything was normal and proceeding as planned on the flight from San Francisco to Honolulu. As Flight 7 reached the midway point of its ten-hour flight—the point of no return—the plane’s position was charted by the Coast Guard crew and radioed to the Clipper flying overhead.

  And now, the once-serene flight has turned into hell, and forty-four souls are hanging in the balance, the odds overwhelmingly against any of them living to see another day. The airliner continues to plummet like an out-of-control missile from the Pacific sky.

  Fortenberry shivers and feels powerless.

  Lost.

  Alone.

  Images of his wife and three small sons dash across his eyes as he quickly charts the plane’s position and prepares to send out a distress call on the radio.

  For reasons that remain unexplained, his message is never heard.

  A panic-stricken couple kiss their last kiss, grasp each other’s cold and shaking hands, then bow their heads and pray aloud. Hard-sided makeup bags, ladies’ leather purses, and men’s felt hats tumble from the overhead compartments and rain down on the seats and cabin floor eight feet below as the big airliner jerks back and forth.

  “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done . . . ”

  Their prayer becomes a quiet united communion of hearts and souls as other passengers join in.

  Five hours ago, they were mere strangers. A moment ago, they were reading magazines, enjoying before-dinner cocktails, thinking about tomorrow, and dreaming of the sugar-white sandy beaches and turquoise-blue waters of Waikiki.

  Now, they are unwilling partners in an unfolding tragedy.

  The familiar words of the Lord’s Prayer are chanted rhythmically, and for a few brief moments there is a strange peace and calm aboard Flight 7 to Honolulu.

  “ . . . but deliver us from evil, for Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever. Amen.”

  Suddenly, there is the ear-deafening roar of crunching and ripping metal as the Stratocruiser’s long starboard wing smashes into eight-foot waves and breaks in two. Tons of water gush into a huge, gaping hole that just moments ago was part of the luxurious passenger cabin, and what’s left of the aluminum fuselage cartwheels in the sea and splits in half.

  Screaming passengers are yanked from their seats, heads jerking violently left and right. Bones are crunched and snapped like pretzels as they are tossed and turned in a salty hell and knocked unconscious by the ferocious crash.

  Then, silence. Total silence as Romance of the Skies is slowly sucked into the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

  Flight 7
has ended.

  Friday, November 1, 1957

  Santa Cruz, California

  Oliver Eugene Crosthwaite is on a collision course with the devil.

  His whiskey-bloodshot brown eyes dance around the puke-green room, bouncing from wall to wall. They search frantically for something—anything—to focus on, to rest on, to hide behind. The tiny office inside the annex of the Santa Cruz County Courthouse is closing in on him, just like everything else in his go-to-hell world, and he can’t take much more. He won’t take much more.

  For a split second, his eyes fix on a cheap dime-store landscape picture on the cement block wall, but just as quickly they flit away. They are dancing again. Moving again. Shifting again. Just like the story of Gene’s forty-five-year-old life. He tugs at his left shirt sleeve, and then nervously twists the cuff between his thumb and forefinger.

  Back and forth. Back and forth. Twist. Twist.

  Gene is about to explode. Last night’s double shot after double shot of whiskey hasn’t helped, but he needs the booze to cope these days, and whose business is it anyway if he likes to take a drink?

  Gene has spent much of the last week visiting old friends, friends from his early days with Pan American World Airways, friends of his recently deceased wife, and just about anyone who will listen to him bitch about Pan Am, the stepdaughter he despises, and his miserable life in general. And now here he is, bitching again, this time to Santa Cruz County Juvenile Officer Sergeant Herbert G. Johnson, a retired Navy chief warrant officer and professional polygrapher, who is trying to make sense of it all.

  Sergeant Johnson leans attentively forward in his chair and fights back his growing impatience with the strange man sitting across the desk from him. What is this guy saying? What is his problem? Why isn’t he making any sense?