1959 – Nov 16, National Air #967 Crashes, suspected sabotage, Gulf, off Pilottown, LA– 42

lornajarrettblanchard November 16, 1959

— 42 Aerospaceweb.org. Commercial Airliner Bombing History.

— 42 Aviation Safety Network. Accident Description. National Air Flight 967, 16 Nov 1959.

— 42 CAB. AAR. National Airlines…Douglas DC-7B…in the Gulf of Mexico, Nov 16, 1959.

–36 Passengers –6 Crew

— 42 Quarterly of the NFPA. “Large Loss of Life Fires of 1959.” Vol. 53, July 1960, p. 28.

— 42 Time. “The Naturopath.” Feb 1, 1950.

— 42 Wikipedia. “National Airlines Flight 967.”

Narrative Information

CAB: Synopsis

“National Airlines Flight 967, a DC-7B, N 4891C, crashed in the Gulf of Mexico while en route from Tampa, Florida, to New Orleans, Louisiana, on November 16, 1959, about 0055 c.s.t. All 42 occupants, 36 passengers and 6 crew members, were killed. There was no radio message of impending trouble.

“A radar-observed descent was close to Lat. 29 degree 13’N, Long. 88 degree 40’W. This position is about 108 miles east-southeast of New Orleans, about 30 miles east of Pilottown, near the mouth of the Mississippi River, and very nearly on the planned course. Intensive sea and air searches resulted in finding nine floating bodies and a small amount of floating debris the following morning. None of this disclosed conclusive evidence as to the genesis of the accident. The main wreckage has not been located despite several well planned searches.

“Because of the lack of physical evidence, the probable cause of this accident is unknown.

Investigation

“The flight departed Miami at 22l2 and landed at Tampa at 2300. This segment of the flight was completely routine. At Tampa, some passengers deplaned and others boarded. The passenger manifest for Tampa-New Orleans listed 36 passengers. One of these was not aboard, although a final passenger count showed 36 passengers upon departure from Tampa….Departure from Tampa, with the same crew, was at 2332….

“At 0044 the flight again contacted FAA Pensacola and advised that it would change over to company frequency and would report to the company when leaving 14,000 feet and 7,000 feet. At this time the flight also contacted New Orleans company radio confirming the ATC clearance and reporting the weather to be CAVU [ceiling and visibility unlimited] with low solid (undercast) to the WNW. This is the last known radio contact with Flight 967….

“Coast Guard and civil surface craft immediately searched the area exhaustively and retrieved everything sighted. There were nine bodies, a portion of a tenth body, five life rafts, five life vests, and a highly diversified quantity of buoyant debris entirely from within the cabin and baggage compartments directly below it….

“Post-mortem examinations of the nine bodies, all of which were identified by fingerprints, indicated that all had received traumatic injuries. These injuries indicated that all nine persons had been seated at the time the aircraft struck the water. No seat belt abrasions were found. The inertia of the bodies was plainly downward and forward and the forces at impact were severe. None of these nine persons had been subjected to fire or smoke before death, as demonstrated by low carboxyhemoglobin levels in blood and tissue. Some of the bodies showed distinct evidence of burning on portions exposed above their waterlines.

“…at Pilottown, Louisiana, the United States Coast Guard maintains a manned lookout tower for observing surface craft approaching and departing the port of New Orleans. The tower is about 30 miles west of the crash site. The Coastguardsman on duty saw an unusual light in the sky at an angle which he estimated as about 15 degrees above the horizontal and in the general direction of where N 48910 was lost and at about the time it was lost. He did not log the incident. His testimony indicates that the light was red or dark red, appearing suddenly, lasting a “couple of seconds,” and then producing a vertical, white light which fell with a white trail. He estimates that the white trail took three or four seconds to go “straight down,” and that the initial red flash was “almost as big as the sun.” He heard no noise. At the time of these observations the stars were visible, the weather was hazy and there were no surface craft within his range of vision. Subsequent investigation has failed to reveal the use of any marine signal flash or pyrotechnic, which might have had a somewhat similar appearance, at the time and place….

“Investigation has disclosed certain details in regard to a last minute boarding of the aircraft at Tampa by a person using another person’s ticket. Pertinent details are:

“William Allen Taylor, of Tampa, Florida, disappeared November 15, 1959, after telephoning his employer he would be late for work. A few moments before the departure of Flight 967 from Tampa, Taylor purchased a flight insurance policy in the amount of $37,500 from a coin-operated machine at Tampa International Airport. making his son the beneficiary and showing his destination as Dallas, Tex. National Airlines records do not show a ticket issued in his name and he was not carried on their records as a passenger on Flight 967. Taylor’s body was not among those recovered.

“Robert Vernon Spears, of Dallas, Texas, was listed as a passenger on Flight 967. He was subsequently apprehended by Federal authorities in Phoenix, Arizona, for having unlawful possession of Mr. Taylor’s vehicle. The Board, with the aid of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has thoroughly investigated Mr. Spears activities in order to determine whether they might have had a bearing upon the accident. We have been unable to find any such relationship.

Analysis

“Analysis of this accident must rest almost entirely on circumstantial evidence for the aircraft’s wreckage still lies on the bottom of the Gulf. There is little or no physical evidence upon which to explain this accident.

“The aircraft was airworthy at the time of departure, the crew was competent, weather conditions were good, and when disaster struck, the flight was very close to being both on course and on schedule. No operational or maintenance item was found which can reasonably be linked to this accident. It may safely be concluded that there was no warning of the disaster. This is evident by the lack of any unusual radio messages. As has been detailed, the fire marks on bodies and on debris were of the type caused exclusively by a flash surface fire, probably both hot and brief, upon impact with the water.

“Because of the lack of physical evidence, the probable cause of this accident is unknown.”

Aerospaceweb.org: “A Douglas DC-7B carrying 42 people (36 passengers, 6 crew) was en route from Tampa, Florida, to New Orleans, Louisiana, when it crashed into the Gulf of Mexico. The investigation took a bizarre turn when a mystery involving one of the passengers was uncovered. William Taylor disappeared the day before the flight after telephoning his employer that he would be late for work. He next turned up at the airport just before National 967 departed and purchased a $37,500 flight insurance policy. Though it appears Taylor was killed on the flight and his ex-wife received the insurance money, the peculiar fact is the airline had no record of anyone by that name being aboard. The ticket Taylor had used was instead issued to Robert Spears. Spears lived in Texas but was in Tampa visiting his friend Taylor at the time of the crash. The two men knew each other well and both had long criminal backgrounds. Many suspect Spears tricked Taylor into taking the flight and into carrying a piece of luggage along. The luggage presumably contained a bomb. When the plane was destroyed killing all aboard, it would be assumed Spears had perished and his wife could collect $100,000 in life insurance. Spears vanished after the crash until he was arrested in Phoenix, Arizona, for unlawful possession of Taylor’s automobile. However, investigators were unable to find any proof linking Spears to the plane’s loss. The lack of physical evidence in the case made sabotage impossible to prove and no charges were ever brought. (Aerospaceweb.org. Commercial Airliner Bombings. “16 November 1959 – National Airlines Flight 967”)

NFPA: “Nov. 16, Gulf of Mexico, DC-7B, National Airlines, 42 killed. Explosion in flight with strong suspicion that a bomb had been placed aboard the aircraft and detonated maliciously in flight.” (National Fire Protection Association. “Large Loss of Life Fires of 1959.” Quarterly of the National Fire Protection Association, Vol. 53, July 1960, p. 29.)

Time: “In Los Angeles one day last November, an attorney read down a list of 42 victims of a National Airlines DC-7B crash in the Gulf of Mexico and spotted the name of a client. It was Robert Vernon Spears, 65, naturopath^[1] of Dallas and Los Angeles. The attorney soon got a call from a Los Angeles homicide squad lieutenant who had read the same list. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” said the lieutenant, “if Spears blew the plane up.” As the Los Angeles police well knew, Robert Spears, a barefaced quack and crook, had a record of seven jail terms for fraud, forgery, larceny, impersonation, armed robbery, was free on $10,000 bail pending trial on charges of criminal abortion. He was familiar with explosives and had once said he would “blow up a hospital” for $500.

“In Tampa, Fla., Mrs. William Allen Taylor read the same list and stopped at the same name. Spears, a close friend of her husband since the days when they were fellow convicts in the Florida State Prison at Raiford, had been visiting her husband in Tampa. Two days later in the mail she got a $37,500 air-travel insurance policy taken out by Al Taylor (divorced but still friendly) at Tampa Airport just before take-off time of the doomed DC-7B. Taylor was missing, although he was not listed on the plane’s manifest.

“Last week these strands came together in Phoenix, Ariz., in one of the great whodunits of airline history. They began to meet when the FBI arrested Robert Vernon Spears, presumed dead in the crash, but found alive and well. Had Al Taylor then gone to his death on the DC-7B on Spears’s ticket? The FBI began to patch together the pieces to decide whether Spears 1) sent Al Taylor on the DC-7B with a bomb hidden in his luggage to blow up the plane, thereby to fake evidence of Spears’s death, collect a $100,000 insurance policy payable to his wife Frances Spears, 36, and escape the abortion charges in Los Angeles; or whether Spears 2) let Al Taylor ride the DC-7B on Spears’s ticket and then, hearing of the crash, coolly decided to drop out of sight and play out a spectacular insurance fraud.

“On the Trail. The FBI first moved into the picture five days after the crash, when a Tampa contact reported that Spears had been seen in Tampa alive. The FBI alerted its agents to watch the abortion circuits for Spears, but they found no trace of him.

“Meanwhile Spears drove Taylor’s car from Tampa to Dallas and on to Phoenix. Somewhere along the way he put in a call to a casual professional acquaintance, another naturopath named William Turska, who owns an isolated little white stucco house 39 miles north of Phoenix. Spears wanted to know if he could drop by for a visit. Turska said sure.

“Spears arrived soon afterward, hid the car with Florida license plates in a nearby wash, and hung close to the cottage. Meanwhile Spears’s wife, at home in Dallas, filed the claim for her husband’s $100,000 policy with Fidelity & Casualty Co. in New York.

“Early in January Spears sent his wife a note and arranged a quiet meeting. They got together at Dallas’ Lakewood Hotel, stayed there four days. Then Spears headed back to his desert hideaway. When his host, Turska, heard on a TV program that Spears was on the manifest of the crashed plane but was now believed to be alive, he called his attorney. Attorney’s advice: get Spears out of the house and call the FBI.

“The Arrest. One afternoon last fortnight, Turska drove Spears to the Bali Hi motel on Grand Avenue in Phoenix, signed him in under the alias of George Rhodes of Tucson, Ariz. Next morning Turska went to the FBI, and then may well have tipped off Spears. As Spears scurried out one door of the motel, FBI men raced in another door, raced out after him, intercepted his cab down the driveway and arrested him. In the wash near the desert cottage they found Taylor’s Florida-licensed Plymouth, and in it they found a significant haul: dynamite and caps. As reporters milled around Spears when he was jailed (on charges of driving a stolen car across a state line), one shouted: “Did you put a bomb on that plane?” Said Spears: “No. I’ll have a statement tomorrow.”….

“In Dallas his wife Frances, younger than her husband by 29 years, had her own statement of sorts. Told by a TV newsman…that Spears had been found alive, she blurted: “I told him it wouldn’t work.” Why did Spears disappear? “He felt it was a chance to provide security for me and the babies.” She said she had tried to get her husband to turn himself in, but “he wanted a chance to try and stay away.” She did not turn him in because “nobody in authority” had asked her to.

“Tracing the dynamite in Spears’s car, FBI agents found that it had been bought after the DC-7B crash, perhaps to blow up the car if the cops came close. In any event, it proved that Naturopath Spears knew his way around with explosives.” (Time. “The Naturopath.” Feb 1, 1950.)

Mr. Spears died 5-2-1969. (Aviation Safety Network. Douglas DC-7Bm National Airlines, Monday 16 November 1959.)

Sources

Aerospaceweb.org. Commercial Airliner Bombing History. Accessed 12-21-2008 at: http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/planes/q0283.shtml

Aviation Safety Network. Accident Description. National Airlines Flight 967, 16 Nov 1959. Flight Safety Foundation. Accessed 2-25-2009 at:

http://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=19591116-1

Civil Aeronautics Board. Aircraft Accident Report. National Airlines, Inc., Douglas DC-7B, N48910 in the Gulf of Mexico, November 16, 1959. Wash., DC: CAB, 6-14-1962, 8 pp. At: http://dotlibrary1.specialcollection.net/scripts/ws.dll?file&fn=8&name=*P%3A%5CDOT%5Cairplane%20accidents%5Cwebsearch%5C111659.pdf

National Fire Protection Association. “Large Loss of Life Fires of 1959.” Quarterly of the National Fire Protection Association, Vol. 53, July 1960, pp. 7-38.

Time Magazine. “The Naturopath.” 2-1-1950. Accessed at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,826040,00.html

Wikipedia. “National Airlines Flight 967.” 2-25-2009 at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Airlines_Flight_967

[1] One who professes to heal by ‘natural remedies,’ e.g., air, light, water, vibration, heat, electricity, massage, diet, excluding drugs, surgery, x rays. ⁽Time. “The Naturopath.” Feb 1, 1950.