Flight 7 Is Missing

by Ken H. Fortenberry

  Maybe it was the holiday blues and remembering that last Christmas in California with my father, but whatever the reason I now dug back into my files and started over. Surely there was something I could sink my teeth into that might get my investigation back on track? I zeroed in for the umpteenth time on the only publicly known human suspect in the crash, former Navy frogman William Harrison Payne. Too many things just did not add up. I was particularly interested in the Western Life Insurance Company investigation and its initial refusal to pay off his widow’s claim.

  By late afternoon I had tracked down and was talking on the telephone from my living room with a very reluctant Russell Stiles, now sixty-four years old and living in Canon City, Colorado. Stiles was the man who had spent months investigating Payne before his probe had been abruptly shut down by his superiors at Western Life.

  Stiles, a devout Presbyterian and former US Army detective, let me know right from the beginning that he was a man of very modest means and nearing retirement. The last thing he wanted in his life right now was to be dragged back into the public spotlight about an investigation that had dominated his life for several months back in 1957 and 1958.

  “For three months I was very deeply involved in this,” he explained. “It was one of the most moving events of my life.”

  Stiles apologized at first for not wanting to talk with me about the investigation. He understood my desire to know, he said, but he was afraid to talk. It was a statement he would make several more times over the next twenty years as he repeatedly declined to share the details of his investigation.

  “I still wake up nights thinking about it,” he confessed. “I was so close to a solution to it.”

  “What,” I begged him, “could possibly be a reason for not talking about the crash nearly two decades after it happened?”

  Stiles hesitated again, then explained in a somewhat fretful voice that he was afraid of being sued. He started to say something else, but stopped. I let the moments pass without saying a word. It seemed like an eternity, but I hoped he might break the silence with something significant.

  He did.

  “If it came to their notice, they’d stop at nothing,” he pronounced.

  “‘They’? Whose notice? What do you mean?”

  “I would very much like to talk with you, Mr. Fortenberry, but I was told my life was in grave danger.”

  “Who told you that, Mr. Stiles?”

  Silence. Again. This time I couldn’t let the moment pass. I appealed to him in the name of my father and the forty-three others who had lost their lives on the airplane.

  Slowly, he began to open up, perhaps to ease his conscience. He was still reluctant, but his voice was less harsh and he seemed a bit more at ease. He said I was the first person to contact him about it since the probe had ended decades earlier.

  He told me that the lodge the Paynes had owned in Scott Bar “burned down mysteriously” less than a year after the plane went down. This was the first time I had ever heard about the lodge fire.

  “Evidence was destroyed. It’s amazing the facts that came from the probe of the fire,” he said.

  He told me that a woman in a town near the lodge (I learned later that this was the town postmaster) had been helpful to him in his investigation—an investigation that he proudly noted had included interviews with more than 150 people. He refused to reveal the name of that woman; nor would he divulge the name of another source—a “Chicago man who mined chrome with Payne.”

  Mined chrome? That also was a new angle: mining chrome required explosives.

  Stiles then worried aloud about divulging further information. He was not only afraid of being sued or physically hurt by a mysterious someone he refused to identify, but also concerned about breaking any confidentiality agreements he might still have with the now-defunct Western Life.

  And then he clammed up.

  Although we would communicate again by email, that was the last time Stiles and I ever talked by phone. Frightened more than twenty years after the crash, Stiles said he would never talk on the phone for fear of being recorded by someone with an ulterior motive.

  “They would stop at nothing,” he reminded me.

  It would be three more years before Stiles and I communicated again. I tried several times to break the silence but was rebuffed each time, whether by phone or mail.

  But one thing was abundantly clear: Stiles honestly believed that his life would be in danger if he publicly pointed the finger at William Harrison Payne or someone else who might have been involved.

  Invigorated by Stiles’s enigmatic comments, I pressed on for more information about his investigation. Several months later I was able to track down R. B. Richardson, chairman emeritus of Western Life, who had long since retired and was living in Helena, Montana.

  Just as he was with reporter Ed Montgomery of the San Francisco Chronicle back in 1958, Richardson was eager to talk about Payne and the company’s investigation. The details, he admitted, were vague after so many years, but he reminded me there was no proof Payne had even boarded the plane.

  “Pan Am wasn’t even sure who or how many people were on the plane,” he asserted. “Payne was a troublemaker. Every time he got into some kind of trouble, financial or otherwise, something went wrong.”

  Richardson claimed that Payne had blown up bridges, roads, and cabins in northern California and Oregon, adding that the former Navy explosives expert was a very troubled man.

  He strongly suggested that Payne had perpetrated the crash for insurance purposes and hinted that his “widow,” Harriet, was deeply involved.

  “We were thoroughly convinced that he was still alive in Mexico,” he revealed.

  More than two years later, and after repeated prodding, investigator Stiles reentered the picture, this time with two brief but revealing letters about his probe of Payne’s possible connection to the crash.

  “In the course of my investigation I worked very closely with Pan American World Airways. In fact, they paid for a good part of the cost of the investigation. They wanted very much to have someone discover some proof that this did not just happen as an ordinary accident. My reluctance in furnishing information to you is brought about by the fact that you are going to publish this information and if you knew the circumstances as I do, I am sure that you would understand,” he stated.

  “I do not believe that I would wish to put anything in writing. nor would I want to discuss it on the telephone since I don’t know you and even if I did, I would still be reluctant. The San Francisco Examiner tried every possible way to obtain the information and even published a telephone interview with me, even though to practically every question my answer was no comment.

  “Believe me I understand your desire to know but I must protect myself and the company I worked for at the time.”

  So here we went again, just like two years earlier. I begged for help and information; he responded with nothing new. Still, he had responded, and once again I saw that as a positive sign— that he was weakening in his resolve. I wrote him yet another letter, and a couple of weeks later he replied:

  “. . . a vigorous pursuit 20 years ago might have disclosed some facts, but I left the company in 1961 and I might say with considerable regret at not having continued the matter. I have had a guilt complex because it was not done but I did not have the finances myself. Believe me, I am sympathetic with your attitude and the need to know. I would like to help you and I’ve written to the man who was president of the company at that time. He is no longer active with the company.

  “In the past week I have consulted an attorney to determine what my position would be if I give you all that I know. First, he says that I am bound by the rule of law which prohibits an employee from divulging information such as this without written consent from the Corporation. Second, he feels that I am in a vulnerable position legally by giving information in writing or on the telephone. Person to person might be different if it is not recorded.

>   “Concerning the sixth paragraph of your letter, am I to understand that the wife of the man is no longer living? You state ‘as all possible parties are dead.’ I might also state that there is no statute of limitations in the matter at hand.

  “I will say again that I know how difficult it is for you to understand why I am being so cautious. You do not know the circumstances and therefore can’t understand my reluctance. If you did, I am sure you would.

  “I have been somewhat puzzled by the fact that I’ve never been contacted by any of the other survivors on this matter. After the articles in the San Francisco Examiner and the Chronicle everyone in the state of California knew about this. I received many long-distance calls, some bad and some good.”

  Stiles’s bold statement that “there is no statute of limitations in the matter at hand” could mean only one thing: he believed that someone had committed murder.

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  By 1979 my career as a newspaperman was well underway and I already had earned dozens of state and regional journalism awards. I had written investigative stories about unsolved murders in Florida and dirty politicians in the Carolinas. I had crafted feature stories about little old ladies and Little League baseball games, but one story—the one that mattered the most—still eluded me: What had happened to Flight 7 twenty-two years earlier?

  Lodge owner William Harrison Payne was still my number one suspect. The name Oliver Eugene Crosthwaite didn’t mean much to me at this point. I knew he was the purser aboard the plane, but only that. He seemingly bore no significance to the investigation. Press reports in the aftermath of the crash did not mention him. His name had not surfaced publicly at all during the Civil Aeronautics Board investigation. As far as anyone other than a few officials in Washington and at Pan American were concerned, he was a virtual nobody, just one among forty-four lives lost on that November afternoon.

  That all changed on July 5, 1979.

  During a remarkable phone call I had that morning with Robert Ashcraft of the National Transportation Safety Board, a new suspect emerged.

  During the preceding several years I had had a series of exasperating, back-and-forth interactions with both the National Transportation Safety Board and the FBI and had come up virtually empty-handed every time. I would formally ask for every document in their files about the crash and months later they would formally reply. Their response was usually something like this: There was nothing in the files. Whatever files they may have had many years ago are long since gone. Or, all they have is the official CAB report.

  I didn’t believe a word of it, and pressed on.

  My phone call with the NTSB’s Ashcraft that day gave me my first decent lead in years. Somehow, I managed to guilt-trip Ashcraft into looking “just one more time” to see if the agency had anything that might be of help.

  It paid off, and Ashcraft read me excerpts from a document pertaining to Crosthwaite. I was stunned beyond words. Crosthwaite? Who would have ever thought that? A crewman as a saboteur? Ashcraft stated that a Santa Cruz County sheriff’s deputy had reported that Crosthwaite was “shaky” and “psychotic” and that the CAB and Pan Am had put together a team to investigate him. That was about all Ashcraft would tell me that day, but it was enough for me to once again formally ask both the FBI and the NTSB for all of their files on the crash and for me to zero in specifically on Crosthwaite. I learned that the best way to get what you want from a government agency is to be as specific as possible about the request. In other words, make it easy for them; do their research for them. Above all, be persistent.

  Months later some poorly copied documents arrived in the mail, and I immediately tore into them, racing through page after page to get a quick glimpse of my newest suspect. Could Crosthwaite actually have been a suicidal murderer? Could the grieving widower actually have destroyed the plane and murdered forty-three people? After only a few pages into the report it certainly seemed possible, and after interviewing former Pan Am pilot Dick Ogg, the hero who had saved everyone aboard N90943 Sovereign of the Skies in 1956, I was even more convinced that Crosthwaite deserved more scrutiny.

  Ogg believed that mechanical problems brought down Flight 7, but he also shared with me a chilling description of Crosthwaite, who had been a crewmember on some of Ogg’s previous flights.

  “He was a violent, vindictive, and unpredictable man who hated Pan American and had said on more than one occasion that he would ‘get’ Pan Am for what it had done to him,” Ogg stated. “Pan American hired private detectives after the crash to follow up on this. Although that work produced considerable confirmation of such suspicions, there was never enough to allow a statement to the effect that the crash was caused by sabotage.”

  Ogg then added this piece to puzzle: “I think the location of the episode—almost exactly halfway to Honolulu, in midocean—lends some credence to this, since a madman saboteur would pick a spot furthest from land to bring on the disaster.”

  I began to chase down every scrap of information I could find on Crosthwaite, to develop a rough biography of his life and to learn how his childhood and family background might have affected his adulthood.

  It took me years to learn who he was.

  Born in Bennington, Kansas, on December 13, 1911, Oliver Eugene Crosthwaite lived a nomadic and unsettled life from the start. About the only thing young Gene could count on during his childhood was packing up and moving to another state whenever the urge struck his father, Herbert O. Crosthwaite. And that urge struck so often that Gene really had no place to call home until his late teens.

  His father never seemed to be satisfied, bouncing from one job to another, one town to the next, always chasing an elusive dream. Herbert dropped out of high school before graduation, and as an only son went to work for his father in the family pharmacy before he left home and tried his hand at railroading. That lasted only three weeks before he returned home to Kansas, where he proudly told family and friends that he planned to enlist in the Army. That didn’t last long, either: about as soon as he announced his military plans, he changed his mind.

  Changing his mind became routine for Herbert Crosthwaite.

  Eight months later he changed his mind again, enlisted in the Army, and after boot camp was shipped off to the Philippines for service during the Philippine-American War. After the war ended, he returned to Kansas, where he began to receive a $54.18 monthly government pension, the reason for which is unknown. He soon met and married seventeen-year-old Mary Beeson, a Colorado girl who had been on a summer visit to Kansas with her grandparents.

  The newlyweds moved to New Mexico, but four years and two children later packed up and moved back to Kansas, where Herbert opened a bakery and restaurant the same week their son, the future Pan Am purser, entered the world. By all accounts the bakery was a huge success, but Herbert continued to search for that elusive pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and less than a year after it opened he sold the bakery, packed up his family, and headed to Colorado.

  It was near Pueblo that three-year-old Gene was thrown from a burro, struck his head, and was knocked unconscious for five days. The family fretted that he might never be the same mentally and faced the prospect that Gene might never walk again. His back was badly broken, and he struggled to regain consciousness, but miraculously was walking and talking again within weeks with only one chiropractic treatment.

  His family was elated, but the concussion may have left him with hidden injuries that plagued him for years to come. His mother later recalled that he suffered from severe headaches for much of the rest of his life.

  Pueblo was fine, but there was no pot of gold to be found, so the Crosthwaites packed up a year or so later and headed to California. There was no pot of gold there, either, so they headed back east to Colorado, crossing the Rockies in a covered wagon when tragedy struck again.

  On July 24, 1915, near Florence, Colorado—just west of their former home in Pueblo—their covered wagon caught fire and burned to a crisp. The
family lost all of its possessions, and in the desert Southwest, in the middle of nowhere, the Crosthwaites were forced to start all over again.

  They finally settled in the tiny farm-and-ranching hamlet of Yellow Jacket, where Gene attended the two-room Yellow Jacket School in a community with a general store that also operated as the local post office. His father homesteaded for seven years in Montezuma County, but just couldn’t get the wanderlust—that desire for something more, something better—out of his head.

  So, off to California once again.

  The Crosthwaites migrated up and down the Golden State for a year or two. Herbert did carpentry work when he could find it and occasionally picked fruit for a paycheck, but these were tough times and the itinerant Crosthwaites were tired of moving and settling, moving and settling. Herbert decided one day that they needed to return to Colorado, so they were on the road once more. They found a farm near Cortez and, now joined by Herbert’s financially secure and recently widowed mother, lived there for several years before the siren call of California summoned them once more. They traded their Colorado farm for one near Ripon, California, but lost it not long afterward due to financial hardship.

  Then the ultimate blow struck the Crosthwaites: working near Buena Vista, California, one afternoon in May 1927, the forty-five-year-old Herbert was accidentally struck in the head by a piece of lumber while working on a carpentry job. He was in a coma for three weeks.

  The sole provider of the Crosthwaite family never saw the light of day again. The Lodi Memorial Cemetery became his next and final home.

  Gene was seventeen years old when his father died, and he did what was expected of him: he quit school and got a job, as a bellhop at the Hotel Covell in Modesto, to help support the family. His siblings sold fruits and vegetables, worked as messengers, and graded eggs for a poultry company. His mother became a maid. Without the wanderlust of Herbert Crosthwaite to lead them on another endless search for financial success, the Crosthwaites finally settled down, on Alturas Avenue in Modesto. They struggled, but managed to get by.