Flight 7 Is Missing

by Ken H. Fortenberry

  I reached out to Dr. Ballard’s team, and although they also turned me down, there was some slight encouragement in the response, and we remain in communication.

  “Our day rate for chartering the ship for expeditions we are not specifically funded by NOAA to support is $55-$60K (depending on the assets required). Is that feasible within the realm of the budget?” chief operating officer Allison Fundis asked.

  That, of course, was impossible, and I thanked Fundis for her reply.

  “Understandable,” she responded. “I will plan to keep in touch if we have an opportunity arise in the near future that will potentially allow us to help with this search involving other funding partners.”

  Like Schmidt Ocean Institute, she asked me to send coordinates of the search-and-recovery area, which I promptly did, and Fundis has kept the door open to the possibility that one day Dr. Ballard’s team may search for what remains of Romance of the Skies.

  With the federal government refusing once again to help, and having been rejected by the deep-sea exploration organizations, I had two choices: either admit defeat and give up or continue the search for my father’s killer.

  The search continued.

  Panama City, Panama

  Monday, May 26, 1952

  “Dear Mother and Boys,

  “Daddy Bo is in Panama after a nice flight last night on the ‘El Inter-Americana.’ Most of the passengers had dinner and went to bed soon after we left Miami, so I suppose they were going on south of the Equator. Today has been uneventful. I’ve been eating and looking the ‘El Panama’ over most of the time. Soon, I’m going to take a nap.

  “My little Jerry Boy was sweet yesterday. I could hear him very well and he knew who was on the other end of that wire. He seemed to be quite interested in telling me ‘I wove you!’ I love that little Bee Bo, too, and all of you. Kenneth, I could see looking for his daddy. He is too young to fully understand the miracles of science and therefore couldn’t comprehend fully what was going on.

  “I don’t know why you wanted me to write. If I write now, I was there less than a day ago, and if I wait longer, I’ll probably beat the letter to you. I guess you must still love me a little bit. I still love you, Mother Dear. When I quarrel and fuss with you, I don’t mean any harm by it. When I say something about you not being able to swim, I’m only trying to make you resolve to learn. I don’t suppose you will ever learn, though. You are too afraid of water. It is not your fault. You didn’t have the chances of other girls when you were young. That only makes me want to give you more of the nice things now that you are older. I hope you will be happy with me. I’ll try to give you the things you need.

  “You should be glad I’m gone for a few days because I don’t help you when I am there anyway. I only grumble because I haven’t eaten in the last hour, etc.

  “Hope to see you before the 1st of June. In the meantime, take care of all three of my babies and remember this old mean, grouchy, nearly bald-headed old cuss loves all of you sincerely. Love my Babies,

  Daddy.”

  I was frustrated and discouraged, but I was accustomed to those emotions after searching for my father’s killer for more than fifty years. Determined to never give up until I had the answers I had been seeking nearly all my life, I had reached out once again in late September 2018 to purser Gene Crosthwaite’s stepdaughter, Tania, this time on her Facebook page. Tania had been living in Texas for more than twenty years, but for reasons unknown had been unwilling to talk.

  Midmorning on Tuesday, October 2, my Facebook alert sounded. Someone was sending me a message. And that someone was Tania.

  We exchanged a few get-to-know-you pleasantries before I asked her again to please sit down with me and talk about 1957. After all these years, something seemed to be tugging at the seventy-eight-year-old widow’s conscience. Why else would she have responded to my message? Maybe she had finally decided to get some things off her chest? In the Facebook chat it became clear she was about ready to talk, although she still hadn’t convinced herself that she should.

  Tania: I feel guilty I didn’t share what I knew before. I was really scared.

  Me: Scared?

  Tania: Yes.

  Me: About what?

  Tania: Well, it’s something that affects more than u and me. My pastors felt I should leave it alone but maybe I shouldn’t.

  For whatever reasons, she was still reluctant to talk, so I decided that for the moment I would not press her. The mere fact that we were communicating was positive, and I didn’t want to risk that. We chatted occasionally throughout the day about nothing significant, and in the meantime she checked out my Facebook page and learned that we had something in common other than the loss of our fathers on the airplane: we were both cancer survivors. It was enough of a hook to keep the doors of communication open to the possibility of a sit-down interview. Fearful that she might change her mind about talking after all these years, I told her that evening that I could book an airline flight and be in Texas the following afternoon.

  Tania: My goodness. You would do that after all these years?

  I told her a little bit about all the work I had done trying to solve the airline crash mystery, and used a reporter’s technique to pique the retired secretary’s curiosity about what I knew. I let her know that I was aware that her stepfather had been out-of-his mind nuts in the weeks before the crash and that I had some notes taken by one of the federal investigators who had questioned her after the crash.

  Tania: Wow! Would you share?

  Me: I will gladly share everything I know—if we can talk openly and honestly.

  While I was still Facebook-chatting with her I opened another screen and booked a morning flight to Houston. I told her I would meet her at her apartment the following day at 3 p.m. if that would suit her.

  Tania: OK. I have a feeling this is long overdue.

  The deal was done. Tania Crosthwaite was finally going to sit down for an interview that could shed new light on the lifelong search for my father’s killer.

  I was running purely on adrenalin as I boarded the early morning flight from Charlotte to Houston, where I planned to rent a car and drive about an hour to League City for what I considered to be the most important interview of my life. What little sleep I had the night before had been repeatedly interrupted by a thousand questions buzzing around in my head.

  Was I being led on a wild-goose chase? What had prompted her to agree to an interview after all these years of refusing to give me the time of day? Was Tania going to be open or was she going to be deceitful? How was I going to break the ice, win her trust, and get her to go back in her mind to those troubling days sixty-one years earlier, when she was just a sixteen-year-old with a bully stepfather? Does she really have anything new to offer or is she just trying to clear her conscience of something I already know? Will she be angry? Will she be hostile, thinking I am trying to finger her stepfather as a suicidal murderer? Would I have to struggle to get her to open up and share not only her remembrances of those days back in November 1957, but also her emotions at the time?

  As it turns out there was no ice to be broken; Tania was ready to talk, and I was more than ready to listen.

  Precisely at 3 p.m. I took a deep breath and rang the doorbell to her first-floor apartment. It was an awkward moment for both of us, perhaps more out of nervousness and curiosity than anything else, but we had both been waiting for this moment for many years, and the desire to share outweighed everything else. Why it had escaped me I don’t know, but as I sat down in her small living room filled with beautiful Chinese antiques that had belonged to her parents, I realized that this was the first time I had ever met face-to-face with anyone whose family member had died on Romance of the Skies. Her stepfather may have been a suicidal murderer, but I felt a kinship with her from the beginning of the interview and held no ill feelings toward her in any way. She, too, had been a victim of whatever had happened on November 8, 1957.

  I asked her for permi
ssion, then tapped “record” on my iPhone. Tania talked freely for nearly thirty minutes about anything and everything except her stepfather and the crash. I let her do so without interruption. It seemed to me that she was trying to convince herself that talking with me was the right thing to do. I learned that she was still grieving from the loss of her husband of twenty-two years, Steve Barnes, who had died after a long battle with cancer and Alzheimer’s less than a year earlier. His death had left her not only in an unexpectedly bad financial situation but also with a deep hole in her broken heart.

  As she talked about Steve, I learned why she had told the San Francisco newspaper reporter those lies about what a wonderful stepfather Gene had been to her and why she had stated that Dr. Herken and I must have been wrong to suggest otherwise. I had the distinct impression that Tania hadn’t told Steve the details of her troubled teen years and didn’t want to bother him with the heavy burden she had borne all her life. His medical problems were overwhelming both of them at the time, and the last thing they needed was a ghost from yesterday haunting their lives.

  She wasn’t clear about this, and I didn’t press her. It really was none of my business, although she had told me in the Facebook chat that her pastors had encouraged her not to talk with anyone about what happened. That meant that she had told them something—something so secret and so important that they worried about how it might impact her emotionally if it got out to the public.

  I also learned that she was recovering from breast cancer and had just recently moved from San Antonio to the apartment in League City, wanting to be closer to her grandchildren now that she was a widow in her late seventies and in questionable health.

  She spoke several times about her faith, a faith she said had helped pull her through many tough times in her life, and it was obvious that she had faced a great deal of heartache and trouble since her childhood in California. She didn’t blame anyone for anything that had happened to her. In fact, several times she pointed the finger squarely at herself for mistakes and bad decisions she made after the plane crash. She reminded me that she had lost her mother and her stepfather in a period of only three months and suddenly felt alone in the world, with only her Russian-speaking grandmother, whose old-world customs and expectations of a teenage girl was tough on them both.

  She admitted that after the crash, but not before, she had turned into the wild teen that Gene had often accused her of being. She said she was ashamed of some of the things she did back then but had spent much of her life trying to forgive herself.

  “I never really started acting up until after his death,” she disclosed. “Before that I was just an innocent kid. I don’t know what his complaints were. I never did anything. I never knew him to hug me. I never knew him to take me anywhere. He never like mistreated me, but it was like I wasn’t there.”

  When the plane crashed, she was finally free from her overbearing stepfather, and she began to hang out with the wrong crowd. She became pregnant when she was barely eighteen, only sixteen months after the plane went down. She and the child’s father, a twenty-four-year-old ne’er-do-well hell-raiser named George Freeman Tolbert, married seven months later in Oregon, and had three more children in quick succession before they divorced. The marriage was in trouble from the beginning, and George had numerous run-ins with the law in California and Oregon. He had a thing for fast cars, booze, weapons, and beating women.

  Tania never benefited from her father’s estate; she had married before the age of 21 and not in a Catholic church, in defiance of the last-minute changes to his will.

  Tania didn’t share the details of her troubled life after her parents died, but I had pieced some of them together through my own research and didn’t let on during the interview that I knew about those dark days. They were important to know, to be able to understand what went on in her mind back then and to be able to write a factual story not only on the crash itself but also on how it had impacted her life and the lives of others.

  Nearly two hours after the interview began, I started to steer her in the direction of why I had come halfway across the country in the first place, but I didn’t want her to feel like I was pressuring her. She seemed at once both fragile and resolute, but slowly began to return to her childhood and wove an interesting and heartbreaking story of a girl who felt unloved and unwanted by her intimidating stepfather, rejected and ignored by her stepfather’s family, and puzzled to this very day about why he seemed to hate her so much and why he had told the Santa Cruz juvenile officer that she was uncontrollable.

  “I remember he never had anything positive to say to me. He was always negative.”

  It was painfully slow, but the interview I had been seeking for decades was finally getting somewhere, and before I left that evening I would have the closest thing to a “smoking gun” I would ever have in the search for my father’s killer.

  We talked first about her stepfather’s funeral.

  “I was just in a state of shock, you know. Mama died in August, and he died three months later, in November. Grandma and I thought it would be nice if, well, my mom had a huge picture of Gene in his Pan American uniform, and it was real beautiful picture. And as a surprise he had bought Marie [Crosthwaite’s mother] a trip to Hawaii, and she didn’t know about it. I could have torn it [the ticket] up, but that was not in my thoughts. And so we thought, well at the funeral when we met her, ’cuz we didn’t know how to contact her, I’d give her the picture of Dad and her ticket to Hawaii.”

  “Was he close to his mother? Did he see her often?” I asked.

  “He never mentioned her. It was strange.”

  “So, we’re standing outside and I’m holding this and all the people are in their cars and there’s some kind of hold-up. So, Helen [her godmother] was very bored and she says, ‘I’m going to find out what the hold-up is.’ She got a hold of the men from the funeral parlor and they came over, and she wanted to know why we weren’t going to the cemetery. And they said, ‘Well, there’s a fuss over there.’

  “They [Crosthwaite’s mother and brothers] felt they should be in the first car instead of me, and then, you know, Helen goes, ‘I don’t believe this. That’s what they’re fussing about?’

  “And I just didn’t even know what they’re talking about other than somebody’s upset about which car they were in. I didn’t know it dealt with me, you know, and I said, ‘I’ll be right back,’ and I went over there, and I’ve got [the picture] in my hand and I didn’t really get to say anything.

  “I said, ‘This is for you,’ and that’s as far as I got. She [Crosthwaite’s mother] grabbed it out of my hand and just turned her back to me. I didn’t even know why, and so I go back there and then Helen is fussing with the funeral people, and then I heard this thing about me being in that car.

  “I told that funeral director, I said, ‘I don’t care what car I’m in,’ and Helen says, ‘Let’s go. If they want to come, they can follow us,’ and that’s all I know.

  “And we went to the cemetery and then I never saw them or ever heard from them again or nothing. I told Grandma what happened. I said, ‘Grandma, she was really rude,’ and that’s all I know. I don’t know why they didn’t like me. We suspicioned that it was ’cuz we were Russian and at that time, not long after the Second World War, the fifties, some American people were very touchy about it.

  “I think they were unhappy that he married a Russian, but other than that I don’t know, ’cuz we did not personally offend them in any way. We never heard from them again.”

  “You never saw your dad’s mother or his family again?”

  “I never heard from them again.”

  “Where is your dad buried?”

  “It was closed casket. He wasn’t in there. I don’t know what they put in there. They said the sharks ate him, and they said they identified him by his arm.”

  “Do you know the name of the cemetery?”

  “It’s the Santa Cruz Mausoleum. He’s there and so is my grandpa
Peter. In fact, they had a vault for me, and I don’t know why, but Grandma managed to get the $600 back and it was my vault and I didn’t even know till years later. I’ll tell you, there’s a lot of people who stole from me.”

  She paused to take a phone call from her granddaughter, who was calling to check if everything was going OK with the interview. She assured her that it was, and then I tried to steer her back to the final years of Gene’s life.

  “Going back to when Gene had TB: what do you recall about him before and after he was in the hospital?”

  “For sure he wasn’t the same person when he got out. Something happened and he was very cranky, and he was mean even. I’ll never forget that first breakfast [after his TB hospital discharge] we were having in Felton at our home. Mama fixed the breakfast. We were sitting there, and he wanted the syrup, I believe. And I don’t know why but he took his fist and slammed it hard on the table like this and said, ‘I said I need the syrup!’ and Mom’s eyes got this big and I froze in my place and she got him the syrup.

  “We wondered what happened to the man that we all loved and that did all that work to bring me to America and a horrible lot of work to bring Grandma to America. What happened to him? What did I do that he didn’t like me? After he had TB, we didn’t know him at all. He was just not the same person.

  “He had these outbursts of anger, so much that he had her in tears for a whole month, and she finally called the doctor, whoever that was who was treating him. Later she was telling Grandma, and I was listening, and the doctor said, ‘Oh, Mrs. Crosthwaite, I wish you had called me sooner.’ He said, ‘We’ve got him on medicine, and we can adjust it. If you had told me earlier, I could have spared you a lot of misery.’ I guess it was adjusted. I don’t know. He stayed mean.

  “I always stayed out of the way when he was home, because Mama would tell me, ‘Daddy’s home. It’s our time, so why don’t you just stay in your room,’ or whatever, and that’s what I did.”