Flight 7 Is Missing

by Ken H. Fortenberry

  And what about that startling revelation that he had been bawling and begging some woman named Tamara to marry him soon after his wife’s death? That should have raised the eyebrows of even the most novice of investigators.

  While studying my Crosthwaite files I came across a page near the back of the notes I had received decades earlier from CAB investigator Schonberger. There, at the top of the page, was this: “Tamara Shankoff. Close friend of Julia. At least 40. Born in Shanghai. Was bridesmaid at wedding. Saw last at Julia’s funeral.”

  There really was a Tamara. She really was Julia’s close friend. Tania was telling the truth. Schonberger’s notes supported Tania’s story, but what intrigued me most was one brief sentence Schonberger had written about Tamara: “Gene didn’t like her.”

  Gene didn’t like her?

  So not only was Schonberger totally unaware that Gene had been begging Tamara to marry him, but she had outright lied to the CAB investigator and said that Gene did not even like her. It made me wonder: What if she had told him the truth? What if she had told him that Gene had been repeatedly pestering her to marry him and that she had turned him down? What if she had told him how depressed he was when she had rejected his marriage proposal? Would that have pushed Schonberger to dig deeper into Crosthwaite’s life and mental state and perhaps have helped persuade the higher-ups to deploy more resources into what turned out to be an inadequate investigation? And what if Tania and her grandmother had told Schonberger about Tamara or had told him about that last-minute warning that something “big” would soon happen?

  I again reviewed Schonberger’s notes from his interview with Santa Cruz County juvenile officer Johnson, and they further supported the idea, at least in my mind, that Crosthwaite was mentally imbalanced:

  “Suffering from pre-occupation . . . badly disturbed . . . ill at ease . . .

  twitching . . . possible paranoid . . . very rambling in conversation . . . retire to room and cry . . . more frequent depression periods since wife’s death . . . crew against him and trying to get rid of him.”

  There was also this short, cryptic statement in Schonberger’s notes, which seemed to somewhat strengthen the possibility that Crosthwaite had sabotaged the plane:

  “Stump gun. Wedge-shaped. 2”x12” long. Cap needed on one end of fuse. Black blasting powder. Electric fuse or?”

  Schonberger died in 2015, so it was impossible to get any clarification from him at this stage of my investigation, and his fellow investigator, Charles S. Collar, died in 1998. Instead, I moved on to someone else who might provide answers about Crosthwaite: his only surviving sibling, Harold Richard “Dick” Crosthwaite, his ninety-three-year-old brother, living in rural Winnemucca, Nevada. For years I had maintained a Facebook friendship with his daughter, Madonna, and she had been urging me to talk with her father, who, she had assured me on numerous occasions, was loaded with all sorts of important information about Gene, the crash, and “that nut” Tania.

  “He knows a lot about that day, Ken. You need to talk with him,” she insisted. “His mind is sharp as a whip.”

  I had purposely put off talking with Gene’s brother, having decided that I wanted to learn everything I could about Gene before I talked to someone who was not only unaware of just how guilty his brother appeared, but who also might be his greatest defender, unwilling to accept the idea that he could have committed suicide and murder. But the clock was running out: Dick Crosthwaite wasn’t getting any younger, and now that I had finally talked with Tania the time was right to approach him.

  I called him one evening in November 2018, and although he was eager to talk, I was disappointed in just how little the tough-talking cowboy knew and how much he didn’t seem to care. He bounced from one thought to the next in a pattern of disjointed sentences and disconnected thoughts. After a few minutes it was obvious that it was going to be very difficult to get him to concentrate on anything for more than a few seconds. It’s not that he seemed mentally impaired in any way. I didn’t think so then and don’t think so now. That’s just the way he was, a grizzled old codger like the western film star Gabby Hayes.

  I asked him to tell me about his brother, to describe what kind of person he was.

  “He was a very strong individual personally. Hell, he was not wishy-washy or anything. He was a very strong-willed person. He had his shit together. He treated me awful good; he didn’t commit suicide.”

  That was strange, I thought.

  I had never even mentioned suicide.

  “He had the ticket and everything for him and my mother to go to Hawaii for a week. There’s no way in the world he would have disappointed her and committed suicide. I think a prop went through the side. That son of a bitch [Stratocruiser] was eating props and engines. I still say it was the prop, the props on that bastard.”

  He told me about Gene’s failed marriage to Thelma Lou and his years working as a steward with Matson.

  “His wife had left him. She told my mother that she never got along with him being away. He made big money with Matson on those luxury liners. Anyway, in 1938 he come to Arizona and told my mom he was leaving Matson. He said, ‘I don’t want to go swimming. Those goddamn Japs. I don’t want to be on a ship and for them to sink it,’” he said.

  “One day the sheriff knocked on the door. He was eating dinner at his house in Belmont. The sheriff says, ‘I have a summons for you,’ and Gene says, ‘What for?’ The sheriff says ‘Divorce,’ and Gene says ‘OK,’ and that was that.”

  I needed to understand more about Gene and Tania’s relationship and just how much Dick really knew about his brother in his final years.

  “The last time I seen Gene alive was when we drove over to Felton and spent the night. I didn’t see anything different about him. He could handle life as well as anybody else,” he said.

  I asked him if he was aware of Gene’s personality changes after TB treatment and in the months before his death.

  “I wouldn’t know. The last time I seen him he was just like he always was. Julie was still alive. She was in good health when we were there, but you can’t tell when cancer strikes a woman, a man, or a dog for that matter. I thought Julie was a pretty nice woman. Very polite. Courteous. She and Gene were both in love with each other. She was something you dreamed about. He was really happy with Julie.”

  Julie? Julie? He said that twice. Her name was Julia, with an “a.” I was beginning to wonder just how much he really knew about his older brother’s life. His next words told me:

  “Me and Gene never talked much. I never seen him after that. I don’t even know where he’s buried.”

  So the man who supposedly knows everything about Gene, Julia, “that nut” Tania, and the plane crash that took his brother’s life never talked much with his brother and doesn’t even know where he is buried?

  “What about Tania?” I asked him. “What was Gene’s relationship with her?”

  “I never did pay any attention to the girl.”

  “What about the comments that Gene made to others that she was out of control, a demon?”

  “There was hearsay—it might have been from my sisters—that she was a little on the wild side. It’s just my opinion. He never talked to me about her. This is just hearsay after the death.”

  “Did you ever meet Tania?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” he admitted.

  Dick’s daughter had made a point several times through the years of letting me know that his mother, Mary, had received a phone call from Pan Am president Juan Trippe in the hours very soon after the plane had been reported missing because Gene was such a valuable, longtime, and loyal employee. That was further proof, she insisted, that Gene had nothing to do with the crash, but neither she nor Dick had a clue that Gene’s job with Pan Am was on the line back in 1957.

  “They talked for over an hour,” Madonna stated.

  Dick’s story was the same.

  “My mom was out here when the plane went down. It was on the TV. I think
that’s where we heard about it. Anyway, he called her and talked for one hour. One hour.”

  “What did they talk about?”

  “I don’t know what he said, but Gene was his oldest crew member on the plane.”

  “Did your mother tell you what he said in that one-hour conversation?”

  “No, don’t believe so.”

  That was odd, I thought. His mother had a one-hour conversation with the president of Pan American World Airways about a missing plane with his brother aboard and she never told him a single word about the conversation?

  Trippe may have called Crosthwaite’s mother, but it was unlikely to have been on the night the plane went missing. He may have been a compassionate man, but surely the president of the biggest airline company in the world had other things on his mind that night than calling and consoling the mother of a purser. Also, there is no way—with the time difference, if for no other reason—that a TV station in Nevada would have broadcast the news of the missing plane that same night. The following night, maybe.

  I don’t doubt that Trippe spoke with Crosthwaite’s mother in the days following the disappearance, but I wonder if he might have been on more of a fishing expedition than a mission of consolation. Maybe Trippe had called Crosthwaite’s mother to learn something more about the man who was fast becoming Pan Am’s No. 1 suspect in the crash of the airplane.

  “Did anyone from Pan American, the Civil Aeronautics Board or anyone with the investigation ever ask you any questions?”

  “Not a damn word.”

  The interview was going nowhere, but as is often the case, the final comments may have been the most important. Out of the blue he added credibility to the notion that his brother had lost his mind after Julia’s death and lapsed even further into depression after his amorous advances had been rejected by Julia’s Russian friend, Tamara, a few weeks before the plane crash.

  “He said he would never marry another American woman. Never.”

  Days later I reread every letter, email, and note that I had accumulated in decades of research about Gene Crosthwaite’s life. I spent hours putting together a timeline not only for the last weeks of his life, but as far back as the 1930s, when he had worked on cargo ships in the Orient. I tracked his comings and goings with Pan American for ten years before the plane went down and documented every trip he made across the Pacific during that time.

  What had happened to Gene Crosthwaite? Based on statements from his wife, his stepdaughter, his colleagues, and his friends, the angry, depressed, paranoid man who poured cocktails in the downstairs lounge on the Stratocruiser that fateful day in 1957 was not the same man who just a few years earlier had worked so diligently and faithfully to bring his foreign-born family into a new world with hoped-filled lives in California.

  I had only a few notes about his medical history, but they began to fill in the blanks, and I dug into every research document I could find about tuberculosis and its effect on a patient’s mental health. What I learned put another piece of the puzzle into place, but it also led to another possible reason for Crosthwaite’s unexplained behavior.

  Tuberculosis has been with mankind since ancient times, and its symptoms have been recorded since the days of the Old Testament. It is a painful disease that attacks the lungs and causes bloody, “graveyard” coughs, fatigue, fever, and, sometimes, death. Evidence of TB has been discovered in Egyptian mummies, and for centuries it was nearly always fatal. Even as late as the early 1900s nearly fifty percent of those who contracted tuberculosis in the United States died from the disease.

  I discovered that three of its victims had been Gene Crosthwaite’s aunts: sisters Hazel, Vivian, and Gertrude Mae, all of whom had suffered from the disease for months before passing away in the prime of their lives. Crosthwaite had more than the usual reasons to be depressed about TB and to fear its possible recurrence; he had a strong family connection to the killer.

  The emergence of powerful medicines in the late 1940s and early fifties brought new hope to those afflicted with what was once called “consumption” and “White Death,” and by the time Crosthwaite checked into the San Mateo County sanatorium in 1955 a TB diagnosis was no longer considered a death sentence. It was a treatable and even curable disease, although still considered by many, especially those of far Eastern European and Asian backgrounds, a shameful one, stigmatizing for life. Many family members and coworkers were fearful of “catching” TB, which is a contagious disease, and some patients felt not only guilty and lonely during their confinement, but also dirty, like “lepers” of olden days.

  Two of the first drugs to be effectively used in the treatment of TB were isoniazid (INH) and iproniazid, both accidentally discovered by a Swiss pharmaceutical company experimenting with leftover Nazi V2 rocket fuel. By the 1950s INH was being prescribed to nearly half of those affected with TB in the United States. It was cheap, easy to administer, and effective, especially with TB patients who were confined to sanatoriums for months at a time, where medical staff could ensure that it was properly taken.

  Gene Crosthwaite hated having TB. He hated being confined to the sanatorium and he hated not being able to be with his beautiful Russian wife and to fly across the Pacific. He hated the routine, the daily regimen of rest and required nutrition. He missed grilling steaks in his backyard, drinking his hard liquor, gambling, and playing cribbage. One of his doctors said he had been a “moderately difficult patient,” but because he so desperately wanted to get out of the sanatorium, he did what he was told when he was told and how he was told. That was unusual for the strong-willed and independent Crosthwaite, who preferred doing things his own way.

  Doing what he was told when he was told included taking 100 milligrams of the “miracle drug” INH twice a day for more than two years. He was taking INH until the day he died.

  While the treatment of TB made considerable progress in the 1950s, psychiatry was still an evolving medical field, and the intersection of TB treatment with psychiatry was full of contradictions. Some TB patients developed psychiatric conditions, including major depression, anxiety disorders, delirium, and personality changes, likely a result of sanatorium confinement. Meanwhile, while “talk therapy” was still the primary treatment tool of psychiatrists, new drugs were emerging, and they worked nicely in treating both TB and resulting mental issues. One of those drugs was INH; doctors quickly learned that it was not only effective in treating TB, but also had a side effect as a mood enhancer in treating depression.

  But INH also caused troubling neuropsychiatric side effects in some patients, including severe mood swings, depression, sleeplessness, emotional instability, irritability, and obsessive-compulsive neurosis, sometimes triggering suicide attempts. Patients older than fifty and those who drank alcohol had a higher prevalence of INH-induced psychoses, and weight gain was noted in many cases.

  Those side effects fit Crosthwaite to a “T.” He drank alcohol to excess. He had gained sixty pounds. He was deeply depressed. He was irritable. He had severe mood swings. He couldn’t sleep. He was unstable to the point that the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s officer had described him as “psychotic.”

  Going back through my decades-old notes, I found an investigator’s statement, attributed to Dr. James Bodie of the San Mateo TB hospital, that Crosthwaite “had paranoid tendencies” during his hospitalization and described him as “a rather strange fellow with a chip on his shoulder.”

  Dr. Bodie stated that Crosthwaite was “hypercritical of others and has a cynical attitude.”

  Grief controlled his life after his wife’s death, and while it is true that only three months had elapsed since her death—likely not long enough for him to fully recover from his loss—it must be remembered that he had been mentally out of balance ever since his release from TB confinement, more than a year before she died, and likely even before that.

  His bursts of anger, meanness, and instability had troubled his wife so much that just a few months before she had been hospital
ized with cancer she had called his doctor at the sanatorium in a plea for help.

  Medical experts had suspected the rare but documented INH-psychoses link for many years but were unable to prove it until more than twenty years after Crosthwaite began taking the drug.

  By then it may have been too late. The misery may have already been spread. From Gene to Julia and from Gene to Tania. Could it also have been spread from Crosthwaite to the families of forty-three innocent men, women, and children who died on Romance of the Skies?

  That seemed a plausible explanation for Crosthwaite’s irrational and mean-spirited behavior and could have been the trigger for him to destroy the aircraft and kill everyone—including himself—but something else began nagging at me: What about that fall from the burro when he was only three years old? Could the fall that knocked him unconscious for a week also have played a role in what may later have developed into adult mental illness?

  A few scribbled notes in a file I had received from CAB investigator Schonberger made me even more interested in that possible angle:

  “At 3 yrs. age, brain concussion left violent headaches for years afterwards.

  “Riding burro in Pueblo, Colo. Pulled from burro & struck head. Unconscious 5 days.

  “Bad headaches. . . back injury. . . vertebrae damaged.

  “Walked after several weeks after only one chiropractic treatment.”

  Unconscious for five days? Bad headaches?

  Crosthwaite’s fall from a burro as a child was not something to be ignored or dismissed then or now. He received no medical treatment, other than one visit to a chiropractor, and his five days of unconsciousness today would be considered a traumatic brain injury requiring hospitalization and expert medical care. When a person suffers sudden external trauma to the head to the degree that it renders the person unconscious for that long, the brain suffers damage that may not be noticed for many years to come.