January 11, 1957.
Inside the Colorado State Penitentiary, Jack Gilbert Graham sits in a steel chair, calm and silent, as guards fasten the straps.
Minutes later, cyanide gas hisses from the vents.
The nation watches justice claim one of its coldest killers.
Two years earlier, on November 1, 1955, Graham had slipped a homemade dynamite bomb into his mother’s suitcase before she boarded United Air Lines Flight 629 out of Denver.
She thought she was flying to visit family.
He was sending her — and 43 others — to their deaths.
When the plane exploded 11 minutes after takeoff, the shock rippled across America.
Investigators combed through 6,000 acres of debris before discovering something unthinkable:
The bomb wasn’t political. It wasn’t revenge.
It was for money.
Graham had insured his mother’s life for $37,500, payable only if she died in an accident.
When arrested, he confessed with chilling ease:
“I don’t have any excuses. I’m not sorry for anything I did.”
That statement sealed his fate.
On execution night, a photographer captured his final moments — his face expressionless as the gas filled the chamber.
It remains one of the most haunting images of postwar America — the face of a man who turned greed into mass murder.
Source: Some Amazing Facts
