The Gulf - The mystery of Flight 967 and Robert Vernon Spear
Dec 12, 2019 7:05:40 GMT
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Post by hi224 on Dec 12, 2019 7:05:40 GMT
The Gulf
National Airlines Flight 967
1
On November 16, 1959, an airplane vanished over the Gulf of Mexico, with 42 people onboard. The flight had been on its way from Tampa, Florida, to New Orleans. The last radar contact with the aircraft--made at 12:55 am, over the open sea--had indicated the plane was still on course to its destination at the time that it vanished.
A massive search began. Rescuers went out in aircraft and boats, arriving before dawn and still combing the cold, rough seas as the sun came up. Early that morning, they spotted something: a small amount of debris, a large oil slick, and several floating bodies. Immediately they concentrated their efforts on this area, eventually retrieving:
"nine bodies, a portion of a tenth body, five life rafts, five life vests, and a highly diversified quantity of buoyant debris."
This debris included parts of seats, parts of overhead racks, upholstery, items of clothing, parts of leather suitcases, shoes, a pack of cigarettes. Despite intensive searches over the following months and years by the Coast Guard, Civil Aeronautics Board, the US Navy, the US Fish and Wildlife Service and private companies--the rest of the wreckage has never been found.
2
The Civil Aeronautics Board investigated the cause of the crash. Without an aircraft, this was no easy task.
Investigators determined that the flight crew was competent and experienced. The aircraft was airworthy at the time of departure and had an adequate amount of fuel. The weather conditions were good. Nearby radar stations reported "the flight was very close to being on course and on schedule.'' There were no apparent problems with the plane's operating equipment, no apparent discrepancies in the maintenance records, nothing mechanical which could "reasonably be linked to this accident".
“Nothing unusual was observed and no other objects were observed in the vicinity of the flight which indicated to the station that any difficulty was being encountered".
There was one witness--the attendant of a lookout tower 30 miles west of the crash site, who
“saw an unusual light in the sky [...] in the general direction of where [the flight] was lost and at about the time it was lost [...] the light was red or dark red, appearing suddenly, lasting “a couple of seconds” then producing a vertical white light which fell with a white trail [...] the initial red flash was “almost as big as the sun”.
Investigators were divided on whether the aircraft broke apart on impact with the water, or exploded in the air before it went down. The Coast Guard favored the former explanation, while the Air Force favored the latter. The autopsies of the bodies, all of which were identified by fingerprints, indicated that all had received traumatic injuries:
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. A considerable amount of the floating debris also exhibited signs of burning but only above waterlines. [...] 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.
Acknowledging "there is little or no physical evidence on which to explain this accident", the CAB was forced to conclude, after nearly three years of investigation:
Because of lack of physical evidence, the probable cause of this accident is unknown.
3
One part of the investigation focused on the passengers. The only noteworthy observation from the gate agent in Tampa was "a man in a brown or tan suit, carrying a newspaper but no luggage, hurrying toward the Flight 967 gate right at closing time". The agent's attention was drawn elsewhere, however, and he never noticed if the man boarded the flight or not.
Carefully the investigators went through the flight manifest. Initially, there was some speculation based on the fact that a noted Chicago mobster--Ellis “Itchy” Mandel--was on the flight. But this investigation led nowhere.
Among the 42 names of the dead--there was a passenger named Dr Robert Vernon Spears--a distinguished naturopath from Dallas, Texas.
There was nothing immediately remarkable about Dr Spears. 65 years old at the time of the crash, he had been the national secretary of the National Association of Naturopathic Physicians and the head of the Texas Naturopath Association. Photographs depicted Dr Spears as a plump, jovial man--in a checkered suit and round spectacles, he embodied the image of a kindly family physician. Dr Spears lived in an affluent suburb of Dallas, and he and his wife were relatively well-known in the city’s social circles.
For weeks Dr Spears was mourned along with the rest of the victims. His wife, who had recently given birth to twins, even collected a partial payout from his $120,000 life insurance policy.
This all changed two months after the crash, on January 20, 1960, when Robert Vernon Spears was arrested in Phoenix, Arizona, in possession of a stolen car--a salmon-pink Plymouth. Dr Spears (who was calling himself Dr Rhodes) had tried to file down the numbers on the car’s registration numbers and had even used dynamite to damage the car's crankcase.
The car belonged to a man named Al Taylor, a longtime friend of Dr Spears, who had been the best man at his wedding.
Curiously, Al Taylor had recently been reported missing. In fact, he had vanished on November 16, 1959 - the very same day that airplane went down in the Gulf.
Spears and Taylor
4
At the time of his disappearance, Al Taylor lived in Tampa and worked as a salesman for the Pioneer Tire Company. By all accounts, he was in financial difficulties, and had many debts. The day before the fateful flight, Taylor had visited his ex-wife Alice Steel Taylor at her home, looking for their adult son Junior, who wasn’t home. “He kept checking his watch,” his ex-wife later said, “and looked anxious to leave". After he left, he phoned again three times, again asking for Junior. Then he abruptly told her was headed to Atlanta the next day, to look for a job there. He asked her not to tell Junior this. Taylor apparently then he called his boss at the tire company and asked for the next day off work.
Though no longer married to Al Taylor, Alice later told reporters they had been amicably divorced, and were still close. After not hearing from Taylor for a few days, and discovering he had not showed up for work, Alice became worried. She contacted his work--they knew nothing. She later determined that Taylor’s brown jacket was missing from his apartment, though everything else seemed untouched, “just as if he had stepped out to buy a newspaper”.
The former Mrs Taylor was becoming increasingly frantic. When she read that Dr Robert Spears had been a victim of the air disaster, she became even more curious. Spears had been a close friend of her husband, and she had never considered him to be a good influence. She called Spears’s wife (who was still grieving at that time) and asked if she had seen or heard from Taylor. Mrs Spears replied that she had not.
Alice was not to be dissuaded. She was an unflappable woman in her late fifties, with a fondness for ostentatious feathered hats, pearl necklaces, and large brooches. She later said she had a “premonition” that her husband had been on that flight, and she never wavered from it. She received a court order to open his post office box. There she discovered a receipt addressed to their son Junior.
It revealed that Al Taylor had bought a $37,500 life insurance policy-- in Tampa airport--at 12:16 am, just nine minutes before Flight 967 departed. It had his signature on it.
[Some context here: In the 50s, life insurance vending machines were commonplace in airports. Playing upon people's uncertainties about air-travel, insurance companies did quite well off them. Mr Taylor would need to have put just $1.50 into that machine to secure that $37,500 insurance policy (equivalent to more than $300,000 today).]
With this information, Mrs Taylor's lawyer called the Tampa police department and the newspapers. She told them all about her missing husband and his missing pink Plymouth, which sparked a nationwide search. The FBI got involved. Debt collectors got involved--suddenly "every repo man in America" was looking for a pink Plymouth.
The media, of course, went straight to Dr Spears’s wife. These were her statements:
"If my husband was on that plane, I can accept it although my life will be hard. If he were not, I don't know anything I could do about it.” [Here she began choking back tears] "I know one thing, we had planned on celebrating my son's birthday and we had bigger plans for Christmas. I know that he loved those babies and that if he were alive I am sure I would have heard from him. I believe him lost in the crash."
That was before Spears was found in Arizona with Taylor’s car. On January 20, when she was informed that her husband was alive, Mrs Spears struck a very different tone. A reporter happened to be in her home at the time. Clearly in shock, she turned to the reporter and said:
"What can I say? I told him it wouldn't work!"
5
According to the Senior Passenger Agent for National Airlines, there were no established procedures in 1959 for determining if a reporting passenger was the same person for whom the reservation was made. Sometimes passengers even boarded the wrong planes by accident. At that time there was also very little airport security.
Clearly, Dr Spears had not been on that plane. But where had he been? And who was he?
He had actually been hiding out with an old associate named William Turska (also a naturopath), in Turska’s remote bungalow in the desert 40 miles from Phoenix, Arizona. During this time, Spears had briefly visited his wife (on January 7)--so her answers in her first interview were a lie. The FBI had found Dr Spears through an ex-wife of Spears’s associate Mr Turska. The FBI then tracked him down through surveillance.
The FBI discovered there was much more to the kindly old Dr Spears than met the eye. He was not a licensed MD, and his license to practice naturopathy had been revoked in 1957. In fact, it was revealed that Spears was facing charges for performing abortions--which was illegal at the time, and had been set to stand trial on December 3, 1959. It turned out he had a long criminal record--a string of confidence schemes, forgery, and thefts under a variety of aliases. The man was a con artist. Spears had been in and out of jail in multiple states (even mistakenly deported to Canada on one occasion). He had "an uncanny ability to move on at a moment's notice". After several decades of false names, new identities, fresh starts, abandoned wives, abandoned lives--he had spent the last years running "a lucrative underground abortion business".
Perhaps most bizarrely of all--Dr Spears was an expert in hypnosis. He had hypnotized his own wife for the births of their children. Two dozen books on hypnosis had been found in Spears's home in Dallas. Mrs Taylor recalled that Dr Spears had held an unnatural sway over her former husband. She had never liked Spears. “I loathed him,” she said, and had always considered him a bad influence on Al. Recently, she said, Al Taylor had been strangely depressed and withdrawn, but his mood only lifted when he talked to Spears. Suddenly his strange behavior all made sense to her--her hapless ex-husband was a puppet, under Dr Spears’s spell. She put it bluntly to the Dallas Morning News:
"I believe that Spears hypnotized [Taylor] into doing it."
The FBI, while stopping short of the Svengali hypothesis, acknowledged that "Spears may have had someone travel for him to collect a large insurance policy for the benefit of his young wife".
A theory also emerged that Spears was connected to another unexplained air disaster just months later. Before the crash, Spears had briefly sought advice on his pending abortion case from a New York City lawyer named Julian Frank. On January 6, 1960 (less than two months after Flight 967) Frank was on board a National Airlines flight which was blown up by dynamite over North Carolina, resulting in 34 deaths. Frank’s body was found with “injuries … significantly different from and much more extensive than the other passengers”, injuries which “were inconsistent with the type of injury usually incurred in an aircraft accident”. Frank was covered by $900,000 in life insurance policies at the time of his death, and had also been under investigation for corruption. That crash remains officially “unexplained” also. Spears himself apparently admitted to having met with this man in New York City. If Dr Spears was somehow responsible for both incidents, that would make him responsible for the loss of 76 lives, making him one of the most prolific killers in American history.
In spite of this string of suspicious details, the airplane was still missing, therefore there was no hope of charging Spears with anything relating to the crash. Upon his arrest in Arizona, the FBI charged him with transporting a stolen vehicle beyond state lines. The combination of the auto theft charge and his existing abortion charge eventually got him ten years in prison.
It has been claimed that Dr Spears tried to access a vial of cyanide before his sentencing--but some have disputed this. As he was leaving the courthouse after his first hearing, he was observed to be whistling.
6
Spears disagreed with the characterization of himself as a sinister hypnotic puppetmaster. This is the story Spears gave after his arrest:
He said he had been in Tampa and was planning on heading back to Dallas on November 16. Taylor also wanted to go to Dallas, to see a doctor about a neck injury, and to get away from his irritating ex-wife. Spears said “he begrudgingly gave his Flight 967 ticket to Al Taylor, a friend who couldn't face a long drive to Dallas. Al Taylor asked him to drive the Plymouth to Dallas where they were scheduled to meet up. He heard about the Flight 967 disaster along the way, and although he was devastated to think his old pal had perished, Spears simply decided it was an opportunity for a fresh start."
When Spears met secretly with his wife on January 7, he had reportedly given her the same story. As Mrs Spears described it,
"He saw an opportunity to leave me and the babies with some financial security. He felt he had been a burden and it was a chance to free us of that burden.”
Mrs Spears said that when he came to see her, Spears was sad about Taylor’s death. "I asked him if anything had been done to plane and he said no". She also said she had begged him to turn himself in but he refused.
7
Alice Steel Taylor had long claimed that her ex-husband was nothing more than an unwitting “puppet” in Spears’s schemes. Yet cracks soon appeared in this image too.
It turned out Mr Taylor was not just a gullible friend of Dr Spears--he was a criminal himself, Spears’ partner in crime for many years. The two had met in the Missouri State Penitentiary, back when Taylor was still known as Albert O. Thompson. Taylor, investigators discovered, was wanted in Washington DC and Philadephlia under a variety of assumed names at the time of his disappearance. Taylor had also been married before his marriage to Alice. After forging several checks, he had skipped town and completely abandoned his first family. Over the course of their long friendship, Spears and Taylor had worked together on confidence schemes throughout the USA.
Letters between the two men, which Mrs Taylor believed to be evidence of a skilful manipulation by Dr Spears, could also simply indicate a strong friendship. They even raise the possibility that the two con-men may have been plotting something together. Remember Julian Frank, the corrupt lawyer who allegedly blew up the other aircraft? According to Alan C. Logan’s book, Taylor had also met with Frank in New York (though Logan does not explain why). In one letter, Spears urged Taylor not to use his real name in future communications, but to refer to him as “F. Massey”. This is also unexplained.
Three days before the crash, (the day Spears had arrived in Tampa) Taylor and Spears were seen together enjoying a lavish meal in the Hillsboro Hotel. According to the hotel staff, Taylor was talking about boarding a flight to Dallas--the waitress specifically remembered making small talk about Dallas. That day the two men also reportedly met with a man they referred to in letters only as "the fellow". The next morning (November 14), Taylor and Spears were together again--Taylor’s son Junior saw them drinking and laughing in Spears’s hotel room, in a celebratory mood. According to Junior, Taylor was carrying over $600 in cash--a lot of money at the time, especially for a man in serious debt.
Despite these strange details, Mrs Taylor stuck to her story--her ex-husband had been hypnotized. Meanwhile she campaigned in the courts to have him declared legally dead (which would give her son access to the life insurance money). She ultimately succeeded, and her son Junior received an undisclosed settlement. According to Logan’s book, Mrs Taylor was “media savvy”, and exaggerated her closeness with Taylor before his disappearance. They had been divorced longer than she claimed, and the divorce had been far from amicable.
Though he was legally dead, many had begun to doubt that Taylor was ever on that flight at all. A “mystery woman” told a local Tampa newspaper that she had had a relationship with Taylor shortly before his disappearance, and did not believe he was dead. Another friend of Taylor reportedly told police that he had seen Al Taylor on Christmas Eve, 1959, in a crowd of Christmas shoppers in Nashville, Tennessee. He was "100 percent" certain it was Taylor, and when he called out "Hey Al" he said the man turned, but then hastily slipped away into the crowd.
Police seriously looked into the possibility that Al Taylor may still be alive, even working with Mexican law enforcement to explore the possibility that he had fled south of the border. Tampa Police Detective John C. Daniels was among those who did not buy the hypnosis theory:
”Taylor was in debt over his head. We know he was at the airport that night, at 12:16 am. but he would have had to have done some rushing to get aboard the plane because it taxied away at 12:25 am. [...] Both men were in the confidence rackets at one time. Taylor's not going to let himself get talked into something as crazy as getting on a plane that's about to blow up. Who knows, Taylor might show up one day, alive and healthy."
Alan C. Logan’s book also cites a vague remark by Mr Turska that Spears was “not alone” when he showed up in Arizona after the crash. Citing reports that Spears may have gone to Yuma while hiding out in Arizona, Logan notes, “At that time the long US-Mexico border to the west and south of Yuma was largely unpatrolled.”
Turska
8
Questions also surround the third man involved in all this--William Turska, the naturopath who Spears went to stay with in the immediate aftermath of the crash. Turska participated in a few interviews about the case--notably in Life Magazine--in which he played the part of a bemused bystander.
In fact, Turska had also been facing abortion charges in November 1959 (though Turska’s charges were later dropped). Turska also gave wildly conflicting accounts of his involvement in the affair.
At first, Turska downplayed his association with Spears, saying they were merely acquaintances and that Spears had showed up out of the blue. Turska claimed at the time he did not even know about the airplane crash. "We don't get newspapers out here,” he told reporters. He also told them that "after he left I found a case of hidden dynamite". Yet as Logan points out, the crate of dynamite found on Turska’s property was actually purchased in Tucson, and Spears had no way of getting into Tuscon from Turska's compound unless Turska himself drove him.
Turska claimed that once he found out about the plane crash fiasco, he immediately told Spears to leave, and then went straight to see his attorney.
In a second interview, however, Turska told a different story. In that interview, he said he knew about the plane crash, admitted taking Spears to see his wife, and said that Spears had confided in him that he wanted to start a “new life”:
”He wanted to change his character,” Turska said, “change his fingerprints, change everything.”
In that interview, Turska said he now thought Spears had been lying to hm, and implied Spears's wife was in on the whole scam--accusing her of faking her reaction to seeing him.
As it turned out, William Turska was not a model citizen himself. He was arrested for assault and battery for his wife in 1971. He also had convictions for drunk driving and drug possession. He ran unsuccessfully for Idaho County Coroner in 1972 on the Republican ticket. "Turska was the one to fear, not Bob,” Mrs Spears once said. Logan alleges "Turska was planning his own exit strategy" before the crash--in September 1959 he had put up his Arizona property for sale: "priced to sell, owner leaving state".
Spears Reveals "The Truth"
9
In Autumn 1960, while in jail, Spears agreed to a taped interview with reporter Ed Barker. In this interview, he told a completely different story about what had happened.
According to this new story, in November 1959 Spears was extremely worried about the upcoming abortion trial in Los Angeles. He planned to intimidate the witness in that case somehow with a bomb (not to kill her but to intimidate her). He needed to get the dynamite from Tulsa to Dallas. He said he had persuaded Al Taylor to take the dynamite on the airplane by promising to pay him $10,000 to do it. Taylor would fly and Spears would drive. Taylor apparently agreed to this, and boarded the flight that night with nothing more than a briefcase containing the dynamite. Spears said:
“If the business did detonate during the flight, it had to be by accident [...] I’m still of the opinion that the plane--something else happened to it”.
As for the insurance policy taken out by Taylor, Spears said:
”Taylor was sort of a nut on insurance. I can understand him taking out an insurance policy. But even then there would be no point in destroying the plane or himself. I am quite sure that Taylor would not have exploded it.”
This new story was made public in 1963. Spears immediately said he had made the whole thing up after the reporter had “pressured him” to tell him something new. Taylor’s son Junior dismissed the story. The prosecutor in Spears’s abortion case pointed out they already had sworn affidavits from the abortion witnesses, which they could simply have read out in court. The notion of intimidating the witness thus made no sense. “His story is absurd,” the prosecutor said.
10
Alan C. Logan is among those who dismiss this second story as fiction. Logan seems to be a firm defender of Spears. As he said in a recent interview:
"The more that I learned through the research about Spears, even though this guy had an incredibly profound criminal past [...] he never had any history of violence at all. Nothing. Of all the prison terms he served, he never had a single infraction of violence. [...] Then you also have to think about the fact that Al Taylor was his friend since 1928. [...] for all those decades and all the different things they got up to. To me it just doesn’t add up that Spears is going to tell his best friend of many decades, a man with essentially no history of violence, to take on this package like it’s Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner.”
Logan points out that much of the public demonization of Spears resulted from the fact that he performed abortions--something that is viewed very differently in today’s political discourse. He also cites the testimony of Spears’s wife, neighbors and friends who spoke of him as a “lovely person” and a “gentleman” and expressed “utter disbelief that he would be capable of doing something so heinous as taking down a passenger aircraft”.
Logan says Taylor’s ex-wife was media-savvy--and points out that she had a potential financial motive to portray Taylor as an unwitting passenger on that flight. Logan asks a number of questions--whether Taylor could have planned a murder-suicide without Spears’s knowledge, whether Taylor boarded the flight at all, whether the last-minute insurance policy was an intentional red herring to “throw off investigators” and “utterly confuse everyone”?
Personally I suspect that Logan has at least partially fallen prey to the charms of Dr Spears--I highly doubt Taylor is living it up in South America--but his questions are interesting ones.
An Aviation Accident
11
With so many tantalizing details about Spears and Taylor, it’s easy to forget we know next to nothing about this plane crash. Investigators found less than 1% of its structural components and no conclusive evidence that a bomb was used. The conclusion of the Official CAB Accident Report (June 11, 1962):
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 any bearing upon the accident. We have been unable to find any such relationship.
Note the use of the word “accident”, which is used throughout the report. Could it be that in spite of this vast, tangled web--this was just another plane crash? A tragic accident due to some unforeseen mechanical malfunction or even pilot error? And just a freak coincidence that a couple of conmen just happened to have a ticket? And that they happened to know a seedy lawyer who (allegedly) blew himself up a month later? Without the plane’s black box, it is impossible to rule this out.
The theory of a Svengalian puppet master was convenient not just for the former Mrs Taylor. It was also convenient for National Airlines. It is perhaps no coincidence that a PR man from National Airlines wrote a book in 1963 accusing Spears of being responsible for the crash. As Logan points out, in the first three weeks of 1960 alone there had been four major airline crashes. “Just a few years before,” Logan writes, “on Valentine's Day 1953, a National Airlines flight on the very same run--from Tampa to New Orleans--also plunged into the Gulf. […] The final ruling was “probable severe turbulence.””
The Yet Yawning Gulf
12
There are a thousand ways of connecting the dots, and a thousand other explanations out there. Who hatched the plot--Spears? Taylor? Turska? Mrs Taylor? Mrs Spears? Mr Frank? A rival airline company? Extraterrestrials? Someone connected to the abortion case? The mafia? Or was it all a freak accident?
The answer is down there, somewhere.
Here are the names of the people from the flight manifest.
HERBERT N. ADAMS, Miami
A. BATES, Fort Lauderdale
H. W. BUMPAS, Miami
DONALD DAY, Miami
LEO DONNELLY, Fort Lauderdale
JOSEPH FARRELL, Fort Lauderdale
J. M. GIBBONS, Van Nuys, California
MRS. J. M. GIBBONS
EVERETT ENGERSOL, Evergreen Park, Illinois
ELLIS MANDEL, Chicago
GEORGE MANDEL, Chicago
MRS. EILEEN McGARRY, Miami Springs
R. PHIPPS, Miami
MRS. CHUCK SCHNEIDER, Chicago
J. W. SHUTTS, Glendora, California
MISS. C. TAYLOR, no address
C. M. YEAZEL, Miami
ETHEL EARWOOD, Albuquerque
PEDRO MARCO, arrived in Miami from Havana
A. VINAS, Havana and Loma Linda, California
LEWIS MAY, JR., No address
STANLEY R. MIKUS, Houston
FRED NOEL, ticketed from Beaumont, Texas
H. SALAS, no address
D. LEITZ, Tampa
F. OBERTHEIR, Dallas
DR. ROBERT SPEARS, Dallas
A. H. FRASER, Tampa
R. ALEXANDER, Orlando
F. M. PAGE, Orlando
J. H. BICKERSTAFF, arrived from Orlando
MISS ELOISE PITTS, Lake City
The REV. C. L. McGAVERN, Jacksonville, Florida
MRS. C. L. McGAVERN
R. D. DOWIS, Sterling, Colorado
RENFRO (no first name), arrived from Orlando
JACK ATKINSON, Miami Springs, an inspector for the Federal Aviation Agency
Captain FRANK E. TODD, Miami
1st Officer DICK S. BEEBEE, Miami
Flight engineer GEORGE H. CLARKE, Miami
Stewardess PAT HIRES, Miami
Stewardess DONNA OSBURN, Miami
References
“Self-Styled: Chasing Dr Robert Vernon Spears” by Alan C. Logan
Civil Aeronautics Board - Aircraft Accident Report, June 11, 1962
“Robert Spears, 1959 bomb suspect, dies in Dallas". St. Petersburg Times. May 3, 1969 LINK
“Con Man, Best Man, An Air Crash - A Far Out, Far Up Mystery". Life Magazine. February 1, 1960 LINK
National Airlines Flight 967
1
On November 16, 1959, an airplane vanished over the Gulf of Mexico, with 42 people onboard. The flight had been on its way from Tampa, Florida, to New Orleans. The last radar contact with the aircraft--made at 12:55 am, over the open sea--had indicated the plane was still on course to its destination at the time that it vanished.
A massive search began. Rescuers went out in aircraft and boats, arriving before dawn and still combing the cold, rough seas as the sun came up. Early that morning, they spotted something: a small amount of debris, a large oil slick, and several floating bodies. Immediately they concentrated their efforts on this area, eventually retrieving:
"nine bodies, a portion of a tenth body, five life rafts, five life vests, and a highly diversified quantity of buoyant debris."
This debris included parts of seats, parts of overhead racks, upholstery, items of clothing, parts of leather suitcases, shoes, a pack of cigarettes. Despite intensive searches over the following months and years by the Coast Guard, Civil Aeronautics Board, the US Navy, the US Fish and Wildlife Service and private companies--the rest of the wreckage has never been found.
2
The Civil Aeronautics Board investigated the cause of the crash. Without an aircraft, this was no easy task.
Investigators determined that the flight crew was competent and experienced. The aircraft was airworthy at the time of departure and had an adequate amount of fuel. The weather conditions were good. Nearby radar stations reported "the flight was very close to being on course and on schedule.'' There were no apparent problems with the plane's operating equipment, no apparent discrepancies in the maintenance records, nothing mechanical which could "reasonably be linked to this accident".
“Nothing unusual was observed and no other objects were observed in the vicinity of the flight which indicated to the station that any difficulty was being encountered".
There was one witness--the attendant of a lookout tower 30 miles west of the crash site, who
“saw an unusual light in the sky [...] in the general direction of where [the flight] was lost and at about the time it was lost [...] the light was red or dark red, appearing suddenly, lasting “a couple of seconds” then producing a vertical white light which fell with a white trail [...] the initial red flash was “almost as big as the sun”.
Investigators were divided on whether the aircraft broke apart on impact with the water, or exploded in the air before it went down. The Coast Guard favored the former explanation, while the Air Force favored the latter. The autopsies of the bodies, all of which were identified by fingerprints, indicated that all had received traumatic injuries:
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. A considerable amount of the floating debris also exhibited signs of burning but only above waterlines. [...] 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.
Acknowledging "there is little or no physical evidence on which to explain this accident", the CAB was forced to conclude, after nearly three years of investigation:
Because of lack of physical evidence, the probable cause of this accident is unknown.
3
One part of the investigation focused on the passengers. The only noteworthy observation from the gate agent in Tampa was "a man in a brown or tan suit, carrying a newspaper but no luggage, hurrying toward the Flight 967 gate right at closing time". The agent's attention was drawn elsewhere, however, and he never noticed if the man boarded the flight or not.
Carefully the investigators went through the flight manifest. Initially, there was some speculation based on the fact that a noted Chicago mobster--Ellis “Itchy” Mandel--was on the flight. But this investigation led nowhere.
Among the 42 names of the dead--there was a passenger named Dr Robert Vernon Spears--a distinguished naturopath from Dallas, Texas.
There was nothing immediately remarkable about Dr Spears. 65 years old at the time of the crash, he had been the national secretary of the National Association of Naturopathic Physicians and the head of the Texas Naturopath Association. Photographs depicted Dr Spears as a plump, jovial man--in a checkered suit and round spectacles, he embodied the image of a kindly family physician. Dr Spears lived in an affluent suburb of Dallas, and he and his wife were relatively well-known in the city’s social circles.
For weeks Dr Spears was mourned along with the rest of the victims. His wife, who had recently given birth to twins, even collected a partial payout from his $120,000 life insurance policy.
This all changed two months after the crash, on January 20, 1960, when Robert Vernon Spears was arrested in Phoenix, Arizona, in possession of a stolen car--a salmon-pink Plymouth. Dr Spears (who was calling himself Dr Rhodes) had tried to file down the numbers on the car’s registration numbers and had even used dynamite to damage the car's crankcase.
The car belonged to a man named Al Taylor, a longtime friend of Dr Spears, who had been the best man at his wedding.
Curiously, Al Taylor had recently been reported missing. In fact, he had vanished on November 16, 1959 - the very same day that airplane went down in the Gulf.
Spears and Taylor
4
At the time of his disappearance, Al Taylor lived in Tampa and worked as a salesman for the Pioneer Tire Company. By all accounts, he was in financial difficulties, and had many debts. The day before the fateful flight, Taylor had visited his ex-wife Alice Steel Taylor at her home, looking for their adult son Junior, who wasn’t home. “He kept checking his watch,” his ex-wife later said, “and looked anxious to leave". After he left, he phoned again three times, again asking for Junior. Then he abruptly told her was headed to Atlanta the next day, to look for a job there. He asked her not to tell Junior this. Taylor apparently then he called his boss at the tire company and asked for the next day off work.
Though no longer married to Al Taylor, Alice later told reporters they had been amicably divorced, and were still close. After not hearing from Taylor for a few days, and discovering he had not showed up for work, Alice became worried. She contacted his work--they knew nothing. She later determined that Taylor’s brown jacket was missing from his apartment, though everything else seemed untouched, “just as if he had stepped out to buy a newspaper”.
The former Mrs Taylor was becoming increasingly frantic. When she read that Dr Robert Spears had been a victim of the air disaster, she became even more curious. Spears had been a close friend of her husband, and she had never considered him to be a good influence. She called Spears’s wife (who was still grieving at that time) and asked if she had seen or heard from Taylor. Mrs Spears replied that she had not.
Alice was not to be dissuaded. She was an unflappable woman in her late fifties, with a fondness for ostentatious feathered hats, pearl necklaces, and large brooches. She later said she had a “premonition” that her husband had been on that flight, and she never wavered from it. She received a court order to open his post office box. There she discovered a receipt addressed to their son Junior.
It revealed that Al Taylor had bought a $37,500 life insurance policy-- in Tampa airport--at 12:16 am, just nine minutes before Flight 967 departed. It had his signature on it.
[Some context here: In the 50s, life insurance vending machines were commonplace in airports. Playing upon people's uncertainties about air-travel, insurance companies did quite well off them. Mr Taylor would need to have put just $1.50 into that machine to secure that $37,500 insurance policy (equivalent to more than $300,000 today).]
With this information, Mrs Taylor's lawyer called the Tampa police department and the newspapers. She told them all about her missing husband and his missing pink Plymouth, which sparked a nationwide search. The FBI got involved. Debt collectors got involved--suddenly "every repo man in America" was looking for a pink Plymouth.
The media, of course, went straight to Dr Spears’s wife. These were her statements:
"If my husband was on that plane, I can accept it although my life will be hard. If he were not, I don't know anything I could do about it.” [Here she began choking back tears] "I know one thing, we had planned on celebrating my son's birthday and we had bigger plans for Christmas. I know that he loved those babies and that if he were alive I am sure I would have heard from him. I believe him lost in the crash."
That was before Spears was found in Arizona with Taylor’s car. On January 20, when she was informed that her husband was alive, Mrs Spears struck a very different tone. A reporter happened to be in her home at the time. Clearly in shock, she turned to the reporter and said:
"What can I say? I told him it wouldn't work!"
5
According to the Senior Passenger Agent for National Airlines, there were no established procedures in 1959 for determining if a reporting passenger was the same person for whom the reservation was made. Sometimes passengers even boarded the wrong planes by accident. At that time there was also very little airport security.
Clearly, Dr Spears had not been on that plane. But where had he been? And who was he?
He had actually been hiding out with an old associate named William Turska (also a naturopath), in Turska’s remote bungalow in the desert 40 miles from Phoenix, Arizona. During this time, Spears had briefly visited his wife (on January 7)--so her answers in her first interview were a lie. The FBI had found Dr Spears through an ex-wife of Spears’s associate Mr Turska. The FBI then tracked him down through surveillance.
The FBI discovered there was much more to the kindly old Dr Spears than met the eye. He was not a licensed MD, and his license to practice naturopathy had been revoked in 1957. In fact, it was revealed that Spears was facing charges for performing abortions--which was illegal at the time, and had been set to stand trial on December 3, 1959. It turned out he had a long criminal record--a string of confidence schemes, forgery, and thefts under a variety of aliases. The man was a con artist. Spears had been in and out of jail in multiple states (even mistakenly deported to Canada on one occasion). He had "an uncanny ability to move on at a moment's notice". After several decades of false names, new identities, fresh starts, abandoned wives, abandoned lives--he had spent the last years running "a lucrative underground abortion business".
Perhaps most bizarrely of all--Dr Spears was an expert in hypnosis. He had hypnotized his own wife for the births of their children. Two dozen books on hypnosis had been found in Spears's home in Dallas. Mrs Taylor recalled that Dr Spears had held an unnatural sway over her former husband. She had never liked Spears. “I loathed him,” she said, and had always considered him a bad influence on Al. Recently, she said, Al Taylor had been strangely depressed and withdrawn, but his mood only lifted when he talked to Spears. Suddenly his strange behavior all made sense to her--her hapless ex-husband was a puppet, under Dr Spears’s spell. She put it bluntly to the Dallas Morning News:
"I believe that Spears hypnotized [Taylor] into doing it."
The FBI, while stopping short of the Svengali hypothesis, acknowledged that "Spears may have had someone travel for him to collect a large insurance policy for the benefit of his young wife".
A theory also emerged that Spears was connected to another unexplained air disaster just months later. Before the crash, Spears had briefly sought advice on his pending abortion case from a New York City lawyer named Julian Frank. On January 6, 1960 (less than two months after Flight 967) Frank was on board a National Airlines flight which was blown up by dynamite over North Carolina, resulting in 34 deaths. Frank’s body was found with “injuries … significantly different from and much more extensive than the other passengers”, injuries which “were inconsistent with the type of injury usually incurred in an aircraft accident”. Frank was covered by $900,000 in life insurance policies at the time of his death, and had also been under investigation for corruption. That crash remains officially “unexplained” also. Spears himself apparently admitted to having met with this man in New York City. If Dr Spears was somehow responsible for both incidents, that would make him responsible for the loss of 76 lives, making him one of the most prolific killers in American history.
In spite of this string of suspicious details, the airplane was still missing, therefore there was no hope of charging Spears with anything relating to the crash. Upon his arrest in Arizona, the FBI charged him with transporting a stolen vehicle beyond state lines. The combination of the auto theft charge and his existing abortion charge eventually got him ten years in prison.
It has been claimed that Dr Spears tried to access a vial of cyanide before his sentencing--but some have disputed this. As he was leaving the courthouse after his first hearing, he was observed to be whistling.
6
Spears disagreed with the characterization of himself as a sinister hypnotic puppetmaster. This is the story Spears gave after his arrest:
He said he had been in Tampa and was planning on heading back to Dallas on November 16. Taylor also wanted to go to Dallas, to see a doctor about a neck injury, and to get away from his irritating ex-wife. Spears said “he begrudgingly gave his Flight 967 ticket to Al Taylor, a friend who couldn't face a long drive to Dallas. Al Taylor asked him to drive the Plymouth to Dallas where they were scheduled to meet up. He heard about the Flight 967 disaster along the way, and although he was devastated to think his old pal had perished, Spears simply decided it was an opportunity for a fresh start."
When Spears met secretly with his wife on January 7, he had reportedly given her the same story. As Mrs Spears described it,
"He saw an opportunity to leave me and the babies with some financial security. He felt he had been a burden and it was a chance to free us of that burden.”
Mrs Spears said that when he came to see her, Spears was sad about Taylor’s death. "I asked him if anything had been done to plane and he said no". She also said she had begged him to turn himself in but he refused.
7
Alice Steel Taylor had long claimed that her ex-husband was nothing more than an unwitting “puppet” in Spears’s schemes. Yet cracks soon appeared in this image too.
It turned out Mr Taylor was not just a gullible friend of Dr Spears--he was a criminal himself, Spears’ partner in crime for many years. The two had met in the Missouri State Penitentiary, back when Taylor was still known as Albert O. Thompson. Taylor, investigators discovered, was wanted in Washington DC and Philadephlia under a variety of assumed names at the time of his disappearance. Taylor had also been married before his marriage to Alice. After forging several checks, he had skipped town and completely abandoned his first family. Over the course of their long friendship, Spears and Taylor had worked together on confidence schemes throughout the USA.
Letters between the two men, which Mrs Taylor believed to be evidence of a skilful manipulation by Dr Spears, could also simply indicate a strong friendship. They even raise the possibility that the two con-men may have been plotting something together. Remember Julian Frank, the corrupt lawyer who allegedly blew up the other aircraft? According to Alan C. Logan’s book, Taylor had also met with Frank in New York (though Logan does not explain why). In one letter, Spears urged Taylor not to use his real name in future communications, but to refer to him as “F. Massey”. This is also unexplained.
Three days before the crash, (the day Spears had arrived in Tampa) Taylor and Spears were seen together enjoying a lavish meal in the Hillsboro Hotel. According to the hotel staff, Taylor was talking about boarding a flight to Dallas--the waitress specifically remembered making small talk about Dallas. That day the two men also reportedly met with a man they referred to in letters only as "the fellow". The next morning (November 14), Taylor and Spears were together again--Taylor’s son Junior saw them drinking and laughing in Spears’s hotel room, in a celebratory mood. According to Junior, Taylor was carrying over $600 in cash--a lot of money at the time, especially for a man in serious debt.
Despite these strange details, Mrs Taylor stuck to her story--her ex-husband had been hypnotized. Meanwhile she campaigned in the courts to have him declared legally dead (which would give her son access to the life insurance money). She ultimately succeeded, and her son Junior received an undisclosed settlement. According to Logan’s book, Mrs Taylor was “media savvy”, and exaggerated her closeness with Taylor before his disappearance. They had been divorced longer than she claimed, and the divorce had been far from amicable.
Though he was legally dead, many had begun to doubt that Taylor was ever on that flight at all. A “mystery woman” told a local Tampa newspaper that she had had a relationship with Taylor shortly before his disappearance, and did not believe he was dead. Another friend of Taylor reportedly told police that he had seen Al Taylor on Christmas Eve, 1959, in a crowd of Christmas shoppers in Nashville, Tennessee. He was "100 percent" certain it was Taylor, and when he called out "Hey Al" he said the man turned, but then hastily slipped away into the crowd.
Police seriously looked into the possibility that Al Taylor may still be alive, even working with Mexican law enforcement to explore the possibility that he had fled south of the border. Tampa Police Detective John C. Daniels was among those who did not buy the hypnosis theory:
”Taylor was in debt over his head. We know he was at the airport that night, at 12:16 am. but he would have had to have done some rushing to get aboard the plane because it taxied away at 12:25 am. [...] Both men were in the confidence rackets at one time. Taylor's not going to let himself get talked into something as crazy as getting on a plane that's about to blow up. Who knows, Taylor might show up one day, alive and healthy."
Alan C. Logan’s book also cites a vague remark by Mr Turska that Spears was “not alone” when he showed up in Arizona after the crash. Citing reports that Spears may have gone to Yuma while hiding out in Arizona, Logan notes, “At that time the long US-Mexico border to the west and south of Yuma was largely unpatrolled.”
Turska
8
Questions also surround the third man involved in all this--William Turska, the naturopath who Spears went to stay with in the immediate aftermath of the crash. Turska participated in a few interviews about the case--notably in Life Magazine--in which he played the part of a bemused bystander.
In fact, Turska had also been facing abortion charges in November 1959 (though Turska’s charges were later dropped). Turska also gave wildly conflicting accounts of his involvement in the affair.
At first, Turska downplayed his association with Spears, saying they were merely acquaintances and that Spears had showed up out of the blue. Turska claimed at the time he did not even know about the airplane crash. "We don't get newspapers out here,” he told reporters. He also told them that "after he left I found a case of hidden dynamite". Yet as Logan points out, the crate of dynamite found on Turska’s property was actually purchased in Tucson, and Spears had no way of getting into Tuscon from Turska's compound unless Turska himself drove him.
Turska claimed that once he found out about the plane crash fiasco, he immediately told Spears to leave, and then went straight to see his attorney.
In a second interview, however, Turska told a different story. In that interview, he said he knew about the plane crash, admitted taking Spears to see his wife, and said that Spears had confided in him that he wanted to start a “new life”:
”He wanted to change his character,” Turska said, “change his fingerprints, change everything.”
In that interview, Turska said he now thought Spears had been lying to hm, and implied Spears's wife was in on the whole scam--accusing her of faking her reaction to seeing him.
As it turned out, William Turska was not a model citizen himself. He was arrested for assault and battery for his wife in 1971. He also had convictions for drunk driving and drug possession. He ran unsuccessfully for Idaho County Coroner in 1972 on the Republican ticket. "Turska was the one to fear, not Bob,” Mrs Spears once said. Logan alleges "Turska was planning his own exit strategy" before the crash--in September 1959 he had put up his Arizona property for sale: "priced to sell, owner leaving state".
Spears Reveals "The Truth"
9
In Autumn 1960, while in jail, Spears agreed to a taped interview with reporter Ed Barker. In this interview, he told a completely different story about what had happened.
According to this new story, in November 1959 Spears was extremely worried about the upcoming abortion trial in Los Angeles. He planned to intimidate the witness in that case somehow with a bomb (not to kill her but to intimidate her). He needed to get the dynamite from Tulsa to Dallas. He said he had persuaded Al Taylor to take the dynamite on the airplane by promising to pay him $10,000 to do it. Taylor would fly and Spears would drive. Taylor apparently agreed to this, and boarded the flight that night with nothing more than a briefcase containing the dynamite. Spears said:
“If the business did detonate during the flight, it had to be by accident [...] I’m still of the opinion that the plane--something else happened to it”.
As for the insurance policy taken out by Taylor, Spears said:
”Taylor was sort of a nut on insurance. I can understand him taking out an insurance policy. But even then there would be no point in destroying the plane or himself. I am quite sure that Taylor would not have exploded it.”
This new story was made public in 1963. Spears immediately said he had made the whole thing up after the reporter had “pressured him” to tell him something new. Taylor’s son Junior dismissed the story. The prosecutor in Spears’s abortion case pointed out they already had sworn affidavits from the abortion witnesses, which they could simply have read out in court. The notion of intimidating the witness thus made no sense. “His story is absurd,” the prosecutor said.
10
Alan C. Logan is among those who dismiss this second story as fiction. Logan seems to be a firm defender of Spears. As he said in a recent interview:
"The more that I learned through the research about Spears, even though this guy had an incredibly profound criminal past [...] he never had any history of violence at all. Nothing. Of all the prison terms he served, he never had a single infraction of violence. [...] Then you also have to think about the fact that Al Taylor was his friend since 1928. [...] for all those decades and all the different things they got up to. To me it just doesn’t add up that Spears is going to tell his best friend of many decades, a man with essentially no history of violence, to take on this package like it’s Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner.”
Logan points out that much of the public demonization of Spears resulted from the fact that he performed abortions--something that is viewed very differently in today’s political discourse. He also cites the testimony of Spears’s wife, neighbors and friends who spoke of him as a “lovely person” and a “gentleman” and expressed “utter disbelief that he would be capable of doing something so heinous as taking down a passenger aircraft”.
Logan says Taylor’s ex-wife was media-savvy--and points out that she had a potential financial motive to portray Taylor as an unwitting passenger on that flight. Logan asks a number of questions--whether Taylor could have planned a murder-suicide without Spears’s knowledge, whether Taylor boarded the flight at all, whether the last-minute insurance policy was an intentional red herring to “throw off investigators” and “utterly confuse everyone”?
Personally I suspect that Logan has at least partially fallen prey to the charms of Dr Spears--I highly doubt Taylor is living it up in South America--but his questions are interesting ones.
An Aviation Accident
11
With so many tantalizing details about Spears and Taylor, it’s easy to forget we know next to nothing about this plane crash. Investigators found less than 1% of its structural components and no conclusive evidence that a bomb was used. The conclusion of the Official CAB Accident Report (June 11, 1962):
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 any bearing upon the accident. We have been unable to find any such relationship.
Note the use of the word “accident”, which is used throughout the report. Could it be that in spite of this vast, tangled web--this was just another plane crash? A tragic accident due to some unforeseen mechanical malfunction or even pilot error? And just a freak coincidence that a couple of conmen just happened to have a ticket? And that they happened to know a seedy lawyer who (allegedly) blew himself up a month later? Without the plane’s black box, it is impossible to rule this out.
The theory of a Svengalian puppet master was convenient not just for the former Mrs Taylor. It was also convenient for National Airlines. It is perhaps no coincidence that a PR man from National Airlines wrote a book in 1963 accusing Spears of being responsible for the crash. As Logan points out, in the first three weeks of 1960 alone there had been four major airline crashes. “Just a few years before,” Logan writes, “on Valentine's Day 1953, a National Airlines flight on the very same run--from Tampa to New Orleans--also plunged into the Gulf. […] The final ruling was “probable severe turbulence.””
The Yet Yawning Gulf
12
There are a thousand ways of connecting the dots, and a thousand other explanations out there. Who hatched the plot--Spears? Taylor? Turska? Mrs Taylor? Mrs Spears? Mr Frank? A rival airline company? Extraterrestrials? Someone connected to the abortion case? The mafia? Or was it all a freak accident?
The answer is down there, somewhere.
Here are the names of the people from the flight manifest.
HERBERT N. ADAMS, Miami
A. BATES, Fort Lauderdale
H. W. BUMPAS, Miami
DONALD DAY, Miami
LEO DONNELLY, Fort Lauderdale
JOSEPH FARRELL, Fort Lauderdale
J. M. GIBBONS, Van Nuys, California
MRS. J. M. GIBBONS
EVERETT ENGERSOL, Evergreen Park, Illinois
ELLIS MANDEL, Chicago
GEORGE MANDEL, Chicago
MRS. EILEEN McGARRY, Miami Springs
R. PHIPPS, Miami
MRS. CHUCK SCHNEIDER, Chicago
J. W. SHUTTS, Glendora, California
MISS. C. TAYLOR, no address
C. M. YEAZEL, Miami
ETHEL EARWOOD, Albuquerque
PEDRO MARCO, arrived in Miami from Havana
A. VINAS, Havana and Loma Linda, California
LEWIS MAY, JR., No address
STANLEY R. MIKUS, Houston
FRED NOEL, ticketed from Beaumont, Texas
H. SALAS, no address
D. LEITZ, Tampa
F. OBERTHEIR, Dallas
DR. ROBERT SPEARS, Dallas
A. H. FRASER, Tampa
R. ALEXANDER, Orlando
F. M. PAGE, Orlando
J. H. BICKERSTAFF, arrived from Orlando
MISS ELOISE PITTS, Lake City
The REV. C. L. McGAVERN, Jacksonville, Florida
MRS. C. L. McGAVERN
R. D. DOWIS, Sterling, Colorado
RENFRO (no first name), arrived from Orlando
JACK ATKINSON, Miami Springs, an inspector for the Federal Aviation Agency
Captain FRANK E. TODD, Miami
1st Officer DICK S. BEEBEE, Miami
Flight engineer GEORGE H. CLARKE, Miami
Stewardess PAT HIRES, Miami
Stewardess DONNA OSBURN, Miami
References
“Self-Styled: Chasing Dr Robert Vernon Spears” by Alan C. Logan
Civil Aeronautics Board - Aircraft Accident Report, June 11, 1962
“Robert Spears, 1959 bomb suspect, dies in Dallas". St. Petersburg Times. May 3, 1969 LINK
“Con Man, Best Man, An Air Crash - A Far Out, Far Up Mystery". Life Magazine. February 1, 1960 LINK
