At 2:10 p.m. on October 10, 1933, Emil Smith sent a telegram to the aunt with whom he lived in Chicago. “Leaving New York today by plane,” it read. “Everything O.K.” Approximately two hours later, Smith boarded United Air Lines Trip 23 in Newark, New Jersey. The twin-engine Boeing 247, tail number 13304, was headed to Cleveland, where it would refuel and take on a new crew of pilots. Then it was on to Chicago, and from there to the airplane’s final destination of Oakland. Smith had a ticket for Chicago and he carried a small package, wrapped in brown paper, that he kept close to him over the next few hours—the final hours of his life.
Smith and his fellow passengers never made it to Chicago. Just before 9:00 p.m., United Air Lines Trip 23 exploded over Chesterton, Indiana, as it approached Chicago’s Municipal Airport, killing all seven people aboard. Considered the first time a bomb had destroyed a commercial airline flight, the crash became the subject of an intense investigation by the U.S. Bureau of Investigation (the forerunner to the FBI). Overseen by director J. Edgar Hoover and led by Special Agent Melvin Purvis (who would later gain fame leading the manhunts for gangsters George “Baby Face” Nelson, Charles Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd and John Dillinger), agents interviewed hundreds of people from Newark and New York to San Francisco. The interviewees even included a young, upand-coming attorney who would twice win the Democratic Party’s nomination for president two decades later.
Theories for the crash included tail flutter, a meteor strike, a faulty fuel line and sabotage by a disgruntled United pilot upset about the contentious negotiations between the pilots and
