Canadian Pacific Airlines Flight 21
(Part 1)
A month short of 20 years before Air India Flight 182 was blown out of the sky by British Columbia-based terrorists, B.C had its own aerial mass murder.
Late in the afternoon of July 8, 1965, CPA Flight 21, bound for Whitehorse, Y.T. via Prince George, Fort St. John, Fort Nelson and Watson Lake from Vancouver, exploded in the sky near 100 Mile House, 170 miles northeast of Vancouver, crashing and killing all 52 persons aboard.
It’s B.C.’s worst mass murder and—unlike Air India—has been all but forgotten.
* * * * *
—A Canadian Pacific Airlines DC-6B such as the ill-fated CP 21 that crashed with all aboard in July 1965. —www.propspistonsandoldairliners.blogspot.com
Next morning’s front-page headlines of the Victoria Colonist breathlessly reported Three Staccato Mayday Calls, then
PLANE EXPLODES, CRASHES WITH 52
VANCOUVER (CP) – Three staccato cries of “Mayday” broke from a stricken Canadian Pacific Airlines plane Thursday just before the aircraft exploded and crashed with 52 persons aboard.
There were no survivors.
* * * * *
The four-engine DC-6B Empress of City of Buenos Aires, with 46 passengers including four children, and a crew of six piloted by Capt. John Alfred Steele, was within 25 minutes of Prince George, flying at 16,000 feet, when it vanished from radar screens after passing Ashcroft.
Following the parent company’s maritime tradition of naming ships ‘Empress,” Canadian Pacific Airlines christened its passenger aircraft for various cities, beginning with the postwar Empress of Vancouver. —City of Vancouver Archives
When the first responders to reach the crash site in darkness and pouring rain reported that wreckage was spread across a mile-wide area, search operations were paused until morning when 24 bodies were recovered. Initial reports indicated that many of the passengers were from northern B.C., including 10 from the asbestos town of Cassiar.
Whatever the cause of the crash it had happened quickly. Prince George airport manager Jim Hendrickson said a single radio distress call had been received about 5:10 PDT, moments before CP 21 vanished from the sky.
A B.C. Forest Service dispatcher at Williams Lake said he thought the smoke from the crash scene was a forest fire and ordered a ‘bird-dog’ spotting craft to the scene, by which time three forest lookouts had also reported the smoke. It was the B.C. Forest Service aircraft that located and reported the wreckage.
Veteran BCFS pilot Slim Sherk described the ghastly scene that greeted him as he circled the crash site after being ordered out on a routine call to investigate smoke.
It took him 15 minutes to reach the scene; as he approached, he saw black smoke “curling up in the sky from a distance of 30 miles,” but still thought it was a brush fire.
He realized later that he’d seen burning magnesium from plane crashes before.
“The fuselage was smoke and raw flames. The wings were collapsing from the heat, but the plane was relatively intact except for the tail section. There were bodies and debris all over. The tail section wasn’t there. It appeared as thought the plane dove straight into the bush. There was no trail of broken trees. I counted 20 or 24 bodies until I couldn’t find any more.
“There was no sign of life. The bodies I could see had been blown out of the plane because most had no clothing...”
When ground searchers reached the scene they found several passengers still strapped into their seats in the forward section of the aircraft.
Sherk’s usual method of marking trails for ground crews to follow was to lay trail rolls of toilet paper from his plane and this is the way he marked the crash site in a stand of thick firs surrounded by sparse jack pine. He also noted that one of the port engines had separated from the wing and plowed a path through the trees but stopped short of where the fuselage was resting.
The tail stabilizer was a quarter-mile from the main wreckage, with only sparse debris between it and the fuselage.
It was Sherk who first raised the suspicion of sabotage. “As far as I could see, apparently the tail end exploded. It was blown over a wide area. The wings were still on... The stabilizer was in one piece as though it came off long before the plane crashed.”
The headline that graced the front page of The Daily Colonist on the morning of Friday, July 9, 1965. —Author’s collection
As for the electrical storm at first suspected of being the cause of the crash, he said the weather was fine when he arrived, with a small electrical storm to the southeast and just the odd flash of lightning. With a mile-high ceiling he’d had “no trouble at all with my little plane. I could have gone on in much worse weather than that.”
Fifteen minutes before the “Mayday” calls (three heard in Vancouver, one in Ashcroft), Capt. Steele had radioed that he was altering course to avoid the weather disturbance.
Sherk explained that he stalled calling in until he was absolutely sure there was no sign of life. After circling the crash scene for almost 45 minutes, he began laying down the toilet paper to guide the crews coming overland. Only when he was short of fuel did he return to Williams Lake to quickly tank up and return.
He summed up his grim experience: “I’ve been flying for 15 years. I’ve seen a number of plane crashes but never a big one before.”
A Search and Rescue Albatross aircraft with two para-rescue teams aboard had been dispatched from Williams Lake, 50 miles from the crash site. CPA also sent company officials including vice-president R.P. Phillips and technicians, to the site. Accompanying them was an RCMP constable and Insp. Donald Bolduc of the federal Dept. of Transport, much to the disappointment of newspaper reporters who tried to hitch a ride.
Up to this point there were no clues as to the cause of the crash other than the reported electrical storm.
For a Victoria family, the crash of CP 21 was the second family tragedy in two years; passenger Mrs. W.K. Quayle, 50, one of two Victorians aboard, had been predeceased by her son Gary, killed in the construction of the Bentall Building in downtown Vancouver, in October 1963. She was on her way to Watson Lake and had intended leaving days before but decided to wait so she’d arrive for the weekend.
“I still can’t believe it,” her grieving husband William told the Colonist. “Only this morning she went up to put flowers on Gary’s grave.”
Other victims included three pulp mill executives, a university student on his way to a summer prospecting job, a mines manager, a banker, a Winnipeg couple going to a funeral, an automobile executive, the director of an Ontario cancer society, a husband and wife from California, a couple with their infant daughter, a Norwegian family of three, a research engineer, the father of five en route to a construction job in Prince George. Many of them left families with young children.
Making up CP 21’s crew were air force veteran Capt. John Steele, 41; First Officer Warner Murray Wells, 29; Second Officer Stanley E. Clarke, 26; Steward Ernest Wenzel Soural, 31; Stewardess Sue Heinrich, 22; Stewardess Marlene Brauer, 20.
Within 34 hours, 49 bodies had been recovered, 41 one of them being placed in a refrigerator truck serving as a mobile morgue. Overseeing this grim duty, at the request of the attorney general’s office, was Vancouver Coroner Glen McDonald who said he had a team of pathologists and morgue facilities at two Vancouver hospitals ready to accept the bodies.
Five weeks after the crash, CP 21 was still making headlines. —Author’s collection
Fifteen victims remained strapped in their seats, of whom eight had been so badly burned that they were unidentifiable. Although Dept. of Transport officials remained mum, a senior officer conceded that the RCMP were pursuing the likelihood of a bomb in the rear of the plane.
As it happened, two witnesses had seen the plane blown apart. “It exploded like a bomb, like dynamite,” said sawmill watchman John Hyra. Companion Tom Shaylor said the plane “was flying normally. Then there was this awful blast, a boom, and we could see it sort of split apart. The back part of the plane fell off when the boom came.
“Then the plane started to teeter. It looked like the pilot was trying to get control. But the plane made a sort of revolution, then another and started to float down in the air.”
By the time it hit the ground it had turned around four times with smoke and debris streaming from the damaged tail end.
Shaylor was convinced he’d just witnessed murder. “It was something that would explode in the plane, possibly dynamite, because it made quite a noise. I was in the army and I know.”
The Victoria Daily Times had no doubt of it, its two-inch-high, full-width, front-page headline shrieking,
PROBERS FIND EVIDENCE
OF AIRLINER EXPLOSION
Bomb Placed in Toilet?
This leap to judgment was based upon investigators having found that the “left side toilet, which is made of stainless steel, was crumpled like tissue paper. The floor was blown out by a tremendous force and there were black smudges around the toilet. The lavatory bulkhead (wall) and the fuselage in this area were blown out. Rivets on the side of the plane were sheared off.”
With no running gear or fuel in the immediate vicinity of the lavatory, the Times, for one, leapt to the conclusion that a bomb was the cause of CP 21 having “dropped from the air like a stone”.
R.L. Bolduc, heading the investigation for the Dept. of Transport, explained what his team faced: “At daybreak tomorrow, we start going over the plane inch by inch to find out what happened. Every scrap of metal we can find will be picked up and checked. If it’s bent or burned, we want to know why. And if it’s bent or burned suspiciously, it will be turned over to the RCMP for their lab to investigate further.”
While they worked the entire crash site would be roped off, only police, DOT investigators and a doctor being allowed within; even CPA officials were denied entry.
In Vancouver, police had began examining flight insurance records and a grimmer task faced seven pathologists, including an expert air crash investigator from Seattle, who began examining bodies to identify the nature of their injuries. “This is an enormous and involved task in view of the condition of the bodies,” said Coroner McDonald.
Already, one passenger had caught investigators’ interest: professional powder (explosives) man Steve Koleszar, 54, of Vancouver, whose body was being X-rayed for metal fragments that would determine if he’d been within close proximity to the blast, and whether he was carrying detonator caps with him. He’d been on his way to a construction job near Prince George for a Vancouver firm.
Married with five children, it was known that he’d been on welfare and left only $50 with his wife and family. His employer, H.E. McEachern, rated him as a competent and experienced man who’d worked for his company on a previous job. All powdermen, he added, knew better than to carry explosives off a job site.
It was also reported that preliminary checking indicated that few of the ill-fated CP 21 passengers had purchased flight insurance but those policies sold amounted to $200,000.
There were further revelations as to the force of the “strong destructive force” that blew the airliner’s tail completely off, the left side toilet bowl being “forced close, like a tulip,” the floor below being forced down. But, so far, experts had found only traces of an unidentified acid on the lavatory floor and on a stewardess’s pink nightgown kept kept in a travelling case near the washroom. Picric acid, they pointed out, is explosive, and acids are found in battery-powered detonators. But there were no traces yet of nitrates from conventional explosives.
Coroner McDonald suggested that an explosive could have been concocted on board the plane from ingredients carried aboard and mixed in the washroom sink. It was so easy that a bright high school student could do it, he said, but picric acid is so explosive that “a fly landing on it would set it off”.
Meaning, of course, that the bomb maker, intentionally or otherwise, could have detonated the chemical mix while in the brewing process.
He also noted that the location of the lavatory was adjacent to a critical welded seam in the aircraft’s construction that could have easily been ruptured by the blast with a resulting fatal de-compression. And a shard of flying steel from the wash basin had travelled a distance of 46 inches “at extreme velocity” and cut into a pipe used for de-icing.
A gas heater remained on the suspect list but was considered to be highly unlikely.
McDonald conceded that there was no evidence that anyone had been in the lavatory at the time of the blast nor had any of the remains shown traces of explosives although some bodies bore shrapnel of formica and paint from the aircraft’s washroom and floor.
“I have been investigating air crashes for many years,” Dr. Warren Lovell of Seattle told the Vancouver Province, “but I have never seen anything like this. In all previous cases we have been able to determine the cause of the crash. In this case there is no explanation that our present scientific knowledge can determine.”
The former bomber pilot and flight surgeon who’d later work with the space program and retire in some controversy as a coroner, then proceeded to place his professional credibility at risk by saying that the cause of the explosion could be “something completely unknown to science at present. I would not exclude that a force from outer space is responsible, no matter how unlikely this possibility appears to be.”
For their part, police were digging deeply into passengers’ personal lives, trying to determine their finances and affairs, in particular their psychological records, and examining insurance policies.
Of particular interest was Douglas Edgar, 40, of Surrey; an unemployed construction working going to Prince George seeking work. He’d bought a policy that paid $125,000 death benefit at the airport, and made it out to his wife who declined to speak with reporters.
Married with a young daughter, Edgar had a minor criminal record, having been convicted and fined twice for keeping a gaming house—“a heavy-betting poker game”—in 1959. Neighbours described the Edgars, who had an unlisted phone number, as aloof and uncommunicative.
RCMP declined to comment on Edgar, saying they’d have to be reasonably certain of foul play before they acted and that they didn’t “want to hurt anyone”.
As pathologists continued their grim work in Vancouver—only 21 victims had been positively identified so far—Coroner McDonald predicted that the inquest could take up to five weeks and wouldn’t finish until the deaths were classified as homicide, suicide or accident. “There is no known pattern into which the circumstances of this crash appear to fall.”
At the crash site, 18 members of the Royal Canadian School of Engineering equipped with metal detectors were searching for and classifying pieces of wreckage; what remained of the tail section was to be transported to Vancouver for further study by scientists, among them an explosives expert from the Dept. of National Defence in Ottawa.
Making their task even more challenging was the fact that heavy rain had fallen the night of the crash and could have washed away chemical residues.
Although officials continued to shy away from saying “bomb,” preferring to use Coroner McDonald’s “strong destructive force,” newspapers zeroed in on the criminal angle and passenger Edgar. Taking its cue from the Vancouver Sun, the Colonist showed his photo beneath these headlines:
Traces in Lavatory
DID ACID MIXTURE DOWN CPA PLANE?
Attention then focused on Stewardess Marlene Brauer’s overnight bag, spattered with traces of acid. It would have been kept just outside the lavatory. “I don’t know what this means yet,” McDonald told the media, “but I have no doubt this is the most important evidence we have found.”
But fellow stewardess Gudrun Schroeder said she’d packed the bag for her friend and roommate and it had contained only “the things a stewardess needs to stay overnight—about the most dangerous thing in there was a can of hair spray.”
Only the outspoken Dr. Lovell who’d investigated 150 air crashes involving 2000 deaths dared to say the “bomb” word a week after the crash: “At this point in the investigation I will say it was a bomb until proven otherwise.”
Heaven help the coroner’s jury, all of them selected for their commercial airline flight experience, whose job it was to view the mutilated remains laid out in the Vancouver morgue. (The six-person jury had been enlarged by one in case a juror became ill.) Of the 20 victims who’d been positively identified, only an unnamed 35-year-old man was easily identifiable despite his horrific injuries. Bodies were being released to their families upon completion of X-ray examinations while plans for a mass memorial were tentatively begun.
Just one family was represented by a lawyer at the inquest, that of the Edgars, it having turned out that he was the only buyer of flight insurance for the flight which had cost him all of $4.50.
(To be continued)
