GAS CHAMBER FOR MURDER

Press, Volume XCIII, Issue 27961, 7 May 1956, Page 13

GAS CHAMBER FOR MURDER

Verdict On Airliner Bomb Disaster

(Rec. 9 p.m.) DENVER, May 5. Death in Colorado’s gas chamber was decreed last night for John Gilbert Graham, aged 24. who was found guilty of causing an airliner crash that took 44 lives last November. A jury of seven men and five women deliberated for an hour and 12 minutes and found Graham guilty of murdering his wealthy mother, Mrs Daisie King, aged 55. and specifically ordering the death penalty.

Graham, father of two. bit his lower lip but otherwise showed no emotion as Judge Joseph McDonald read the. verdict. He told reporters a moment later: “I’m innocent.”

“Of course, we’ll appeal,” said Mr Charles Vigil, one of Graham's three court-appointed lawyers. Judge McDonald granted the defence 10 days to file a new trial motion. Graham will not be formally sentencted by the Judge until that motion is heard.

Graham took out two air trip insurance policies on his mother's life, naming himself as the beneficiary. Each would have paid him 37,500 dollars.

He made a confession to the F. 8.1. —and later repudiated it —that he put a 25-stick dynamite time bomb in Mrs King’s suitcase before she left Denver on November 1 in the airliner for a trip to Anchorage, Alaska. The defence called several witnesses in an attempt to prove that Graham had not purchased the dynamite which the State said he used to blow up the plane. The prosecution produced the storekeeper who sold the dynamite sticks to Graham.

The defence pictured Graham as a psychopathic liar who invented a confession of an atrocity that he could not have perpetrated.

Graham cut short the brief defence case by refusing to testify, or to permit his wife or a psychiatrist to take the stand on his behalf. The State’s case included 75 witnesses and 150 exhibits.