The News Reporter

Did lawyer commit suicide, or was bomb a boobytrap?

By JEFFERSON WEAVER
Staff Writer

Early in the morning of Jan. 6, 1960, Letsie Ann Rudolph woke her husband, Richard, and said she thought an airplane had crashed.

The family lived in a new brick house on their family farm, a short distance from Bolivia. Richard Rudolph looked out the bedroom window, but when he saw nothing unusual, he went back to bed.

When the Rudolphs heard another loud noise moments later, Rudolph again got up to check. He told his wife he saw a light descending from the sky, but nothing else. The farmer and his wife then went back to sleep.

Letsie Ann Rudolph didn’t know until the next morning how right she was – an airliner had crashed a short distance away on the Rudolph farm in Brunswick County.

While some debris did strike the Rudolph home, most was scattered across a wide pasture. When Richard Rudolph and his son McArthur went out at 7 a.m. to feed the family’s hogs, they found a piece of the airplane’s fuselage in their yard.

Other residents of the area made similar finds.

Some reported hearing three explosions around the time the plane began falling from the sky, while others talked of “weird noises”.

Richard Rudolph called the National Airlines office in Wilmington and reported finding pieces of an NAL plane in his yard.

It was the first report of the first major airline disaster to strike southeastern North Carolina.

In a scene reminiscent of modern terrorism, the airplane was destroyed by a bomb carried on board by one of the passengers.

But even today, no one is sure why – or even if – Julian Frank detonated a bundle of dynamite that blew off his legs and within minutes caused National Airlines flight 2511 to crash at the Rudolph farm near Bolivia.

First on the scene

News Reporter publisher Jim High was a reporter with the paper when NAL 2511 went down. He went to the scene with editor Vic Bubbett.

“It was a Wednesday,” High said. “Jim Harper (of the State Port Pilot ) was at our office finishing off the Pilot when the call came in. He was too busy, so we headed for the scene.”

Their stories and photos of the scene were published later that day in The State Port Pilot and the next day in The News Reporter. In a scene very much like the recent Riegelwood tornado, national news organizations clamored to buy photographs and stories from the newsmen who were first on the scene.

The plane’s 29 passengers and five crew members were dead on impact. Contemporary news accounts describe that the watches of some of the victims stopped at 2:38 a.m., the estimated time of the crash, while others were still keeping time.

High said there were major differences between modern disaster scenes like the tornado and the 1960 plane crash.

“We were able to walk around inside the area,” he said. “There was very little law enforcement there to cordon off the scene. That’s how we were able to get some of the most startling photos.”

Law enforcement and rescue personnel from across the area responded to the crash. Columbus County Sheriff Ben Duke located one of the plane’s four engines in a pine thicket. Duke and High are shown standing near the engine in one of the photos.

“I remember seeing shoes scattered here and there,” High said. “There were pieces of luggage, even some gift-wrapped presents.”

Photos in The News Reporter from Jan. 6, 1960 show bodies still in their seats, some with arms and limbs twisted or hands seeming to reach out for help.

“They still had on their safety belts,” High said. “Quite a few of the bodies were wearing life jackets, and there were other (vests) nearby. A life raft was inflated. We wondered if the pilot had time to warn the passengers of the crash, and he thought they would land in the ocean.”

The crash site was near U.S. 17, 16 miles from the original flight path. Debris discovered near Kure Beach indicated the plane sustained major damage from an explosion near the location reported in the last radio call.

Final message

Although the official report doesn’t say how many times the crew traveled between New York and Florida, it was probably a routine run for Capt. Dale Southard and his crew.

A big part of National’s business came from the New York to Florida routes, ferrying vacationers and businessmen. The company promoted itself as the “Coast to coast to coast” airline, linking California, Florida and New York.

Somewhere near Carolina Beach, at an altitude of 18,000 feet, the pilots radioed a National Airlines controller with a normal status report at 2:31 a.m.

A short time later, a passenger detonated a bomb under the right cabin window seat in row seven, a few feet from the cockpit.

According to a federal investigation, the aircraft’s radios were destroyed or damaged in the explosion, and the plane began veering out of control. The report notes major damage to control cables and electronics located near the blast site.

Air traffic controllers at Wilmington and elsewhere apparently thought the plane had moved over the ocean and out of range of their radar. Satellite guided navigation systems were still several years in the future, and losing aircraft on early radar was considered normal.

Investigators thought the pilot may have been trying to make it to the Wilmington airport, but instead, the plane hit the ground at the Rudolph family’s farm near Bolivia.

The plane went into a long, curving dive that ended at the Rudolph farm.

‘Grotesque’ scene

“It was probably the most grotesque thing I’ve ever seen,” High said of the crash site.

In the pasture and around the crash scene, bodies were found hundreds of yards from the plane, either dropped as the plane was falling or thrown on impact. The force of the crash was such that aircraft parts and some of the bodies were forced into the muddy loam. Craters four feet deep were noted in some spots.

“I will never forget the bodies embedded in the ground,” High said.

Few of the bodies were burned or mutilated, according to the news accounts.

Marines from Camp Lejeune brought helicopters to help members of a half-dozen law enforcement agencies search for bodies. Meanwhile, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Federal Aviation Administration began piecing together what happened, and the Brunswick County coroner took over a high school gym for a makeshift morgue.

Slowly but surely, officials began gathering and identifying bodies and airplane parts, and a U.S. senator, without citing his sources, told the Associated Press that the plane crash was caused by a bomb.

Two of the victims , a Connecticut lawyer and a banker from Havana, Cuba, were still missing.

While one body would be found after the crash scene was searched again, the second, Julian Frank, would become the center of a mystery that remains unsolved.

To be continued in
Thursday’s edition.