The Mysterious Crash of National Airlines Flight 967: A Conversation About Quacks, Con Men, and Carnage with Author Jerry Jamison

Summary

Summary of "The Mysterious Crash of National Airlines Flight 967: A Conversation About Quacks, Con Men, and Carnage with Author Jerry Jamison"

Introduction to the Tragedy (04:21 - 07:04)
The episode delves into the mysterious crash of National Airlines Flight 967, which took place on November 16, 1959. Departing from Tampa, Florida, the Douglas DC7B aircraft was en route to New Orleans, Louisiana, but tragically never reached its destination. All 42 individuals aboard—including 36 passengers and six crew members—perished in the Gulf of Mexico crash. Among the victims was Dr. Robert Spears, a prominent Texas physician, and his close friend, William Taylor, whose disappearance sparked suspicions of foul play.

Unraveling the Mystery (07:04 - 12:16)
Hosts Áine Cain and Kevin Greenlee introduce Jerry Jamison, the author of "Vanishing Act," to explore the complexities surrounding the crash. They discuss how the lack of modern investigative tools, such as black boxes, hindered the immediate understanding of the disaster. As investigators sifted through limited evidence, initial theories pointed towards a freak accident. However, emerging clues suggested the possibility of a bomb on board, raising questions about intentional sabotage.

Dr. Robert Spears: The Man Behind the Mystery (12:16 - 22:05)
Jerry Jamison provides an in-depth look into the life of Dr. Robert Spears, revealing him as a lifelong con artist with 26 aliases. Spears's background as a charismatic and beloved physician contrasted sharply with his deceitful nature. Despite multiple incarcerations, Spears consistently managed to evade long-term imprisonment, often being released early due to his charm. Jamison states, “Dr. Robert Spears was a lifetime con artist... He did nothing but con people out of their money” (14:00).

Media Manipulation and Ethical Concerns (22:05 - 36:27)
The discussion shifts to the role of the media in shaping public perception of the crash. A prominent Dallas journalist, Eddie Barker, becomes obsessed with the case, exerting significant control over the narrative. Jamison highlights the ethical dilemmas posed by Barker’s actions, stating, “He decides what the story is, what will be released, what he will keep for himself” (30:27). This media control complicated the investigation, as conflicting reports and manipulated information obscured the truth.

Investigation Challenges in the 1950s (36:27 - 44:35)
Investigators in 1959 faced numerous obstacles due to the era's limited technology. The crash site was in shark-infested waters at depths beyond the capability of contemporary divers, leaving much of the evidence unrecovered. The Civil Aeronautics Board (now FAA) concluded the crash as undetermined, unable to definitively ascertain the cause. Jamison notes, “They can’t definitively say what happened, only because there’s not enough evidence” (41:28).

Spears’s Naturopathic Ploys and Corruption (44:35 - 62:44)
A significant revelation in Jamison's research is Spears's involvement in the naturopathy movement and his clandestine abortion business. Operating under the guise of an OB-GYN, Spears capitalized on the 1950s distrust of government and conventional medicine to perform and profit from illegal abortions. This illicit enterprise fostered widespread corruption, with Spears manipulating law enforcement and the media to protect his operations. Jamison explains, “Dr. Spears never attended medical school... he purchased a diploma... he was a flim flam man” (56:51).

The War of the Widows and Unresolved Questions (62:44 - 73:00)
The aftermath of the crash ignited a fierce media battle between the widows of Spears and Taylor. Frances Spears, Dr. Spears's wife, sought closure for her husband's presumed death, while Alice Taylor, William Taylor's ex-wife, pushed for the truth behind her husband's disappearance. This conflict obscured accountability and deepened the mystery, with Jamison expressing strong conviction that Spears orchestrated the crash: “I’m very convinced that Dr. Spears planted that bomb” (79:32).

Character Analysis: Dr. Robert Spears (73:00 - 85:15)
Jamison delves into Spears's psyche, attributing his manipulative behavior to a tumultuous childhood marked by instability and constant identity changes. Spears's lack of a stable identity fostered a survivalist mentality, prioritizing self-preservation over loyalty and integrity. Jamison reflects, “Self-preservation was the guiding force of Dr. Spears... he was willing to destroy the lives of 42 people to make sure his life survived” (77:32).

Historical Context and Societal Reflections (85:15 - 87:55)
The conversation concludes with reflections on 1950s America, highlighting the era's facade of perfection contrasted with underlying corruption and moral hypocrisy. Jamison emphasizes that the societal values of the time created an environment conducive to Spears's deceitful actions. He states, “The 1950s was a very, very different era... Society was in this really sweet spot of everyone goes to church, everyone is nice to their neighbor” (85:56).

Notable Quotes:

• “Dr. Robert Spears was a lifetime con artist... He did nothing but con people out of their money” – Jerry Jamison (14:00)
• “He decides what the story is, what will be released, what he will keep for himself” – Jerry Jamison (30:27)
• “I’m very convinced that Dr. Spears planted that bomb” – Jerry Jamison (79:32)
• “Self-preservation was the guiding force of Dr. Spears...” – Jerry Jamison (77:32)

Conclusion: The episode offers a comprehensive exploration of the enigmatic crash of National Airlines Flight 967, intertwining it with the complex life of Dr. Robert Spears. Through meticulous research and engaging conversation, Jerry Jamison sheds light on a convoluted web of deceit, media manipulation, and societal corruption that continues to provoke questions decades later. This deep dive not only unravels a historical mystery but also prompts listeners to reflect on the ethical and societal dynamics of the past and their parallels to contemporary issues.

Transcript

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Content Warning this episode contains discussion of murder, violence and abortion.

[Anya Cain]

On November 16, 1959, National Airlines Flight 967 took off from Tampa, Florida with 42 souls on board, 36 passengers and six crew. The Douglas DC7B aircraft was heading for New Orleans, Louisiana. But the plane and all those on board were never made it. Flight 967 went down over the Gulf of Mexico. There were no survivors. Only a few badly burned bodies were even recovered from the shark infested waters.

[Kevin Greenlee]

One of those believed lost was a prominent Texas physician, Dr. Robert Spears. Spears's devoted friend, William Taylor turned up missing. Around that same time, questions began to arise. Was this a freak tragedy or something far more sinister?

[Anya Cain]

Who were Spears and Taylor, really?

[Kevin Greenlee]

And did Taylor's mysterious disappearance have anything to do with the crash?

[Anya Cain]

If it did, who was the victim? And who was the victimizer, Spears or Taylor?

[Kevin Greenlee]

Authorities were left to unravel the mystery without the benefit of black boxes or any of the modern day technology needed to fully recover the plane and piece together what exactly caused the disaster. But the more investigators dug into the incident, the more they found clues to indicate the crash had been no accident, that it had been possibly the result of a bomb on the aircraft.

[Anya Cain]

To help us all understand what happened to Flight 967, we will interview prolific author Jerry Jamison. His latest nonfiction crime book is Vanishing Act. A Crashed Airliner, Fake Death, and Backroom Abortions. It delves into a truly mind boggling plot. The whole background of a cast of bizarre, twisted characters, the strange connections to controversial topics like secret abortions and quack medical treatments, the desperate media war that ensued between two possible widows, and some of the questions that still linger to this day. My name is Anya Cain. I'm a journalist.

[Kevin Greenlee]

And I'm Kevin Greenlee. I'm an attorney.

[Anya Cain]

And this is the Murder Sheet.

[Kevin Greenlee]

We're a true crime podcast focused on original reporting, interviews, and deep dives into murder cases. We're the Murder Sheet.

[Anya Cain]

And this is the Mysterious Crash of National Airlines Flight 967. A conversation about quacks, con men and carnage with author Jerry Jamison.

[Jerry Jamison]

Sam.

[Anya Cain]

All right, Jerry, to start out with, I just want to say thank you.

[Jerry Jamison]

So much for coming on our show. We really appreciate it.

[Eddie Barker]

Well, I'm looking forward to it.

[Jerry Jamison]

Awesome. I guess before we get started talking about your latest book, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself? You're such a prolific author. How did you get started doing that? And sort of tell us a little bit about your background.

[Eddie Barker]

I logged 40 years in the advertising business. I owned my own advertising, national level advertising firm out of Southern California, and I was the chief copywriter in the firm, so, you know, always a writer. But most of our clients were financial services, which is a really constrictive field, which means everything is about attorneys approving every word you say. It's highly, highly regulated industry, which in essence meant for me, you can't use any adjectives or adverbs and say you can't say something's Good. You can just say it is. So it was really kind of a, you know, a relief and a breakthrough for me to be able to write creatively after a while. I really enjoyed that and primarily did fiction and still primarily do fiction. But my training and my background was actually in sociology and as a sociologist. So I just kind of was, you know, this. Biographies, history, true crime. You know, there was always a lure to it because, you know, in fiction you can make up worlds and you make up characters and, you know, you can do no wrong because you can make them do or be or say anything you want. Again, I really liked the parameters of nonfiction, and I was drawn to it. And when I came across this story, it just blew my mind. I felt like it was like, you know, you have to write this story. The world needs to know this story, because it was a story that was.

[Jerry Jamison]

Completely forgotten, this story. I think if I read a fictional book with this plot, I would think that the author was being really over the top and unrealistic. So I think that definitely says something about what happened, I guess, specifically, how did you learn about the story of, I guess so called Dr. Robert Spears? And you know what? Where did you even find this?

[Eddie Barker]

Yeah, that in itself is kind of an interesting story in that I was, you know, wearing my advertising agency hat, and we had a. A client that I wanted to do a sort of a retro vintage campaign. I wanted to. I wanted to give it kind of a 1950s look, to educate myself on that. Educate it specifically on the style. The style of advertising in the 1950s. I just to do research. I just went on ebay in order to stack up magazines, Life magazines, Time magazine, Popular Mechanics, you know, Vogue, anything that would be around at the time. And then just started looking at ads, looking at the drawings, the photographs, the headlines, the writing style. I even wanted to smell the paper. You know, I kind of wanted to drift back into the air and go, yeah, this is what it feels like. And I'm just doing that, flipping through pages, and I. I turned a page in a Life magazine, and it said, man downs airliner to fake death. And such an inconceivable headline. He downed an airliner, an entire airliner full of people to fake his death. And, you know, I. I dug a little bit, couldn't find much about him, but his name popped up. And then for the next year, my assistant and I, Julia Estrada, we worked every day, basically, you know, kind of morning to night, researching this guy and reconstructing his life from his earliest memories all the way till the day he died. And, you know, nothing had really ever been done on him. And what I thought was really maybe a one dimensional story about the plane, My goodness, this man lived a huge life. A huge life. So it was very much a rabbit hole. I mean, I just kept. I started here and then that led to this, and it led to this. There was also certain challenges to it because he had 26 aliases. So it's not like you, you know, it's not like you go to Wikipedia and say, tell me about this guy, because nobody knew all about him because he was 26. Different Personas across the nation.

[Jerry Jamison]

It's a remarkable research job. And what you were able to uncover through this book, what you and your research were able to uncover is pretty extraordinary. And you know, I want to save, I want people to read this book. I really would encourage our listeners to read Vanishing act, but I want to save some of the twists for the book because there were times where I was just like, oh my gosh, you've got to be kidding me. I guess, though. So as we kind of launch here, can you put this story into a nutshell as best you can to kind of convey to the listeners, you know, what, what this book is about?

[Eddie Barker]

Sure. By the way, in addressing the veracity of the book, the publisher required an extensive bibliography simply because it was an unbelievable story. When you read something and you go, well, this, this can't possibly be true. And I've had some book reviews who just simply said, well, this can't be. I believe this is historical fiction, which is a certain irony when every single bit of it is documented. But I think it speaks to how dramatic the story is. His life is. Dr. Robert Spears was a lifetime con artist. To understand him, you have to realize he never did anything else in his entire life except con people. He was a flim flam man, he was a scammer, he worked huge cons, he worked small cons, but he did nothing but con people out of their money. And that was. I mean, it started when he was a child and ended up in reformatory in the 1920s in Oklahoma. And he just discovered he was very, very good at what he did. So to understand him, you have to realize the airplane element is really almost literally the last chapter in his story. But it is only one chapter of a. Just a massive life. And you've read the book, you know that each one of these outrageous scams that he did, you know, are mind boggling in their own. Almost each one of those is a complete story. Like wow. How can he pull these things off? And yet he did. And he also landed in prison 12 times, but.

[Jerry Jamison]

Didn'T always work out for him. But. But he kept going.

[Eddie Barker]

Oh, he. He would. First of all, he'd get like a 10 year sentence. And he was so charismatic and so liked. Loved by the guards that he'd always get out in less than two years. He had no problem with prison, by the way. You know, he was happy with prison. He never really had a home. So, you know, this was as good a home as any. And after, you know, maybe 18 months, he'd get released. And within the. By the end of that week, he was already working a new scam. I mean, I mean, he just was like, thank you. I got a new suit. I got a hundred dollars. I'll set up a shop.

[Jerry Jamison]

It's really remarkable. And, and it's. It's interesting to track his trajectory from the sort of dapper gentleman rogue that everybody loves to what ended up happening, which is, you know, kind of like. Like. I mean, it kind of. It kind of makes you question the whole concept of like, kind of celebrating the gentleman rogues, because there might be something darker lurking beneath that.

[Eddie Barker]

Yeah, I think it's a very good point because, you know, I started my research with the darkest chapter, but as I peel back the layers of the onion and got to really, his really young years, you know, I developed an affinity for the man. I mean, he would be Robin Hood, except he kept all the money, didn't give it to the poor. The story is very much like a movie that your readers will remember, and that is Catch Me if youf Can. So with Tom hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio. And it was kind of a caper where Leo's character is out foxing the FBI agent. And there's a. Almost a tongue in cheek element where Leo can slip out the window right at the. The minute that, you know, Tom Hanks is opening the door and the coffee's still hot. And, you know, it's like you're really kind of pulling for that Leo character. Like, come on, get away with it. Do it. Oh, my gosh. Now you're, you know, you're an airline pilot. This is awesome. But that character never downed an airplane. So when you go back, you're really kind of cheering for this guy all along because he really is, you know, he had this. He had this. I don't know if it was an opinion or a worldview, and that was. He almost felt obligated to relieve people of their money. It's almost like, if you're so dumb, if you're so stupid, how can I not take your money? And so in some ways you smile at that. And he just seemed to be, you mentioned, dapper, you know, kind of rogue criminal. He was very much that. And his, you know, there are some wonderful, 30 wonderful pictures in this book at every stage of his life. But early on, he was just strikingly handsome man. And he was a, an officer in the army in World War I. He was decorated and honored in every way. And he was, he was that classic military man that looked sharp and handsome in his uniform. And the, and the ladies swooned.

[Jerry Jamison]

Yeah. And you know, but as you said, you know, when, when a person's life is sort of built on lies and like that's all they have, you can, you can see it escalating potentially to where other people aren't just hurt emotionally or financially, but maybe unfortunately in this case, physically. And speaking of that, can you tell me just, and just tell the listeners a little bit about what happened on November 16, 1959, and this sort of airliner tragedy, how that unfolded?

[Eddie Barker]

Yeah, that's so that's just in, in that year, in 1959, that was if just a few days before Thanksgiving and Dr. Spears had a been arrested for one of his many, many times he had been arrested, was fairly certain this time, however, he was going to go to prison for a long term. And as he thought that through and after he was arrested, he was released on bail. He was, after all, a renowned doctor. He was released on bail. He. And he called up his best friend who happened to be in Tampa, Florida. Now, when I say best friend, your listeners need to realize this is close like a brother. They had known each other for about 30 years. They were best men in each other's weddings. Their families vacationed together. Their wives knew each other.

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[Eddie Barker]

Like probably as close as you could, you could be. And so he calls up his friend and says, hey, I'm going to fly out. He was in Los Angeles. I'm going to fly out to Tampa. Let's get together. I have a business opportunity that I guarantee you will make us a million dollars. 1959. Let me come out, let me explain it all to you. And then we're going to go back to Dallas together. I have the business meetings are all set up for, you know, the following days and we're going to go into business together. Well, this was just a thrill to his friend Al Taylor. And so they met at the Tampa airport in the coffee shop, which afterwards all the, you know, the waitresses remembered them. They were laughing, they were having a good time like you would expect any two friends. And then Al, who had just got a brand new car, said, I'm going to drive out to Dallas. And Dr. Spears said, I have my return ticket. I'm going to fly back to Dallas. We'll meet in Dallas, have our meetings at the last minute. According to the records, Al said, oh my gosh, you know, I was in a car accident a couple of weeks ago and my neck is just killing me. And Dr. Spears, being the close and dear friend that he was, said, you know what, you take my plane ticket, you give me your keys, your license, your registration and your car and I'll drive your car back. I'm up for a road trip. You fly back. And of course, your listeners need to remember that in 1959 you could just hand a plane ticket to somebody that was not, you didn't need to clear what you have to do today. So he said, yeah, sure, takes the plane ticket, goes in there and he says, wait, before you Go, though. If you could carry this package. Take this package to my wife when you land. There's. It's cash. It was like a brown parcel type thing. There's cash in here, so don't lose it. But I need to get this cash to my wife right away. Not a problem. He got on the plane, put the package under his seat, and 22 minutes later, that airliner exploded over the Gulf of Mexico and killed all 42 people on board.

[Jerry Jamison]

Yeah, it's truly insane. And there's. I mean, one remarkable element of that, though, that I want to, like, pause upon a little bit, just because I think it just says so much about the time and it being a different time from ours. Can you talk about the vending machines that existed in this aircraft, in this airport?

[Eddie Barker]

You probably don't remember those, do you?

[Jerry Jamison]

No. Yeah. No.

[Anya Cain]

Yeah.

[Eddie Barker]

I'm fortunate enough that I was very young, but I remember these very plainly. And in every airport, every terminal, they had vending machines that sold life insurance. And literally, in this case, Al Taylor, who got on the plane at the last second, he ran off the plane again, something you couldn't do today. But he got up from his seat, he ran off the plane, and bought flight insurance. So for 10 quarters, he bought about $35,000 worth of life insurance through a vending machine. You drop in 10 quarters, it prints out a form that you fill out. You name your beneficiary. If anything happened with the plane, it actually became $100,000. It kind of. Kind of the double indemnity type thing. It went up to $100,000, which is equivalent of a million dollars today for 10 quarters. So he gets it, he fills it out, he drops it. There's a. It says on the machine, I have a picture of the machine. It's like, free stamp included. I mean, that's 4 cents at the time. So he fills out the envelope, puts the paper in it, stamps it, slips it right back through the slot. This was Mutual of Omaha, by the way, that provided this, and gets back on the plane. That little chapter, that little event in this much larger story proved to be critical because Al Taylor never came home to his wife that night. And she's like, why didn't he come home? She goes to the police, hey, my husband never came home. They go, you know, he's probably got a girlfriend on the side. He's probably out drunk. You know, let's just wait a few days and find out what happened. And she said, no, because tomorrow is our son's birthday, and he loves his son, he would never miss that birthday. And they still completely dismissed her concerns until three days later when that son received an envelope in the mail addressed to him, and it was the life insurance form, and he had been named the beneficiary. And the wife instantly said, why was he on a plane? He was never on a plane. And that's what really launched what would be a huge FBI search for him because she knew he was on that plane. The police said, well, what's the last thing, you know, he did? And they said. She said, well, I know he was going to have dinner with a Dr. Robert Spears at the Tampa Airport. And then they started to put together. Could it possibly be that he switched identities? Is that possible? They started to link up. Wait, he's about to go to prison or he's going to go to trial and probably go to prison. Could he have possibly done this? And what is so interesting is because in researching these old papers, you're following the actual chronology as articles are written. This is a big story now. A plane blows up, and he is listed on the manifest in all of the early articles as a renowned Dallas doctor is missing. And obgyn, with a very popular practice, is one of those lost. His wife is distraught beside herself with grief. He had two small children. They're just devastated. You know, father and husband has been killed on this plane crash. Wow.

[Anya Cain]

It's.

[Jerry Jamison]

I mean, the amount of research you guys put into this is remarkable. And I do want to ask about that, you know, because I think you noted this in one of the author's notes. You had to sort, not just through all these aliases, not just through this whole wild life story, but also through misinformation and media manipulation from, like, kind of different sides that arose in this controversy. How are you able to sort fact from fiction when you're doing this research?

[Eddie Barker]

Yeah, that was a challenge. I think it's a little bit like you hear in police crime stories, triangulation. There really was this sense that we couldn't take any single thing as fact. We were forced to get two or three corroborating stories, which also was a challenge, because in any old story, and I have written some true crime based on the 1920s. When you go back in time, first of all, the standards of journalism, the purpose of journalism, was to sell newspapers. Maybe it still is. What we discovered was the earliest versions of fake news. And that is to say, once a story was developed, it would get passed on, actually systematically passed on, because Associated Press and United Press International, Reuters, would develop A story and then start passing it around. And we could see where it would slightly change and slightly alter and mistakes would be made. So we had to. There's a lot of sifting. That's the. Probably the process that would describe it best, a lot of sifting to truly get the, you know, the facts out of the story. Also, again, there was the chronology of it, and that is this story changed over time in that as they started to believe things, not prove things, but believe things, the tone of the writing began to change. And that was very interesting because people who had made a career of saying, you know, I have all the inside story on the details of a plane crash now are starting to wonder, have I been duped? And there's actually one particular journalist in Dallas who makes a cottage industry out of this story, actually moves into the living room of Dr. Spears home while he's missing. And he's a TV, radio and Dallas Morning News writer, so he just. He actually controls the story, which is fascinating from a journalistic standpoint. And he now is fashioning the story. So we also had to sort through everything he was doing because he wants to exploit the story for everything he can. So from a journalistic and writing standpoint, yes, it was a challenge, but it was a fascinating challenge. It really was, and we enjoyed it very much.

[Jerry Jamison]

Yes. And we're going to return to Eddie Barker later because some of that is truly wild from a journalistic and ethical perspective, and the partisanship and the sort of like, you know, connections with law enforcement is just kind of wild. And I would like to unpack that more. He really brings a new meaning to owning a story. Like, not in a good way, in my humble opinion, but, you know, but I mean, still remarkable. I did want to ask you before we moved on, I want to kind of touch upon some of the big themes that I think that were in this book. And. But before we do that, I do want to ask you, this plane crash, which is really kind of where the story starts, and then we kind of go back and see, like, how did we get here? A number of coincidences with that in itself and, you know, a minor mobster figure being on board at the time, and that being a bit of a red herring. But I guess I just want to ask you, can you talk about what you learned about, you know, how many lives this horrible crash impacted?

[Eddie Barker]

Yeah. Even today, you know, if there's. If there is a catastrophe on the level of a plane crash, but any number of, you know, huge catastrophes that you read about the Next day and the following days, the papers and the stories are filled with the individual lives. And we've all read these where someone was on their way to a wedding, you know, someone was going to meet their grandchild for the first time, you know, a couple were taking a vacation or a honeymoon. The stories of people that, you know, had these big rich lives and the tragedy of that, and again, just put it in modern terms is always so overwhelming because at first it's, oh my gosh, a plane crashed and then the faces, and then the faces begin to appear and it's just always heartbreaking. I mean, how many news reports have we seen when they literally. The faces come up, the faces come up and you know, you say that, yeah, I mean there are two children on board this plane and you just go, I mean it's just so devastating. And as we researched, because what would happen, there would be a story of someone, oh, you know, they were in New York, they flew to Miami, which was the first stop on this flight. Miami to Tampa, Tampa to Dallas. Then it was to go Dallas to Los Angeles. So you really have lives, you know, that represent all of that giant arc across the country as you would read these stories. And then each hometown newspaper would tell a deeper, deeper story of all these lives. So, you know, it was, it was emotional. You know, by the end, I knew every one of them by name. I knew every one of their stories. And it, I think still was kind of part of the impetus of like this story needs to be told because, you know, I mean, there are grandchildren and great grandchildren around today that know tiny bits of that story. But I don't really understand what happened to their loved ones that they never knew.

[Jerry Jamison]

The scope of this tragedy is really quite immense.

[Eddie Barker]

You know that the pilots, the stewardesses, oh my gosh, I mean those alone, you know, veteran pilots that, you know, were two years, one of them, two years from retirement and ah, just all the stories, they're really, really emotional. And I think the readers, although there's a sadness to this, I think the readers will. It makes the story come alive. I mean this is a very real story.

[Jerry Jamison]

Yeah, it shows you why it matters so much because these people's lives mattered and they were taken away in a really horrible, despicable fashion. One thing I did want to ask that might surprise modern day readers though, and you know, it kind of makes sense when you think about it, is can you talk about some of the challenges that investigators, you know, had when investigating this crash nowadays? Sort of used to, okay, let's get the black box. Let's, you know, send divers. Let's get all, get, let's figure it out. But like, that's not. I mean, this is 1959. So can you talk about, like, maybe how things were a little bit different then when it came to being able to figure out what even happened here?

[Eddie Barker]

Yeah. By the way, these are really good questions you're asking. Really good questions, and I think they'll be of interest to your listeners. The 1950s was a very, very different era in certainly in plane travel, certainly in investigations. First of all, the first reports that came out was that it was a weather disturbance. They thought perhaps lightning had struck the plane. They talked about it was kind of blustery weather and a storm was in the offing. This would be, by the way, where it was flying is somewhere around New Orleans, that area. So it's leaving Tampa, going to Dallas, it's going over the Gulf of Mexico. Then one of their first reports is from a Coast Guard spotter. So there was a Coast Guard station off a coastal town in Louisiana. And he notices this huge explosion in the sky. Doesn't really necessarily at first understand it's an airplane, but there's this, you know, huge explosion in the sky. But one of the things that he notes in his report is there was an explosion and then the object went straight down, which meant it went to a certain point, exploded, and for all intents and purposes, disintegrated. So that speaks to the degree of the blast, for one thing, because if there's an internal explosion on an engine, the plane continues to coast. It was actually close enough that theoretically it could have landed. So because the flight was a 30 or 40 minute flight and this was 22 minutes into it, so their destination was in sight when this happened. So the fact that it dropped and then this is. This happened at about 12:30 at night. So it's happening in the middle of the night, very dark, moonless, almost stormy night. So they can't really do any search and rescue until the morning again, probably now they could, then they couldn't. So then they start sending out, first of all, Coast Guard people. But also New Orleans, of course, is a huge shipping, boating town. So all of these personal crafts go out and they find debris scattered for miles and miles and miles, and they see that it's burned, that it's singed. So they know it's an explosion, they know it's what the Coast Guard guy saw, and they begin picking up pieces which, as macabre as it is, were a Lot of body parts. In fact, there are only nine people they could ever identify. So when the plane blew up, it immediately sank to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. It sank so deep that it was beyond what any divers could do at that time, the experienced Navy divers. This was a depth beyond anything they'd ever reached. So they couldn't go down and get it. And to this day, it is still on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. But they recovered parts of people that. And again, there's no DNA, so they're having to identify. The last person that was identified was a finger with a ring on it. So this was the job. When you talk about what was the search and recovery of the 1950s, this is what they were doing. Small boats, you know, picking up parts of suitcases, you know, pieces of a woman. I mean, a woman's hat, things like that.

[Jerry Jamison]

It's so frustrating because as much as you wouldn't want it to happen at any time, if it happened today, you imagine they could have recovered a lot more evidence.

[Eddie Barker]

Well, yeah, I mean, I think from the. Well to this day. So that was the. I think it was the Civil Aeronautics Board at the time, the cab. It's now the faa. To this day. They can't definitively say what happened, only because there's not enough evidence. Not because they don't know. They know what happened. I mean, they have come to a conclusion, I'll say that. But it's just left on the records. And the records were closed in like 1961 or two, as undetermined.

[Jerry Jamison]

Absolutely. How does the FBI, specifically the federal Bureau of Investigation under J. Edgar Hoover, it's kind of famous, founder, infamous, perhaps. How did they get involved in this?

[Eddie Barker]

Well, first of all, J. Edgar Hoover makes it a personal mission of his. I mean, he calls a press conference and says, we're going to find this guy. So there apparently was no question in the FBI's mind about who was behind it. But, I mean, he calls a press conference just to point out this guy, something he rarely did. And so he's really, like doing a big shout out to the nation. We're going to track this guy down. We're going to find him. So they take on this case, and there is in particular one person that heads up the investigation. His name is Lieutenant Bud Zander, and he is of the Los Angeles Police Department. He is aided by the FBI, but he becomes the Tom Hanks character in the Catch Me if youf can story. He becomes the guy that becomes obsessed with finding Dr. Spears. And so The FBI is throwing everything they can into to find it. I should tell your listeners that through the Freedom of Information Act, I was able to obtain all the FBI records on this story, which was well over a thousand typewritten pages, hand typewritten pages with, you know, personal pencil notes on it and all the notes of the agents. I mean, I felt like I was looking at a, you know, this historic document. It was really interesting. Incidentally, for your listeners, the Freedom of Information act is not like you just make a phone call and you get it. That is a huge challenge. The FBI is like, why do you want this? Why are you looking into this story? Is there a reason? I mean, they were like, you know.

[Jerry Jamison]

Did you do it?

[Eddie Barker]

Why are you asking me this? You know, and then it was delayed two months, then it's delayed two months, then they come back. We have questions for you. I mean, it really was a thing to uncover and I believe there was a reason for that. I found out that the FBI was covering up a major, major corruption and they chose apparently not to reveal that. And it is revealed in this book for the first time.

[Jerry Jamison]

Yeah, people, that twist at the end was something. I'm not going to spoil it. I do want people to read this. Have you ever read the, have you ever watched the Jimmy Stewart film, the FBI Story?

[Eddie Barker]

Yes, I have.

[Jerry Jamison]

Yeah.

[Eddie Barker]

Yeah, I'm a big fan of those old movies.

[Jerry Jamison]

Oh, same, same, same. I know. That's not that there's a, there's a plane incident about an explosion on a.

[Anya Cain]

Plane for insurance money.

[Jerry Jamison]

It's not this story. It's a different one that I think happened in like Colorado or something. But you know, just kind of wild that this wasn't necessarily like an isolated incident.

[Eddie Barker]

Yeah, actually. So this was National Airlines, which was a regional airlines that basically was originated in New York, went through the south and ended up in LA as its regular routes. So National Airlines, maybe it was a little bit like Southwest Airlines, that kind of a know it was big enough. But they had three plane crashes in a matter of months, all three of them questionable. One of them in the New York area. I mean, there's no doubt the guy carried a bomb on board. And he was an attorney and he was being investigated. We know he carried a bomb on board. In fact, his. He was still strapped in his seat and was found like 12 miles away from the crash site. It just propelled him into the atmosphere and then twist of all twists. He was Dr. Robert Spears, attorney.

[Jerry Jamison]

What did he. I mean, that's again like if you'd written this Fictional book. I would have been like, okay, like, really like.

[Eddie Barker]

And we have a photograph in the book of that guy's wife, who was a world famous model in New York. Beautiful woman and her children and her mother and the agony on their face when they are notified that he blew up this plane. Her husband. I mean, it's, you know, the connections, they're beyond fiction, remarkable.

[Jerry Jamison]

And I do want to go back a moment because you might be delighted by this. So we actually filed a FOIA request. Well, I say. Say we, Kevin, years ago. Right. And there was a time where that FOIA request for a different homicide case out of Indiana was. We were waiting on that longer than he was actually married to me. Like, he. That. That predated our relationship. And we were still waiting for it. I think it took like three or four years in total. It was wild. I mean, it was just.

[Anya Cain]

But it's.

[Jerry Jamison]

It's certainly worth doing because you get so much interesting historical context.

[Eddie Barker]

Yeah, it. In all transparency. I never did get it from them. I got it kind of the equivalent of a deep throat. It's so exciting. It's so fun.

[Jerry Jamison]

Did you meet in a parking garage?

[Eddie Barker]

We were, you know, I had shades off. No, it was really cool. I mean, I just was able to get every, you know, every word of that file. It's so funny to hit print on your printer. Prints for a half hour and it's like, oh, my gosh, look at the stuff that's coming out of this. And the things they. First of all, the FBI, I was very impressive because they interviewed everybody. I mean, if somebody said, I think I worked with him for about three months in this place, they'd be like, we're interviewing him. I mean, they just interviewed every. All the neighbors, all the. Anybody that, you know. And he had this. Again, he had such a wide ranging and varied life. You know, they helped put together that story and the story of his wife, who turned out to be interesting as well.

[Jerry Jamison]

Indeed, indeed. And I wanted to ask you with Dr. Spears. I mean, one thing people may be a little bit scratching their heads about right now is we talked about this guy as this sort of gentleman rogue who very likely blew up an airliner to fake his death. But we also are talking about him as a renowned physician in the Dallas area. So people may be wondering what happened with that. So I want to talk a little bit about naturopathy. I hope I'm saying that right. You know, what's that movement in the context of, you know, 1959 and how is it more Regarded today.

[Eddie Barker]

Yeah. So really we'll go back to the 1930s and 40s, which is when Dr. Spears becomes kind of entranced with it. What's very important for your listeners to realize is that the 1930s and 40s, you're coming out of the Great Depression. All of the 30s is the Depression. It's around that time also they're starting to develop vaccines. They're starting to develop pharmaceutical solutions to diseases. This will be, you know, eventually Jonas Soc and polio vaccine. This is rolling into that era. However, at that time, there was a massive distrust of government, parallels to today, a massive distrust of vaccines, science and government. So there was two large groups that handled healthcare in America. There were the naturopaths and then there were the physicians. The physicians belonged to the American Medical association, the naturopaths, which we would think more of like holistic doctors. So they're going to use herbs and that kind of thing to treat diseases. Yeah, and they belonged to the American Naturopathic Association. This is what's striking about that. There were the same number of members in both organizations. So the number of naturopaths is equal to the number of physicians. Medical doctors. They were also equally respected among their group. So people basically said, if I have to trust a doctor and a chemist, I'm going to trust my grandmother more. My mom always said, if you drank castor oil, you know, you're going to be healthy. Which actually my mother had to. She said every morning we had to drink castor oil. She said, you know, you're just gagging all the stuff. I'm like, why? She said, we never knew. We just, you know, because her mother had made her do it, you know, so there was this huge buy in in naturopathy because they didn't trust other people. That elevated his position dramatically. Now let me point out by saying he never attended medical school, he never attended naturopathic training or any education. He never attended medical college. He had never attended high school, he never attended elementary school. As far as I could tell, he had no formal education at any level for any time. So he purchased a diploma from a major university and then he purchased a medical license from a man out of the trunk of his car and printed up stationary immediately in business cards that said robert Spears md. Now he's an md he's in Maryland at that time. And he says, where's the best place to practice? Where can I make the most amount of money? And he looks at Dallas, because in the 1940s and 50s, this is the oil boom. Era. This is massive. Massive amounts of money are being made, more than any other industry in the world at that point. But there's an additional factor, and that is Texas is the only state in the nation which allows a doctor to transfer his medical license without being recertified or checked. So if you have a medical license from any other state, Texas, which was trying to invite people in, would just accept. And once you are accepted by the Texas Medical association, it can never be challenged again.

[Unknown]

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[Eddie Barker]

Go to wickstudio.com so he is instantly an obgyn with no training whatsoever. I mean none.

[Jerry Jamison]

Good lord. I mean it's it just the amount of crankdom and like crankdom.

[Eddie Barker]

That's a good one.

[Jerry Jamison]

Yeah crankdom and quackery that that occurred in the Naturopath movement or whatever you want to call it is is REM remarkable and I think did not go unstated here. I don't think these are two equal differentiated but equal movements of the AMA versus the Naturopaths. It's like One's like a bunch, it's like a circus carnival. Weirdos who were like, scamming people and then, you know, doctors who are also not perfect but not necessarily, like, doing illegal stuff.

[Eddie Barker]

Well, the doctors were held to, you know, standards. I mean, they, they had to live up to standards. They were, you know, regularly being reviewed and, you know, looked into. Dr. Spears became the president of the American Naturopathic. He was the president. He appeared before Congress, he appeared before state legislature to promote the rights and the benefits of naturopathy. Now, without laying too much of a burden on, say, holistic approaches to medicine, the reality is there were a lot of snake oil salesmen at that time doing these kinds of things. A lot of what they do in Mexico to cure cancer, a lot of inventions of machinery that if you attached it to your body and you charged yourself with electricity, it would heal everything in your body. So they were far from equivalent. Also attracted the kind of people that Dr. Spears was. That's who he attracted. And of course, you've read the book. Do you know what kind of doctor he was?

[Jerry Jamison]

Oh, yes. I, I, I, I think that is, it's not to knock any sort of holistic med medicine or treatment in any situation. It's more of it just because there were no standards anyone could come in and do, basically. I mean, the fact that he didn't even go to naturopathy so school and he still was like the head of the organization is wild.

[Anya Cain]

He wasn't.

[Eddie Barker]

They had national, huge national conventions. I mean, like, as big as the AMA would have. And they would trade, you know, trade secrets mostly. They would say, hey, I've got. I, I invented this thing you stand on that makes you shake, and it's going to, you know, make your breasts bigger and your hips thinner. And, you know, and people are like, I want one of those. You know, I mean, it's like, it's not a great chapter in American health care, I'll say that.

[Jerry Jamison]

No. And one thing I do want to touch upon this, and it isn't. I know that this is in the title, so I don't think it's too big of a surprise, but this book really does get into the subject of abortion at the time of, you know, 1930s, 40s, 50s, pre Roe v. Wade. And I mean, I learned some things that surprised me about this, and just, it intersects with the story in a big way. You know, I, I always associate, you know, that pre Roe v. Wade time with, like, backroom alley abortions. Very, very dangerous and unsafe, which is true. To a certain extent, it sounds like, but also, it was also much more of a bigger business that was sort of quietly not legitimized, but kind of like allowed to happen. Can you talk a little bit about that and how it intersects here?

[Kevin Greenlee]

Sure.

[Eddie Barker]

That was probably the biggest eye opener to me when we got into this. It was more like a side connected to him. Like, oh, by the, you know, of all the weird stuff in this guy's life. Oh, by the way, he did abortions. He. He performed abortions. What we found out and we began doing deep research on this topic in this era, which, again, almost the whole discussion starts with Roe v. Wade. In current American discussions, other than what exactly what you described, you know, dark alley coat hangers. It's like we think it's all that and then we go. Then there was Roe v. Wade, and then there's what's developed since and this huge eye opener. We started getting books just on the topic that were published back in that era. I mean, I went online and found antique books, you know, from the 1930s and 40s on this topic and to really fully flesh out this part of the story. But the fact of the matter was, is that abortion was considered to be an acceptable and necessary part of society. And it was one of the primary reasons that Dr. Spears relocated to Dallas because it was turning out that wealthy oil executives, secretaries, were getting pregnant and he knew he would have a huge business. I mean, he literally said, the combination of money and hypocrisy is going to make me very, very wealthy. And he charged $5,000 for an abortion in 1959. That's the equivalent of $50,000 today. He would do up to six, seven, eight abortions a day. So he had a regular clinic. It advertised as an obgyn. He was an obgyn. I have his actual advertisements that he ran in the Dallas Morning News, and it's Dr. Spears. It says, a specialist in female problems. And female problems was code for unwanted pregnancies. Only one. That's the only thing it was, is the only thing he did. And he could book them all day long. And society had, I would say, especially fundamentalist Christian Southern society had decided to just look away and say, it'll be taken care of. And part of it was because the legal system, the court system and law enforcement felt like it would destroy society. In other words, if wealthy, powerful men ended up all going to prison, that's just not going to happen. And so it was those very groups that protected, almost an underground backroom. Acceptable solution in Part because they said that's the old argument. You want a clothes hanger or do you want someone that has sterile equipment? And he was the guy with the sterile equipment. So they, they not only approved it, they participated in it. In terms of, I know somebody that can take care of that problem for you, especially law enforcement. I can get that taken care of. Everybody along the line made money.

[Jerry Jamison]

Yeah, you get like a kickback. If you are, you know, a detective or a police officer who's like, yeah, I'll hook you up with somebody I killed.

[Eddie Barker]

It's Tupperware. I mean, it's. Everybody gets a slice of the pie. Yeah, yeah.

[Jerry Jamison]

It's really pyramid. The level of corruption is remarkable.

[Eddie Barker]

This is also part of a snapshot of we'll say 1940s and 50s America. 1950s America. So coming out of the World War, Eisenhower becomes president. We are now getting interstate systems. Women are working and choosing to continue to work. They worked during the war, but now they're saying to their husbands who wanted them theoretically to stay home, you know, if I keep working, we get a second car. If we keep working, I buy a washing machine. So all of these modern appliances are coming in. We'll get a television if I keep working. And the husbands who were morally opposed to that said, oh, a television. Heck yeah, let's do that. And so America's becoming wealthy. America's becoming super wealthy post war. And society was in this really sweet spot of everyone goes to church, everyone is nice to their neighbor, they mow their lawns. It's the classic white picket fence with a birdbath in front. That was America. It most certainly was Dallas. And Dr. Spears lived in an exclusive part of town with a beautiful two story brick, almost a mansion, drove a brand new car. His wife was a socialite that threw garden parties. He had two beautiful children. He was the epitome of what the successful Dallas man was supposed to be. And one of the last things they wanted to do was bring down that image. So he was actually protected by the very people that should have called him to justice.

[Jerry Jamison]

Yeah, it's. It's really remarkable. And it's remarkable you think like you, I mean, you just have a. I mean, I'm, I'm a. I was a history major in college. Sometimes you have a flattened view of the past or like, oh, no one approved of abortion before this time. Then it was accepted. But to learn the nuances and that it really was an industry and that the industry could be a. Unsafe for women. But it also, you know, I mean, it made people a lot of money. It's just. It's. It's really remarkable and just not an area of history I was familiar with at all. So super interesting in the book. I want to turn back to something we sort of touched upon earlier, which is the media environment around this Eddie Barker. Eddie Barker. What the heck was that.

[Eddie Barker]

Again? Another thing I stumbled across in the. In the course of the research, because in a way, it's kind of methodically, you know, oh, I found this thing about. Oh, and then part of it was with 26 different aliases. Again, it's not like going to the Encyclopedia Britannica and looking up Dr. Spears and you say, well, here's his story. I mean, I would be searching through 1940s newspapers, and they would talk about this huge scam. I think one of them was in Indianapolis, by the way, a big yay. I think it was a. It's like farmers insurance or something like that. And it was their national sales convention. And they. You know, everybody brings them all in. All the salesmen come in and stuff, and he's. He's just scamming these guys. He has multiple scams going at the same time. He has people. He has a hospitality suite where there's free drinks. They go to the. In the hotel. They go to the hospitality suite. And he tells him, you know, I've got this thing where I can give you qualified leads, guaranteed money. Da, da, da, for a hundred bucks. And he has people lined up out the door of the hospitality suite with $100 bills in their hands. And, you know, he's kind of later, like, how could I not take it? Like, I know. I get it. You know, so he is working all these scams and everything, but that would be another different name. And I would go. I would turn to Julie, and I said, well, this sounds like what the guy would do, but it. You know, he's got a completely different name here. He's like, you know, Oscar somebody. And then we start doing the research and stuff. And then I would get records from, like, Joliet Prison and. Yes, and, you know, Miami Penitentiary and stuff, and go, wait, this name is on there. There was no one of his prison records that had all of his aliases. So, I mean, when I published the book, it was. It was like 23 or 24. It's 26 now. Just. I found three more accidentally. I mean, he just keeps appearing. So researching the book was. Was a challenge in that regard because he. It's all different names in all different cities and different Newspapers, you know, but eventually I'm able to track him down. And this is when I come across Eddie Barker. And Eddie Barker is, first of all, he was the first guy that announced that JFK had been shot in Dallas. He's the guy that broke the story. I mean, so. And this will be about three years later, but so he's this very popular, very well known journalist in the area, bit of a sensationalist, and he just latches onto the story and he becomes, literally becomes the press agent for Mrs. Spears. I mean, literally takes the title and the position, moves and sleeps on her couch. And as all the other reporters, which are now a worldwide collection of reporters, gather at the door, he decides, he becomes the pool reporter that they refer today. And he decides what the story is, what will be released, what he keeps for himself and what he will allow. And he, in the end, I don't know, he records something, 40 hours or something of audio radio interviews with Dr. Spears, which becomes the source of much of the facts as we know them.

[Jerry Jamison]

Between that, which I've actually, I've seen modern day iterations of something like that, but usually it's with sort of YouTubers or people who are not really professional journalists. It's. It's like. It's very ethically dubious, frankly. Yes, it's actually totally not acceptable. I'm gonna just be blunt here. Sorry, Eddie. But like, it's crazy. Between that and between some of the connections with law enforcement or what maybe his true intentions were, it's really an ethical minefield. I mean, what was your, what was your reaction to it?

[Eddie Barker]

Well, you know, it was like discovering everything about the underbelly of abortion in America. Now you're. You're kind of dealing with this, with media, too, and how, you know, at different times the media has done this. You know, kind of like maybe the Lindbergh case, where it just becomes so huge and by all accounts, maybe the wrong person was executed for that murder.

[Jerry Jamison]

No, he was guilty of sin, okay?

[Eddie Barker]

But it, you know, the story becomes much bigger than life, and we got to see this. So to skip ahead a little bit, Dr. Spears ends up in Alcatraz, and Eddie Barker is the only person in history who's allowed to go into. He's in the yard, you know, the yard in Alcatraz, and he's sitting there with a microphone recording him for tens of hours. And the warden's going, yeah, we got a big celebrity here. Spears was a friend of the Birdman of Alcatraz. They were buddies. I mean, there's no end to this. And yet Eddie Barker is controlling it all again. Like the abortion story, the story of media influence in America, just. I mean, that's a book by itself. It's so fascinating. I think readers will be like. I think they'll feel like. Because every morning there would be a new article that comes out with new things, and the whole country, at least, is hanging on the next installment in this story. So it's really serialized and, you know, becomes in and of itself an entire event independent of the crime 100%.

[Jerry Jamison]

And I. I mean, as a journalist, it instills such mixed feelings in me because I miss or I. I don't think I ever really lived through the media being as robust as it once was. But the idea of multiple competing outlets in the same city or town and local papers digging up the local angle, I mean, what a rich tapestry of.

[Anya Cain]

Just, you know, information.

[Eddie Barker]

Dallas, they had the morning news and the evening news, and they were at war with each other. They're not trying to find the truth as much as they're trying to sell papers. So they're at war with each other. And anybody that was connected in any way with the story, like a. Like a motel clerk at some point becomes a celebrity because she's like, oh, I signed him in at the register in the motel. Tell us what? He was like, oh, my gosh. And she's like, you know, she's getting her hair done and she's. You know.

[Jerry Jamison]

People never change. That's why I love history, because you could totally see that happening today, too. But it's definitely a much more decimated media landscape. And, you know, that. That's. That's not good. I think for whatever the flaws, ethical or otherwise, in the media back then, what we have now with sort of social media and people just posting whatever is maybe still worse, in my opinion. But I do want to ask you. You did all of this amazing work, and there's this cipher at the heart of the story, which is Spears, and you mentioned earlier kind of developing a bit of an affinity for him, despite the horrible thing he was accused of doing. If you had to sum him up in a nutshell, who was he as a person? Why would he. Like.

[Anya Cain]

What makes a person like this?

[Eddie Barker]

Excellent question. That's a great question. I think to answer that question, we go back to his childhood, and I mean, very young. So Robert Spears never in his entire life knew his name. He never knew his own name because when he was a child in Oklahoma, living in poverty, single mother, first of all, never knew his dad, but his mother had this be the 1920s, lots of boyfriends, let's say. And that's how she lived. She lived through her boyfriends. So what she did is she would live a month or two with a man and then she would move on. And she had this strange habit of whenever she moved, she would change her son's name to the name of the man she was living with. Change the last name, I'm guessing, for societal reasons. In other words, that would imply they're married as opposed to what they were doing. And so maybe every few months his last name changed. Now when I talk about aliases, that's none of these. The aliases are law enforcement recorded aliases. So his entire life he's moving and moving and moving. So he's not going to school. He's also not developing any friends, any neighborhood friends as a result. I think just my own opinion is that he thought it was normal that you just changed your name all the time. Not only changed your name, but you changed your Persona completely. Because whenever she moved, she became whatever that man was or whatever that man wanted her to be. And so the young boy, 45 year old is going to. When you can't pay the rent or when you get kicked out, you become a different person. That's the way humans operate. You become a diff. When there is difficulty, you become a new person. Now that would seem really strange to all of us because we know what normal life is like. I don't think he ever knew what normal life was. I don't think he had a childhood friend that said, no, my father's name is this, and this is my name. I don't think he knew that. And by, I don't know, 12 or 14, he's in a reformatory. He's taking whatever the last name is that he had. He gets out. It's only a matter of time till he steals some checks. It's only a matter of time till he gets a job and robs from that person. I mean he would take a job only to be in a position to steal from them. And then he just, he'd move over two counties and change his name. And of course there is no CODIS system. There is no law enforcement working together. There certainly were no states working together. Those were independent entities. And not even the penitentiary system worked together at all. I mean, you could be in a state prison, you could be in a federal prison. The federal prisons didn't necessarily share their information. He could literally reinvent himself all along the way. And I think he did. And I think, to answer your question, who is this person? How can he become this person? I think he was a person that was unfortunately cursed, with no foundation, no roots, or no sense that you were supposed to have roots. He was the result of how he was raised in an era when no help would ever have been available. You would just get passed along to some other institution. So I think it's part of the, you know, this odd empathy I have for him. I always felt like when I discovered more about him that he. He didn't have a chance. He did not have a chance. And so what he did is he just created the life that he wanted.

[Jerry Jamison]

Yeah. And I imagine having no real core identity would ultimately make someone pretty cold.

[Anya Cain]

In terms of what they were willing.

[Jerry Jamison]

To do to survive in their mind.

[Eddie Barker]

Well, I think you hit the key word. I think survival. I think self preservation was the guiding force of Dr. Spears. There was nothing because he put his wife and children through torture. I mean. I mean, he destroyed the lives of so many people around him. He loved his wife. This is an oddity. I got a hold of love letters between them. And he loved his wife dearly. He loved his children dearly. He just felt like that was the best thing that ever happened to him in his whole life. And of course it did. He had a home, he had a family. He had people that loved him. Something he had never had and something he had always wanted, and he finally had it. But when it came down to it, self preservation was a stronger force than anything else in his life. And so he was willing to destroy the lives of 42 people to make sure his life survived.

[Jerry Jamison]

It's really remarkable and just very well captured in your book. And I wanted to ask you. This is one thing that arose, and, like, I wanted to. I. I think I know the answer to this, but it. It arose in the media, this war of the widows. So, like, one of them was an actual widow. One of them wasn't. But between Taylor, Alice Taylor, the. The ex wife of Mr. Taylor, who seemingly died on the airplane, and Frances Spears, who is, of course, Dr. Spears wife, and it really kind of came down to who is culpable for this. Did Dr. Spears die on the plane? We know he didn't. Or did Taylor die on the plane? And there were even theories of like, well, maybe. Maybe neither of them died on the plane. Like, who. Who did the bomb? Who was more culpable? Having gone through all this, do you have a theory on who was ultimately more culpable or Was this a suicide by Taylor? Are there any other explanations or. Where do you come down in that sort of spectrum?

[Eddie Barker]

Yeah, I'm very convinced that Dr. Spears planted that bomb. I'm very convinced that he pulled in someone he loved, a friend, Al Taylor, because he knew that man would carry through with it, Wouldn't question him, wouldn't say, I don't know, wait, there's something weird about this. He had someone that was totally devoted to him and in, I mean, literally could hand over the keys to his life to him, and he could assume that life. There's been a lot of speculation. Was it just a last minute decision kind of thing? You know, like, hey, wait, he said, you know, I could take his car. Wait, he built a bomb? Yeah, he built a bomb that was a time bomb based on a camera shutter. So a timer on a camera, you know, you click it and then it's going to go for so long. So it was probably set for 30 minutes, time lapse type camera. And, you know, by the time the guy got on, it was 22 minutes after it took off. And so he, they think he set, you know, he set the timer, handed him the package. So I'm very, very convinced it's him. I think the war of the widows, which I think your readers will find very fascinating because, I mean, it's a cat fight between these two women. And also two newspapers. You have the Tampa Tribune and the Dallas Morning News who are standing up for their reporters. Now Tampa's going, hey, this is our story. You know, you back off. I mean, it's amazing in that regard. So they're blocking each other from, from access, but Al Taylor's wife seems, and by the way, they were separated, divorced maybe, I'm not sure. Separated. I think she sincerely, you know, like, I want to know what happened to my husband, the father of my child. You know, it's devastated my child. I want to know. So although they're fighting back and forth, she's the one getting an attorney. She's the one talking to the FBI. She's the one saying whatever it takes to track down. And she had serious people involved in it. Mrs. Spears, we don't know what she knows. We don't know when she knows what she knows. And we don't know what she was willing to allow her children to go through. And I think as a parent, that's, you know, there's a big tug on your heart right then of, of what are you allowing your children to go through?

[Jerry Jamison]

Yeah, I, I gotta say, I'm Team Alice all the way. I mean, like, you know, I, I can't. Francis is suspect in my eyes. I think Alice, for all her flaws, was trying to get to the truth on some level and I can respect that. And I think she was ultimately the wrong party here. Not the Spears family.

[Eddie Barker]

They're very good photographs too in the book of. There's the moment when Mrs. Spears, when Frances Spears finds out the news and she's curled up in agony and screams.

[Jerry Jamison]

I don't buy it at all.

[Eddie Barker]

Very interesting. And that is all being photographed by Eddie Barker, naturally.

[Jerry Jamison]

So her, her pr. Her flack, as they say.

[Eddie Barker]

Yes, yes, flack. Good, good word.

[Jerry Jamison]

Yeah. I, I was so impressed by this book. I don't really want to get into any more because I want people to read it to find out what exactly happens. How does the FBI unravel all this? Like how does it all turn out for everybody? It's really a worthwhile read and it's one of those things. I think it doesn't just speak to this horrible situation with the crash. It also tells you a lot about American history in terms of medicine, abortion, the media. Like it really just kind of gives you a glimpse of, you know, where we've come. And I think there's some extraordinary parallels to true crime today. Like the circus environment, the sort of victims getting lost because oh, this guy's so wild. And you know, like, I think it really speaks to a moment right now, you know, woo, woo. Nonsense in terms of new age, you know, medical treatments versus like science. I think there's something for everybody and I would strongly urge people to buy this book. Where can they get vanishing Act?

[Eddie Barker]

Well, they can get it through Amazon and any online source. You can also get it at Barnes Noble and most really anywhere you can, can buy a book, you can get this book. So I would encourage people to get it. I won't go into any detail, but I'm going to tease your listeners with a chapter of the book that your eyes will get big at when you hear this. There's an entire Hollywood connection to this story as well. And it's why he was in Los Angeles, it's why he was arrested. That is a mind boggling twist that I discovered by coming across memos from mgm.

[Jerry Jamison]

I forgot that whole angle of Hollywood and how complicit they were and just like it, I don't know, it just touches upon almost like every aspect of life. It's really kind of a remarkable, as you said, it's an enormous life that this man led. One that was at devastating consequences for many people. But enormous is is exactly the word.

[Eddie Barker]

Actually, when you think of the golden age of the 1950s and the cry today to go back to the 1950s when hypocrisy reigned in America doesn't mean everybody was bad, but it was woven into society. And I think this book and this story peels back the layers on the era as well. And from a just a purely historical standpoint, I'm very proud of the work and the research we did on the history. Not just as it connects to the crime or this person, but because it shows the fertile ground where this kind of thing could have happened.

[Jerry Jamison]

Yes, the good old days are a myth. Nostalgia is a trap. And especially nostalgia for things people never even experience themselves. All advertising, you know that I do.

[Eddie Barker]

That for a living.

[Jerry Jamison]

Yeah, yeah. You know, like looking back at, you know, the old lovely advertisements from the past and thinking, ah, I wish that were. That was crafted by somebody to sell you something.

[Eddie Barker]

Yeah. And the 1950s TV shows, I mean everybody is familiar with those. And all you have to do is to think back and say, wow, everyone was perfect and they weren't. And certainly non white people didn't have that experience.

[Jerry Jamison]

Yeah, exactly. And I still, I mean there's still. I love the past, I love history. I love like looking at the nuances and how kind of gritty it really was. And I think, you know, we can be interested in those. I just think we need to never put on those rose colored glasses because that's just not the case.

[Eddie Barker]

There are good lessons in this book for everyone.

[Jerry Jamison]

Absolutely. And I just want to thank you for taking the time to speak with us. I mean it was really a delight talking with you. It was delight reading this. And so, you know, please, if you ever do any other true crime books, let us know.

[Eddie Barker]

Well, I'm very happy to say that I've already received two contracts from Bloomsbury, the publisher, Bloomsbury is the. Was the publisher of Harry Potter and the original publisher, the first publisher of Agatha Christie. So that feels something to be proud of. They already have the manuscripts for two more that I would say are at least or greater in terms of interest in this story. Two stories that no one also knows about that are mind boggling.

[Jerry Jamison]

So look for those, those are our favorites. So please keep us posted. And thank you again, Jerry. We really appreciate it.

[Eddie Barker]

Again, you ask great questions. I have to say it again, you really ask good questions. So good for you. Keep it up.

[Jerry Jamison]

Thank you so much. Thank you. Awesome.

[Anya Cain]

Thanks so much to Jerry for taking the time to talk with us. We'll include a link to his book in our show notes.

[Kevin Greenlee]

Thanks so much for listening to the Murder Sheet. If you have a tip concerning one of the cases we cover, please email [e-mail] if you have actionable information about an unsolved crime, please report it to the appropriate authorities.

[Anya Cain]

If you're interested in joining our Patreon, that's available at www.patreon.com. if you want to tip us a bit of money for records requests, you can do so at www. Buymeacoffee.com murdersheet. We very much appreciate any support.

[Kevin Greenlee]

Special thanks to Kevin Tyler Greenlee, who composed the music for the Murder Sheet and who you can find on the [e-mail] if you're looking to talk with.

[Anya Cain]

Other listeners about a case we've covered, you can join the Murder Sheet discussion group on Facebook. We mostly focus our time on research and reporting, so we're not on social media much. We do try to check our email account, but we ask for patience as we often receive a lot of messages. Thanks again for listening.

[Kevin Greenlee]

You know, Anya, can I ask you something?

[Jerry Jamison]

Yeah.

[Kevin Greenlee]

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[Anya Cain]

Trial by combat.

[Eddie Barker]

No.

[Jerry Jamison]

What about Cash App?

[Eddie Barker]

That's Cash App.

[Kevin Greenlee]

Why? That's one of our sponsors.

[Anya Cain]

No, but seriously, this is one of those things. Whenever anyone's asking us to do any sort of technological thing, we're immediately like, oh geez, this is going to be a whole incident, this. You did it. You didn't even need my help. You just did it. We didn't have to put our heads together and figure anything out. You set it up. It was super easy. It's been so easy to use. The convenience is unbeatable in my opinion. In terms of other, I mean, I will say one competitor of theirs we used once when we were setting up our T shirt business. Never again. I. I'm in a blood feud with that company now. They acted like we sold too many T shirts, which we were trying to do, and that we were somehow suspect.

[Jerry Jamison]

And then they kicked us off their.

[Anya Cain]

Platform and it was a whole mess. And we like our Money Got Frozen Cash App has been the opposite of that. It's been a breeze, it's been a dream to work with them and it's Been just so convenient. And I would really encourage people to get in on this because you're missing.

[Jerry Jamison]

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[Anya Cain]

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[Kevin Greenlee]

You know, Anya, we are in this true crime space. It's such a difficult place to be in sometimes. And one of the reasons is because you're talking about cases that people have a real emotional involvement in. And so if you reach a conclusion that some people don't like online, they're going to, like, start attacking you and even threatening you.

[Anya Cain]

Yes.

[Kevin Greenlee]

And I know when that first started happening to us, it was really, really unsettling and difficult. And I know one thing that really helped us feel better and safer to continue on with the show was Simplisafe.

[Anya Cain]

Simply Safe has been a company we've trusted for years. We've used them for years to protect our home. And one of the reasons is they just give us that peace of mind. As Kevin said, we're no strangers to controversy. And sometimes that can mean getting threats or getting basically hit veiled threats where.

[Jerry Jamison]

People say they're gonna come hurt you because they disagree with what you're saying about a case.

[Anya Cain]

And so with Simplisafe, we're able to kind of keep the murder sheet train chugging along and not worry about that too much because we know that they.

[Jerry Jamison]

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[Anya Cain]

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[Jerry Jamison]

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[Kevin Greenlee]

That's very fair to say.

[Anya Cain]

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[Eddie Barker]

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