‘Unsolved Histories’: How love was maintained despite grief of plane crash

Susan Francis was 16 years old and going to high school in El Paso, Texas in the spring of 1963. She and Jody Whipkey had been best friends since middle school and were making the most of their sophomore year.

It was a golden age to be a teen in America.

“We were crazy kids. We flirted with boys, and we loved theater and drama and dance. We were in dance classes together,” Francis said. “We loved dogs. We bought each other crazy things.”

“She was sparkly, and she had a sense of humor, she laughed,” Francis recalls of her best friend Jody. “My mother loved her, because you always laughed when you talked to Jody – she said cute, funny things.”

Moving To Alaska

Jody’s father was stationed at the old Biggs Air Force Base in El Paso. Sometime around March 1963, Jody told Susan that her father had been assigned to Elmendorf Air Force Base, and the Whipkey family was moving to Alaska. Jody’s mom considered letting Jody stay behind in El Paso with Susan, but once school was out at the end of May, Jody departed Texas with her mother, father and older sister. They headed north to McChord to connect with Flight 293.

A few days later, Susan Francis found out about the crash from her mom, who’d read about it in the El Paso newspaper. Susan was devastated.

Before the crash, Susan began having a series of vivid dreams about Jody and her family – picturing them waiting to board the plane, then sitting on the plane, and then buckling their seatbelts as the DC-7C hit turbulence. Then, around the time of the crash, Susan is convinced she saw Jody in her neighborhood, walking toward her in the distance, only to disappear a few blocks away.

Susan claims to be a confirmed skeptic who needs evidence in order to believe something is true. But she also said that something inexplicable was happening in June 1963.

“I felt like Jody tried to say goodbye to me,” Francis said. “Whether I made that up in my brain, or whether there’s some remote way through, I don’t know, mitochondrial DNA or something like that, she tried to connect with me.”

Over the decades, Susan Francis left El Paso and moved to California. But she never forgot her best friend. “I graduated. I got married. I had a baby. I mean, life goes on,” she said. “But Jody has always stayed with me.”

Creating a Community

Susan Francis and Greg Barrowman, who we met in Episode One, each lost someone they love on Flight 293. After sharing their experiences in an emotional phone call, the two decided to organize and to seek out others with connections to Flight 293 and to create a group devoted to commemorating the tragedy.

One of the first people they found is Don Bennett, who was just a young child in Louisiana when his father Austin “Dallie” Bennett died on Flight 293.

One day, Don joined Greg and Susan on a conference call on which Don shared distinct memories of his father, and was overcome with emotion.

“I’ll probably cry when I get off the phone, just knowing that I’m talking with somebody that had family or friends on that plane,” Bennett told them. “They might have been sitting next to my dad.”

“What went through my dad’s mind when that plane was going down?” Don asked Greg and Susan. “What went through my dad’s mind knowing that he has five children he ain’t never gonna get to see again?”

Losing a Sister, Niece and Nephew

Connie Miller of Gresham, Oregon lost her younger sister Jewell Smith on Flight 293. She also lost Jewell’s two young children, who were Connie’s two-and-a-half-year-old nephew and six-week old niece.

Miller said the tragedy changed her parents immediately. They had driven Jewell and her two kids from Gresham to McChord Air Force Base, so they could join Jewell’s husband in Anchorage.

“My mother and father left as a middle-aged couple up to take their daughter to put her on a plane with their grandchildren,” Miller said. When they returned home, having learned of the plane’s disappearance, the couple were haggard and hunched over, and, she said, “walking up the sidewalk were two old people.”

“It just aged them instantly,” she recalls.

On Episode Three of Unsolved Histories: What Happened to Flight 293?, we explore the love between friends – and between siblings, parents and children – and how it endures despite tragedy. And we learn how shared tragedy can unite strangers to create a powerful antidote to grief and loss, and to give hope to an otherwise lost cause.