The Lost Pilots Read online

  “Look,” Lancaster said, “Haden left these notes.” He passed them over to Jessie. The first note read, “Bill, I can’t make the grade. Tell Chubbie of our talk. My advice is, never leave her again.” The second note read, “Chubbie, the economic situation is such I can’t go through with it. Comfort mother in her sorrow. You have Bill. He is the whitest man I know.” The messages were typed, with the two signatures—one reading “Haden” and the other just “H”—scrawled in pencil.

  “We’d better destroy them,” Lancaster urged, but Jessie disagreed. Lancaster protested: “There’ll be a scandal if that note to you is made public.” The notes gave all the evidence of a love triangle. But Jessie wanted to hold on to them; to do otherwise would be to invite suspicion.

  The notes were only a brief distraction. Jessie’s focus was getting medical attention for Clarke. The name of Clarke’s personal doctor escaped her, so she decided to call Ernest Huston. As a prominent lawyer, he would know the town’s finest physicians. Huston said he would call for help immediately and then meet them at the house.

  Not long afterward the name of Clarke’s doctor, Carleton Deederer, popped into Jessie’s head. She rang him at once. “Haden has shot himself,” she said. “He’s bleeding terribly. Please come at once.”

  By now it was nearly 3 a.m. As Jessie hung up the phone, the front doorbell rang. When Lancaster opened the door, an ambulance driver named Ditsler from the W. I. Philbrick Funeral Home stepped in. Lancaster led Ditsler to the sun porch, where the driver looked over Clarke’s wound. Because Clarke’s feet kept striking the iron end rail of the bed, Lancaster grabbed a pillow from his own bed to place against the rail. But as he lifted Clarke’s feet onto the pillow, Ditsler warned him that doing so would increase the flow of blood to Clarke’s head.

  “Do you think he’ll talk again?” Lancaster anxiously asked. Ditsler said it was unlikely.

  Jessie urged the driver not to move Clarke until the doctor arrived—it might exacerbate his injuries. Ditsler agreed, but as time ticked by with still no sign of a physician, he decided to check in with his office. Jessie asked him to also call the police, but he said the office had already done so.

  When Ernest Huston arrived at 3:15 a.m., he found Jessie and Ditsler in the living room. Lancaster showed him Clarke’s suicide notes. Should he destroy them? Lancaster asked. “No,” Huston responded firmly. “They’re important.” Jessie was growing more sensitive to the scandal the notes might provoke, so she slipped the one addressed to her into the telephone desk drawer. She asked Huston and Ditsler not to mention it.

  As the group waited still longer for a doctor to arrive, Lancaster said, “I wish that Haden would talk, so he could tell us why he did it.” Frustrated and exhausted, Jessie called Dr. Deederer’s house to ask when he’d left. Much to her surprise, Deederer himself picked up the phone. He had gotten lost on the way to S.W. 21st Terrace, he said, and driven back home to consult a map. He would be leaving in a minute.

  In the hour since Lancaster had phoned for a doctor, Clarke had received no treatment, other than Jessie wiping the blood from his face. Finally the assistant manager from the Philbrick Funeral Home arrived and granted Ditsler permission to transport Clarke’s body. Lancaster, mistaking the assistant manager for a doctor, agreed.

  With difficulty, Ditsler and the assistant manager carried Clarke’s body down the stairs. Jessie protested that a doctor was on his way, but to no avail. The assistant manager insisted on taking Clarke to Jackson Memorial Hospital. As the ambulance drove away, Dr. Deederer pulled up to the curb. He would take Lancaster and Jessie to the hospital, while Huston remained at the house. Shortly before leaving, Lancaster took Huston aside. “If it should be necessary, will you [represent] us?” he asked. Huston said yes.

  Dr. Deederer had difficulty locating the hospital, and was forced to ask directions from the few pedestrians on the street. The car’s progress was slow. Once at the hospital, Deederer was unable to treat Clarke because the attendants didn’t believe he was a physician. When Jessie and Lancaster finally arrived at Clarke’s room, they found a doctor, a nurse, and two policemen. As it happened, one of the policemen, Earl Hudson, was married to the sister of Clarke’s old girlfriend Peggy Brown. “I know all about you and Jessie, [Clarke] told me,” Hudson declared. Lancaster and Jessie were equally familiar with Hudson.

  Hudson brought Lancaster and Jessie out to his police car for the drive back to Coral Gables. As they cruised through the darkened streets, Lancaster asked Hudson more than once if he thought Clarke would be able to talk and “tell why he did it.” When they arrived at the house, Hudson and another police officer, Fitzhugh Lee, went straight to the sun porch. The gun lay in the center of the bed. Noting the blood-soaked sheets, Hudson picked up the gun and announced to Lee, “One thirty-two pistol.” He wrapped the gun in his handkerchief and slipped it into his hip pocket.

  Lancaster corrected him: “It’s a thirty-eight Colt.”

  “No, it’s a thirty-two,” Hudson argued.

  Lancaster picked up the gun’s box and showed him the caliber on the label. Hudson, Lee, and Lancaster then gathered up the bedcovers, trying to locate the discharged bullet, but they came up empty. (The bullet was found the following morning lodged in Clarke’s pillow.)

  Following this unimpressive performance, Hudson inquired after Clarke’s suicide notes, of which Ditsler, ignoring Jessie’s plea, had informed him. Because Jessie wanted to keep Clarke’s note to her a secret, she handed Hudson only the one addressed to Lancaster. But Hudson wasn’t so easily put off. “There were two notes, weren’t there?” he asked. “Where’s the other one?” Jessie said the other note was personal, but Hudson wouldn’t be dissuaded. Reluctantly, Jessie retrieved the note from downstairs. Having examined the scene, and still operating under the assumption that Clarke pulled the trigger, Hudson and Lee drove off.

  After the officers left, Ernest Huston asked Lancaster whether the pistol Clarke had used belonged to him. Lancaster told Huston about pawning the original gun in Tucson and buying a replacement in St. Louis. “Technically it belongs to you,” Lancaster argued. “Is it all right if I say it’s yours?” Huston said no.

  “Can I say it’s the property of Latin-American Airways?”

  Again Huston refused. He was no longer affiliated with Tancrel and Russell, whom he now knew to be criminals, and he was wary of being associated, however tangentially, with Clarke’s shooting. The situation was far too messy for his liking.

  Huston offered to drive Lancaster and Jessie back to the hospital. On the way they stopped at the Everglades Hotel to inform Clarke’s mother of the tragic news, but they arrived too late—Dr. Deederer was already telling her the story. As Deederer described Clarke’s wounds, Clarke’s traumatized mother cut him off. Was there any chance her son would live? Dr. Deederer, answering honestly, said no. Hearing this, Mrs. Clarke opted to remain in her room rather than go to the hospital.

  At Jackson Memorial Hospital, Clarke remained breathing, but he was still unconscious. No sooner had Lancaster and Jessie arrived than they were met by two detectives. “We’d like to question you at the courthouse,” the detectives said. Lancaster and Jessie were driven to the immense Dade County Courthouse, placed in separate mouse-and-cockroach-infested jail cells on the nineteenth floor, and forbidden to talk. Jessie slowly realized, to her immense shock, that she and Lancaster were suspected of nefarious activities. As the hours crawled by, she was gripped by “desperate thoughts,” she later recounted. “I realized that I was a woman, alone, ten thousand miles from my own country.”

  Having taken Lancaster and Jessie’s keys to the Coral Gables house and the Robin, the detectives headed off to search the premises. At the house they gathered up Lancaster’s diaries and letters, along with samples of Clarke’s typing to which they could compare the two suicide notes. They collected, too, Lancaster’s typewritten manuscripts of stories for aviation magazines. As they pored over the materials, they noted inconsistencies between
Clarke’s usual typing and that of the suicide notes. There were decidedly more parallels, the investigators realized, between Lancaster’s typing and the typing on the notes.

  As the detectives conducted their search, Lancaster and Jessie languished in their jail cells. Finally they were taken, in turn, to the office of their inquisitor, State Attorney N. Vernon Hawthorne, who two years earlier had made a name for himself by leading the unsuccessful fight to kick Al Capone out of Miami. The forty-two-year-old Hawthorne was a Florida native with a richly dramatic voice and an elegant manner that belied the fierce determination with which he tried his cases. Small but sturdy, his thinning hair still dark, Hawthorne had been state attorney since 1927.

  When Jessie entered Hawthorne’s office she found a group of five attorneys who deluged her, albeit politely, with questions about the previous night’s events. Hawthorne, leading the charge, took her step-by-step through the hours from Lancaster’s return to the time she went to bed. When she had finished, Hawthorne made her start from the beginning and repeat the sequence multiple times. The exhausted Jessie found the experience somewhat bewildering, though Hawthorne’s manner was gentle and supportive. When Lancaster entered the office he experienced much the same treatment, with Hawthorne focusing most of his attention on the suicide notes. When they returned to their cells, they were provided with foul, inedible food and coppery water.

  Around 11 a.m. Hawthorne informed Lancaster and Jessie of some troubling news: Clarke had just died in the hospital. The Miami Daily News headline broadcast the disturbing turn of events: “Famous Aviators Held as Bullet Ends Life of Young Miami Writer.” Ernest Huston now wanted to meet with Lancaster, prompting Lancaster to ask Hawthorne if such a meeting was necessary. Hawthorne replied that Lancaster was free to do as he wished. “Isn’t it your job to protect the innocent as well as prosecute the guilty?” Lancaster queried. When Hawthorne said yes, Lancaster replied that he was content to leave the investigation in Hawthorne’s hands. He asked only that Clarke’s syphilis be kept secret, claiming that he wanted to protect Ida Clarke’s feelings and prevent her son’s good name from being sullied. Hawthorne agreed.

  In the afternoon Hawthorne issued a press release detailing the essentials of the case. He told reporters that Lancaster “said he was asleep and was awakened by the shot, yet his pillow showed no signs of being slept on.” Lancaster explained that the ambulance driver, Ditsler, had placed his pillow under Clarke’s head and then replaced it on the bed, but Ditsler denied this. Arousing further suspicion, Hawthorne noted that Dr. Deederer had found no powder burns around the bullet wound in Clarke’s temple, insinuating that the gun had not been pressed against Clarke’s head—and that, by extension, he hadn’t pulled the trigger himself. But Dr. Deederer had found bruising on Clarke’s head and right shoulder, suggesting a possible tussle before the shooting. Hawthorne’s implication—that Lancaster had killed Clarke—was unmistakable. The state attorney admitted, however, that Lancaster “gave the impression of telling a straightforward story,” according to The New York Times. Hawthorne also expressed his belief that Jessie didn’t know how Clarke was shot.

  The Miami Herald reported that the “courage which enabled [ Jessie] to become a widely known aviator” was making itself manifest in her approach to these traumatic events. Though her face was “chalk-white” and her eyes “showed intense weariness,” the paper wrote admiringly that “she held her head up . . . with the unconcern of a tragedy queen” as she entered the state attorney’s offices on the day of Clarke’s shooting, and that her demeanor in the Dade County Courthouse had appeared “as casual and nonchalant as that of any visitor.” Tabloid-like, the paper noted that Jessie’s “hair was slicked down and held in place by bobby-pins” and that she sported “a light tan coat, belted in the military fashion.” Still, the Herald opined, Jessie’s appearance was “in striking contrast to the carefree and debonair air she wore” back when she’d competed in the Miami air meet. In those innocent days she’d been “animation itself and was usually seen with a cigaret in her hand, gesticulating as she talked in the voice so unmistakably Australian in accent.”

  That evening, less than twenty-four hours after Clarke’s shooting, Chubbie was released from her jail cell to attend Clarke’s funeral, after which she immediately returned to the courthouse. Clarke’s body was buried, without autopsy, the following morning, April 22. The newspapers all referred to Jessie as Clarke’s “fiancée” and Lancaster’s “flying partner,” hinting at the love triangle that had preceded Clarke’s death.

  That same day the Miami Daily News reported that Clarke had contacted the paper one week earlier regarding a story published in the Herald about “sinister Chinamen, hidden gold, fortune tellers and smuggling planes,” though no names had been mentioned. Clarke had asked if the Daily News would be publishing anything about the affair. When he learned that reporters were indeed investigating the story, Clarke offered up his and Lancaster’s version of events, including the crucial fact that Lancaster had abandoned the project as soon as he’d learned about the smuggling operation. Clarke told the Daily News that he was “interested in protecting Lancaster . . . as he was convinced Lancaster had been misled by the men promoting the plane syndicate.”

  Now, on April 23, Hawthorne informed Jessie that his office had sifted through all the materials collected from the house and the Robin and found nothing incriminating. On the contrary: “It has been my privilege to see into the depths of a man’s soul through his private diary,” Hawthorne announced, “which was never intended for anyone’s eyes but his own, and in all my experience—which has been broad—I have never met a more honorable man than Captain Lancaster.” When asked whether the Clarke shooting would now be taken before a grand jury, Hawthorne replied, “I see no reason why the grand jury should be interested.” Lancaster and Jessie were to be released immediately, after more than fifty-seven hours in custody.

  While Jessie was still in Hawthorne’s office she met an attorney named James “Happy” Lathero, who had been dispatched by Ida Clarke. The dark-haired, broad-shouldered Lathero, whose toothbrush mustache and trimmed black eyebrows gave him a passing resemblance to Charlie Chaplin, told Jessie that Lancaster would not be leaving the courthouse after all: Hawthorne had notified the Treasury Department about the Latin-American Airways drug-smuggling conspiracy, and Lancaster was about to be rearrested. Federal agents were hunting for Tancrel and Russell, as well.

  Following this harrowing development, Lathero drove Jessie to Ida Clarke’s apartment at the Everglades Hotel That night, however, the Treasury agents released Lancaster, stating they were “contented Lancaster was not part of an alleged conspiracy to smuggle drugs into the United States.” After exiting the courthouse, Lancaster joined Jessie at the Everglades Hotel. The moment was fraught: Lancaster had not seen Ida Clarke since her son’s death, and one day earlier Ida had announced to the press that she no longer accepted “without reservation” the theory that her son had committed suicide.

  Clarke’s mother had laid out several reasons for her change of heart. First, she declared, her son had possessed since boyhood “an aversion to and a fear of firearms that amounted to a complex.” She and her son had recently visited family friends who possessed a vast collection of antique and modern firearms, and Clarke had refused to even touch the weapons. Dr. Deederer’s findings regarding powder burns and bruising had further aroused her suspicions. Ida Clarke reported, too, that after Lancaster phoned Clarke from El Paso to say he was trying to pawn his pistol for food money, Clarke had told her, “I hope he does. I hope he doesn’t bring the damn thing back here.” She told the Daily News that she’d always been “psychic,” and that a few moments after Clarke and Jessie had left her apartment on the afternoon preceding the shooting she’d had a premonition of disaster. Unsettled, she’d canceled a planned tutoring appointment and spent the evening discussing her fears with a friend. When the friend left at 1:30 a.m., Ida had lain on her couch waiting for news of the
disaster she instinctively knew was going to come. Still, she said, she was making “no accusations against anyone.”

  Now, as Lancaster, trailed by reporters, entered Ida Clarke’s apartment following his release by Treasury agents, he laid his hands on her shoulders and told her solemnly, “I swear to you that I had nothing to do with Haden’s death.” In front of the eager gathering of journalists, Mrs. Clarke chose to accept his statement, at least for the moment.

  When Lancaster and Jessie finally returned to their house in Coral Gables, they found, to their dismay, that the Miami detectives had left chaos in their wake. Papers were strewn everywhere, as if a twister had descended inside their home. They set about cleaning up, but their mood remained grim. Hawthorne’s release of Lancaster had been met with immediate public outrage, even though the State Attorney’s Office had reached the maximum three days in which it could hold someone without specific charges. But Hawthorne had employed J. V. Haring, one of the world’s foremost experts on forged documents, to investigate the suicide notes, and while Hawthorne continued to state his belief in Jessie’s innocence, he now referred to Clarke’s shooting as “murder or suicide, whichever it may turn out to be.” The finger was clearly pointing at Lancaster.

  Now, as he and Jessie reordered their house, the late afternoon sunlight still streaming in through the windows, Lancaster shamefacedly admitted his secret: he had forged the suicide notes. He told Jessie that, in the panic of the moment, he had been so terrified that she would think he’d shot Clarke that he had written the notes to convince her otherwise. He hadn’t intended for anyone else to see them, he pleaded, which is why he had asked her to tear them up.

  Immediately Jessie urged him to confess to Hawthorne. But when the two of them discussed the matter with Happy Lathero, the lawyer advised otherwise. “Say nothing whatever about it for the minute, certainly not before the inquest,” he warned. “Otherwise Hawthorne will be bound to hold you.” Lancaster and Jessie were taken aback, but they briefly followed his counsel. Their silence didn’t last long, however, with Jessie remaining insistent that Lancaster unburden himself to the state attorney. Soon the two of them went to Hawthorne’s office to acknowledge the truth.