Pan Am’s Flight 7 was known as the Clipper Romance of the Skies, an around-the-world flight that originated in San Francisco and flew west, eventually arriving in Philadelphia. The plane itself was a Boeing B-377 Stratocruiser. Introduced in 1947, the aircraft was the biggest, the fastest, and the fanciest, called “the ocean liner of the air.”
Pullman-style sleeping berths, separate men’s and women’s dressing rooms, a cocktail lounge in the belly of the airplane, reclining seats that offered 60 inches of something they used to call legroom. Seven-course dinners, with champagne and caviar, catered by Maxim’s of Paris. You could happily go through searched luggage and patdowns for this, but there weren’t any.
Of course it was expensive – a $1,600 round-the-world fare (equivalent to $10,500 today).
When the November 8, 1957, flight left the gate shortly before noon for its first leg, the nine-and-a-half-hour flight to Honolulu, 38 passengers were aboard. They included the vice president of Renault Auto, a French flying ace, the general manager of Dow Chemical in Tokyo, a well-known Phoenix dress designer, a Louisville surgeon, a spice company honcho, and a U.S. Air Force major on a mysterious mission to southeast Asia with a briefcase full of classified documents.
At 4:04 p.m., the flight captain radioed a routine position report from an altitude of 10,000 feet to the Pontchartrain, a Coast Guard weather ship stationed in the Pacific. Romance of the Skies had just passed the point of no return, on course and on schedule, 1,160 miles from Honolulu and about 10 miles east of the Pontchartrain. The skies were clear and the seas calm, the sun low in the western sky. The plane was never heard from again.
The biggest air-sea search since the disappearance of Amelia Earhart ended just days later with the discovery of 19 bodies and floating wreckage about 1,000 miles northeast of Honolulu. And the little that was recovered from the flight only deepened the mystery. There had been no distress call; the location of the debris showed that the Clipper was well off course; and, finally, elevated levels of carbon monoxide were found in several of the recovered bodies.
The definitive cause of the accident has never been determined. Speculation includes a malfunctioning engine, a disgruntled flight crew member, and insurance related fraud involving an explosive device. And then there’s that mysterious major.
Way Bigger Than a Breadbox
To most people, Dorothy Kilgallen was known as a long-time panelist on the television game show What’s My Line? (Does ‘Is it bigger than a breadbox?’ ring a bell?) or as a high society New York newspaper columnist. She was also throughout her career a rather enterprising reporter. Her journalism coming out party was a 1936 race around the world against two male colleagues. Her cabled columns and a book Girl Around the World made her a celebrity.
In 1963, she once again took up the role of daring reporter. According to a biographer, Kilgallen was devastated when President Kennedy was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald. She was among those who refused to believe that Oswald acted alone. She spent the next two years in her own investigation of the assassination, gathering evidence and conducting interviews. She was the only reporter to interview Jack Ruby, and she somehow got hold of an advance copy of the Warren Commission report even before President Lyndon Johnson had seen it. (He was miffed.)
So was J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI and CIA both began to follow her and her friends. She was interrogated, and her phone was tapped. In 1965, she told her lawyer that she was going to break the real story and that it would be the scoop of the century. She planned to meet a secret informant in New Orleans.
On November 7, she appeared on What’s My Line? as usual, and 
afterward wound down with a few drinks along with other members of the show before returning to her apartment. The next day — November 8, 1965 — she was found dead, sitting up in bed in a blue bathrobe and still wearing in her hair a floral accessory from the previous evening. On her nightstand, an empty sleeping pill bottle and a drinking glass. The police, playing the bumblers they traditionally play in detective fiction, found nothing suspicious. Her death was attributed to an accidental overdose.
Loose ends included the fact that her accumulated evidence had gone missing, that she was found in a bed she never slept in wearing clothes she never wore to bed, that she had recently bought a gun telling her hairdresser she was ‘scared for her life.’ Lawyer and author Mark Shaw suggested in a 2016 book The Reporter Who Knew Too Much that Kilgallen’s death was orchestrated by a mobster who feared her book would name him as the mastermind behind Kennedy’s assassination.
befriended by the Cubans, never realizing they might just as easily have been eaten.
Wretched Richard's Almanac 