reconstruction.’
“Air Corps Associates had an interesting premise, and Craycroft was the ideal man to run it. The purpose for which the company had been organized was the restoration of World War Two airplanes for use in war movies. By nineteen fifty-five the U.S. Air Force had a combat flight line of jet aircraft; the designs of the war had been phased out and the surviving airplanes had been put in mothballs. Tens of thousands of aircraft stood parked in rows on a reservation in the desert of northwestern Arizona near the town of Kingman. For a time in the late nineteen forties the Air Force had made some pretense of keeping these planes in repair, as a reserve fleet; but the changeover to jets had rendered the old planes obsolete. The result was that the huge collection of warplanes had rusted, corroded, been pitted by desert sandstorms, ruined in all their ‘soft’ parts (rubber, canvas, wiring, tires), and generally rendered totally unserviceable. Desert packrats and rattlesnakes made nests in the cockpits. Seats rotted away. Glass windows and windshields were shattered by violent desert hailstorms; afterward rainwater seeped into the instrument panels and engine cowlings. By nineteen fifty-five the mothball fleet had been sitting on its flat tires for a full decade, and it was the rare plane that could be restored to airworthy condition with anything less than a complete rebuilding job from nose-hub to tailfin.
“In nineteen fifty-four the reserve fleet was designated ‘war surplus’ and the way was opened for civilian purchase of the planes. The initial purpose of this action, spurred by a Congressional economy drive, was to recoup some of the country’s enormous war-construction debt. But it soon became apparent that nobody had much interest in paying good money for rusted shells. (In many cases the engines had been removed from the airplanes for use in parts-replacement programs for training planes, and even for use in motorboats.) Tens of thousands of once-proud airplanes went begging for buyers.
“For once in their lives, Craycroft and Ryterband were the right men in the right place at the right time. They went to the Air Force with an offer of fractions of a penny on the dollar. It had cost two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to build a B-17 Flying Fortress; Air Corps Associates managed to buy these aircraft from the mothball fleet for prices ranging from ten thousand dollars down to seven hundred and fifty dollars, depending on condition.
“But that would have done no good without Craycroft’s genius for mechanical repair, redesign, and restoration. Other potential buyers-representatives of foreign governments, scouts for feeder airlines, hobbyists interested in air-racing-had looked over the bargain-basement airplanes at Kingman and had passed them up. To them it had appeared insurmountably expensive to get any of the corroded hulks back into flying trim. To Craycroft and Ryterband, evidently, the same challenge acted as a spur to their ingenuity.
“The result was that by nineteen fifty-six Air Corps Associates had equipped itself with an air force of considerable proportions. Starting from scratch in nineteen fifty-four with a capital investment of forty thousand dollars (most of the money put up by motion-picture producers), Craycroft and Ryterband had pyramided their operation within two years to a sixty-three-plane Luftwaffe; and of that inventory, according to company records dated twelve September nineteen fifty-six, fully forty-eight airplanes were in flying condition-including a full squadron of P-40 Warhawks and a ‘flight’ (six planes) of B-17 Flying Fortresses.
“Most war films used actual newsreel combat footage in their aerial sequences. But movies like Twelve o’Clock High and its many successors required substantial ground fleets of actual airplanes for use as backdrops in scenes set on the runway flight lines. A cliche in films of the period was the scene in which the wing commander stands at the railing of the control tower, counting the number of bombers returning from the day’s raid on Berlin or Schweinfurt or the Channel ports. These scenes could not be reconstructed out of wartime news footage; they had to be filmed on the spot, with real airplanes which actually flew. It was Air Corps Associates which provided these warplanes.
“Craycroft restored (and test-flew) the B-29s that bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki; he gave us-in several films-the Japanese air fleet that bombed Pearl Harbor (most of these being U. S. Navy surplus planes mocked up to resemble the silhouettes of Zeros); he made possible the movie scenes in which John Wayne and Robert Ryan fought the Japanese in the Pacific, in which countless Hollywood stars bombed Germany, and in which other stars fought dogfights with the Luftwaffe, the Italian Air Force and the Imperial Japanese Air Fleet.
“By the early nineteen sixties it was routine for Craycroft and Ryterband to accept a special rush order for a squadron of B-24 Liberators to be painted up with the markings of a specific World War Two unit (real or fictitious), and to actually fly the planes across the Atlantic and deliver them to the moviemakers’ locations in England or Spain.
“In his early forties Craycroft was a success. On paper he was a millionaire. But his wealth consisted entirely of stock certificates in Air Corps Associates. His standard of living was meager. He had never married; he lived in a modest apartment in Sherman Oaks, hardly a ten-minute drive from the company’s immense hangar-field in Burbank. His personal car was a war-surplus Jeep, made by Ford in nineteen forty-two; he had paid eighty-five dollars for it at an Army auction and had rebuilt it himself. He owned two business suits and, it is said, one necktie. His fingernails were invariably black with petroleum grease and grime. When not on purchasing expeditions to Kingman or ferry-delivery flights to film locations, he appears to have spent seven days a week working in the hangars of the Burbank facility. All evidence indicates he had little interest in money for its own sake; his work was his life. He neither swam nor played golf nor drank more than one or two drinks a week. He had no known romantic relationships, either heterosexual or homosexual. His social activities were minimal, confined to occasional dinners with his sister and brother-in-law and the unavoidable business lunches and dinners, the number of which he kept to an absolute minimum. He is not known to have had any close friends other than Charles Ryterband. He had not been in touch with his eldest sister, who still lived in Ohio, since the late nineteen forties.
“Interviewed recently by the FBI, an aircraft mechanic who was employed by Craycroft at Air Corps Associates during the period between nineteen fifty-five and nineteen fifty-eight had this to say:
“‘I guess most of us guys who devote our lives to airplanes are a little screwy. But most of us aren’t that screwy. I mean, I was married then, I had the first kid and the other one on the way, I had a bowling league, and we’d go to Disneyland or down to the beach on the weekends. We had plenty of friends, God knows. I mean we’re normal, you know? But Harold, he was something else. I mean, for openers nobody ever called him Hank or Hal or Old Buddy. He didn’t like “Mr. Craycroft” at all, even if he did own the whole shebang. But he’d only answer to “Harold.” No nickname. Now everybody in the airplane racket has a nickname. My name’s Joseph but half the guys I work with don’t know that; I’m Shorty, that’s all, on account of I’m so tall. Old Mr. Ryterband, we all called him Charlie.
“‘You know what it was about Harold? I’ll tell you how he always struck me. He never looked his age, you know. I guess he must have been around forty when I worked for him but he could have been twenty-eight, thirty. He was always kind of gangly and he had that shock of dark hair that he was always shoving back out of his face. He’d got kind of farsighted, I guess, and he had to wear glasses to do close-up work or reading. He had these great big black-frame eyeglasses that kept slipping down his nose. You’d see him working on an engine torn apart on the bench, and he’d be pushing his hair back, pushing his glasses up on his nose, and biting his lower lip-his teeth were a little buck. Actually he wasn’t bad-looking at all. He got mistaken for Gregory Peck a couple of times, only his jaw was a little small and he had those big upper teeth. But he always struck me like one of those introverted kids you always knew in high school-the ones that never had the nerve to date girls, they were always wrapped up in their toy chemistry sets and their microscope slides and their butterfly collections. You know what I mean? He wasn’t queer or anything. He was just sort of a teenage kid that never outgrew the stage of being fascinated with brainy toys. I bet you when he was fourteen he had an Erector Set.’
“Craycroft hadn’t had an Erector Set at fourteen, of course; by the time he was fourteen he’d dropped out of school and was learning to fly. But the characterization seems apt-as accurate as anything the detectives have been able to learn about Craycroft up to this time. He had a single-minded and virtually adolescent devotion to the mechanics of flight and the romance of aviation.
“This, mainly, is why it has been difficult to ‘get a handle’ on Craycroft’s psychology. It has been impossible to interview his friends because he had no friends in the usual sense. Employees, business associates, and fellow airmen have been interviewed but their answers have been limited to the sphere in which they knew Craycroft: the professional sphere. He lived for his work, and apart from it he seems to have had no life at all. Nothing about him, really, has been added to what was written in his early Army file reports. He was a mechanical genius, dedicated and devoted to the one passion of his life-the airplane.”
But evidently he’d made himself very successful. He was doing what he enjoyed doing, and making a great deal of money from it. How does that jibe with the obvious sudden desperation that led him to this incredible crime?
