Case of the Missing Pilot

A diplomatic note rocketed last week from the State Department to Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo's Dominican Republic: What had the Dominican authorities discovered in their prolonged investigation of the death of Airline Pilot Gerald Lester Murphy, 23, a U.S. citizen? Buried in the question was a startling story. The FBI and New York police believe that Pilot Murphy was murdered because he knew too much about the mysterious disappearance last March of Columbia University Lecturer Jesus de Galindez, writer of a Ph.D. thesis condemning Dictator Trujillo (TIME, April 2 et seq.).

"Cancer Patient." Pilot Murphy was hired by the Dominican Airline six weeks before Galindez vanished, was made a copilot in spite of defective eyesight, which had barred him from U.S. military or commercial flying. Cocky and buoyant, he settled in Ciudad Trujillo, flew in and around the Dominican Republic for ten months. And one of the flights, he boasted in indiscreet moments last summer and fall, had been a hush-hush special job. His plane, he said, had taken Scholar Galindez, disguised as a "cancer patient," from the U.S. to the Dominican Republic.

In November Murphy got a better job in the U.S., and announced to the airline that he planned to resign. On the afternoon of Dec. 3 he met his fiancee, an airline hostess, when her plane stopped over briefly in Ciudad Trujillo. He told her that he was headed, by official request, for the presidential palace. After that, Pilot Murphy vanished.

A few days later the U.S. embassy asked Dominican police to investigate Murphy's disappearance. A month went by. Then the U.S. charge d'affaires was told that Octavio de la Maza, another pilot on the airline, had hanged himself in a prison cell and left a note confessing that he had killed Murphy. Motive for the suicide: "remorse." Motive for the murder: not given.

"The Lame One." Dictator Trujillo & Co. plainly intended to let the suicide report end the affair. But the U.S., as its note last week showed, found the story hard to believe. From inside the Dominican Republic came a report that Pilot De la Maza as well as Pilot Murphy had talked. By De la Maza's story, he and Murphy together had indeed spirited a cancer patient from Miami to Ciudad Trujillo. But the mysterious passenger was not Galindez. It was, instead, one Francisco ("The Lame One") Martinez Jara, urgently wanted then and now by U.S. authorities on suspicion of arranging the Galindez kidnaping. (Martinez Jara himself has since been reported missing, and his wife was killed last August in an automobile accident in Ciudad Trujillo.)

Significantly, the U.S. note specifically included a request for De la Maza's alleged suicide note. Washington's investigators obviously wanted a look at the handwriting. And until the Dominican Republic proved its story, U.S. police could not discard the suspicion that Galindez' disappearance had brought in its train as many as four cover-up murders.

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