The Dictator's Long Arm

Facts poured in fast last week as U.S. authorities dug deep into the suspiciously linked disappearances of Columbia University Lecturer Jesus de Galindez and a U.S. airplane pilot named Gerald Lester Murphy (TIME, Feb. 11). The evidence indicated that Galindez had been kidnaped and then flown out of the U.S. to the Dominican Republic in a plane piloted by Gerry Murphy, an airplane-happy youth of 23, who then vanished. In an investigation paralleling the FBI's, LIFE this week unearthed elaborate details of how the deed was done.

Eagle Scout. A onetime eagle scout, Gerry Murphy was working for an air-taxi outfit in Miami a year ago, when he told friends that he had met an important man: Arturo Espaillat, now New York consul general for the Dominican Republic. Around the first of March Murphy quit his job, saying he had got a high-paying charter proposition. The records show that on March 5 he arranged to rent (for $800) a twin-engined Beechcraft, registered as N 68100, at the Linden, N.J. airport. At a field on nearby Staten Island, he had it fitted to carry extra gasoline tanks. On March 12 at 9:44 a.m., he took off from Newark Airport, announcing his destination as Miami. But at 10:30 a.m. he landed at Zahns Airport in Amityville, L.I. That night, Murphy said later, a "cancer patient" was transferred from an ambulance to the plane. It was the same night that Galindez vanished. Early the next morning N 68100 put down in Florida at the Lantana airport for refueling, then buzzed straight for Monte Cristi on the northern coast of the Dominican Republic.

Three days later, back in Miami, Pilot Murphy, suddenly in the money, bought a $3,412 Dodge convertible for himself. The next month, he got a co-pilot's job on the Dominican Airlines, through the personal decision of Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. Murphy bragged that he could have "anything I want down there." He bought another car, kept up apartments in Miami and Ciudad Trujillo.

Shark-Infested Explanation. After drinks, Murphy sometimes boasted that his passenger-patient was Galindez. On Dec. 3, after he had quit his job and was packing to return to the U.S., he disappeared. Neither he nor Galindez has since turned up.

Under heavy U.S. pressure, the Dominicans have produced their own explanation for Murphy's disappearance. They say that another airlines pilot, a Dominican named Octavio de la Maza, "committed suicide" last month in a Ciudad Trujillo jail cell after leaving a note confessing he had knocked Murphy off a cliff into shark-infested waters. When the U.S. charge d'affaires in Ciudad Trujillo implied doubt of their story, by testing the shower pipe from which De la Maza was supposed to have hanged himself, the furious Dominicans complained to Washington.

The presumed reason for Galindez' kidnaping: he had written a doctoral thesis condemning Trujillo, for whom he had once worked.

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