The Naturopath

In Los Angeles one day last November, an attorney read down a list of 42 victims of a National Airlines DC-7B crash in the Gulf of Mexico and spotted the name of a client. It was Robert Vernon Spears, 65, naturopath* of Dallas and Los Angeles. The attorney soon got a call from a Los Angeles homicide squad lieutenant who had read the same list. "I wouldn't be surprised," said the lieutenant, "if Spears blew the plane up." As the Los Angeles police well knew, Robert Spears, a barefaced quack and crook, had a record of seven jail terms for fraud, forgery, larceny, impersonation, armed robbery, was free on $10,000 bail pending trial on charges of criminal abortion. He was familiar with explosives and had once said he would "blow up a hospital" for $500.

In Tampa, Fla., Mrs. William Allen Taylor read the same list and stopped at the same name. Spears, a close friend of her husband since the days when they were fellow convicts in the Florida State Prison at Raiford, had been visiting her husband in Tampa. Two days later in the mail she got a $37,500 air-travel insurance policy taken out by Al Taylor (divorced but still friendly) at Tampa Airport just before take-off time of the doomed DC-7B. Taylor was missing, although he was not listed on the plane's manifest.

Last week these strands came together in Phoenix, Ariz, in one of the great whodunits of airline history. They began to meet when the FBI arrested Robert Vernon Spears, presumed dead in the crash, but found alive and well. Had Al Taylor then gone to his death on the DC-7B on Spears's ticket? The FBI began to patch together the pieces to decide whether Spears 1) sent Al Taylor on the DC-7B with a bomb hidden in his luggage to blow up the plane, thereby to fake evidence of Spears's death, collect a $100,000 insurance policy payable to his wife Frances Spears, 36, and escape the abortion charges in Los Angeles; or whether Spears 2) let Al Taylor ride the DC-7B on Spears's ticket and then, hearing of the crash, coolly decided to drop out of sight and play out a spectacular insurance fraud.

On the Trail. The FBI first moved into the picture five days after the crash, when a Tampa contact reported that Spears had been seen in Tampa alive. The FBI alerted its agents to watch the abortion circuits for Spears, but they found no trace of him.

Meanwhile Spears drove Taylor's car from Tampa to Dallas and on to Phoenix. Somewhere along the way he put in a call to a casual professional acquaintance, another naturopath named William Turska, who owns an isolated little white stucco house 39 miles north of Phoenix. Spears wanted to know if he could drop by for a visit. Turska said sure.

Spears arrived soon afterward, hid the car with Florida license plates in a nearby wash, and hung close to the cottage. Meanwhile Spears's wife, at home in Dallas, filed the claim for her husband's $100,000 policy with Fidelity & Casualty Co. in New York.

Early in January Spears sent his wife a note and arranged a quiet meeting. They got together at Dallas' Lakewood Hotel, stayed there four days. Then Spears headed back to his desert hideaway. When his host, Turska, heard on a TV program that Spears was on the manifest of the crashed plane but was now believed to be alive, he called his attorney. Attorney's advice: get Spears out of the house and call the FBI.

The Arrest. One afternoon last fortnight, Turska drove Spears to the Bali Hi motel on Grand Avenue in Phoenix, signed him in under the alias of George Rhodes of Tucson, Ariz. Next morning Turska went to the FBI, and then may well have tipped off Spears. As Spears scurried out one door of the motel, FBI men raced in another door, raced out after him, intercepted his cab down the driveway and arrested him. In the wash near the desert cottage they found Taylor's Florida-licensed Plymouth, and in it they found a significant haul: dynamite and caps. As reporters milled around Spears when he was jailed (on charges of driving a stolen car across a state line), one shouted: "Did you put a bomb on that plane?" Said Spears: "No. I'll have a statement tomorrow."

Spears did not get around to his statement, and seemed to lose some of his aplomb under two long days of questioning by FBI agents. In Dallas his wife Frances, younger than her husband by 29 years, had her own statement of sorts. Told by a TV newsman (see PRESS) that Spears had been found alive, she blurted: "I told him it wouldn't work." Why did Spears disappear? "He felt it was a chance to provide security for me and the babies." She said she had tried to get her husband to turn himself in, but "he wanted a chance to try and stay away." She did not turn him in because "nobody in authority" had asked her to.

Tracing the dynamite in Spears's car, FBI agents found that it had been bought after the DC-7B crash, perhaps to blow up the car if the cops came close. In any event, it proved that Naturopath Spears knew his way around with explosives. But until the DC-7B was recovered from the 300-ft. Gulf waters, nobody could prove that the plane was bombed out of the air, or that Al Taylor was really aboard and died in the crash.

* One who professes to heal by "natural remedies," e.g., air, light, water, vibration, heat, electricity, massage, diet, excluding drugs, surgery, X rays.

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