Born near San Francisco in 1891, he studied mine engineering and managed an Arizona gold mine before he discovered his real passion: speed. Time offered a brief account of the crash under the eye-catching headline, “Modern Murder.” DeLay, the magazine mused, may have been the victim of a new form of homicide “more subtle than mediaeval poison … the first airplane murder.”īeverly Homer DeLay was the son of a wealthy mine owner and seemed bound to follow in his father’s footsteps. The rumors of foul play soon caught the attention of the editors of a new weekly magazine that had hit newsstands four months earlier. “Had Enemies Here,” the Venice newspaper noted in the wake of the crash. Not long before, on a night when DeLay was at Clover Field, someone had fired a shot at him. “A man of his knowledge of the flying game,” the Venice newspaper noted, “would not be likely to endanger his life with a faulty plane.” Was the crash an accident, or was there a more sinister explanation for the catastrophic structural failure that sent the Wasp into a nose dive? DeLay’s friends suspected someone had tampered with his plane. For all his stunts and daredevil feats, he had a reputation as a careful, safety-conscious airman. He was a skilled and experienced pilot who had been flying for a decade. This story originally appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.ĭeLay himself had survived crashes and close calls. “So long as the dangers of air travel are as great as they now are and the accidents as numerous,” scoffed an editorial in Muncie, Indiana’s Evening Press in 1923, “we must conclude that air navigation still is in the experimental stage.” Stunt pilots and fliers trying to set new distance records died at an alarming rate. Commercial air travel was in its infancy but at least three airliners crashed that year, killing a dozen passengers and crew. The newspapers of the day were filled with reports of fatal crashes due to mechanical failures, pilot error, and bad weather or poor visibility. Planes were rickety by today’s standards wings and fuselages were framed in wood and covered in fabric, and most had open cockpits that exposed pilots to wind and weather. It was just two decades after the pioneering Wright Brothers designed and flew the world’s first manned, self-propelled aircraft. Their fellow pilots managed to remove the bodies – both “mutilated almost beyond recognition,” the Los Angeles Times told its readers – before the wreckage burst into flames.įlying was a risky business. Thirty-one-year-old DeLay, the father of two young daughters, and his passenger, Los Angeles businessman R.I. The plane was a shattered mass of wood and metal. Other fliers watching from Santa Monica’s Clover Field, about a mile away, jumped into cars and raced to the scene. “Both wings of the plane bent back,” by one account, “as though on hinges.” Another report described them as “snapping like reeds.” The plane went into a freefall, dropping “like a wounded bird” and plummeting to the ground at high speed. The Wasp was at an altitude of about two thousand feet when its wings suddenly collapsed. The Venice, California daily paper was the first to publish allegations that aviators B.H. No holiday or special event was complete until DeLay swooped over Venice’s beaches and amusement parks to dazzle the crowds with his daredevil performances. He operated the airfield in the resort town, owned a small fleet of passenger planes, and staged aerial stunts in Hollywood movies. DeLay, “one of the best known aviators in Southern California,” as the Venice Evening Vanguard described him. It was The Wasp and at the controls was B.H. Venice residents would have recognized the plane preforming the impromptu airshow. Thousands of people, it was later estimated, stopped what they were doing and looked up. Motorists fleeing the stifling heat of Los Angeles on 1923’s Fourth of July holiday pulled over to watch from the side of the main highway to Venice and Ocean Beach. The two-seater biplane had been roaring above Santa Monica for about twenty minutes, executing a series of graceful loops against a cloudless sky.
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