On a cold December day in 1972, United Airlines Flight 553 crashed in a Chicago neighborhood while trying to land at Midway Airport. As the wreckage smoldered, word began to spread that the flight had a somewhat famous passenger on board: Dorothy Hunt. She was the wife of E. Howard Hunt, a key figure in the growing Watergate scandal. Howard, alongside G. Gordon Liddy, had helped orchestrate the Watergate break-in. As of December 1972, he and the other Watergate burglars had been indicted by a federal grand jury, and storm clouds were swirling around the Nixon White House. As time went on, Howard and Dorothy Hunt increasingly pressured the White House for money, which came in erratic spurts, if it came at all. In October 1972, Dorothy reached out to Charles Colson, Special Counsel to the President. Though he allegedly refused to speak to her, The New York Times reported in June 1973 that “Mrs. Hunt was upset about an interruption in the payments from Nixon associates to the Watergate defendants.” Dorothy Hunt had boarded the flight from Washington, D.C., to Omaha, Nebraska, with at least $10,000 in cash. Just before her departure, she took out a flight insurance policy worth $225,000. Hours later, the plane crashed, with 43 of the 61 people onboard being killed. Was Dorothy Hunt simply unlucky when she boarded United Flight 553? Though the tragedy was chalked up to pilot error, conspiracy theorists suspect that Dorothy was murdered because of the pressure she put on the White House. Others believe she was about to blow the whistle on Watergate. Possibly, her death was meant to pressure Hunt to cooperate, which he did. In the end, despite the White House’s efforts to keep the Watergate cover-up a secret, the scandal came to light. Nixon resigned from office in August 1974 and Hunt never received a pardon. He spent 33 months in prison. Decades later, questions continue to swirl around the plane crash that killed Dorothy Hunt, and Colson, for one, came to believe that her death was more sinister than it seemed.
