On Sunday morning I received a text from Elizabeth Sanders saying what I feared it would say, “Jim passed away this morning.”
“So sorry,” I answered. “He was one of a kind.” Said Elizabeth, “Yea he was.”
Elizabeth was in a position to know. In the pursuit of truth, she and James – his preferred public name – had endured the worst the U.S. government could throw at them and survived with their integrity and their patriotism intact.
I first met the Sanders in September 2000 at a Kansas City country club where James was making a presentation. A veteran cop turned investigative reporter, he had authored the 1997 book “The Downing of TWA Flight 800,” and paid a high price for doing so.
As James explained, 53 TWA employees were on board that doomed aircraft in July 1996, most of them deadheading back to Paris.
Elizabeth had served as a trainer for TWA flight attendants. She knew many of those who had died on the plane and attended more memorial services than she had ever hoped to.
At one of those services she encountered a friend named Terry Stacey, a 747 pilot and manager. Stacey had been working at the investigation site in Calverton on Long Island and harbored deep suspicions about the direction of the investigation.
Knowing that James was an investigative reporter with a couple books to his credit, Stacey asked Elizabeth to introduce them. Her role in what followed would not go much deeper, but for the authorities that was deep enough.
Elizabeth’s life began to unravel in March 1997 when California’s Riverside Press-Enterprise published a front-page article headlined, “New Data Show Missile May Have Nailed TWA 800.”
The story described in some detail Sanders’ inquiry into the TWA 800 investigation. A still unknown individual working at Calverton had removed a pinch of seat back material from the plane and sent it to Sanders by Federal Express for testing.
That person was Stacey. Once the story broke in the Press-Enterprise, the Clinton Justice Department (DOJ) had little choice but to hunt down the conspirators.
Lest she be forced to give up Stacey, Elizabeth went into hiding for the next eight months in an Oregon trailer park. That exile almost cost Elizabeth her sanity. James, too, refused to give up Stacey.
The FBI honchos pursued the removal of the TWA 800 evidence with more passion than they pursued the evidence itself. Soon enough, agents found their way to Stacey, arresting him and the Sanderses.
“Conspiracy theorist and wife charged with theft of parts from airplane,” the FBI announced much too proudly on the New York office’s website.
Despite Sanders’ two previous books, the DOJ decided that was not enough output to merit standing as a “journalist.” Denied that standing, the Sanderses were tried as thieves, Elizabeth the Bonnie to James’ Clyde.
To save his pension, Stacey pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. James and Elizabeth went to trial in a Long Island federal court and were convicted of conspiracy to steal airplane parts.
This was the story James told to a large crowd at the country club. Not until I recalled that Kansas City was the ancestral home of TWA did the size and intensity of the audience make sense to me.
Almost to a person, the TWA people in the room appeared to endorse Sanders’ argument that TWA 800 had, in fact, been shot down. This surprised me.
At the time, I thought this theory among the more improbable then in circulation. Admittedly, though, I had paid little attention to the investigation.
Being on the board of the group that invited the Sanderses, I went to dinner with them afterward. We sat at a long table, and I found myself at the end of it seated next to Elizabeth. We had a chance to talk.
As she related, when she and James first met, he was a police officer and accident investigator in Orange County, California, and she a Polynesian dance instructor. Of Filipino descent, she looked the part. She was sweet, soft-spoken and agelessly pretty.
By evening’s end, I had begun to reassess Sanders’ missile theory. I figured if agents of the government were willing to arrest someone like Elizabeth Sanders for conspiracy, they might, in fact, have had something to hide.
Hoping to probe a little deeper, I asked the Sanderses if they could meet me the next morning for breakfast, and they agreed.
Later that day I went online to research TWA Flight 800 – and quickly sobered up. The debate had apparently been settled. Three years earlier, in November 1997, the FBI essentially closed its criminal investigation into the disaster.
At a press conference, the FBI declared emphatically, “No evidence has been found that would indicate that a criminal act was the cause of the tragedy of Flight 800.”
For its part, the NTSB wrapped up its investigation in August 2000. At the final hearing, the NTSB’s Bernard Loeb said confidently, “The physical evidence indicated indisputably that a missile did not strike the airplane.”
Neither the FBI nor the NTSB was sure exactly what electrical source sparked an explosion in the plane’s center fuel tank, but each agency vigorously rejected the idea that a bomb or missile might have been responsible.
Knowing how hard the media rode “conspiracy theorists,” I had no interest in becoming one. My idea was to do a video documentary, but before embarking on the project I needed to be convinced.
By this time, two mainstream books had been written on TWA Flight 800. Both toed the government line. I read these books before going to Florida to see James’ evidence. They almost made me rethink my trip.
At the time, I had little up-close insight into the way the national media worked. I had to assume that two reporters with great contacts working for top-flight media outlets had a pretty good grasp on the facts.
Sanders, by contrast, was an off-brand reporter and convicted felon living in a low-end Florida apartment complex by a smelly canal from which alligators occasionally emerged to eat neighborhood dogs. I owed him a visit, but I expected little.
I underestimated the couple. During our few days together, James impressed me with his relentless, good-spirited energy. In his mid-50s when we met, he saw the world as it was and did not flinch from its occasional injustice.
Three intense days with James and Elizabeth in March 2001 left me convinced they had a much better handle on the facts of the case than did the major media.
Two things persuaded me. One was the willingness of James to confront the evidence and follow where it led. He hid nothing. He fudged nothing. He offered no improbable rationales.
The Sanderses’ integrity was just the half of it. For all their good intentions, I would not have embarked on this excellent adventure had they not shown me one particular swath of evidence: the eyewitness testimony. I could scarcely believe there was so much of it, and that it was so consistent and so credible.
In the summer of 2001, James and I co-produced a documentary called “Silenced.” A year later, we collaborated on the book “First Strike.” In 2016, with James’s guidance, I wrote the book “TWA 800.”
James never gave up. To the end, he continued to hound the FBI for information on the suppressed seat-back residue when he wasn’t working on his magnus opus about Soviet infiltration of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations.
James was right about TWA 800. He was right about Truman and FDR. His heroic quest for the truth made him what he was – one of a kind. He will be missed.
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