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Welcome back to Bad
Things in History, where we begin our new series exploring the least remembered and
most horrible events of the 1980s. For now, we will look at a few terrible things from 1980.
Accidents, murders, and natural disasters were
just a few of the more troubling events of this depressing year.
Let’s start with an entirely preventable plane crash.
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Polish Airlines Flight 007
Airplanes from communist countries
were not necessarily known for their reliability and safety.
The Ilyushin II-62 was a commercial jet created by the Soviet Union.
In 1972, Polish Airlines decided to buy some of these aircraft.
Each one could hold up to two hundred passengers, making it a very profitable plane.
On March 13th, 1980, one of the Soviet-made jets, Flight 007, took off from John F. Kennedy
International Airport. Its final destination was Warsaw, Poland, with eighty-seven people on board.
Some of those on the plane were well known. Famous Polish singer Anna Jantar
was on board. So were twenty-two members of the United States amateur boxing team.
The landing gear didn't deploy properly as the pilots attempted to land their aircraft.
Air traffic control instructed them to abandon the landing attempt and fly away.
As the pilots increased the throttle to the engines, it triggered a series of disasters.
The engine on the left side of the fuselage exploded. It shot shrapnel in several
directions. Some of the debris destroyed the other engine. Additional flying chunks of metal
severed the electronics and hydraulics, which allowed the pilots to control the aircraft.
The air traffic controllers watched in horror as the plane tilted to the right
and plowed into the ground. It burst into flames, killing everyone on board.
An investigation determined that a manufacturing
defect in one of the turbines was responsible for the crash.
Launch Pad Disaster
In addition to aircraft manufacturing defects, the Soviet Union had a problem with its space program.
The Plesetsk Cosmodrome is a spaceport near the town of Mirny in Russia. Construction of
the facility was completed on July 15th, 1957. At first, it was used to launch ballistic missiles.
But in 1963, they expanded the facility’s mission. In addition to missiles,
the spaceport needed to launch rockets. More importantly,
the cosmodrome was used to place satellites into orbit around the Earth.
On March 18th, 1980, a launch was scheduled. The rocket was supposed to put a military
surveillance satellite into orbit. But the payload would never reach its destination.
Several hours before the rocket engines ignited, the ground crew began filling the fuel tanks.
First, with kerosene. Then liquid nitrogen and liquid oxygen. Finally, hydrogen peroxide.
A few minutes later, at 7:01 pm, three hundred tons of rocket fuel
exploded. Forty-eight people died, and another 38 were seriously injured.
An official investigation determined that the ground crew was at fault.
But the following year, the same accident almost happened again.
Engineers discovered there was a flaw in the fuel filters used by the rocket.
The Soviet government lied and told the public that the satellite launched as
expected. Countries outside the Soviet Union were unaware of this disaster until 1989.
Longest Serving Inmate
Long prison sentences aren’t uncommon for
those who commit murder. But only one prisoner can hold the world record.
Paul Geidel was born in Hartford, Connecticut,
on April 1st, 1894. His childhood was a series of traumatic events.
Paul’s father was an alcoholic who owned a saloon. He died in 1900 when Paul was just five years old.
Paul’s mother couldn’t care for him, so he spent most of his formative years in orphanages.
At fourteen, Paul dropped out of school and started working at hotels
in New York City. He also attempted to increase his earnings by stealing.
On July 26th, 1911, when Paul was only seventeen,
he attempted to rob a wealthy seventy-three old broker. He let himself into the man’s room
and then suffocated him to death with a rag soaked in chloroform.
Two days later, the police arrested Paul.
He was convicted of murder and sentenced to twenty years to life.
After being found guilty, he was sent to Sing Sing prison. For the next fifteen years,
he behaved perfectly. Due to good behavior, Paul’s sentence was reduced.
In 1926 it looked like he might be released. But instead, a doctor found that he was legally
insane. Paul transferred to the Dannemora State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
He remained there until 1972 when he was moved again to the Fishkill Correctional Facility.
In August 1974, Paul was finally granted parole.
But he was eighty years old and had spent sixty-three years in prison.
He decided he wouldn’t make it on the outside and chose to remain behind bars.
On May 7th, 1980, Paul, who was eighty-six years old, finally decided to leave prison. He had
served sixty-eight years and 296 days, earning a spot in the Guinness Book Of World Records.
He spent the rest of his days at a Beacon,
New York nursing home. Paul passed away on May 1st, 1987, at ninety-three.
Sumpul River Massacre
Central America was also a dangerous and violent place.
El Salvador and Honduras share a border. Honduras is the larger country
and has usually been more prosperous. Because of the economic inequality,
refugees from El Salvador have periodically poured into Honduras to find better lives.
This led to a war in 1969. Once hostilities ended, the two countries agreed to establish
a Demilitarized Zone, which extended more than a mile on each side of the border.
Over the next decade, refugees began pouring into the town of Los Aradas in the DMZ.
Honduras was worried about refugees from El Salvador causing instability in their
country. The government in El Salvador accused the refugees of training guerilla forces.
In March 1980, El Salvador instructed the refugees to leave the DMZ and return to their home country.
When they didn’t follow instructions, the military
marched on Los Aradas. The refugees fled across the river into Honduras.
The leaders of El Salvador and Honduras then put
aside their differences and devised a plan to eliminate the refugee problem.
On May 13th military forces from El Salvador began pushing into Los Aradas.
Refugees tried to flee across the river into Honduras. But on May 14th,
soldiers from Honduras began attacking the refugees to force them back into El Salvador.
The refugees started crossing the Sumpul River, hoping to return to El Salvador and stop the
attacks. However, they weren’t allowed to complete the journey. Soldiers from both
sides began shooting at the refugees. Helicopters even arrived and started killing anyone who ran.
Most of the children who survived the massacre drowned in the river.
At least three hundred died. Some estimates say that the body count was closer to six hundred.
Several weeks after the massacre, villages along the river began experiencing outbreaks
of typhus. The reason is that nobody bothered to retrieve and bury the bodies
of the dead refugees. So the corpses polluted the river and spread disease.
Both Honduras and El Salvador refused to admit wrongdoing. The
United States also didn’t acknowledge that anything had happened. However,
the United Nations published a full report describing the incident on April 1st, 1993.
Night Of The Twisters
Tornadoes are a common feature in the United States. But one event
created an exceptionally deadly and rare event.
On June 2nd, 1980, intense storms appeared over the upper midwest.
They created tornadoes that touched down in Iowa, Indiana and Ohio.
The storm continued overnight but would target a new set of victims the next day.
In the early hours of June 3rd, the storm system
deployed more tornadoes into Pennsylvania, West Virginia,
Maryland, and Nebraska. The city of Grand Island soon became ground zero for the storm’s wrath.
A tornado touched down in the city a little after 2 am, but the storm system was slow-moving and
remained stationary. Over the next two hours, six more tornadoes dropped from the sky into the city.
By 4:30 am Grand Island was devastated by seven tornadoes.
The twisters killed five people, injured two hundred, and caused $285 million in damage.
That would be worth over one billion today.
Debris from the storm was buried in a landfill known as Tornado Hill. It is
a popular spot for bikers in the summer. In the winter, people ride their sleds down it.
The Dingo Attack
In Australia, even children weren’t safe in the 1980s
Lindy Chamberlain-Creigthon was born in New Zealand on March 4th, 1948,
and moved with her family to Tasmania in 1969. She married Michael Chamberlain on November 18th.
Five years later, the couple moved to Mount Isa.
Lindy and Michael had two children during the 1970s, and both of them were boys. But Lindy
always wanted a daughter. Her wish finally came true on June 11th, 1980, when Azaria was born.
On August 17th, a couple months after Azaria was born, Lindy and Michael decided to take
their baby on a family camping trip. They went to Uluru, the site of a famous sandstone formation.
When the couple awoke the following day, Azaria was gone. They reported the missing child to the
police and told investigators that a dingo had taken the baby from their tent. They organized
a search but never found the baby. All that remained of the infant was bloody clothes.
The Australian government didn’t believe Lindy and Michael. Investigators decided that the couple
must have killed their child. On October 29th, 1982, Lindy was sentenced to life in prison.
Michael received an 18-month suspended sentence.
Lindy appealed her conviction, but the courts refused to reconsider the
decision. Fortunately for her, a random discovery would soon clear her name.
In early 1986 a British tourist visited Uluru. He fell to his death during a climb. It took eight
days for rescuers to find his body. When they found the dead tourist, it was clear that he
had fallen near several dingo lairs. Not far from the corpse was a jacket that belonged to Azaria.
Lindy and Michael were telling the truth. A dingo did kidnap and kill their baby.
On September 15th, 1988, the convictions were overturned.
The couple was awarded 1.3 million dollars for being wrongfully imprisoned two years later.
The settlement did not provide financial security
for the family. It only covered one-third of their legal fees.
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Whether it was due to plane crashes, exploding rockets,
oppressive governments, or hungry animals, death was stalking everyone
in 1980. And those who won the deadly lottery didn’t live to tell the tale.
What do you think about these horrible events? Did we miss anything that we
should have included? Let us know in the comments below.
And if you want to learn more about this turbulent decade,
subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode in this series.
Thank you for watching Bad Things in History.
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