On that Wednesday morning, July 11, 1990, Senator Schmit was in his office, talking with a journalist about the Franklin investigation.
He related the numerous threats received by himself and Caradori, and Caradori's evaluation of those threats. "It's unlikely that they would kill you or me, Loran, because that would be too obvious,"
Gary had said once, "But then again, you never know." At about 10:30 a.m., Senator Schmit took a phone call.
He listened for a moment, appeared shaken, and said, "Oh, my God, no!" After asking a few questions, he hung up, tears in his eyes.
"Gary's dead."
It happened at 2:30 a.m. on July 11, when Gary and A.J. were flying back to Lincoln, Nebraska from Chicago.
A farmer in Lee County, Illinois reported that he saw a flash of light, heard an explosion, and saw a plane plunge to the ground.
The Caradoris were killed, the plane's wreckage scattered over threequarters of a mile. The eyewitness account of a flash of light and an explosion was on the early edition of television news in Nebraska, but got pulled from subsequent reports, which said that the plane exploded on impact.
At the Nebraska statehouse that morning, Senator Schmit talked to reporters, who soon filled his office. "There were a lot of people in this state who wanted to see Gary dead," he charged. "They got their wish. The question to be answered is whether it was a coincidence."
Gary's brother Dick Caradori was interviewed by the Lincoln Journal about the many threats Gary had received.
"I know that it weighed a lot on his mind," Dick said. “He always hoped that they just didn't cover it up. He said there was a lot to it and a lot of big names involved and hoped their money wouldn't sweep it under the rug."
Gary Caradori
Gary's mother, Mary, told the paper that Gary "cared dearly about the people involved in the Franklin case. He worked day and night for them."
Sandie Caradori never received official notification of her husband's and son's deaths. She heard the news from friends, who heard it on the radio.
Early the next day, before the bodies were even home from Illinois, the FBI descended on Caradori's office with a subpoena for all his records.
What evidence had Caradori turned up? According to the Lincoln Journal the day after Caradori's death, "Schmit confirmed that Gary Caradori had been trying to obtain pictures that some alleged victims said were taken of them during the period when they were being abused. He also confirmed that Caradori had been told that some of those allegedly involved in child sexual abuse 'had exposed some of the victims to satanic cultism. He was working on places and times."
He was also working on leads into Washington, D.C. Mystery surrounded not only the crash of the airplane, but Caradori's whole trip.
Gary and A.J. had stayed at the Days Inn Lakefront Motel in Chicago where both his wife and his associate Karen J. Ormiston had telephoned, asked for him by name, and spoken with him (their phone bills showed the calls), but motel management would tell Caradori's investigative firm there was no record of his ever having stayed there.
And if there was no record that Caradori had registered at the motel, there was also no record of what phone calls he might have made from Chicago.
After months of investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board had not come up with the cause of the crash.
My friend Bill Colby, former director of the CIA, commented after he looked into the matter, that the cause would probably never be known.
Mary Caradori rendered her own verdict on the deaths of Gary and A.J.: “My son and grandson were murdered."
Many Nebraskans echoed her opinion. They have growing grounds for suspicion.
From late 1988, when the Franklin case first broke into public view, until mid-1991, at least 15 people associated with the case as investigators, alleged perpetrators, or potential witnesses, died sudden deaths, many of them violent.
In December 1990, as Dr. Densen-Gerber prepared to travel to Nebraska at the request of the Legislature's Franklin committee, she consulted several friends with relevant expertise.
One of them was a member of the New York State Police, who warned her, “Don't go. Nebraska is death-laced."