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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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060589
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06058900.033
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1990-09-17
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NATION, Page 40Mystery Aboard the IowaWas the blast that killed 47 sailors murder -- or suicide?
A few days after a 16-in. gun turret blew up on April 19 during
practice firing on the battleship U.S.S. Iowa, the Navy presented
one of the heroes of the disaster at a press conference: Gunner's
Mate Third Class Kendall Truitt, 21, who had been sacking powder
in a lower-level magazine when the blast took 47 lives. A
bespectacled sailor with a mild manner, Truitt calmly recounted his
escape from the burning turret. Last week the Navy's inconclusive
probe of the explosion took a bizarre twist, and Truitt was shoved
front and center again -- but hardly as a hero. Investigators said
Truitt might have set off the explosion to kill a shipmate and
collect $100,000 in life insurance. At the same time, they said it
was also possible that the other sailor, Gunner's Mate Second Class
Clayton Hartwig, 25, intentionally caused the blast to kill
himself.
These competing theories surfaced as the Naval Investigative
Service conceded it has failed, in its review of the training,
equipment and gunpowder involved, to find a technical explanation
for the explosion. The idea that the blast was no accident arose
largely from a report that Truitt and Hartwig had been such close
friends that in 1987 each had made the other the beneficiary of a
life insurance policy for $50,000, with double indemnity in case
of accidental death. According to Hartwig's sister Kathleen
Kubicina, 36, of Cleveland, the friendship ended last year when
Truitt married. While Truitt last week denied he had bought such
a policy, Hartwig certainly did, and had not scratched Truitt as
beneficiary when he died.
Government sources denied a story in New York Newsday that a
search of Truitt's Norfolk, Va., apartment after the Iowa explosion
had netted detonating caps and a copy of the book How to Get Even
Without Going to Jail. According to the newspaper, another copy of
the book and a detonating device supposedly were found in Hartwig's
car.
Truitt, on leave from the Iowa, flatly denied that he or
Hartwig was a culprit. At a press conference with his wife last
week, he claimed that the rumors proved that the Navy was "at a
loss" to explain the tragedy. Said the sailor: "They're just
looking for a scapegoat."
When investigators asked, Truitt denied that he had a
homosexual relationship with Hartwig. He said they were best
friends, who, as teetotalers, did not mingle with the hard-drinking
sailors and as a result got "razzed" a bit. Kubicina similarly
denied that her brother was homosexual or had ever shown signs of
any suicidal despair. Said she: "My brother died a hero. Now
they're making him out to be a homicidal, suicidal maniac. It's
incredible, these bizarre tales."
While Hartwig's letters showed he had been saddened when he
lost Truitt as a pal, she said his spirits had soon picked up when
he found out his next assignment would be as a driver at the U.S.
embassy in London. In a letter written three days before the
explosion, she said, he was "totally up."