Three weeks ago, my father’s best friend told me how he knew another man on the same plane as my dad, a cruel twist of fate. The odds seem slim enough for any two people I know, who don’t know each other, to be on the same plane at all. To be murdered in that situation? The odds must be astronomical1.
As I wind the Pacifica through southern New Jersey, across an incredibly narrow bridge into Pennsylvania, and towards the idyllic hamlet of Newtown, Pennsylvania, I’m about to learn that the circumstances surrounding Steve Butler’s death were crueler than I ever could have imagined.
I’m here to speak with Steve’s brother Brian, who sports a trimmed but full beard, mostly brown but visibly graying. Upon first impression, I’m surprised by how old he looks—he seems to be in his late 50s— but, considering Maurice knew him when they were both teenagers, I don’t know why I’m surprised.
We settle into the living room, where a collection of books nearly overflows the wall of shelves, and Brian tells me how Steve’s death was a tragedy piled on top of a tragedy.
“(Steve) was in the Peace Corps, stationed in Tunisia,” Brian tells me. “The Peace Corps had trained him to teach modern beekeeping skills to Tunisian farmers, although Steve had absolutely no background in agriculture or beekeeping. He had lived in Africa a number of years on and off, but he never had anything to do with agriculture. It was just one of those strange bureaucratic decisions, that they needed somebody. Steve had lived in sub-Saharan Africa, he’d lived in Zimbabwe. He was a Fulbright Scholar in Lesotho, this tiny little kingdom in the middle of South Africa. When he joined the Peace Corps, he had applied to go back to Southern Africa, preferably Zimbabwe or Kenya, but instead they sent him to Tunisia. He wasn’t thrilled.”
In mid-December of 1988, Steve and Brian’s sister, Michelle, gave birth to her third child, but the next day, complications set in. Michelle slipped into a coma as doctors struggled to figure out what was wrong with her, and everyone began to fear the worst.
“We contacted the Peace Corps to see if they could get Steve home on an emergency leave, because based on what the doctors told us, Michelle was either going to die or, if she survived, would be in a persistent vegetative state.”
The family had no way of contacting Steve directly, but the Peace Corps arranged for him to return to the States. Originally, he was scheduled to fly from Frankfurt to D.C., but his plans changed, and he wound up flying Pan Am 103A from Frankfurt to Heathrow, before continuing on to Pan Am 103 to JFK, and then catching another flight to Philadelphia, where Brian was going to pick him up..
Brian remembers that first heard about a plane crash while he was leaving home to visit his sister at the hospital in Philadelphia.
“Strangely enough, as I was leaving home, I was walking out and the news was on. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a Peter Jennings story about a plane crash. I didn’t even pay any attention to it. I was in a hurry to get to Philadelphia to get to the hospital, and I was at the hospital all night, and then I went to the airport in Philadelphia and waited at the gate for the flight from New York. No Steve. Someone came and asked me if I was waiting for someone that was supposed to come from New York. I said yes, and they said, ‘Come with us.’ Halfway to the office, they decided to tell me that the plane had crashed, but they refused to give me any other information. So that’s how I found out about it. At first, I couldn’t even be sure he was on the plane. He called from Heathrow before he got on the plane and spoke to my wife, Bonnie, and told her that he was leaving, and that he would be leaving soon. We didn’t put it all together.”
Steve’s sudden death cast an even greater pall over the ongoing situation with Michelle.
“It was overwhelming. We were convinced that she wasn’t going to survive or, if she did, we were going to be dealing with this horrendous situation indefinitely.”
In addition to the newborn, Michelle and her husband already had two children, who were eight and four years old at the time. While Michelle’s husband tried to handle her medical situation, the three children stayed with Brian and Bonnie. Even before Steve’s death, everyone was overwhelmed.
“We wound up with a newborn baby, a four-year-old, an eight-year-old, and a crisis all at the same time.”
Eventually, doctors diagnosed Michelle with Thrombotic Thrombocytopenic Purpura, a rare genetic disorder that was barely understood at the time. The diagnosis invited many more questions, few of which had answers.
“One night, I was at the hospital. It was about 3:00 in the morning, I was badgering this poor resident, and he got really annoyed, so he dragged me to the hospital library, pulled out a book, opened it up, and said, ‘Here. You see this page? Read it, then you’ll know as much as I know about this disease.’ The treatments at the time were all experimental.
“It’s possible that other members of our family died from it, but nobody knew. A lot of people on the maternal side of my family died young, including my mother, her mother, her father, other relatives. It’s possible other people have been dropping dead from this, and they’d call it a stroke or they’d call it a heart attack without doing autopsies.”
Miraculously, Michelle survived without any lasting complications. Brian recalls her condition stabilized after a month, and a year later, she had recovered fully. While she fought for her life, the family didn’t want to tell her that Steve had lost his.
“It was very difficult, because we had to go to the hospital to break the news to her. When she did come out of the coma, there were still news stories, and we were trying to shield her from those. It was very emotional for the whole family, trying to encourage her recovery, but there was a point where we had to tell her. We were tight, the three of us. She asked, ‘Where’s Steve?’ She knew that, whether he was in Africa or Australia or wherever he was, he’d be there.”
In the meantime, the Peace Corps helped the grieving family immensely. A staff member became a liason for the family, running interference with Pan Am and helping to work with the State Department and the American consulate in Edinburgh.
Ultimately, the Butlers decided to have Steve laid to rest at Dryfesdale Cemetery in Lockerbie, which has since become the site of several memorials. While nobody in the family made it there for the burial, they viewed it as the the most appropriate place, especially given Steve’s worldview.
“It was kind of funny. Steve was the first or second person buried there, and they put this huge black headstone. It used to be in the middle of nothing. It was before there were any other memorials, and so for the longest time, there was this big black headstone. The people at the consulate in Edinburgh had arranged for it. We were a bit surprised when we first saw it. Steve would have laughed. He would have thought the whole idea of memorials was a joke. His attitude was just sort of, ‘Bury me where I fall.'”
“He actually had said that to a friend of his, because he traveled so much, and he had had medical problems. He almost died a couple of times traveling. He was in a hospital in Kenya for a month. They had no idea what was wrong with him and he wasn’t getting any better, and finally he picked himself up, called a cab, and flew to London. He was in Heathrow, ironically, trying to get a flight back to the States, and a public health nurse saw him. She said, ‘You’re really sick.’ He wound up in a hospital in London until he recovered. They never quite figured out what he had.
“Another time he was traveling, he got Hepatitis. He was in Russia, and he decided he didn’t want to be in a hospital in Russia, so he got himself to Stockholm and wound up in a hospital there for a while. He knew there was always a risk, and at one point, he said, ‘You know what? If something happens, just bury me where I drop. I don’t want anybody to go through any trouble. Don’t be shipping me home.’
“It’s funny, ironically funny—a couple of months after the bombing, there were some support groups. In New Jersey, actually, there were a couple of good ones. There was a family support group that was run by a grief therapist. That’s when I first met Kara2, going to her house. She was a teenager. The first group I went to there, one of the members of the group started talking about this cold-hearted family that had buried their loved one in Lockerbie, and they couldn’t understand why they would do that. He was going on and on and on, and I was sitting there thinking, He has no idea who I am.”
Steve was 36 and single when he died. Brian tells me that Steve’s life was one of travel, never settling down in any sense of the phrase.
“We had a troubled family. My mother died when we were in high school, and my father was an alcoholic who was not a very stable parent. My father remarried not long after my mother died. I had already moved out. Steve dropped out of high school before he was 16. He wasn’t even legal, he just left. Stayed with me for a while, and he started traveling then. He was in California for a little while, and then he went to live in a commune in Maui for a while. He started traveling in his teens.”
Brian describes Steve as someone who was fiercely committed to seeing the world. Steve had a pattern of settling in a place, working several jobs to save up money, and then moving on, traveling for six months or a year before starting over somewhere new. His adventures included teaching English in Tokyo for a year, working for a tobacco company in Zimbabwe, serving as a hotel’s assistant manager in Australia., and working on farms in New Zealand. He always moved on, and he always checked in with his family back home.
“We actually were in touch all the time. Steve loved to write postcards, so you’d constantly get postcards from all over the world. He’d write as much as he could fit on a postcard, so we kept in touch that way. Occasionally, when you travel, things happen. He’d get stranded, he’d need money, or he’d get sick. Sometimes, I had to bail him out. We kept in touch, and every time he came back to the States, he’d come and stay. Also, wherever I lived, people would show up and say, ‘Oh, I met your brother at Victoria Falls, and he said if I was ever in the States, to come look you up.’ When I lived in Miami, people were constantly showing up, saying, ‘I met your brother in Israel’ or ‘I met your brother in Sweden, he said to look you up.'”
Despite his many travels, Steve still spent enough time close to home to develop relationships with Michelle’s children. Her older son, Carson, was especially close with Steve.
“Whenever Steve was in the States, he would do things with Carson. They were great pals. I remember one time, I was living in Georgia and teaching, and I came home from work one day. As I’m driving home, I see these people walking down the road. We lived way out in the country. It’s this tall guy and this little kid, and I slow down, and it’s Steve and Carson. Carson was three or four at the time. Steve had taken him on a road trip. He had been in New Jersey, picked Carson up, and drove down to Georgia to visit us.”
Carson, then eight years old, was particularly shaken by the horrific events unfolding around him. Then, even after Michelle recovered, the family became entangled in another sort of crisis. Steve died without a will, which made his estranged father the beneficiary of his estate.
“When he joined the Peace Corps, he named me as next of kin, but he never had a will,” Brian explains. “In every state in the United States, if you die without a will, your next of kin, if you’re not married, first it’s your parents, and then siblings come after that. While my father was alive, my father technically had full say. The legal case was in his name.
“We had been totally estranged. If I saw my father once every five years, it was a lot. After Steve died, we sort of got thrown together. Between Steve’s death and my sister’s medical crisis, we were sort of forced to deal with each other. On one level, it actually was positive, in the relationship at least. We both made an effort, but it was complicated because of the legal issues.”
Steve’s father hired Kreindler and Kreindler as his representative without informing Brian. When Brian found out, he went to meet with Jim Kreindler, and was angry with the way Kreindler treated him. Despite that, Brian had no say in the matter.
“My sister and I were not happy about that, because my father had absolutely no relationship with my brother. He had quite literally thrown him out of the house when he was 15 years old. On a moral level, we thought it was reprehensible that my father thought he had the right to do this, but on a legal level, there was nothing we could do about it.”
The familial estrangement ran so deep that the Butlers’ father didn’t even know when Steve was born.
“Anything you see that has his date of birth is always wrong, because for some unknown reason, my father was giving people the wrong birthdate. The actual date of birth is August 30th, 1952. They have him listed as ’53 everywhere.”
The senior Butler passed away in 1991, but he had remarried, and his new family inherited his share of the legal case. Eventually, they, Brian, and Michelle agreed to share any money that resulted from the lawsuit. Meanwhile, Brian fought on in a different way, becoming involved in the family group and taking a long, hard look at airline security.
Brian explains to me that he and his wife created a security survey, and asked people throughout the world to report on how security was handled where they were. The results of these surveys shocked the couple, who presented their results to the FAA.
“I don’t know if they had any impact, but I can tell you that I personally got calls from people who worked in airport security who were concerned because they were being briefed by their bosses about this survey being done, and to look out for it and be particularly careful. They were trying to beat our test.
“There used to be these lead-lined film bags, when people used old-fashioned 35mm film in cameras. When you traveled through x-rays, it would destroy the film. What we did was, we asked people to put these bags through with their carry-on baggage. Put items in, not contraband, but just to record how often the screeners actually opened the bags, searched the bags, or questioned them about the bags. That was part of the testing process, and it was frightening how few screeners paid any attention to these bags. I can tell you, on the x-ray equipment at the time, it just showed up as a big black mass. I personally never was questioned by a screener about it.
“It was particularly galling at the time of the 9/11 attacks, because for so many years, we had been campaigning to improve security to avoid things like that. Astonishingly, after 9/11, they started paying attention. All of a sudden, and people are taking off their shoes. They’re actually looking at what people pack in their carry-ons.
“Our tragedy was not a big enough issue for the country to pay attention. Maybe if the plane had been blown up over New Jersey instead of Scotland, it would have been different. Because it was in the U.K., there was a different attitude.”
His efforts to improve airline security have only been a small sliver of Brian’s efforts to improve the world since Steve’s death. He spent most of his adult life working in mental health, therapy, and social work, but now, he sells antiquarian books on the Internet. He says the business grew out of a minor travel-writing career that he had when he was younger.
“I wrote a couple of travel books and wrote for newspapers and newsletters. I published a newsletter for budget travelers to Europe, and when I was doing that, I started to collect old travel books. I had a fairly extensive collection, and when I decided I didn’t want to be a bureaucrat anymore and stopped working for the county agency, I was looking for something I could do. I thought, I could do this as a business. So I started a website and started selling travel books. The core specialty is mostly 19th century and early 20th century travel guides.”
While Butler isn’t in touch with his father’s second family, he remains close to his sister. Michelle’s kids are grown up now, but she still lives a couple miles away. There lies the irony of Brian’s tale: The sister who wasn’t supposed to live to see 1989 is still alive today, and the brother whose sole goal was to see as much of the world as possible was buried where he fell, just as he always asked.
Ever since 9/11, I’ve heard—and believed myself—that if officials had listened to experts’ advice after Pan Am 103, that those attacks wouldn’t have happened. Today, Brian became the first to offer a compelling argument as to why.
Pan Am 103 was felled by a bomb in the luggage compartment, and as a result, most of the recommendations the victims’ group offered afterwards focused on preventing a similar attack. Kathy mentioned the idea of positive baggage checks—not putting a bag on the plane until the passenger who checked it was also on board—but that was supposed to be in place before Pan Am 103 anyway. Another big concern was air cargo, a loophole that still hasn’t been closed—while all luggage going onto an airplane is screened these days, the cargo loaded right beside it isn’t checked at all.
Brian’s approach of testing passenger security lines put him in the minority. To a larger extent, I wonder how much a sense of complacency overtook the group as the ’90s went along. With the Pan Am lawsuit ongoing and no further terrorist attacks against American planes, the group may have felt it did the best it could and moved along.
I can’t say for certain. I wasn’t at those meetings. But I remember how I felt on 9/11, staring at the Space Needle from Gasworks Park, thinking about how I had never been to the top of the World Trade Center and now, I never would. I felt as though I had failed somehow, even though I couldn’t even vote yet. I thought my life had been a waste, six days before reaching adulthood.
Remembering how I felt that day, I can’t shake the impression that perhaps the Pan Am 103 families have engaged in a little revisionist history, that where I turned my anger inwards, they turned theirs outwards at the politicians whom they had lobbied for so long.
In the TSA era, many of us have forgotten how little of a concern air terror was for so long—from Pan Am 103 until 9/11, no American aviation targets were struck by terrorist attacks. Granted, terrorist attacks still happened—the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and several against American targets abroad—and several air incidents were initially believed to be terrorist attacks, and later proven otherwise3.
For nearly 13 years, the skies were quiet, and we grew quiet too.
- I’ve tried to reassure nervous fliers by telling them my dad died on an airplane, and the odds of that happening are so low that, by virtue of having met me, they’re functionally immune. This approach has yielded mixed results to date.
- Kara Weipz, who recently stepped down as president of Victims of Pan Am Flight 103, lost her brother Richard Monetti. Her parents, Bob and Eileen, helped establish the group.
- Most notably, TWA Flight 800.