Original subtitles

We don't have anything quite like it in the United States.

Not that sort of verdant green pastures

with the trees and the water and the sheep everywhere.

And our sort of agricultural landscape is different.

The one main high street, you know,

we don't have that really,

unless you go to a very far off place.

Stories have always been so healing and so helpful.

That's why we have them,

why we have books and movies and documentaries

and, you know, there's something about the human experience

and seeing someone else go through it

that we learn from and find hope in.

I want to tell the story about the people,

not just the political aspect.

It's actually what took me to Lockerbie.

I think everybody would say Lockerbie

was a sort of typical rural, southern Scottish town.

Its population was about 3,000 maybe 30 years ago.

It's slightly bigger now.

So you had the chip shop and, you know,

the town high street bustled.

It was a market town,

so agriculture farming is big industry in the area.

I came to the town initially

as an 11-year-old from a primary school nearby

and did my secondary education here

from 1981 through to '86 when I left to join the police.

I thought it was so beautiful, shockingly so.

That this horrible tragedy

in my life

could have fallen here.

- I lived down the road, come round the bend,

about another three quarters of a mile,

the whole road was...

There's vehicles on the road ablaze,

two houses ablaze,

and the road is completely covered with masonry,

beds, garden gates,

the people in the houses

wouldn't have any chance to getting out.

Good evening.

A Pan Am jumbo jet with 258 people on board

has crashed tonight just north of the Scottish border.

I had dreams of planes cracking in half and blowing up,

and I thought I was losing my mind.

I went to the hospital one day

thinking I was having a heart attack.

I'd never had panic attacks before.

I wanted to go and change it to the Pan Am flight with Theo,

and I didn't have enough money.

We had just gone to Paris and I was a student.

And so I just went back to her and I, you know,

I said, "I'll be fine.

This is ridiculous.

This is stupid.

I'll just bear my way through it."

So I didn't end up on that flight.

Pan Am Flight 103 started in Frankfurt.

The passengers didn't board the 747

until transferring at Heathrow.

The plane took off at 25 past 6, 25 minutes late.

It climbed to 31,000 feet,

passing over the Scottish border, right on course.

Some 50 minutes after takeoff,

shortly after the last radio contact,

the aircraft disappeared from radar screens,

apparently exploding in midair.

The main parts of the plane hit Lockerbie in a ball of fire,

but wreckage and burning fuel spread over a much wider area,

most falling in an area, roughly 10 miles by six,

but some debris landing 80 miles away.

The cockpit landed three miles away in Tundergarth,

a cabin door near Langholm and clothing at Westerkirk,

the result of a massive explosion.

That night, I came home from work,

I travel all the way back from Newton Stewart,

where I was based, got changed.

I told my parents I was off to this party in Lockerbie.

I'm two or three minutes away from Lockerbie.

There was this huge explosion.

This explosion got bigger and bigger,

to the point it must have been about 300 feet in the air.

So I came off the road, went past the hotel

I was due to go to the party at,

and there were people running towards the town.

And I got concerned

that they may be getting into difficulty with the fire.

This sergeant more or less bumped into me

in Sherwood Crescent, Sherwood Park area.

And he said, "There's a huge hole in the road.

We're not sure exactly what it is,

but you'd better go to the police station and sign on."

Pan Am jumbo jet with 258 people on board.

First pictures

from the devastated town of Lockerbie.

Both Scotland and England

were strewn with wreckage.

There's no indication

that there was anything out of the norm

with this aircraft this evening.

The abiding memory I've got of those minutes

was just the sheer confusion.

There were conflicting reports.

There was reports of the petrol station having exploded.

Well, we knew that wasn't true,

but then there was damage being reported

to houses on the other side of town.

I think, "Well, is that true?"

Because the explosion was in Sherwood Crescent,

but it turned out that that was in fact correct.

I was a very young keen firefighter

and I was probably involved with search Sherwood Crescent

for most of my incident.

Unfortunately, it turns out

that one of the main engines had come down

and pierced the main water supply into Lockerbie.

And Lockerbie is on a ring main,

so it had an effect on a massive part of the area.

The crater was next to a main road

where five vehicles were caught

in the ferocity of the explosion.

Their drivers are among the dead.

One man narrowly escaped, but watch his house burned down.

We're in the house in Sherwood Park,

about seven o'clock, when there was this almighty bang.

My son and I were in the house

so I said, "Get down."

And the whole sky lit up

and I realized it was a plane, I think,

but there was debris falling everywhere

and I thought the whole roof

was gonna cave in on us at the time.

But looked out the back window

and all I could see was fires starting up, you know,

just right over the whole countryside was ablaze.

I'm standing at this door in Bridge Street

when a farmer came from the hills,

from the darkness on the east side of Lockerbie.

He'd loaded up the pickup truck

with one of the inflatable shoots that is deployed

when the emergency exit doors were opened and so on,

it was one of those, and some fuselage.

We had seen that there was a passenger

in the front passenger seat of his pickup truck.

Just looked like they were asleep, you know.

But it turned out that this was a toddler

that had been from the plane and was in fact dead.

He'd explained that he was worried

that the child was out in the field

and exposed to the wildlife and so on

so he'd thought this was the best thing he could do.

We had spent the day sort of moving flats.

So Miriam was down below, in an apartment down below.

Theo and I weren't living in the same flat,

she was living in one flat below me.

And then Turhan and Luanne, who were on the flight,

were in my apartment with my friends Mike and Hank.

We had spent all day together,

and Theo and I actually,

we called her our last supper ironically.

But we, and Daniel, walked to Portobello Market

and had our favorite falafel for lunch that we loved.

And I started having pretty severe panic attack,

but I was trying to keep it really like on the down low

'cause I didn't want to freak everybody out.

So when they finally left,

I crawled back into the living room

and I was trying to distract myself,

and this had been going on for a while, like trying.

And I finally turned on the television to just anything

to keep my mind off of why I was feeling this way.

And the BBC popped up and it said a plane was missing.

They didn't know where it was going, and I knew instantly.

Fortunately, the huge cockpit crashed to earth

three miles away on a deserted hillside.

Eyewitnesses said the shattering force of the collision

made it almost impossible anyone could have survived.

For such was the force of the explosion

that blew apart Flight Pan Am 103,

it shattered into a million pieces,

spread over 10 square miles of countryside.

And such was the suddenness

that though this doctor looked forlornly

through the cockpit wreckage for any survivors,

there wasn't even time for those onboard

to make a mayday call.

Well, there must be about at least six houses,

they're just not there.

I felt the heat and I seen everything coming over like,

but I see most of it, so I took across there

and over the petrol station.

The house is at the back here.

There's an engine lying in the farm.

The Crown took in new guests last night.

The Whittles arrived late and homeless.

From what we've seen and what we've heard,

we think we're lucky.

We're very lucky.

I don't know if we've got any damage or not.

Car's slightly damaged

and Phil's car next door is slightly damaged.

But we've got nothing.

We've got nothing.

- It's gonna take a long time,

isn't it, for the town

- to get back to normal? - I don't think

I'd ever forget that.

- How can it- - I just won't

- get back to normal? - forget it.

I mean, there's people that we probably know

that are worse than us.

You can go and have a look at it now.

- Can I? - Yep.

- Okay. - I saw it myself.

How do you feel about it now?

Very, very relieved for us.

I'm very sorry for poor devils down there.

- A disaster actually gets worse as it goes along

because the whole extent and the whole enormity widens out.

The picture gets bigger and bigger and bigger

and gets worse.

Syracuse University had an overseas semester

and the theater department

had this specific program in London

because of course the West End and all the theater.

So we all were really excited.

Theodore Cohen, my best friend and roommate at the time,

we had a flat,

or an apartment, in Syracuse together.

Turhan Ergin was my roommate in London.

And Miriam Wolfe was from the drama department.

Nicole Boulanger was from the drama department.

Luanne Rogers was my roommate as well in London,

but she came from a different school,

so I'd only just met her when we got to London.

Wendy Lincoln I knew, who was also on the flight.

She was an art student, but a roommate of a friend of mine.

And then Daniel Rosenthal,

who was not actually part of Syracuse,

but a friend of a friend

who we ran into literally in Piccadilly Circus one day

and started hanging out.

We saw every West End show.

We saw every fringe, we saw every backdoor pub,

funky, weird thing you could see.

I mean, we were just obsessed with that opportunity

to see this incredible amount of theater at our fingertips.

It was just such a very alive time in our lives

because we were finding our feet

as young university students

and being in control of our daily lives

and what we could do.

And as an American, when you're that age,

we hung out in the pubs

because you could and we couldn't here.

So we, you know, we drank a lot of beer and hung out.

I am Amy Engelhardt, and I'm a composer,

lyricist, playwright, singer, producer, director.

What's the gig?

I knew five of the 35 Syracuse students

who were aboard Pan Am 103

as I was a senior when they were I think freshmen

or sophomores, possibly,

in the drama department at Syracuse University.

The person that I knew the best was Miriam Wolfe.

Miriam was like a sunflower.

Miriam was known for just showing up

when you were at your lowest point

and bringing you flowers or

treats or bringing roses for you

and you'd accomplish something or...

She was just unflappable,

sometimes almost irritatingly so.

She was, no, she was an absolute gem of a person

and I don't think she had realized yet

her value in that.

Just so you guys can see, that's Catherine Crossland.

That's the picture of the crying cheerleader.

It's so close, you know,

it's just very personal when it's that close.

But she and I are friends to this day,

bound together in an unusual way, you know.

I'm Lawrence Mason Jr.,

retired professor of visual communication

at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications

at Syracuse University,

and I taught nine victims of Pan Am Flight 103.

I remember the day so well, December 21st, 1988.

And I was firmly ensconced at my dining room table

wrapping Christmas presents, music on, and the phone rang.

And it was the New York State Director

of United Press International Photos

and I was the local coordinator for UPI photos in Syracuse.

And he said, "We're getting reports

there were as many as 40 Syracuse University students

on that plane coming back from study abroad in London."

I'm like, "Whoa."

Now I know why he's calling me.

They're gonna need news pictures out of Syracuse.

I've worked with a partner

on United Press International, David Grunfeld.

So we stopped down to the court just before the game

and I immediately encountered a young woman

named Catherine Crossland,

who was a student of mine that semester.

And so I went up to her,

I said, "Catherine, how are you are?

How are you doing?"

And she said that she had reason to believe

that she lost a sorority sister onboard Pan Am 103,

and she was very, very distraught.

I wasn't even thinking of shooting a picture at that

moment but David was nearby and he saw the moment

and he shot it.

We shot some basketball action too as well

and went up to our darkroom and we had to develop film

and we had to print a picture and we had to type a caption

and we had to put it on a transmitter and, you know,

it's just a big process before digital.

I wanted to give Catherine a chance

to say, "That's too personal.

I really wish you wouldn't use it."

But without that I just had to go with the news judgment

and say, "Okay, we're gonna send it."

And it ran all over the place.

Back in the '80s we had these coin operated phones,

stupid phones,

where you had to, like, put in, like, pence

to get it to work, and I didn't have the right coins.

And I went to the neighbors

and I knocked on the door to, like, make change for me.

And they took one look at me and took me into their home

and took care of me until the secretary came

and then led me to the Syracuse office.

We were stuck and surrounded by press for five or six hours.

At the airports last night,

people waited in silence for news of their relatives.

For quite some time,

Pan Am would only confirm there had been a crash

and couldn't answer their questions.

My friend Hank, had come back with his family

and we had reunited

and he and I walked back to Miriam's flat

and we just sat in the front room.

Actually the pullout bed was pulled out

because that's where I was supposed to sleep.

And we watched on the BBC,

we watched Nicole's mother find out,

because she had a camera in her face at JFK.

A notice board simply directed people

inquiring about the plane to see an agent.

Despite the widespread publicity,

many arrived to meet the flight,

only to be told for the first time

that there had been a crash.

Pan Am officials began the grim task of breaking the news.

There was almost no hope that their relatives had survived.

And I watched Theo's mother being escorted, live,

if you can imagine, I mean, live on BBC,

her being taken into a room, crying and screaming.

And we turned off the television

'cause we couldn't take it anymore

and we just held hands

and we just watched the sunrise in silence,

like, just silence.

Cheese steak, peppers and onions on the side

and pizza sauce.

- Did they give you any sauce? - Yes, yes, yes.

- We had been able to see Rick when he was in London.

We spent three or four...

Four days?

- In London. Yeah.

Yeah.

And it was great, you know,

it was great to be with him.

It was great, we had never been to London,

so it was wonderful to go to the museums

and art galleries and all of that.

Kara was 15 when Pan Am 103 happened.

She stayed home from school that day.

She was watching her favorite soap opera when they broke in

and said that a plane leaving London

for JFK had disappeared.

I was on my way home from work,

but she called, she called you.

You were working in Philadelphia at the time.

And so when I got here,

I saw a neighbor's car in the side of the house

and I thought, "Something must have happened to the cat."

That's the first thing that came to my mind.

Something happened to the cat.

And when I came in,

she said, "I think Rick's plane went down."

They found all the female sheep

who were pregnant had aborted, all of them,

from the shock of everything that had happened.

What did they feel?

What made them do that?

The shock of the explosion?

Did the earth shake?

Like, I don't, you know, it just...

To hear that story was just gave me chills,

that it was not just the people

but the land and the livestock that were affected there.

The town awoke this morning

determined to carry on.

There was still a routine to stick to, a need for normality.

That's why Hunter Wilson and his staff

were baking bread at five this morning.

Not just for the towns folk,

but for the rescue services and the media.

- I'm afraid, we're busy for the wrong reasons today.

Surrounded by farmland,

Lockerbie is a compact community,

shocked that the most deadly debris

should have fallen on their streets and homes

rather than scattered across neighboring open country.

A housing estate alongside the busy A74

took the full force of an impact

that blasted a crater 30 feet deep

where houses once stood.

The flight deck, however,

landed in a field three miles away,

crushed and spilling the contents of the cockpit.

An engine plunged into a farm yard.

Eyewitnesses said the spinning metal

fell amid sheets of flame.

Other massive sections fell across a wide area,

some 80 miles away.

But it was the damage within Lockerbie

that left the town in shock.

Milk tankers were filled up, everybody improvised.

You know, the community came together,

the different agencies, organizations came together.

I can always remember the young soldiers

that were there helping to search when it was up at

Rosebank and thinking how young they were.

16, 17-year-olds having to deal with this.

And for me to think that,

and I was 23, not that much older,

but the soldiers had to deal with a lot more

than what we did.

Police diving teams are now searching the lakes

and lochs down wind of the crash site,

it's thought some bodies and wreckage could lie here.

I found a body part

and it had the person's identification on it.

Being young, I picked it up

because it was a green emerald like gold ring.

And I went took it to the police,

because that was somebody's identification.

It was the wrong thing to do, I was only 23.

So a police officer was quite adamant

I had to go put him back, he explained why.

So I had to put him back.

But I always hoped

that that gave closure to the family, you know?

I mean, I saw other stuff as well.

But, yeah, that's the thing that has stopping me.

And I just pray that that family got that ring back.

- And as we sifted through the wreckage,

it was body after body after body.

It was really devastating.

We are trained for these such occasions.

But in my many years as a fireman,

I think this is the worst I've ever came across.

So that's really quite sickening.

Yeah, very sick.

Donna, the Border Collie,

knows every inch and every boulder of the crash site.

For seven days, she has worked the rubble.

As debris is removed, she searches again and again

for anything carrying human scent.

She has detected remains under rubble

that is four foot six inches deep.

Donna's father, Shep, is the veteran

of the 50 dogs now in Lockerbie.

Their owners are all volunteers

who formed the Search and Rescue Dog Association

to standardize training across the country.

On the night of the crash,

police escorts brought them from homes

hundreds of miles away.

And in the first two hours, they'd found 111 bodies

under hazardous conditions.

- The vast amount of broken glass, the heat, the smoke,

and probably worst of all, the aviation fuel

because it tended to deaden the scent.

And we could only work

for something like 10 minutes at a time.

They used to mount in rescue incidents.

And this was so different,

the stress on the handlers, let alone the dogs.

And you've got to remember,

the dog and handler work as a team.

So anything the handler feels, it transmits it to the dog.

And we were transmitting our stress at some times.

Debriefing is important learning

'cause we all make mistakes.

It's just dealing with them and making things better.

Less chance of making them again.

Yeah, I think all organizations have learned

because that was probably been the first terrorist attacks.

I've got the type of brain

that it does put things in the filing cabinet back.

It's strange 'cause I know other people

that can remember so many different things.

I've been to jobs with people and they've said I was there

and I've blanked it out.

I'm fortunate that I probably blank out the bad stuff.

So whether it comes back one day, I don't know, I hope not.

This is my own psychological analysis of myself.

But I had mixed feelings about grief

and who is entitled to grief.

I know that sounds a little strange,

but as I was not BFFs with these people

and I was not a relative

or technically a classmate for very long,

I didn't feel like I was permitted somehow

to feel this loss as deeply as I did.

And watching them go through it

and being there for them as they went through it,

which is one of the

biggest honors of my life, honestly,

just being able to stand there and be there for them,

made me realize how much showing up means.

And that can take many forms.

The care extended past those directly affected

by the tragedy.

I mean, Colin Dorrance regularly hosts visitors

from all over the world

who have been affected in any way by this tragedy.

I mean, he does a lot of other

amazing charitable activities,

that's why he got the MBE.

But to them you are a survivor if you care.

If you care, they will take care of you.

I like to think of myself as this, you know,

hard-ass comedy writer person from New Jersey

with a potty mouth.

But I was absolutely bowled over

by the care and kindness of those people.

And I think I would've taken that away anyway.

But I felt like I got to see it

in all its depth by being there with Kim and Rene.

This incident is universal no matter what the tragedy is.

I mean, sadly

everyone knows someone now

or knows someone who knows someone

who is affected by this kind of a massive tragedy.

Whether that's COVID, any terrorist attack,

any school shootings,

it's terrible.

And the helplessness that people feel

and wanting to do something

and not being able to is universal.

On a hilltop outside the town,

firemen and rescue services have spent Christmas Eve

working round the shattered cockpit of Flight 103,

sifting through the wreckage.

Hundreds of police from forces throughout Scotland

are now involved in the search for debris.

Reports are coming in from far and wide

of further sightings.

Stretchers were ferried in for the grim task

of recovering the remains of the victims.

The bodies were flown out by helicopters.

On all the hillside surrounding Lockerbie,

stretcher parties were at work.

They were taken to the temporary morgue in the town hall

where their relatives face the distressing task

of identifying them.

The personal belongings of the victims

are being stored in this warehouse.

A careful log is being kept of exactly where they were found

to help with the task of identification.

All of this wreckage from the aircraft

was collected from just one street in Lockerbie.

At a local bus stop,

part of the engine still lies buried

only feet from the pavement.

And in the shattered and still smoking remains

of Sherwood Crescent,

they're painstakingly picking their way through the rubble.

10 local people, including three children,

are reported to be missing.

My name is Richard Hartunian

and my involvement in the Pan Am story

relates to my 21-year-old sister, Lynn.

She was a communications major

at the State University of New York at Oswego.

And she was traveling abroad with her friends,

having the trip of a lifetime,

checking in with us periodically

from different countries that she was at.

Looking forward to having her come home at Christmas,

my mother had the house decorated

as she did every Christmas.

But this moment she took some particular care

to really deck the halls.

We got the terrible news that afternoon

when the press reports started to hit.

And I ended up being the one to go to the Albany Airport

where she was to arrive

and was told that the Pan Am folks in New York

wanted to know who, if anyone, was at Albany.

And that was a signal to me that there was a problem

Before that, I couldn't even fathom

when I was called by family members

that we could be involved in anything like this

because acts of terror, most terror victims will tell you

only happen to other people or so you think.

The accident investigators

have their base at Farnborough.

It's there that the flight recorders will be analyzed

to see if they can explain the cause of the crash.

The flight data recorder monitors continuously

a wide range of information from the planes machinery.

It's been revealed today

that the Americans recently received two warnings

that an aircraft flying between Frankfurt and New York

would be the target of a terrorist attack.

Tonight it emerged that an anonymous caller

with a Middle East accent

phoned the US Embassy in Helsinki two weeks ago.

The caller said the Abu Nidal Group

planned to put a bomb on a Pan Am flight to the US

and it would be carried by a Finnish woman.

The White House spokesman said this morning,

there was now no question that public notification

of such threats must be considered.

I don't know how I got the state department's number,

but I did, and they knew nothing either.

So we were just lost.

And then neighbors started coming

and I'm trying to clean up the house

'cause God forbid they should think I'm a lousy housekeeper.

And, you know, it gave me something to do.

I was so scared, I was so upset,

I didn't know what was going on.

And then we started getting phone calls

from "Chicago Tribune" and "Los Angeles Times"

and, you know, all of the newspapers,

local newspapers and everything.

What's strange is that I'm a news junkie

and for the next couple days,

of course I didn't look at newspapers or anything

and we had people, well, there were people over all the time

and one of them said, "Yeah, well, they think it's a bomb."

And I said, "What?"

The PFLP-GC, a Palestinian terror group

based in the Syrian capital, Damascus,

under the leadership of Ahmad Jibril

were always the prime suspects for Lockerbie.

At the time they were funded by Iran.

It is here at Heathrow

that the baggage is transferred in containers

in what some experts see

as an inevitably vulnerable process.

The through baggage from Frankfurt stays in its

containers, much of it uninspected cargo.

An attempt is made to check passenger lists

against baggage tags, but it is not foolproof.

After this horrible tragedy,

they had no clue.

They had no clue.

And that was the beginning.

People who went over to Lockerbie right after

the tragedy

they said all the State Department did was stamp papers

and, you know, they did nothing more than that.

And it took a long time

for Rick's body to be identified.

Eventually the Scottish police and the FBI

started talking to each other

and they got better at it,

but the State Department was useless.

Yeah.

We got together with the State Department,

did a training video for the State Department,

how to handle victims of terrorism's families, and it's--

So they may still have the training video,

but they're still not good at it.

Right.

They're not trained for that.

They really aren't.

We received clothing and stuff from Rick,

but the State Department sent it to us

right before Mother's Day.

Yeah.

And it said, "Compliments of your state department."

My name is Judy O'Rourke

and I am retired from Syracuse University.

I've been mentor to the Remembrance

and Lockerbie Scholars since the program started,

which was in 1989.

At the time, in 1988, the media, in my opinion,

ranked very, very low, horrible,

printing, quote, "manifests" of the people on Pan Am 103,

before any of it was verified.

So people's names were put out there

who were not on the plane.

People found out that their loved one was on the plane

by this manifest that was on a TV station.

Just let them put their head on my shoulder

and cry, you know.

What words can you use, hey?

Give them a hug and just say, "Hey, I care."

Putting your microphone and your camera on someone

who's clearly distraught

and demanding that they tell you how they feel.

Just truly awful, human to human contact.

35 years on,

we're in danger of forgetting many of those lessons.

But at the same time, we still do remember them.

And I think most people in the media

are cognizant that they are dealing with other people

that they need to treat well.

It was a different age in 1988, believe it or not.

You know, we know now, looking back 30 years,

the government had very little information to share.

I reached out to our, you know, local government officials

and although they're good people,

they didn't have much to offer.

We ended up actually using the press to help get information

as they camped out outside of my parents' home.

I ended up communicating and getting to know them

and they would get press reports more quickly

than any other source of information we had.

So it was a very, very difficult three weeks

until my sister's body was recovered.

And ultimately we ended up hiring a forensic pathologist

who went over and ended up aiding in the investigation.

First official act was to help locate my sister.

And so after obtaining some samples of hair

and other things that might help identify her,

we got word about three weeks later

on my birthday on January 13th, 1989,

that she had been located.

So we brought her home.

We had a beautiful memorial service for her.

And then we, you know, we went on

to try to make some sense of it all.

Did you get any guidance

from Pan Am or the government?

Absolutely none.

We watch that every day glazed over on our news

and we don't think about the possibility

of ramming into our lives.

No ordinary life left for us.

They were too afraid

because of the ongoing threat of Kaddafi

wanting to bomb American planes.

How big is the danger

that we might see a repeat of what happened in Iraq

happening in Libya?

This is why we're here.

This is my daughter, this is Theo Cohen.

And we became thrust into this international crime story

that still 30 years later is unfolding.

Many of the ways that you take for granted

when you fly in the United States

are the result of what the victims of Pan Am families did.

They've become quite savvy

and have been really helpful to families and communities

and groups who have experienced

subsequent high profile traumas.