You've probably heard it countless times before, but here it is again.

Knowing by air in a commercial passenger plane is the safest way to travel. Between 2000 and 2009,

only 97 Americans died in aviation-related accidents. That's an average of less than nine

per year. Compare that to the number of people who die each year in car accidents in the United

States. That number is about 42,000. And still, despite knowing these hard statistics,

I still feel a lump in my throat every time my plane is taking off. And I guess it doesn't take

a psychologist to figure out why. In a car, you're in control. In a plane, you're not. Being in

control represents safety to us. And in a plane, you're surrendering that control to someone that

you can't even see. What's also scary about flying for many people is the fact of being trapped

and also being very high up. Car crashes tend to happen suddenly, which sure is frightening in

its own right, but then imagine being in a plane that's 36,000 feet in the air when something

goes wrong. And the plane begins to nose dive. The feeling of being in freefall of knowing you're

going to die of the chaos inside of the cabin. For me, it ranks right up there with drowning and

being abducted by a serial killer as among the most terrifying of nightmares I can think of.

Continuing our theme of bombings, today's main story combines multiple nightmares into one.

Being murdered, being high up in a plane and knowing you're going to die, in a crime that's

remained and will probably remain unsolved forever. And then we'll touch on some other unsolved

bombings in the United States one dating back more than a century. But first, let's start here.

It was January 6th, 1960. It was in the middle of a rainy night in rural North Carolina,

a farmer named Richard Randolph was asleep in his bed when suddenly his wife shook his arm and

jared him awake. I just heard something she said. Richard looked at his watch. It was 243 in the

morning. Then they both heard something. It sounded like an explosion followed five seconds later

...