April 1970

April 1, 1970 (Wednesday)

• Sixty-one of the 82 persons aboard a Royal Air Maroc Caravelle twin-jet were killed when the aircraft crashed on its approach to Nouasseur Airport near Casablanca. The passengers were returning from the vacation resort of Agadir on a one-stop flight to Paris.
• All 45 people on Aeroflot Flight 1661 were killed after the plane collided with a weather balloon at an altitude of, severing the nose section and sending the plane into an uncontrollable descent. The Antonov An-24B had departed Novosibirsk 25 minutes earlier, at 3:42 a.m., and was bound for Krasnoyarsk.
• U.S. President Richard M. Nixon signed the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act into law, banning cigarette television and radio advertisements in the United States effective January 2, 1971. The "one, big last day" on January 1 was permitted by Congress to allow television networks to get tobacco revenue for the college football bowl games on New Year's Day.
• American Motors Corporation introduced the Gremlin.
• The 1970 United States census began to count on all people residing in the U.S.; the final tally was that there were 203,392,031 United States residents on April 1, 1970.
• Died: U.S. Army Brigadier General William R. Bond, 51, was shot and killed by a Viet Cong sniper, moments after stepping off of a helicopter to inspect a patrol in the Bình Thủy District of South Vietnam. General Bond, the commander of the 199th Infantry Brigade, became the highest ranking American officer to be killed in combat on the ground. Four other generals had been killed in aircraft crashes.

  April 2, 1970 (Thursday)

• Massachusetts became the first U.S. state to challenge the obligation of individual participation in the Vietnam War as unconstitutional, as Governor Francis W. Sargent signed the "War Bill" passed by both houses of the state legislature the day before. The measure, which passed 127 to 92 in the state House and 29 to 3 in the state Senate declared that no resident of Massachusetts "shall be required to serve outside of the territorial limits of the United States in the conduct of armed hostilities not an emergency and not otherwise authorized" by a declaration of war by the U.S. Congress.

  April 3, 1970 (Friday)

• In South Korea, the Japanese Red Army terrorist group accepted a proposal that Japan's Vice Minister for Transport, Shinjiro Yamamura, take the place of the remaining 100 passengers held captive on Japan Airlines Flight 351. The Boeing 727 jet had been hijacked 79 hours earlier while en route from Tokyo to Fukuoka, and the crew had landed at the Kimpo airfield outside of Seoul rather than acceding to the nine hijackers' demand that they be flown to North Korea. The jet then flew onward to the Pyongyang airport in North Korea with Yamamura and the crew of three. Yamamura and flight crew Shinji Isida, Teiichi Esaki and Toshio Aihara were allowed to fly the Boeing 727 from Pyongyang back to Tokyo the next day.
• Died: Faysal al-Shaabi, 31, Prime Minister of South Yemen during 1969 until being ousted in a coup, was "shot while trying to escape" a week after being transferred from house arrest to a government detention camp.

  April 4, 1970 (Saturday)

• The disposal of the remains of Adolf Hitler was carried out at the Soviet Union's military base in Magdeburg, East Germany. Only the commander of the base was aware that the burnt skeletons of Hitler, Eva Braun, General Hans Krebs, Joseph Goebbels, Magda Goebbels and the Goebbels children, had been interred there. Hitler's skull had been sent to Moscow in 1945, where it was placed in the State Archives in Moscow. In that the base was scheduled to be relinquished to East Germany, the commander consulted KGB Director Yuri Andropov for instructions. To prevent the site from becoming a shrine for neo-Nazis, Andropov ordered that the grave's contents be crushed, burned and scattered. The process was completed the next day at Schönebeck, and what was left over was dumped into the Elbe River. In 1995, the long secret story would be revealed in the book The Death of Hitler: The Full Story with New Evidence from Secret Russian Archives, by Ada Petrova and Peter Watson.
• In what the Professional Bowlers Association would rank in a 2018 poll as its most dramatic game, Don Johnson had perfection until a frustrating final moment in winning the PBA Tournament of Champions. Johnson had bowled 11 consecutive strikes, but on the 12th and final frame, the "300 game" was foiled when only nine of the 10 pins fell. The #10 pin in the upper right corner remained, and although Johnson finished 299 to 268 ahead of his closest challenger, Dick Ritger, the failure to reach 300 cost him a $10,000 bonus and a new car.
• The 222nd and last original episode of the rural situation comedy Petticoat Junction was telecast, bringing an end to the show after seven seasons that began on September 24, 1963.
• A group of 50,000 demonstrators picketed in Washington for what has been called "the era's largest pro-war demonstration", the "March for Victory", organized by fundamentalist radio evangelist Carl McIntire. The marchers, mostly well-dressed, middle-aged white Americans, protested U.S. President Nixon's decision to reduce the American commitment rather than to take the war into North Vietnam.
• Citizens in the Stickney Township, west of Chicago, voted 4,071 to 1,552 to incorporate the new city of Burbank, Illinois. The Chicago Tribune noted that "The new city is bounded by 77th and 87th streets and Cicero and Sayre avenues and will have a population of about 30,000 residents."
• Born: Barry Pepper, Canadian film and Emmy Award-winning television actor; in Campbell River, British Columbia

  April 5, 1970 (Sunday)

• In order to prevent the court-ordered busing of students to achieve racial desegregation, Florida's Governor Claude Kirk issued an executive order appointing himself as the School Superintendent of Manatee County and suspending superintendent Jack Davidson and the rest of the school board, and then traveled to Bradenton the next day to order bus drivers not to comply with the orders of U.S. District Judge Ben Krentzman. Kirk reversed himself the following Sunday, after Judge Krentzman ruled that he was in contempt of court. Krentzman assessed a fine of $10,000 per day to be paid personally by Governor Kirk for every day that he interfered with the court's orders.
• In the worst killing in California police history, four California Highway Patrol officers were shot and killed while confronting two armed suspects outside a restaurant in Newhall, California. Officers Walt Frago, Roger Gore, George Alleyn, and James Pence were all fatally wounded within four minutes before midnight after Frago and Gore had stopped a car driven by Bobby Davis. A passenger in the car, Jack Twinning, fired the first shots after Frago made his approach to the vehicle, and Gore was killed by Davis. The next day, Twinning killed himself after being cornered by police. Davis was arrested, and eventually hanged himself in prison, 39 years after the killings.
• Twenty-seven people were treated at the Memorial Hospital of California in Los Angeles for food poisoning after ingesting the hallucinogen LSD on potato chips served at a private party. The 27, eight of whom were admitted, were among 40 who were taken by the Los Angeles County sheriff's department after being called to the festivities at the South Bay Club, a "singles apartment" complex for unmarried people in Playa Del Rey, California, where 200 guests were attending a party for a departing tenant. One of the people identified as a guest would later be arrested and sentenced to six years to life in prison after pleading guilty.
• Died:
• *Alfred Sturtevant, 78, American geneticist known as the discoverer of genetic mapping
• *Karl von Spreti, 63, West Germany's ambassador to Guatemala, was murdered five days after he was kidnapped by the terrorist group Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes. The Guatemalan government refused FAR's demand that 22 FAR members be released from prison, along with the payment of US$700,000 in cash, and Spreti was killed by a single gunshot to his head.

  April 6, 1970 (Monday)

• BBC Radio 4 broadcast the first edition of its long-running evening news programme PM.
• Photojournalists Sean Flynn of Time magazine, and Dana Stone of CBS, crossed into Cambodia by motorcycle to report on the Vietnam War, and disappeared. Flynn, who was the son of actor Errol Flynn, and Stone were among five journalists who had crossed together for their assignments to take photos and film footage. Captured also were freelance photographer Claude Arpin of France, and two cameramen for Japan's Fuji Commercial Television, Yujiro Takagi and Akira Kusaka. The last time their colleagues saw them was when the men were waved through a roadblock set up by the North Vietnamese Army, which had used Cambodia as a base for operations. In 1986, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency would declassify a report that had concluded that Flynn and Stone "probably were executed in 1971 by an officer of the Khmer Rouge".
• King Frederik IX of Denmark overturned his Bentley convertible automobile while driving on a Copenhagen street but was not seriously injured. After climbing out of his car, which skidded on a slippery street, hit the curb and landed on its side", the King rode part of the way back to the Amalienberg Palace in an ambulance, then asked the driver to stop, got out, and walked the rest of the way, "apparently wary that his arrival by ambulance might cause alarm."
• Died:
• *Dr. Sam Sheppard, 46, American neurosurgeon who had served 12 years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife; from encephalopathy associated with his consumption of alcohol.
• *El Deif Ahmed, 33, Egyptian comedian and film actor and part of the film trio Tholathy Adwa'a El Masrah; from a heart attack