PLANE CRASH AT THE WHITE HOUSE : Pilot in Crash Led a Tormented Life : Profile: Those who knew him said he had problems with drugs, alcohol, business ventures and relationships.

Frank Eugene Corder’s bizarre and very public death came as a shock to those who knew him in the rural Maryland communities where he had lived. That he died violently did not.

Tormented for years by drugs and alcohol, business failures and broken relationships, the 38-year-old unemployed truck driver had a melancholy, even self-destructive side that made his few friends dread the worst.

“Frank has been down on drugs and alcohol before. He told me that sometimes . . . he just wished he had a gun,” said a cousin, Delilah George of Havre de Grace, Md., just a few miles up the road from Perryville, where Corder last lived.

But what surprised the few people who knew Corder was the spectacular nature of his final act. While his dreams were expansive--he loved airplanes and was said to have fantasies about running a major airline--his life was cramped and quiet, a succession of disappointments punctuated by binges of booze and cocaine.

He was moody, uncommunicative and virtually friendless, according to neighbors and relatives. Alfred Davisson, his next-door neighbor on Avenue C in Perryville, said he rarely saw Corder and knew nothing about him or his estranged wife, Lydia, a licensed practical nurse at the nearby Veterans Administration hospital.

His older brother, John, and other relatives said Corder alternated between “dynamic” moments of high hopes and periods of black despair and alcoholic oblivion. John Corder, his brother’s sometime business partner and his closest friend, said he had not seen Frank for three weeks.

In the last 16 months, Corder’s father died, his trucking business collapsed and his marriage dissolved. His mother is seriously ill with cancer. He was barred from flying because of his history of drug and alcohol abuse. He could not pay his living expenses or his drug debts. The Baptist minister who consoled him after his father’s death and persuaded him to seek treatment for his alcoholism moved out of the area, deepening his isolation.

While Frank Corder entered a seven-day detoxification program last year at the VA’s Perry Point Medical Center, relatives said they suspected he had been drinking and using cocaine heavily in recent months.

George said that she spoke to Frank Corder late last week and that he was living “on the streets,” which, she said, happened occasionally when he was on a drug or alcohol binge.

His aunt, Edith Dishman of Aberdeen, Md., said that when he was on a binge, “he would get all the drugs he could get. It was a stupid act. . . . It’s like the devil getting hold of him.”

She said that Frank Corder had no history of violence and that she had never heard him discuss suicide. And she does not believe that he intended to harm President Clinton or his family.

George agreed, saying that Frank Corder admired Clinton and once said: “Anybody who can say on TV that he smoked pot, even if he didn’t inhale, is OK with me.”

Frank Corder thought that his father had never loved him, she said. “This was a way of proving, ‘Hey, I exist too,’ ” she said. “He was wanting to be recognized.”

George added that John Corder had told her his brother had a fascination with German teen-ager Mathias Rust, who evaded Soviet security and landed a light plane in Moscow’s Red Square in 1987.

Frank Corder grew up in a trim one-story house on Darlington Avenue in Aberdeen. His ailing mother still lives there.

His father, William, was an aircraft mechanic and a licensed pilot. Their father used to take them up for rides.

When he signed up to take flying lessons at the Harford County Air Park a few years ago, his father warned the instructor, Joseph Kesser, that Frank had drug problems and should not be allowed anywhere near a cockpit.

Kesser, who is a co-owner of the Cessna that Frank Corder stole Sunday night, said that a Maryland state trooper also warned him of his student’s substance abuse problem. Kesser ended his instruction after one lesson.

“He talked big,” said Kesser. “He had big dreams of starting an airline. He had champagne tastes and a Pepsi Cola wallet.”

Frank Corder dropped out of high school and briefly served in the military, relatives said. Army records do not indicate why he was discharged after six months but his aunt said that he left high school because he had a drinking problem.

John Corder said that his brother had been married twice before, with both marriages ending in divorce. He has one child.