Pilot Had Tried to Talk Friend Into Joining Him : Crash: Woman declined offer of plane ride after watching him spend day drinking beer. She says he also was smoking crack.

The evening before he crashed a light plane into the White House, Frank Corder sat in the doorway of a cheap motel room, trying to talk a new friend into going flying with him.

“You ever been up in a plane?” Cindy Jianniney, 38, said he asked her. “I think I’m going to take my plane out tonight.”

Jianniney, a short, chubby woman with wings tattooed on her cleavage, rejected the offer. “The lord built my ass low to the ground and I think I’m going to keep it there,” she said.

Jianniney had spent the day shooting the breeze at Keyser’s Motel here with Corder and watching as he drank beer after beer and disappeared several times into his room to smoke crack cocaine.

A couple of times, she recalled Tuesday, he walked away from the dreary motel, saying that he was going to the store. She said that she suspected he was probably buying more crack.

Later that evening, Corder called relatives to say, “I’m checking out for good,” Jianniney said she was told by an investigator she spoke to Monday.

That night, Corder stole a small plane from an airfield seven miles away and began the flight that ended in the crash that killed him at the White House.

During Corder’s last days, Jianniney and others recalled, he was depressed and desperate for drugs.

“He was stressed out,” Jianniney said. “He did not have any more money. He needed more money for drugs.”

When she told him she was leaving about 7 p.m. Sunday, he begged her to spend the night, just to keep him company because he was so lonely. But she told him that if she did so, her boyfriend would never believe they were just friends. She promised to stop by later, but never did.

It was not until Monday evening, when Secret Service agents knocked on the door of her apartment, that she learned what happened to Corder. Jianniney said Corder had suggested during the week that suicide was on his mind.

“He said he had thought about killing himself but he didn’t want to die alone in a hotel room,” she said. “He wanted to be remembered. That’s why he went out with such a bang.”

Other people who were at the motel Sunday evening confirmed that Corder had appeared high on drugs and frequently went into his room, sometimes alone and sometimes with someone they said was a drug supplier, to smoke what they all thought was crack cocaine.

Another man who spent part of Sunday with Corder was Dave Wachter, who said Tuesday that he had biked from another motel three-quarters of a mile away to sell Corder marijuana on Sunday.

Wachter, 24, said that he watched Corder smoking marijuana and crack cocaine. Corder wanted more drugs than he had money to pay for, Wachter said, so as collateral Corder gave him the keys to his Cadillac, his wallet and a television set that belonged to the motel.

A loner who withdrew from his family during binges with alcohol and drugs, Corder apparently spent most of his time during his last days depressed about his failed marriage and his bankrupt business.

After his wife asked him to leave their home three weeks earlier, he lived in his yellow Cadillac until he met Jianniney’s boyfriend on Labor Day weekend. Jianniney and the boyfriend opened their home to him, and he spent several nights and days in their one-bedroom apartment.

Friday she asked her employer and landlord, a woman whose holdings include Keyser’s Motel, if she could give Corder a room. “He was very depressed,” said owner Jackie Keyser.

Corder settled into a $500-a-month, 10-foot by 10-foot efficiency apartment, but paid Keyser just $25.

On Friday evening, Jianniney said, Corder was so desperate for drugs that he agreed to drive another woman--a drug dealer and friend of his--to Baltimore so he could get more crack cocaine.

The friend told Jianniney that she and Corder argued because she refused to let him smoke the crack until after he dropped her off in Aberdeen. He kicked her out of the car and she had to hitchhike home.

Afterward, Corder’s Cadillac broke down in Joppatowne, Md., about 15 miles from his motel, and he left the car there and hitchhiked home.