3 Accused in Theft of Flight 800 Debris

Authorities on Friday charged two TWA employees and a policeman-turned-author in the theft of pieces of wreckage from TWA Flight 800 which were used to underpin a theory that a missile struck the jetliner.

According to a criminal complaint, TWA pilot Terrell Stacy stole scraps of seat fabric from the hangar where TWA Flight 800 was being reassembled and gave it to James Sanders, a former California police officer who wrote a book that said a missile downed the plane. Stacey also provided Sanders with confidential documents from the National Transportation Safety Board’s investigation of the July 1996 crash that killed all 230 people aboard the Boeing 747, court papers stated.

Prosecutors charged that Sanders took the fabric to a laboratory for analysis and emphasized to lab personnel his desire that the tests show the presence of solid rocket propellant.

When the tests provided no conclusive evidence of rocket fuel, Sanders misrepresented the results to the media, according to the court papers.

Sanders’ wife, Elizabeth, a TWA flight attendant, was also charged in the federal complaint filed in New York.

“These defendants are charged not only with committing a serious crime, they have also increased the pain already inflicted on the victims’ families,” said Assistant FBI Director James K. Kallstrom, who stressed that “the criminal investigation is far from over.”

Sanders and his wife face 10 years in prison if convicted on charges of removing and concealing parts of a plane involved in an accident. Stacey, who has been cooperating with the FBI, faces a possible year in jail if found guilty on charges of stealing government property.

In a statement, TWA said it was immediately removing Stacey from the accident investigation team and suspending him from flying. Sanders’ wife has been on leave since March and does not face immediate disciplinary action.

“On behalf of everyone at our company, we wish to apologize to everyone who has been involved in the Flight 800 investigation,” TWA said. “. . . We hope and believe that this incident has not seriously impeded the progress of the overall investigation.”

All the defendants are expected to surrender Monday, officials said. Stacey and the Sanderses could not be reached for comment Friday. James Sanders had earlier said that he found the fabric in his mailbox one day and had no idea how it got there.

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On Nov. 18, the FBI announced after a massive 16-month investigation that it could find no evidence a criminal act caused the plane to plunge into the Atlantic Ocean minutes after takeoff from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport.

Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board, who believe mechanical failure downed the jet, have determined the plane’s almost-empty center fuel tank exploded. But the precise source of ignition remains a mystery.

In March, the FBI learned that scraps of seat fabric from three rows of seats were removed from a hangar in Calverton, on Long Island.

Stacey told agents he was contacted by Sanders’ wife, whom he knew to be a fellow TWA employee, and that she wanted him to help her husband, who she said was investigating the crash.

“Our investigation revealed that Terrell Stacey, a TWA employee who worked at the Calverton hangar during the investigation, removed the material and provided it to the defendant James Sanders, the husband of the defendant Elizabeth Sanders, another TWA employee,” the FBI said.

On March 10, 1997, the Riverside Press-Enterprise published a series of articles asserting that a Navy missile was responsible for the crash. The articles extensively quoted Sanders.

“The defendant James Sanders stated that the seat parts from TWA 800 were covered with a red residue and that chemical analysis of the residue was consistent with solid rocket fuel,” the FBI said.

“The defendant James Sanders concluded that the test results, coupled with a residue trail . . . confirmed that a missile had punched through TWA 800 and caused it to explode.”

Court papers said that FBI agents questioned personnel at the laboratory where Sanders took the fabric for analysis and were told two tests did not provide any conclusive evidence of the presence of solid rocket fuel.

The FBI said that in February, Sanders sent a book proposal about the downing of TWA to a publisher, and the day after the articles appeared in the Press-Enterprise, he signed a contract for $125,000.