On December 21, 1988, Mary Lou Ciulla was cooking dinner with one eye on a TV soap opera. The ordinary domestic scene would have quickly evaporated from memory had it not been for the intrusion of a news flash that changed the New Jersey resident’s life.
Reports were coming in of a Pan Am flight crashing in the southwest of Scotland and terror soon dawned on Ciulla that the plane could be carrying her husband, Frank.
Her daughter, Michelle Ciulla Lipkin, was 17 at the time and was called home from school as the family began a search for answers.
She walked into scenes of her sister phoning Pan Am in a frantic attempt to establish if Frank made the flight. At 3am, 12 hours after the plane had come down over Lockerbie, they got the news they dreaded: Frank had checked in.
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