I was supposed to be on that plane.. then I changed my mind at the airport. I don’t know the logic of it all but 30 years on I still feel so guilty
DOCUMENTARY MARKS THREE
A woman who lost her dad in the Lockerbie bombing has forged an extraordinary 30-year friendship with the couple who found his body. Banker Frank Cuilla, 45, was discovered still strapped in seat 11B in a field belonging to farmers Margaret and Hugh Connell on the night Pan-Am flight 103 crashed on to the town. The Connells watched over his body for 24 hours before he was taken to a makeshift morgue. This summer, Frank’s widow Mary Lou, 75, and family took the grandchildren he never met on a moving pilgrimage to Lockerbie to meet the couple. As the 30th anniversary of Britain’s worst-ever terror attack approaches, Frank’s daughter Laurie has shared pictures of the Cuillas’ touching journey to the farm where they laid roses at the spot where he fell. Laurie, 49, of New Jersey, said: “It was very emotional. “My dad was cremated so we have no grave or marker to visit. There’s no other place that makes us feel as connected to him. We’ve grown incredibly close to Hugh and Margaret over the years, calling each other, sending Christmas gifts and writing old-fashioned letters to each other. “It’s such a special bond.” The last time Laurie, her mum Mary Lou, sister Michelle Lipkin, 47, and brother Frank, 51, visited Lockerbie was five years after the disaster. Laurie added: “All we’d seen was TV images of fires burning. “Until we heard dad’s story, I thought he had possibly had a fiery death or imagined that the plane had blown to bits mid-air, but he was relatively unmarked when he was found.”