Artis Henderson seeks truth behind father’s fatal crash

Author Artis Henderson’s father died in a two-seater Piper Cub plane crash when she was 5 years old, leaving her with life-threatening injuries and an eventual fact-finding mission.

All her life, her mother, family and friends referred to the June 20, 1985, crash as “the accident.” They never spoke about Tilton Lamar Chester Jr., the pilot father who doted on her, nor their life in Miami, nor their 500-acre farm in northern Georgia, where the crash happened. After the IRS took everything — their home, islands in the Bahamas, airplanes, boats, even chickens — her mother moved her to a little house on Fort Myers Beach, isolating her from people she’d grown up with.

The 47-year-old former Eastern Airlines pilot and Army and Navy veteran had become one of the nation’s largest marijuana smugglers, operating out of Miami in the 1970s. He was about to testify in a trial that already had implicated top officials — from the prime minister of the Bahamas and a U.S. district attorney to Colombian drug cartels. And Henderson found he wasn’t the only witness to die in a plane crash or be brutally murdered.

“I worked on this book over such a long period of time that … by the ending drafts, my opinion on what had happened had changed so much,” Henderson says. “… It really took me until the final, final drafts to be like, ‘Sh—, this was not an accident.’”

Who ensured he’d die before testifying? Possibly the U.S. government.

No Ordinary Bird: Drug Smuggling, a Plane Crash, and a Daughter’s Quest for the Truth was published Sept. 2, 2025, by HarperCollins. The memoir is a blend of true-crime investigation and a biography of a multimillionaire marijuana smuggler and Georgia farmer. 

Henderson, who lives in a historic Fort Myers cottage, is a certified master naturalist, advanced open-water diver and award-winning journalist who won a 2024 Fulbright–National Geographic Award. She’s written about the environment for The New York Times, National Geographic, Sierra and others, and locally for Gulfshore Life and Gulfshore Business. Her first book, Unremarried Widow, also a memoir, was listed as The New York Times Editors’ Choice and named to more than 10 best-book-of-the-year lists.

Ten years ago, after hearing about Henderson’s past, a friend urged her to write a book. It was the not knowing that piqued Henderson’s curiosity. She dug in and didn’t let go, poring through court transcripts and newspaper articles, interviewing drug smugglers, reporters and others, obtaining the National Transportation Safety Board report and crash photos and filing federal Freedom of Information Act requests with the CIA, FBI and DEA.

“I’m fully convinced the FOIA system is a scam. I was not historically a conspiracy theorist,” she says, noting she received official documents “redacted beyond readability … I think the FOIA system is to give people the illusion of access. I don’t believe it’s a system that’s designed to grant people access to facts. I think it’s a system to placate people.”

After traveling to her former Georgia home — now a regional retreat — she learned her father was a beloved resident. Some believed he was in the Federal Witness Protection Program, as her uncle was. Others she interviewed revealed the drug smuggling was linked to the Iran-Contra scandal. Her father and other smugglers flew arms to the Contras, filling planes with marijuana on return trips while the U.S. government looked away.

The Columbia Journalism School grad, who calls writing an obsession, compiled more than 1,000 pages of notes while juggling a full-time graduate program in fine arts and fiction, freelancing full-time and teaching clients.

“One of the reasons I wanted to be a writer is because it’s in my soul,” she says, adding she never wanted a 9-to-5 job, but that’s now her schedule. “My best times are in the morning. I tend to produce heavy in the morning and then do lighter work, editing or reading, in the afternoon.”

Initially, she awakened at 5 or 6 a.m. “I was really religious about that and loved it because it was dark and nobody bothered you,” she explains, wanting her most productive hours of the day to be dedicated to the book.

“I have periods of intense intellectual activity,” she says. “Now I’m in a stretch of nothing mentally, and I’m champing at the bit.”

She equated her work to planting a field that produces crops, which are harvested. “In a healthy system, you have to let it be fallow, sometimes for a season,” she says.

In fact, a seed of an idea is germinating for her third book, but it’s her fallow period. She’s resting her brain as she renovates her hurricane-damaged cottage — and one next door for her mother, who was supposed to be on the plane.

Henderson’s book is available locally at Books on Third in Naples, Sunshine Booksellers North on Marco Island and Barnes & Noble in Naples and Fort Myers.