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Cash Landing

Phil Hedrick got millions of dollars after the 1993 Life Flight helicopter accident. But the money couldn't satisfy his wife's needs.

By Tony Moton 

Phil Hedrick was a talker, and it was with charmed verbosity that the 38-year-old bachelor found a way to lasso his future wife, Gaela, a three-time divorcée with four children and a history of bad marriages.

"I didn't want anything to do with him," Gaela remembers. "But I thought he was nice and he talked a good talk. He talked about how he had been single and how he'd really like to have a family and kids."

From the word go in January 1988, Phil pursued Gaela by using everything from chivalry to Shakespeare. He was working as a respiratory therapist at St. Luke's Hospital near the Plaza. Gaela's grandmother, dying of cancer, was one of Phil's patients. Gaela had been impressed by the way Phil paid attention to his duties -- she also was in the medical profession. After breaking off her third marriage in South Dakota, she had moved back to Missouri seeking a job as a neuro-diagnostic technician, specializing in neurological disorders, surgical monitoring, and sleep disorders. Gaela and Phil immediately had something in common, something with which to start a pleasant conversation. Phil took full advantage.

"We were talking about different equipment and stuff and I told Phil I was looking for a job. He told me where to look on the bulletin board," Gaela says. "I went to the coffee shop to smoke and get something to drink and I told him I'd come back after he finished doing what he was doing."

Phil couldn't wait. He stopped by the coffee shop.

"He hit on me like crazy," Gaela recalls. "I was 29, young, and thin, and I knew his whole life story before I finished that hot chocolate. I thought he was just blowing smoke. He said I could use him for a job reference, and I said, 'I'm not going to use him as a reference because I don't know if anybody likes him. Why should I put him down as a reference?' But I got the job."

Gaela was hired as a technician in the sleep disorders lab at St. Luke's, but on the first day she was scheduled to work, her grandmother died. Phil consoled her.

"I always said my grandma fixed me up with him," Gaela says. "Phil knew I worked late and he was a night owl. He started calling and reading Shakespeare to me." At first, Gaela thought Phil was weird. He was nice, but she wasn't interested in a relationship. "I still wore my wedding ring because I didn't want anyone coming on to me."

Phil waited five months before telling one of Gaela's co-workers he wanted to take Gaela on a date. Gaela thought it was another one of Phil's follies, but he eventually asked her to attend an awards banquet for the St. Luke's Life Flight air ambulance service -- Phil was a paramedic in the helicopter rescue unit. Gaela, who says she considered Phil a "very lonely person who wanted to be a part of a family," accepted his invitation.

On May 27, 1988, Gaela and Phil had a marathon first date. The Life Flight awards ceremony and dinner, which honored St. Luke's and St. Joseph Health Center for their helicopter units' clean safety record, got the couple's night off to a slow start. "I slept through half of it," she remembers.

But after the banquet, Gaela perked up. She and Phil went to the old Medlin's Colonial Inn in Raytown and listened to Irish music. They drove to the Plaza and sat near a fountain. Phil started getting romantic -- he picked flowers for her. Then they drove to a scenic lookout near Kansas City's downtown airport and talked some more. Phil didn't take her home until 5 a.m.

"We spent all of our time together after that," she says.

Philip Dean Hedrick proposed to Gaela Anne Primeaux less than a month after they started dating in 1988. Wearing his best dark blue suit, with a white shirt and brown shoes, Phil escorted Gaela to the bridge in Loose Park. He brought along a stuffed animal -- Gaela recalls it being a turkey -- and announced the critter was serving as a witness.

"Let's do this in order," Phil said.

Keeping a straight face, Phil asked Gaela to go steady with him. He gave her his 1968 Wellington (Kansas) High School class ring. She accepted it.

Phil went to a knee and asked her to marry him. She said yes.Gaela had been Mrs. Philip Dean Hedrick for four and a half years when she received an urgent call on the fifth anniversary of their first date -- May 27, 1993. It was Dave Wofford, one of Phil's fellow Life Flight paramedics. He wanted to know whether Gaela had heard about Phil.

Gaela was confused. She thought Phil had gotten into an argument at work and been fired, because he recently had been complaining about the Life Flight job. "Dave, what are you talking about?"

"There has been an accident. And Phil was on it."

"Is he okay?"

Wofford wasn't sure, but he had fears he was keeping to himself.

"Just come to the hospital right now."

After hanging up, Gaela called her mother and one of her sisters in Hollister, Missouri, near Branson. Gaela's family had lived in the Ozarks for several years, and her dream was to move back there someday to be close to her people. In the minutes after hearing from Wofford, Gaela's emotions started taking over. On the phone with her mother and sister, Gaela began screaming "Oh, my God!" as she tried to explain what little she knew about Phil's situation.

During the five-hour drive to Kansas City, her relatives heard radio reports about a helicopter accident: In the early morning, an air ambulance had crashed near Cameron, Missouri. Details were sketchy, but four people -- a pilot, an accident victim, and two crew members -- had been involved.

"We listened to the radio all the way up," says Gaela's sister, Gena Hedgpeth. "They were saying they were all dead."

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