If I had to guess, ranchpig, I'd say your crash was caused by a control surface failure due to a return of flutter or a linkage problem that was casued by the earlier flutter but not corrected.

It's amazing how the brain works. If you loose just one flight control, it actually feels like you have no control at all, unless you take the time to verify each control by itself to see what is going on. In most cases, you don't have that time, so you think you have no control.

Just yesterday, I was instructing a student. I took over for a moment after he said something was odd, and it felt like I had no control. Fortunatly, the plane was in level flight at the time. The elevator didn't respond, but I found that the ailerons, rudder, and throttle were fine. But it did take a few moments of stick wiggleing to get my brain to register that everything except the elevator was fine. Oh, I managed to "firebird" it down, made a couple of flat turns around the field and aimed for some tall grass. Only broke the wood prop, if it had been a MAS, it wouldn't have broken either. Turned out the screw holding the elevator arm on the servo had backed out, and the arm came off in flight.

A few weeks back, I had one of my planes fly in to violent aileron flutter that stripped out the aileron servo. Again, no aileron control, but everything else worked. It was a 3-channel combat plane, with no rudder. A bit of intersting use of the elevator and throttle and I was able to ditch in the tall grass with no damage to the plane. But again there was a long moment of "I have no control, oh wait, I have some control, but not what I expect".

In both of those, it happend high enough off the ground that I had time to figure out what was going on. If it had happened lower, the results would have been much messier.