DNA LAYS TO REST LIFELONG QUEST FOR AIRMAN'S IDENTITY
By Michael Fitzgerald
Record Columnist
For 60 years, someone's remains have rested in a French Camp mausoleum behind the name Wesley Stuart, a World War II airman killed in 1944. But the family never believed it was him.
Now, finally, Stuart's sister, Mary Roberts, has proved it. Roberts, who battled the Navy for years, paid for a DNA test that proved the Navy brought the wrong man home.
"They wanted me to go away. Trust me," said Roberts, a Stockton bar owner. "But I didn't. They don't know Irish people. Irish people are persistent."
This latest twist in the story of Wesley Stuart involves an admiral's apology, an honor guard and Stuart's hope that, far away on a tiny coral island in the Pacific, recently discovered remains may really be those of her beloved brother.
On Sept. 13, 1944, Wesley Raymond Stuart, a lanky, 6-foot-1, blue-eyed, fun-loving cowboy, who rode bucking broncos in Oakdale rodeos, who played guitar and sang, flew off the deck of the carrier U.S.S Enterprise, bound for the island of Peleliu.
Stuart, 20, a turret gunner in a three-man Avenger light bomber, never returned. Civilian searchers with the Bent Prop Project found his plane's wreckage in 2005.
They conjecture Stuart's Avenger, crossing over the island's shore, took a direct hit from intense Japanese anti-aircraft fire. Its bomb and gas tank exploded.
Shortly after the battle, 12-year-old Mary and her parents came home to find a note on their door. Her mother screamed and fell to the ground.
The jungle concealed the plane's scattered wreckage.
Four long years passed, and the war was over, when the Navy notified the family Stuart's remains - skeletal fragments - had been recovered.
To the Stuarts, the delay in identifying Wesley's remains, and the thin evidence on which identification was based, raised doubts. Stuart's mother disbelieved.
"How she knew that, I don't know," Roberts confessed. "Mother's intuition. Something."
But the family interred the remains. "My mother took good care of him. She said, 'It's not my son. But it's someone's son.' "
Roberts grew up with the doubt. Long after her parents died, when forensic DNA technology evolved, she asked the Navy to test the remains. The Navy refused.
"The POW/MIA bunch (Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command, or JPAC) gave it all their spin - and boy, can they spin it. They're better than Bill O'Reilly," Roberts said.
When Stuart's plane was found in 2005, human remains were found beneath the fuselage. "I thought, 'I have to find out. I have to know,' " Roberts recalled.
So she hired an attorney to handle the legalities of disinterment and sent remains from the mausoleum to a lab in Pennsylvania along with a sample of her DNA.
The specialist called her personally. "I didn't want your attorney to call you and tell you," she told Roberts. "The DNA didn't match."
Roberts said she notified the Navy, which changed its tune. "No more spin. They came down to earth. ... Let me tell you, it really shook them up."
An official from JPAC promised a letter of apology, signed by an admiral, Roberts said. The Navy is sending an honor guard and "high-ranking official" to Park View Cemetery for a formal disinterment ceremony on April 23.
The unknown soldier will be transported to Honolulu, where experts will try to match the remains to the military's database of MIAs.
Roberts wonders if the remains beneath the fuselage are her brother's. She hopes JPAC will investigate.
But there's another possibility: Could the Navy have mixed up the other two crewmen, sending Wesley's remains to the family of the airman who long rested in French Camp?
"If they never find my brother, I can accept that," Roberts said.
The discovery of Wesley's plane and the photographs taken by Bent Prop gave her partial closure, and the DNA test put an end to a lifelong battle with both the Navy and uncertainty.
She doesn't expect a happier ending than that. "No, no. That isn't life. That isn't the way it is."