IN SEARCH OF A NAME

01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, September 18, 2005

BY RICHARD SALIT
Journal Staff Writer

NEWPORT -- It's a simple gravesite -- tucked in the rear of a small cemetery, sandwiched between two other plots, pressed hard against a metal fence and obscured by drooping tree branches. And it's marked only with a small plain stone.

"UNKNOWN US NAVY," it reads. "WORLD WAR II AUG 1943."

Now, 62 years after a sailor's badly decomposed body was fished out of Narragansett Bay and buried here, the mystery may soon be solved.

It's a story about a deadly boat accident that few locals remember, a veteran on a personal mission to identify and honor unknown service members, and the grief that grips families whose loved ones never come home from war -- dead or alive.

But mostly it's a story about three sailors -- Seaman 1st Class Raymond Johnson, of Fort Wayne, Ind., Seaman 1st Class Cecil C. Joyner, of Jacksonville, Fla., and Seaman 2nd Class Jack M. Shaul, of New Lisbon, Ind.

One of them is buried in Newport. But that may soon change.

AS THEY BOARDED a Navy whaleboat after a night out on the town in Newport in December 1942, the 17 sailors knew a world war awaited them. But they had no idea a fierce squall off Block Island was bearing down on their 26-foot vessel.

They were returning to the 384-foot destroyer Gherardi, moored at a Navy pier at Coddington Cove, in Middletown. The ship had been commissioned only 75 days before, and its crew was green. They had come for training at the naval base's Torpedo Station Annex.

It should have taken just 30 minutes for the whaleboat to motor from Newport Harbor to the destroyer. But along the way, the winds began gusting to nearly 40 mph. The seas quickly turned menacing, repeatedly washing over the rails. Then a large wave filled the boat and stalled the engine. The next capsized it, tossing the crew into the icy waters of Narragansett Bay.

Only two sailors survived, desperately holding onto the boat until it washed ashore in Jamestown. Some bodies were found the next day and more were recovered in the following months. All were identified. That left three missing -- Johnson, Joyner and Shaul.

In August 1943, eight months after the accident, fishermen found another body floating in the Bay. It was missing a head and arms and was badly decomposed. Authorities could not identify it. They did, however, conclude that it was an enlisted sailor because of the Navy trousers found on the remains and that he was probably from the crew of the Gherardi because of the whaleboat accident.

With no name and no home, the body was buried in Island Cemetery Annex.

Meanwhile, the families of Johnson, Joyner and Shaul received telegrams from the Navy informing them their loved ones were presumed to have drowned in Rhode Island when their boat capsized.

IN 1995, a job brought Ted Darcy to Island Cemetery. He was working for WFI Research Group, of Fall River, and had been hired to learn more about foreign aviators killed in accidents in the United States. While walking down a row of tombstones in Lot 172-173, he came across grave 21. It was unmarked.

"I'm wondering why the hell is there this space in the middle of the row," he recalls. "When I finished, I went back to the office. A woman said that's the unknown sailor."

A retired Marine who served in Vietnam, Darcy remembers thinking, "Oh no, he's got to have a marker. I thought that's as far as it would go."

But even after he got a local veterans group to install a stone marker, he couldn't let it go. He pored over newspaper archives until he came across articles about the Gherardi accident and the bodies that were found months later. He figured his unknown sailor was one of the three men whose bodies were unaccounted for.

In 1943, the Navy had no way of identifying the body. But in 1995, Darcy knew there was a way. The military was using DNA testing to identify unknown service members who had been killed, even those who had died many years earlier. It would mean locating the families of Johnson, Joyner and Shaul and then persuading the Navy to disinter the remains.

Darcy had experience tracking down families like these. But he didn't know what he was getting into this time. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't seem to find Joyner's family. And without blood relatives of all three of the missing sailors, the Navy wouldn't disinter the remains and conduct DNA testing, he said.

"I dialed every Joyner in Jacksonville," he said. "Nobody knew him. Nobody heard about him. Of course, his wife had remarried and her name had changed. . . . It's the hardest one I've ever done."

It would be eight years before he would get the break he needed.

MACK VAN OSDELL JR. remembers how his mother used to look at every sailor she saw in their hometown of Jacksonville. Could it be Cecil? Her only brother had supposedly drowned in Rhode Island, but how could anyone be sure?

"She never really believed he had died because the body was never found," Van Osdell said.

Van Osdell was only 5 when his 22-year-old uncle left behind a widow.

"I think they were only married three months. They were high school sweethearts," he said.

Van Osdell traveled around the world during a 23-year career in the Air Force and then worked for a petroleum company. It wasn't until after he fully retired that he turned his attention to his uncle. By that time, Van Osdell's mother was Joyner's sole surviving sibling. Joyner's widow had remarried and is still alive in Florida.

"It was something I always wondered about," said Van Osdell. "No one in the family had looked into it."

The family did know that Joyner had been aboard the Gherardi. With that bit of information, Van Osdell and his wife, Sally, began searching the Internet this summer. They learned about a veterans group called the USS Gherardi Association, which coincidentally was having its annual reunion in Jacksonville this year. They sent an e-mail to its president, Eugene F. Phillips, of Vernon, Conn., asking for information about Joyner. They were amazed at the information Phillips quickly uncovered.

A man named Ted Darcy had been looking for someone from Joyner's family for a long time, he told them.

ON A RECENT summer day, Mack Van Osdell stood next to the grave of the "Unknown Sailor." He pushed aside branches to get a good look at the stone.

"Sixty-three years and it's finally coming to light," he said. "It's mind-boggling." Van Osdell and his wife already had plans to visit the Northeast when they learned his uncle might be buried in Newport. At the cemetery, they met Darcy and Phillips for the first time. Phillips took a log book out of his trunk and looked up Joyner.

"He joined the ship on 10 October, 1942, in Norfolk, Virginia," he told the Van Osdells.

There's a good chance Johnson, Joyner and Shaul would have survived the war, Phillips said. The Gherardi went on to take part in the Normandy invasion and never lost a crew member in combat, he said.

If one of the three missing Gherardi crew members is buried here, there's some indication it's Joyner. The sailor whose remains were found was estimated to be 5 feet 10 to 5 feet 11. Joyner was 5 feet 9.

"He was the tallest of the three," said Darcy, who then added that it could just as well be Johnson or Shaul. "That's as far as you can take it without DNA testing."

Van Osdell, who has agreed to give blood for the test, said he and his mother would be pleased with any outcome.

"Even if it's not my uncle, one of the other families will have closure," he said.

After getting in touch with the Van Osdells, Darcy tracked down the relatives quickly. He called people in Shaul's hometown and learned his sister had married and moved to Bloomfield, Colo. For Raymond Johnson, an article published in a newspaper led Darcy to a tip that Johnson's brother, Jessie, was in Needles, Calif.

RAYMOND JOHNSON knew how to take care of himself. He could also take care of his little brother.

"He never let anyone bother me," said Jesse Johnson, the youngest of nine children. "He wasn't very big, but he was tough." They grew up poor and times got harder when their father died young, in 1936. Raymond left home to work on his own and enlisted in the Navy in 1941. A year later, the family would learn of his death. Jesse was 13.

"We were told he was lost in a boat accident. That's all we was told," he said. "I was in the service myself from '45 to '50. I know what the service is, and I know these things happen. I'm not callous."

His mother took the news hard.

"I came home from school and she was really broken up," he said. "I remember that very well. . . . I'm the only one left and I'm 76 years old."

Jesse was happy to provide a blood sample to help identify the remains. But it's for the other families and the Gherardi Association, not so much for himself, he said. From what he's heard, it's probably not his brother. Even if it is, he's not very emotional about it.

"I don't have any feelings about where he should go," he said. "I'm going to be cremated when I'm dead. When you're gone, you're gone. That's it."

WHEN JANE RYAN picked up the phone recently, it was a stranger bearing strange news.

"He just called out of the blue one day and said, 'We think we have found your brother,' " she said, recalling the conversation with Ted Darcy.

For an instant, the unimaginable came to mind. Jack's alive, she thought. Then she came to her senses. Darcy was talking about buried remains that might or might not be her brother's.

The Shaul family lost Jack when he was 19. Jane was just 11 at the time. Her brother had dropped out of school and enlisted in 1942.

"Everyone in the family was very involved with the war," Ryan recalls. "My oldest brother joined the Air Force and my second oldest joined the Marines. And Jack went into the Navy."

By the end of the year, her parents would receive the tragic news about Jack. They already had experienced the grief of losing a child.

"We had lost my brother, who would have been two years younger, maybe three years younger than Jack," she said. "He had been run over by a car when he was eight years old. He had died in my father's arms."

After the news arrived about Jack, she said, "our lives were never the same." Her parents moved from Indiana to a town in Florida that had a naval base. "That was really bad because there were sailors everywhere. My parents were always looking into everyone's faces and thinking maybe it was Jack and he had amnesia."

Even though she's 74 now, has long since moved far from home and is the only surviving sibling of six children, Ryan definitely wants her brother sent home.

"If it's his body, it would be such closure," she said. "I could get his body and take it back to that little town. They have a beautiful little cemetery there where my parents are buried."

THE NAVY has sent kits to each of the families and each has given blood samples and returned them.

"We're not at the end of the story. We're at the beginning," said Ken Terry, head of the POW/MIA branch of the Navy's casualty-assistance division. "Navy Mortuary has to go through all of the red tape for getting the remains disinterred."

That process could take up to a year. But once DNA is extracted from the skeletal remains, the laboratory analysis shouldn't take too long. Terry said the case was unique because most DNA testing is undertaken for service members killed in combat.

"It's an interesting case, to say the least," he said.

Darcy expects the disinterment will happen much sooner than a year and that one of the families -- Johnson, Joyner or Shaul -- will finally have an answer to a stubborn mystery.

Richard Salit can be reached at (401) 277-7467 or by e-mail at rsalit@projo.com.



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