EASLEY, S.C. – Capt. William Kennedy Mauldin returned home Friday, 56 years after his fighter plane was shot down over North Korea.

“Let us be glad and rejoice, for one of our own was lost and now is found,” said Air Force Chaplain Steve Mays.

For Mauldin’s survivors, Friday’s ceremony brought closure to what had been a heart-wrenching search.

“It’s like something very heavy has been lifted off me,” said Mauldin’s widow, Margot Robinson of Easley, S.C. “We can come (here) and we know where he is.”

A native of Germany, Robinson met the Pickens, S.C., native after World War II when he was stationed at Simmershausen, Germany. They married, moved to the United States and had two children.

Since Mauldin was a career airman, they were living in California when, in 1951, Mauldin was ordered to go to Korea, Robinson said. She and the children moved to South Carolina where they stayed with her husband’s family.

A year after the crash on Feb. 21, 1952, Capt. Mauldin was declared missing and presumed dead. Still, there was some hope he was alive or maybe captured, Robinson said.

“But as time went by, we didn’t know (and) I sort of gave up on it,” said Robinson, who eventually remarried. “It’s been a long time, and I thank God for finally bringing him home.”

Robinson’s daughter, Corrine Mauldin of Charleston, S.C., was just 2 when her father was shot down flying the reconnaissance mission over North Korea.

Her memories of him come from what friends and relatives told her.

While her stepfather had lovingly provided and cared for her, Corrine Mauldin said she still wanted to learn what had happened to her birth father.

By the time she got to college in the mid-1960s, Corrine Mauldin started writing the Air Force, hoping to find clues to what happened to the handsome Citadel cadet with wavy hair and an easy smile.

The breakthrough came Feb. 11, when scientists identified Capt. Mauldin’s remains among the contents of 208 boxes of human remains that were turned over by the North Korean government.

The identity was determined by using mitochondrial DNA. Scientists use mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited through the mother’s bloodline, because it’s plentiful and can last for years, according to the Defense Department.

“We’re just grateful for science,” Corrine Mauldin said.

The pilot’s cousin, Ward Ayres of Surfside Beach, S.C., provided the blood sample yielding the genetic evidence scientists needed to make positive identification.

“I think it’s cool,” said Ayres, now 75 and a retired airman. “It’s about time they found him.”



Mauldin’s family, though, is one of the few from South Carolina who have been able to bring their loved ones home from Korea.

About 470 South Carolina service members died in the Korean War and 113 are listed as missing. Mauldin is the third South Carolinian who was declared missing in Korea whose remains were identified through DNA tests.



On Friday, Mauldin was buried at the base of a flagpole with full military honors as 150 sun-drenched mourners gathered near his grave.

“We’re here to stand in honor and in support of the family – the family that so long ago gave, and who now is receiving . . . a father, husband, friend, brother back,” said the Rev. Jim Yeary, a retired Episcopal minister from Rome, Ga.

The graveside service concluded after a Shaw Air Force Base honors team, wearing blue dress uniforms with silver trim, fired three volleys of musketry – a 300-year-old military tradition of bidding farewell to fallen warriors.

Then two T-6 Texan single-engine trainers flew over Robinson Memorial Gardens in solemn tribute. The planes, used to train pilots at Vance Air Force Base, Okla., are the closest airframes in the Air Force inventory that resemble the RF-51 Mauldin flew, a spokesman said.

After the flyover, a bugler played taps and then the U.S. flag that covered Mauldin’s coffin was presented to his daughter.

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INVESTIGATORS NEED THE RIGHT RELATIVE TO COMPARE DNA

Mitochondrial DNA unlocked the 56-year-old mystery surrounding Capt. William Mauldin’s disappearance.

But the investigative tool requires finding the right relative to provide a DNA sample to match – and a little luck.

Scientists needed mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited through the mother’s bloodline, because it’s plentiful and can last for years, according to the Joint POW Accounting Command. The genetic material needed to positively identify Mauldin came from a nephew of the pilot’s mother.

The military services search for eligible donors so that all remains of missing service members might be identified, said Larry Greer, a spokesman for Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office.

The Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory, which conducts the research, holds monthly meetings around the country with family members to collect DNA material.

And, so far, genetic material has been collected from 60 percent of families whose loved ones have not been accounted for since World War II, the Pentagon said.

The job of identifying the missing is daunting.

That’s because some 88,000 American service members who fought in World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam War and Desert Storm have yet to come home.

Mauldin, an Air Force pilot from Pickens, S.C., was shot down Feb. 21, 1952, while flying a reconnaissance mission over North Korea.

His remains were found in boxes the North Korean government turned over to the United States in the mid-1990s.

For more information about the Defense Department program aimed at identifying missing service members, visit www.dtic.mil/dpmo/index.htm.

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(c) 2008, The State (Columbia, S.C.).

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Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

AP-NY-07-18-08 2300EDT