Woman travels thousands of miles to bring father home

She also sensed her mother's pain when she read the telegrams from the War Department declaring 1st Lt. Shannon E. Estill of Enid "missing." Taylor found she and her mother shared many of the same questions. Where was his plane? Where was his body?

They were questions Taylor asked herself daily, as a child longing for knowledge of the father she never knew and an adult who dedicated her life to studying the psychology of daughters who lost their fathers in war.

The letters ignited a 15-year quest that took Taylor across two continents to find answers to the questions she and her mother shared. Could she do what the U.S. military never did -- find her father and bring him home?

An empty runway
Henry Ham waited on the tarmac for Shannon Estill's plane to return. He had heard the reports that Estill's P-38J Lightning had been hit with a round from a German 88 mm anti-aircraft gun. Another pilot saw the plane spin out and explode in a ball of fire as it crashed in a field in eastern Germany.

But Ham, Estill's crew chief, still expected to see the plane appear in the sky at any second.

It was April 13, 1945, less than a month before the end of World War II in Europe and only three weeks after Sharon Taylor was born.

Ham couldn't believe that Estill had died, so he waited. All night.

"He was the only guy in the squadron with a baby," Ham later would tell Taylor. "I never got over that empty runway."

Estill was the last man in his squadron to die in action. He was 22.

The telegram came soon after. Mary Taylor Estill was told her husband was missing and presumed dead. Six months later, his status was changed to killed in action. But that wasn't enough for Mary Estill.

She wrote to the War Department:

"Even if there isn't a grave, there must have been something to bring about the declaration. I have decided to return, under separate cover, all the medals awarded my husband and recently received. I would prefer having information about my husband rather than awards you send me in an effort to rationalize his absence."

A clear voice
Taylor opened the first letter and immediately noticed her father's handwriting. It was identical to hers. The 17-year-old boy in the letter wrote with a maturity that captured her attention from the start.

"The very first one was written on notebook paper when they were in high school," Taylor said. "He is talking about how boring it is in class and how much he is thinking of her."

As Taylor read more of the letters she discovered the missing piece of her childhood.

Taylor's mother remarried after the war, and the family lived in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Although she had a good relationship with her stepfather, Taylor naturally was curious about her father.

The subject was touchy. It made her stepfather uncomfortable, and it was painful for her mother to speak about it. Taylor picked up bits and pieces from her mother. She heard more from her grandparents, whom she visited every summer in Enid at the farm where her father was raised.

Her grandmother gave her a gray box with the letters that would change her life. As a young woman, Taylor began opening the letters.

Reading her father's words, she discovered a man who seemed older than the 22 years he lived.

"His voice became very clear to me," Taylor said. "He seemed wise to me."

After her mother died, Taylor became less shy about reading the letters. In the early 1990s she decided she had to preserve them and set about transcribing them on her computer.

As she got into the project, the old questions resurfaced. She started writing down names -- the people her parents knew during the war.

The first person to call was Ham. He put Taylor in touch with other members of her father's squadron, and she began to attend their reunions. They told her stories about her father and gave her what information they could about his death.

She hated the thought that he still was in some unknown field half a world away.

Finally, one of the men put her in touch with someone who could help. His name was Hans-Guenther Ploes.

First evidence
Ploes is a German researcher who hunts for World War II aircraft crash sites. Taylor had been planning a trip to Germany anyway. She wanted to see the airfield where her father took his last steps and visit the taverns where he drank with his buddies.

Taylor spent several weeks with Ploes in March 2001, learning about his craft. She visited several crash sites with him but had no luck finding the one that truly mattered to her.

The two stayed in touch, and Taylor sent Ploes records that might help in finding her father's crash site.

Taylor returned to Germany a year later. The night she arrived, Ploes and two of the researchers who worked with him walked into her hotel room. He was holding an aircraft part in one hand and a book in the other.

He carefully removed the plastic wrapping from the heavy airplane part and showed Taylor the numbers on it. He matched them with the missing air crew report written by Estill's squadron commander in 1945.

Ploes had found a piece of her father's plane.

"I slept with it that night, on the pillow next to me," Taylor said. "That was the first tangible piece of evidence I had seen."

Because Ploes and his team also found what appeared to be human remains, they halted their recovery efforts and called the U.S. military's Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, which is responsible for locating missing U.S. soldiers. It took three years for the excavation of the site to begin.

Tears for lost fathers
Taylor noticed flowers at the base of the oak cross a German farmer had placed next to what she believed was her father's crash site near the town of Elsnig. She visited the field several times before the military arrived to unearth and study the wreckage.

The owner of the field was a woman whose husband had witnessed the crash as a 9-year-old. The woman spoke little English, and Taylor spoke little German. Through a translator, Taylor learned the woman's father was a soldier who died in World War II. Like Taylor, she had no idea where her father had died or where his remains were.

Taylor asked her about the flowers.

"She said, 'I do it for both of us,'" Taylor said. "Every day she would come to the crash site and bring something. We would cry. We can't even talk to each other, but we are very close. She's like a sister to me in a weird way."

The excavation took about three weeks. Taylor insisted she be allowed to help.

"Our general policy is that family members are not permitted to participate in a recovery operation," said Lt. Col. Rumi Nielson-Green, U.S. Army spokeswoman for the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command. "Because we were working in an area that was accessible to the general public, we weren't going to tell her not to come."

Taylor didn't just watch. She helped the team excavate the site, setting aside items that might help identify the plane or the pilot. Data plates from an engine, pieces of a uniform, grommets from a boot -- all were saved.

"I touched bones," Taylor said. "I told them not to care about my feelings."

The items were sent to the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command headquarters in Hawaii. Between the circumstantial evidence and the items from the site that matched her father's plane, Taylor had little doubt.

Official word came in April after DNA analysis and other information confirmed the story. Two members of the military delivered an urn with Shannon Estill's remains to Taylor's home.

"I wasn't certain where I was going to bury him -- whether I was going to put part of him in Oklahoma and part of him in Arlington National Cemetery," Taylor said.

Closing the circle
Shannon Estill's funeral was a final gift Taylor wanted to give her father. She decided against splitting up his remains.

The Oct. 10 ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery included all the military traditions Taylor had hoped for. She watched the faces of the soldiers who walked with her father's casket.

They didn't know her father. But they showed no signs that this was just another funeral. Taylor could see in them what she sensed in the team that helped recover her father's remains.

It didn't matter what war her father served in or when he died. He was a brother in arms. It was the reason she wanted to bury her father at Arlington.

"I figure he's there now with 250,000 of his people," Taylor said. "People who died like he did. With purpose."

After the funeral, everyone left for the reception. But Taylor stayed behind.

She watched workers dig her father's grave and place the urn in its final resting spot, ending the cycle that she helped start by digging in a field in Germany.

She dropped a single rose into the grave.

"That, to me, closed the circle," Taylor said. "In some ways, it's never over. What it was for me was a certainty. I could have done the very same thing without a body. But you never know for sure. There always would have been a piece of me that wondered."