Service # 34350910
408th Bomber Squadron, 22nd Bomber Group, Heavy
MOULTRIE - Staff Sgt. Richard Fowler King's bombing mission to Indonesia was successful. But he never came back from the World War II mission.
King's B-24J Liberator ran into a tropical storm off the coast of New Guinea and the plane never returned from its April 16, 1944, bombing run.
For more than 60 years, it seemed there was little chance of recovering the remains of King and the other 10 crewmen.
Saturday, more than 62 years after the fateful mission, King was laid to rest with full military rites.
Another ceremony will be held Friday in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, where all personal items not positively identified and the unidentified remains of crewmen from the crash site will be buried together. All 11 names of the crew will be placed on the grave's tombstone with a description of the plane and mission.
Two years after King's plane went missing, the Air Force changed his status from "Missing in Action" to "Presumed Dead" after a review board concluded that it was likely the plane was lost over water and the remains of the crewmen were unrecoverable.
But in 2001, a hunter reported finding a U.S. aircraft in a forest near Saider, New Guinea. King and the other crew members were positively identified after officials searched the areas for nearly two years.
Inez Jenkins, who was married to King at the time of his disappearance, said she was notified in 2001 that the plane had been found and all crew members had lost their lives. King was identified using a DNA sample from his sister, Ellen Raiford of Jacksonville, Fla.
"It was something that we have wanted to know definitively," she said. "We did not know for sure until 2001."
The research crew found personal items in the wreckage that included rings, dog tags and fragments of shoes, gloves and leather jackets.
They found Jenkins' high school class ring, which she ordered in King's size and exchanged with his class ring, which had been ordered in her size, as a sign of their friendship through grade school.
"Ours was a friendship that grew into love and marriage," she said.