Special Agent Daniel Whitmore was at his desk in Virginia when the call came. As an investigator for the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, Dany was used to finding things people wanted hidden, but he wasn’t prepared for Colonel Marcus Webb’s message: “The remains belong to a woman… We believe she may be your grandmother.” To find her in the Ardennes, the site of the bloody Battle of the Bulge, contradicted every official record his father had ever chased. Dany flew to Belgium, where he met Dr. Paul Hendrickx of the DPAA. The crash site was a scene of haunting preservation. The Thunderbolt hadn’t plummeted; it had been a controlled descent. Evelyn had survived the landing.
The true heart of the mystery was revealed by Henrik Caron, the 86-year-old son of a local resistance fighter. Henrik’s father had discovered the wreckage in 1944. “She was thirty meters from the aircraft, sitting against a tree,” Henrik explained. “My father said she looked peaceful, but she had been wounded by ground fire. She had dragged herself from the cockpit and sat down to rest.” In her lap, the resistance found a pen and a letter addressed to her son, Robert. She had spent her final moments writing to the child she would never see again.
