Vernon Moore?

Are These the Remains of Vernon Moore?

by Mario Martinez

On January 12, 2001, Lady's Men had been out for six years, my next book was nearly finished, my mother in Flushing, Queens, New York had reached 92 and I was in London. The last thing on my mind was the lost Staff Sergeant, Vernon Moore.

I was working on a chapter of my next book Hell, Fire and Damnation; a chapter which was to be part of an account of events that had sparked three decades of violence in Northern Ireland. I was writing about the Province—Belfast in particular—because I had been there throughout a turbulent period in the early 1970s.

Coincidentally, while I was hard at working writing, forty miles away from Belfast on the Isle of Man, a tiny island far from the hustle and bustle of mainland Britain in the Irish Sea, a letter was being written; a letter that might help solve the mystery of the lost crewman of the Lady Be Good, Vernon Moore.

That day on the Isle of Man, an amiable 68-year old retired assistant executive engineer with British Telecom named Peter Cowley wrote to my American publisher of Lady's Men.

The thrust of his message was that he might have information about Vernon Moore.

The letter had been urged by his wife; she had prompted him to write it for weeks after they had seen a documentary on the British network Sky TV about the Lady Be Good—one which had reawakened the ghost of an old discovery with which Cowley had a link, and his wife had not forgotten.

In 1953, 10 years after the Lady Be Good had vanished, Peter, then 19, was doing his 'national service' as a Royal Signals Radio Mechanic attached to the 25th Armoured Brigade and was posted to Libya.

In February of that year he took part in a "desert training exercise, " the object of which was to drive a convoy of vehicles 700 miles south from Benghazi, through varying terrains to Kufra Oasis.

On the outward leg of the exercise, while crossing west to east from one gravel plain to another through the Calanscio Sand Sea, the skeletal remains of a human body—thought to be that of an Arab youth—were found, photographed and buried. The remains were snapped by a friend of Peter��s in the vehicle ahead to whom he had lent his camera.

Around the body and vicinity there was no sign of clothing or other means of identification—just a skeleton, slightly mummified beneath, face up, arms outstretched, partly dusted with sand, skull bleached by the sun.

In the intervening years, Peter had always questioned the identity of the remains.
And his wife Heather, 17 when this took place, had also felt likewise.

Both Peter and his wife have always been puzzled at the hasty and unceremonious manner in which the body was buried; perhaps, they conjecture, it was done in order to avoid the complications of a lengthy inquiry that would have taken time and delayed the convoy.

Peter estimates that at best only twenty minutes elapsed between the discovery and burial of the body.

He says he is certain because on this particular day, his vehicle, with which he was having trouble, was seldom more than 20 minutes behind the vehicle ahead. By the time he reached it, the body had been buried.

Peter's feeling then and now is that the body could not have been that of an Arab; no sane Arabs, nomad or otherwise, ever traveled the barren wastes of the Calanscio Sand Sea region, and in any case the tenets of Islam do not permit the abandonment of Muslem remains by other Muslems.

It is also obvious to Peter Cowley that no proper identification of the body could have been made during the cursory inspection afforded the remains.

These memories had been jolted back to life by the Sky TV documentary, prompting Peter's letter to me.

He was surprised and pleased when I called him. I was not someone that he expected to hear from, as his letter had been written in the hope that he would reach not me, but a relative of Vernon Moore: his brother Richard, who had appeared in the Sky documentary.

For the next 19 months, Peter and I exchanged information and spoke often. In addition to the photo of the remains, one of the first things he sent me was the report of the desert exercise.

Peter had never had any particular reason to associate the body in the sand with anything other than the anonymous remains of some wretchedly lost desert traveler until he saw the documentary about the Lady Be Good.

And when he went out and bought Lady's Men, his suspicions about the identity of the remains grew stronger as the locations described began to jibe with his own memories of that desert training exercise.

A central question to Peter was: at what latitude had his convoy of vehicles struck into the dunes of the Calanscio Sand Sea?

He calculated that the incursion had to be near latitude 28° north if the remains stood a chance of belonging to Moore.

The remains of Sgts. Ripslinger and Shelley had been found along this latitude, and Moore was known to have been with them near the end.

The map in the report showing the route travelled from Benghazi to Kufra gave no latitude or longitude lines; rather a "dune entry point" south of latitude 28° north near 25.30, at a place called Bir el Harasc, where the width of the dunes was far less than 80 miles.

This clearly did not jibe with the reports' narrative relative to the width of the Calanscio Sand Sea—reported to have been 80 miles—where the remains was found.

So that was the question: along what northern latitude did the convoy penetrate the Calanscio Sand Sea?

Since the report had obviously not been written with any awareness of the Lady Be Good incident and Vernon Moore, Peter and I had to hunt for clues.

It was clear from the report that 6 days out of Benghazi, with Algeria to the west, and with the walled face of the Calanscio Sand Sea in sight to their east, the convoy was driving south on a featureless, undulating gravel plain.

Shortly thereafter, the report states, the convoy turned east, and having found a gap in the dunes, entered the Calanscio Sand Sea and zigzagged across it for 80 miles before they ran across another gravel plain, further east of which lay Egypt.

It is clear that it was somewhere midway into this crossing that the remains were found. Was the entry point into the dunes around latitude 28°, where the Calanscio Sand Sea stretched 80 miles, or was it more southerly, as the report suggested? That was the question Peter and I had to resolve.

Throughout this 19-month period it was my intention to visit Peter to try and fix the dune's entry point more clearly.

I had maps of the Calanscio Sand Sea that might help. In the course of my research, 'prior to writing "Ladys Men", the maps had come my way via the D'Arcy oilmen who had originally found the Lady Be Good. But due to other obligations, my plans to visit Peter in 2001 never jelled.

I finally made it on the 9th of August, 2002, on a filthy, chilly, rainy Friday afternoon from Liverpool's John Lennon Airport, which, that day, was filled with week-end travelers heading for Spain's sunny Costa Brava.

With rain falling, my plane took off at 4.30 p.m. and 25 minutes later we landed at Ronaldsway Airport, on the Isle of Man's southern tip. And as promised, there, behind a glass partition near the carousels, was Peter and his wife. And in the 30 minute car ride to their home—a beautiful bungalow, where I was fortunate to stay—I learned all I needed to know about the Cowleys. What I saw was what I got. And from the time I arrived, until the day I departed, I found them to be warm, hospitable and generous people; in tune with each other, proud of their family, proud of their island and decent in all respects.

During his Libyan tour, Peter took many photographs.

Among them are shots taken on the gravel plain east of the Calanscio Sand Sea that the convoy had crossed.

This plain, which is where the Lady Be Good was found, differed in most respects from the featureless, undulating plain they had come from to the west, on the other side of the Sand Sea.

It was volcanic in appearance in many places, and as the convoy neared Kufra, outcrops with flat tops were in evidence.

The near three-day drive after crossing the dunes was relatively easy; here and there shrubs popped up and the occasional black hills that exist north of latitude 25.30 were sometimes to be seen and photographed by Peter. These photos clearly suggest that the entry and exit points into and out of the Calanscio Sand Sea had to have been around latitude 28° north—the only point where the dunes spanned at least 80 miles—and not around latitude 25.30° north, where their width measured little more than 40 miles.

Therefore, the position of the remains was approximately where they had to be —28° N, 23° E—if they were those of Vernon Moore.

The zone of the black hills photographed by Peter relative to latitude 25.30 was fixed by matching it against geological features on the maps I acquired from the oilmen who found the Lady Be Good.

The possibility that the remains might be those of Vernon Moore was growing. I left the Isle of Man on the morning of August 14th, after a happy, enjoyable and productive visit with the good Peter and Heather Cowley.

All this investigation was fine. So far so good. But what about science and medicine? Now what I needed was a scientist in the field of osteology:—the study of modern human bones and their structure—to examine the photo of the remains, match them with the upper-body photo I had of Moore, and see if the bones bore a similarity.

Before visiting Peter I pursued this line of inquiry in New York during a visit in June of 2001. I had tried through the New York Police and the FBI but their doors were shut to me. Although September 11th had yet to come, in June of that year, I found the FBI's response both on the telephone and when I went to their building in Manhattan to be guarded and suspicious. I never got past a lobby guard behind a thick, glass partition, whose suspicious eyes gave me the once-over and fixed their gaze on the case I was holding.

Simply getting into the Federal Plaza building was an ordeal, and for good reason. U.S. federal buildings were thought to be potential terrorist targets after the earlier Oklahoma and World Trade Center bombings.

At that time I had not yet actually met with Peter, so the matter did not seem to require any large sense of urgency.

However, after having met with Peter it was now time to subject our theory to the rigorous perquisitions of medicine and science.

The puzzle: was there compatibility between the skull portion of the skeletal remains and the head portion in the photo of "Moore's" remains?

In the absence of DNA, it was the best chance of corroborating our theory that we could hope for.

In lieu of trying to break through the bastions of the formidable FBI, I did what I thought was the next best thing (which happened to be the most convenient as well) which was to "call a friend" for guidance: in this case, a high ranking British police officer.

I explained the situation and told him what I needed. He suggested consulting the Department of Paleontology at the Natural History Museum in London.

I followed through with his suggestion and was led to the door of Dr. Norman MacLeod, the museum's keeper of Paleontology.

I wrote on August 24th and enclosed copies of the two photos and other relevant materials. Five days later, on the 29th, he responded. He had forwarded what I sent to Dr. Louise Humphrey, whose research involves the study of modern human osteology, and she had already turned in a report—two paragraphs of which I quote:

"Unfortunately it is not possible to determine with certainty whether the human remains shown in the photograph are those of Staff Sergeant Vernon L. Moore. Typically it is not possible to determine the sex and age at death with accuracy from a photograph of an ossified body, and this picture is not very clear. The shape and robustness of the mandible are suggestive of a male. The overall shape of the cranium and mandible suggest an individual with a fairly lightly-built upper face, and this is compatible with the photograph of Staff Sergeant Moore.

"The position and condition of the body suggest that the body may not have been disturbed after death, and certainly not while in an advanced state of decomposition. The apparent absence of clothing and possessions indicates that any such items were insubstantial and had decayed, or that they were removed prior to death or possibly shortly thereafter."

So that was that. The end of the road in my quest for the answer to the Moore puzzle had been reached.

For the moment, at least, there are no other pieces to slot. Nevertheless, the skeletal remains in the photo Peter and Heather Cowley brought to my attention may very well be those of Vernon Moore from New Boston, Ohio, who, drowning from thirst in a sea of sand, fell and died on or about Sunday, April 11th, the fifth week of Lent,1943.

And, if the photo of the remains really are his, the reason his body was never found is because his remains had been buried by the British in 1953—the same people whose own countrymen were ironically to be the ones to help bring to light the strange tale of the Lady Be Good.

Be they or be they not the remains of Moore, it is unlikely that Ripslinger and Shelley were with him when he died.

At some point in the Calanscio Sand Sea, physically depleted and certainly blind, Moore, having walked for 6 days and having had but a couple of sips of water and energy sweets to sustain him, probably separated from his comrades and stumbled west in another direction.

It is most probable that Moore died before his companions.

If the photo does indeed show Moore, the approximate location of his remains is miles southwest of Ripslinger's, who was known to have died before Shelley—Shelley's own bones being found 11.5 miles north of Ripslinger's.

There is no doubt that Shelley outlived Ripslinger because items belonging to Ripslinger were found with Shelley, whose body and possessions over time had come apart and scattered down the side of a dune.

The odd thing about this, however, is that Ripslinger's diary was still with his remains—his last entry was Sunday, April 11th, 1943—but fails to mention Moore.

And it also seems strange that the remains in Peter Cowley's photo were found on the surface of the desert, just like the rest of the Lady's crew, and not covered by sand, which is the reason given by the US Military for not finding Moore after their final desert search in 1960.

Were he living today, Vernon Moore would be 80 years old.

May his soul, separated from his earthly form, wherever it may be, rest in peace.