In 2002, Barbara Jo Payne loaded up her dad’s ashes as she was moving to her new home in Vancouver.
The small box containing the ashes of Wathen “Curt” Curtsinger arrived last week.
“I was just stunned,” Payne said, sitting in her living room with the ashes, some black-and-white World War II photos of her father in a Marine uniform, and the flag the family received after he died in 1996. “The chances of getting them back were minimal.”
The mystery was solved by Woodland resident Bill Malloy, who — like Payne’s father — is a Marine Corps veteran. He was a link between the family and the Woodland Police Department, where the box containing the ashes had been in a stolen-property storage area for 16 years.
Until last week, the last time the family had seen that box was in 2002, when Payne, who goes by B.J., and daughter Yvonne Ortega were packing.
“My daughter was helping me move from Woodland to Vancouver,” Payne said.
After getting part of the load into a rental truck, they called it a night. Each one assumed that the other had locked the truck, Payne said. During the night, someone opened the truck and took the plastic box. The family didn’t notice that anything was missing until they unloaded the truck in Vancouver.
The next step came when police stopped a vehicle that was on a list of stolen cars. The box was impounded and eventually went into storage.
Malloy is a member of Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 1927 in Woodland. A friend, City Councilor Susan Humbyrd, occasionally checks with him on issues involving veterans. And since items in that box identified Curtsinger as a veteran, Malloy was asked to check it out.
The contents included a newspaper clipping — an obituary from a California paper.
“From the obituary, I got the name of the funeral home that had done the cremation,” Malloy said. He was able to get a couple of phone numbers, but they no longer belonged to members of Curtsinger’s family.
There was another family member listed in the obituary: daughter Barbara Payne.
“It was a long shot, but I sent her a message on Facebook,” said Malloy, who served in Vietnam.
He wanted to know if she was the daughter of Wathen Curtsinger. He explained that his VFW post had some of his things and wanted to return them.
“Nothing happened,” he said.
“I don’t go on Facebook hardly at all,” Payne said.
But a month after Malloy posted the message, Payne read it and called the number he provided.
Payne said that her father was just 17 when he enlisted in 1937. As a member of the 5th Marine Division, he took part in some pivotal landings in the Pacific. He was wounded in the campaign for Iwo Jima, losing a significant portion of muscle tissue in his right leg.
While he didn’t limp, “I know he suffered a lot of pain, and he refused to take medication,” Payne said. “He took Midol,” she added.
“He was my hero,” Ortega said of her grandfather. “When I came home from school, he always had a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich, a milkshake and chocolate chip cookies. He was a very good cook.”
