WWII Vet Who Lost Uniform Says She Was Ripped Off
HARWICH (CBS) - Dorothy O'Connell saved every letter she and her husband sent each other during World War II. It's how they met after she quit school to join the Navy.
"She said after Pearl Harbor, there were no men left," her daughter Kathy Riley explains. "They all enlisted. So she said college was pretty dull with no men around. So she essentially ran away to California without her parents' permission." O'Connell joined the Navy WAVES and served in San Diego.
Decades later, at her home in Harwich, O'Connell's prized possession was her Navy uniform: her dress blues. She was honored one day in 2008 when a stranger came to the door with a question.
"He was doing an exhibit on World War II and could he borrow her uniforms?" Riley says the man asked her mother. "And of course, she said yes. And she just signed a paper that basically had his name and address on it."
Months went by with no exhibit, and the uniform never came back.
"She called the guy; he hung up on her," Riley says. "I called and left several messages and he never returned them."
The family eventually went to the Harwich police, who investigated. But they told her the man with the receipt was claiming she had sold him her uniform. Authorities told them there was really nothing more they could do.
Riley is adamant about her mother's motivation: "She would never sell her uniforms," she says. Riley believes her mother was duped. Once they turned that receipt over to investigators, they lost track of the man, and have all but given up on finding the uniform. Riley fears it may have been sold anonymously online.
"Losing her uniform was like losing a piece of her heart," she says. "It really was awful."
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