The date is Dec. 4, 1945, at Pearl Harbor. Four years of war have passed since the infamous attack on this U.S. naval base, and Japan has surrendered. Now, in port, times are relatively quiet.
A ship steward is drinking with fellow sailors below deck aboard their vessel, a 160-foot landing craft.
The steward steps into the latrine. He encounters a sailor, who’s also been drinking. They exchange words. A fight breaks out.
The scuffle spills from the bathroom into a nearby kitchen where a second sailor joins the fray. Both sailors grab knives.
The melee ends. The steward’s body is covered in lacerations.
Steward’s Mate 1st Class William Arthur Brown, of Goodview, Virginia, dies in the bowels of the docked ship.
His family won’t learn the truth of his death for the next 80 years.
Family’s search for answers
This fall, Kenyon Goggins solved the family mystery, finally uncovering what exactly happened to his great-great-uncle during his Navy Reserve service in World War II.
He’d known the story since childhood. According to family lore: His great-great-uncle did not return from the war; the Navy did not provide concrete information; and the explanation for the disappearance came from returning servicemen who told the family:
“‘He was thrown overboard.’ That’s all we were ever told,” Goggins recalled. “Nobody ever knew any sort of context, just, ‘He was thrown overboard.’”
The family was left to wonder: Was he thrown into the water by a torpedo, by an operations accident, the enemy? Was he murdered? And even as a child, Goggins found it fishy.
Now 35 and himself in the Navy, Goggins was resolved to solve the case of his family’s missing person. Stationed in Maryland, he visits his wife in Moneta, Virginia, every weekend. He used his free time during the week to start research two months ago.
His first step was to search census records, and he found a great-great-uncle’s draft card. He sent the draft card for “William Arthur Brown” to the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia. The historians there were able to discover Goggins’ uncle was stationed at Pearl Harbor.
Goggins next combed through Hawaii newspapers from the 1940s and found his uncle’s name in both the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and Honolulu Star-Advertiser in relation to a murder trial.
Sailors Joseph Warren Boyd and Ralph H. Richardson were charged with second-degree murder in Brown’s death. In a pretrial deal, Richardson pleaded guilty to aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. But Boyd, 25, a cook on the ship, chose a jury, and the second-degree murder trial opened Jan. 16, 1946, before federal Judge J. Frank McLaughlin. It lasted seven days and included Boyd taking the standing in his own defense.
During testimony, Boyd said a fight began after Brown called him a bad name in the ship lavatory and then he “broke loose” of Brown and ran into the galley to get away. When Brown grabbed his neck, Boyd grabbed a knife, according to a Jan. 23, 1946, edition of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.
The newspaper reported Boyd’s claim that from “the position in which he was, he could not have inflicted the wound on Brown’s right side which caused his death.” Richardson testified that he defended Boyd by slashing at Brown’s back with a knife.
Boyd was acquitted, and based on the result of the trial, Richardson’s sentence was reduced to five years probation, according to the Honolulu newspaper of the time.
Goggins was just glad to know what had happened to his great-great-uncle. He wrote to the U.S. Navy Memorial in Washington, D.C., requesting that his uncle’s service record be updated.
Two weeks ago, the U.S. Navy Memorial officially updated William A. Brown’s log as having been “killed in service.”
Brown, who was born in Bedford County, died at 21 was buried in National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii.
Colin Warren-Hicks, 919-818-8139, colin.warrenhicks@virginiamedia.com
