Munn's aircraft, Beech 18 AT-7 Navigator #41-21079, was based at Mather Field in Sacramento, California. It was on a navigation training mission when it disappeared. It was piloted by 2nd Lt. William Gamber. Other crew members included Cadets John M. Mortenson and Leo Mustonen.
In 1947, four UC Berkeley students found the wreck. Bill Bond, one of the students, guided an Air-Sea recovery team from Hamilton Field in Marin County to the wreck site in late September 1947. Engine identification tags confirmed that the wreckage belonged to #41-21079. No bodies were recovered.
In 1948, a team of soldiers from Fort Lewis, Washington, led by Captain Roy F. Sulzbacher from the Presidio in San Francisco, visited to the glacier but were unable to recover any remains.
On October 16, 2005, two hikers discovered a glacier-entombed corpse wearing a flight suit with blonde, wavy hair wearing a tattered sweater. Nearby was an unopened parachute. The mummified remains were recovered later in the same month by a team from JPAC and transported to the U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory (CILHI) in Hawaii where a DNA test conducted against family reference samples volunteered by the maternal relatives of the crew. During February 2006, the remains were officially identified as Leo Mustonen.
In August 2007, another frozen body was found in the area of the wreck by Peter Stekel, an author conducting research for a book he was writing about the missing airplane. On March 10, 2008 the US military confirmed by DNA test these remains belonged to Ernest Munn.
Munn was buried May 17, 2008, in the family plot in Holly Memorial Gardens in Pleasant Grove, Ohio. This plot overlooks the former gas station which was one of the places where he spent time while growing up, as well as the current home of his sister, Jeannie Pyle, and the long-time home of his parents, Joe and Sadie ("Mamee") Munn.
He was survived by all three of his sisters, Sara Zeyer of Adena, Ohio; Jeannie Pyle of Pleasant Grove; and Lois ("Peg") Shriver from Pittsburgh, and numerous nephews and nieces and their families.
Missing in action (MIA) is a casualty classification assigned to combatants, military chaplains, combat medics, and prisoners of war who are reported missing during wartime or ceasefire. They may have been killed, wounded, captured, executed, or deserted. If deceased, neither their remains nor grave have been positively identified. Becoming MIA has been an occupational risk for as long as there has been warfare.
The Wrecking Crew is a team of four supervillains—the Wrecker, Bulldozer, Piledriver and Thunderball—appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. While not featured on the cover, the Wrecking Crew's first appearance is in The Defenders #17.
On March 12, 1948, Northwest Airlines Flight 4422 (NC95422) crashed into Mount Sanford, Alaska, with a crew of six and 24 passengers. The flight was a C-54 charter flying back to the United States from Shanghai. The aircraft refueled at Anchorage and took off at 8:12 P.M. to continue on to its destination, New York City. Instead of following the published airway, which detoured around Mount Sanford, the aircraft flew a direct line, crashing into the mountain. After the initial impact the wreckage slid down for about 3000 feet before coming to rest. There were no survivors. The passengers were American merchant mariners, crew members of the tanker SS Sunset, being ferried back home.
Leo Arvid Mustonen was a Finnish-American World War II Army Air Forces aviation cadet who was reported missing after a plane crash on November 18, 1942 until his frozen remains were found in October 2005 on the surface of the Mendel Glacier in the Sierra Nevada mountain range, 63 years later. He was 22 at the time of his death.
Project Recover is an organization dedicated to gathering information that can lead to the location, identification and repatriation of remains of U.S. service members who were killed in action in the Republic of Palau during WWII, and who are still listed as missing in action. The effort was begun in 1993 by Dr. Pat Scannon. Project Recover team members have backgrounds in SCUBA diving, aviation and the history of American World War II involvement in the Pacific.
The Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command was a joint task force within the United States Department of Defense (DoD) whose mission was to account for Americans who are listed as Prisoners of War (POW), or Missing in Action (MIA), from all past wars and conflicts. It was especially visible in conjunction with the Vietnam War POW/MIA issue. The mission of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command was to achieve the fullest possible accounting of all Americans missing as a result of the nation's past conflicts. The motto of JPAC was "Until they are home".
Eastern Air Lines Flight 980 was a scheduled international flight from Asunción, Paraguay, to Miami, Florida, United States. On January 1, 1985, while descending towards La Paz, Bolivia, for a scheduled stopover, the Boeing 727 jetliner struck Mount Illimani at an altitude of 19,600 feet (6,000 m), killing all 29 people on board.
On 15 August 1976, SAETA Flight 232 en route from Quito, Ecuador to Cuenca was reported missing while in flight. The SAETA-operated Vickers Viscount 785D carried 55 passengers and four crew members. The snow-capped mountain Chimborazo, which is 150 kilometers from the capital and stands 6,319 meters above sea level, is thought to be a dangerous part of the route.
Lionair Flight 602 was a Lionair Antonov An-24RV which crashed into the sea off the north-western coast of Sri Lanka on 29 September 1998. The aircraft departed Jaffna Airport with 48 passengers and a crew of seven; it disappeared from radar screens ten minutes into the flight. Initial reports indicated that the plane had been shot down by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam using a MANPADS, which has since been confirmed. All aboard were presumed killed.
Marcia Lenore Sossoman (King) (June 9, 1959 – April 22, 1981) was a 21-year-old Arkansas woman who was murdered in April 1981 and whose body was discovered in Troy, Ohio approximately 48 hours after her murder. Her body remained unidentified for 36 years before being identified via DNA analysis and genetic genealogy in April 2018. King was one of the first unidentified decedents to be identified via this method of forensic investigation.
Unidentified decedent or unidentified person is a term in American English used to describe a corpse of a person whose identity cannot be established by police and medical examiners. In many cases, it is several years before the identities of some UIDs are found, while in some cases, they are never identified. A UID may remain unidentified due to lack of evidence as well as absence of personal identification such as a driver's license. Where the remains have deteriorated or been mutilated to the point that the body is not easily recognized, a UID's face may be reconstructed to show what they had looked like before death. UIDs are often referred to by the placeholder names "John Doe" or "Jane Doe".
Sharon Lee Gallegos was a formerly unidentified American murder victim known as Little Miss Nobody whose body was found in Congress, Yavapai County, Arizona on July 31, 1960. Her remains were estimated to have been discovered within one to two weeks of the date of her murder. Due to the advanced state of decomposition of the child's remains, the specific cause of death of Gallegos has never been established, although her death has always been considered to be a homicide.
The murders of Kerry Ann Graham and Francine Marie Trimble are currently unsolved crimes that occurred in December 1978, when both girls—aged 15 and 14 respectively—disappeared after leaving their homes in Forestville, California, to visit a shopping mall in Santa Rosa. Their remains were discovered in July 1979 approximately 80 mi (130 km) north of Forestville, concealed within duct-taped garbage bags and buried within an embankment of a heavily overgrown woodland area located beside a remote section of Highway 20, 12 mi (19 km) from the city of Willits.
On 7 February 1968, an Antonov An-12 turboprop transport aircraft of the Indian Air Force piloted by Flight Lieutenant Harkewal Singh and Squadron Leader Pran Nath Malhotra, disappeared while flying to Leh Airport from Chandigarh. Flight 203 was on approach to Leh when the pilot decided to turn back due to inclement weather, the aircraft then went missing with the last radio contact over the Rohtang pass. It was declared missing after the failure to find the wreck.
SS D.M. Clemson was a 468-foot (143 m) long steel-hulled Great Lakes freighter that went missing on 1 December 1908, on Lake Superior. The ship was last seen coming through the Soo Locks, onto Lake Superior. The ship was built in 1903 for the Provident Steamship Company. She is known for sinking on Lake Superior, on the night of 1 December 1908 with all hands; 24 men lost their lives. The wreck of D.M. Clemson is still missing, and the cause of her sinking remains a mystery to this day.
On 11 March 2018, a Bombardier Challenger 604 private jet, owned by Turkish group Başaran Holding, crashed in the Zagros Mountains near Shahr-e Kord, Iran, while returning to Istanbul from Dubai. All three crew members and eight passengers on board were killed.
DNA Doe Project is an American nonprofit volunteer organization formed to identify unidentified deceased persons using forensic genealogy. Volunteers identify victims of automobile accidents, homicide, and unusual circumstances and persons who committed suicide under an alias. The group was founded in 2017 by Colleen M. Fitzpatrick and Margaret Press.
Robert "Bobby" Adam Whitt and Myoung Hwa Cho were two formerly unidentified murder victims who were killed in 1998. They remained unidentified until they were both identified using GEDmatch in early 2019. While unidentified, Whitt was nicknamed Mebane Child and the Boy Under the Billboard.
Othram is an American corporation specializing in forensic genetic genealogy to resolve unsolved murders, disappearances, and identification of unidentified decedents or murder victims. The company also offers law enforcement agencies tools and programs to infer kinship among individuals, both closely and distantly related, through a combination of short tandem repeat (STR) and single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) testing, as well as forensic genome sequencing of DNA.
Linda Marie Pagano, formerly known as Strongsville Jane Doe, was an American murder victim from Akron, Ohio who was an unidentified decedent for 44 years. Following an argument with her stepfather on September 1, 1974, Pagano left her stepfather's apartment and was never seen again. On February 5, 1975, partial skeletal remains of a white female were found by three boys in a park in Strongsville, Ohio. After remaining unidentified, the bones were buried in an unmarked grave. Due to a clerical error, the bones were never entered into databases of unidentified decedents, and the case was largely forgotten about. In 2016, a college student doing genealogy research of her own family rediscovered the unidentified body. After posting about it online, the case gained the attention of Carl Koppelman, a forensic sketch artist. The new attention to the case led to a connection being made by the Akron police, and in June 2018 the remains were conclusively identified as Linda Pagano.
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