The day before Harry E. Harkness went missing, he wrote to his wife in Michigan.

"Just a few lines to let you know I am still in the best of health and hope you are the same," Harkness wrote on Nov. 1, 1950, from Korea, where he was serving with Company L, 3rd Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division, as a U.S. Army sergeant.

[naviga:img class="img-responsive" src="https://www.theday.com/Assets/img/news2018/harness-harry-korean-vet/harkness-family-photo-640px.jpg" alt="Sgt. Harry E. Harkness and his family."/]

Sgt. Harry E. Harkness (center) poses for a picture with his wife, Lois, and her brother and sisters. (Courtesy photo)

"Well honey I thought we were leaving here but we are right back on the lines again and boy I sure am mad because myself and another boy named Shaw are Forward Observers and we have to go out in front of them and I don't like it," he continued.

He didn't need a Christmas present, but if his wife, Lois Harkness of Michigan, wanted to send him something, he requested it be canned food like beans because the rations the soldiers were getting weren't filling him up. It was cold, "and we are going farther up north all the time and it gets colder as we go along," he wrote.

The letter closes with: "P.S. I love you and miss you very much and always will no matter what happens."

That would be the last she heard from her husband. Harkness, an infantryman, went missing in action the next day. He was a few weeks shy of his 23rd birthday.

It would take nearly 70 years for his remains to be returned to his family.

Harkness was born in Hopkinton, R.I., on Nov. 24, 1927, according to his military records. Articles in The Day's archives list him as being born in North Stonington and attending Westerly schools, with family in the Westerly-Pawcatuck area. Before joining the Army in 1945, Harkness worked at Bradford Dyeing Association, the largest employer in Westerly at one time, which closed in 2008 after nearly a century in business.

It wasn't until about a month after he went missing that Harkness' mother, Kinner O. Hill, who lived on Hinkley Hill Road in Pawcatuck, received the grim news about her son via telegram from the war department, according to a Dec. 5, 1950, article in The Day. Hill, who was in bad health at the time, expressed hope then that her son was a prisoner or temporarily had been separated from the unit.

[naviga:img src="https://www.theday.com/Assets/img/news2018/harness-harry-korean-vet/letter_92050_thumb.jpg" alt=""/]Read the two letters written by Sgt. Harry E. Harkness to his wife, Lois, in 1950.

"She never gave up hope that he'd be found," said Laura Patterson-Lawrence, of Lansing, Mich., one of Lois' daughters from her second marriage, to Korean War veteran Arthur Patterson. Lois died in August 2006, her daughter said. She and Harry had just one child, a son named Harry "Jupe" Harkness Jr., who was born on Dec. 15, 1950, with cerebral palsy.

Hope that Harkness still was alive began to fade among his loved ones about December 1951, when his name was not included on a list of war prisoners released by the communists during Operation Big Switch.

It later was confirmed that Harkness was taken as a prisoner on or about Nov. 2, 1950, while fighting against the Chinese People's Volunteer Forces near Unsan, North Korea. He died on April 30, 1951, of malnutrition and dysentery in Pyoktong Camp 5 in North Korea, according to the military.

Sgt. Bobby J. Howell of Detroit, who was in the same prison camp as Harkness, delivered the bad news to Lois. Howell told her that he and other soldiers in the camp had agreed that, if any of them returned to the U.S., they would inform the nearest kin of those who died. Howell was one of five soldiers whom the military listed as witnesses to Harkness' death.

For years, Harkness' name has been listed on the Korean War monument at Stonington Town Hall, but little was known about him. That was until former Stonington police Chief David Erskine decided to embark on a monthslong project to research the lives and deaths of 64 local men who died in World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam.

"He was the hardest to find because when he died, his wife wasn't from the area ... plus she had remarried so we had to find her new last name," said Suzanne Matteson, an Army veteran and local genealogist who worked on the project with Erskine. Bob Suppicich, who serves with Erskine on the board of the Stonington Historical Society, also helped.

They eventually tracked down the family, who, it turns out, found out last fall that Harry's remains had been identified. Between 1990 and 1994, North Korea turned over 208 boxes of "heavily" commingled remains of U.S. service members unaccounted for during the war. Scientists use military records and forensic identification tools, including DNA analysis, to try to identify the remains. Lois reportedly heard about the boxes and submitted DNA from her and Harkness' son in 1996.

As luck would have it, Lois' grandson Bradley Patterson, a lieutenant in the Army, is stationed in Hawaii near the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory, where the remains were. He escorted Harkness' remains to Michigan, where they were buried on March 17 next to Harry Jr. Lois is on the other side of Harry Jr., and Arthur, her second husband, is buried next to her. The headstone reads "Patterson-Harkness," and lists all of their names.

"The way it worked out, it was obviously meant to be," said Patterson-Lawrence, Lois' daughter and Bradley's mom.

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