These 13 WWII sailors were unaccounted for. A former Wichita police chief helped change that

When Rick Stone served as Wichita police chief in the early 1990s, he says, he looked for new ideas to solve crimes: a field training program for recruits, a K-9 unit and an automated fingerprint identification system.

“We tried to do something that nobody else had ever done,” Stone said. “We tried to acquire technology that no one else had, we tried to update our policies and procedures and break new ground in law enforcement.”

Now retired, Stone still looks for ways to make a difference. Recently, that happened with 13 World War II sailors who had been listed as unaccounted for over decades.

Here’s what happened:

After a long career in law enforcement, Stone had decided to retire. But then he got a call from a recruiter asking if he would be interested in a job as chief investigator for the U.S. Department of Defense in Honolulu, Hawaii.

“It was the ultimate cold case of investigations; these are military mysteries dating back 70, 80 years, Stone said.” “Well that kind of piqued my interest and that’s kind of how I got hooked into it.”

Stone said he kept coming across snippets about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. The ship had been hit and sunk by Japanese torpedoes on July 30, 1945, on its way to Leyte after delivering atomic bomb components to Tinian Island in the South Pacific in advance of the bombing of Hiroshima.

Only 316 of the 900 men aboard survived.

“Due to administrative errors, many Sailors who were recovered from the ocean and buried at sea from responding vessels were misclassified as ‘Missing in Action’ or ‘Unaccounted for,’” a news release from the U.S. Navy said.

“Somehow that documentation had gotten misdirected or lost or fell through the cracks and never got to the decision making authorities to take them off the list,” Stone said.

Stone worked for the Department of Defense in 2011 and 2012, then retired and spent time as the chair of the Rick Stone and Family Charitable Foundation.

When he went back to work in 2019 as the chief historian in the Naval History and Heritage Command, Stone opened a file for the “unaccounted” for sailors. But his research was cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic.

He retired in 2021 and handed off the research – called the USS Indianapolis Burial at Sea Project – to other organizations. They were able to find evidence for the case in six months, Stone said.

“We tried to do something that had never been done before and that was to go back and research some primary source documents,” Stone said.

Researchers found information in recovery ships’ war diaries, individual deck logs from the seven recovery ships and each recovery ship’s commanding officer’s reports, according to the Stone foundation. Investigators from the foundation got individual personnel files and other documents from the National Archives to determine possible biometric matches to unknown sailors recovered where the ship sank.

Stone and the foundation, along with the Naval History and Heritage Command, Navy Casualty Office, the USS Indianapolis Survivors Association and the USS Indianapolis Legacy Organization were able to get the status of 13 Indianapolis sailors changed to “buried at sea.”

The sailors whose status changed: Seaman 1st Class George Stanley Abbott, Seaman 2nd Class Eugene Clifford Batson, Gunner’s Mate 1st Class William Alexander Haynes, Seaman 2nd Class Albert Raymond Kelly, Seaman 1st Class Albert Davis Lundgren, Fireman 1st Class Ollie McHone, Seaman 2nd Class George David Payne, Storekeeper 3rd Class Alvin Wilder Rahn, Ship’s Cook 3rd Class Jose Antonio Saenz, Coxswain Charles Byrd Sparks, Radioman 2nd Class Joseph Mason Strain, Ship’s Service Man Laundryman 3rd Class Angelo Anthony Sudano and Gunner’s Mate 3rd Class Floyd Ralph Wolfe.

William Baxter, Wolfe’s nephew, was pleased with his uncle’s new status, according to a press release from the Navy.

“It’s nice to finally have some closure to what actually happened to [him],” Baxter said “Thank you all for going above and beyond for me and my family. I wasn’t expecting all of this, but thank you.”

Capt. Robert McMahon, director of the Navy Casualty Office, said bringing closure to families is an obligation that he takes to heart.

“Nothing is more important to me than giving families that knowledge when the unthinkable happens,” said McMahon. “No amount of time lessens the loss. However, if we can bring some certainty to loved ones, even seven decades later, we are keeping faith with those we lost.”