Solving an 80-year-old mystery: What happened to Pvt. William Walters?

It’s been 79 years since the end of World War II, where an estimated 15 million soldiers lost their lives. Some families buried their loved ones, but others were left with more questions than answers.

Until recently, Gerri Walters-Eisenhauer-Larson was one of them.

But on Aug. 25 she received a strange call from the local mortuary.

It received an email from a man in France saying, “we have recently found information that a Pvt. William Walters was killed while liberating the village of Grez-sur-Loing. We are looking for any of his family.”

Gerri was awestruck.

“He got done reading it, and he said, Do you know this person,” Gerri said. “I said, yes, I do. That's my biological dad.”

Pvt. William Walters, or “Roy,” was married to Gerri’s mother, Maxine, but was deployed to France before Gerri was born. While in France, Roy died.

All that was sent to Maxine was a telegram stating that “your husband Pvt. William R. Walters was killed in action on twenty three August in France.”

Gerri was born in January 1945. One of her first memories was seeing her father’s casket coming off the train to be buried in Weeping Water’s Oakwood Cemetery in 1949.

“My mom never said too much at all,” Gerri recalled. “And even when I was at my grandparents’ place, nothing was ever talked about it.”

Gerri would eventually go on to marry Jim Eisenhauer and start a family.

“He was always just this, this person that we just all had questions about, but we never could know anything,” said Jan Moore, Gerri's daughter.

Growing up, she was also curious about her grandfather.

When the family would look into records of Roy's time in the military, they found his records were burnt up in a 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri.

Any effort the family made to find more information came up short.

That is, until Grez-sur-Loing resident Christophe Ligere began searching for the answer.

It's been 80 years since the village was liberated, and Ligere was put in charge of planning the 80th anniversary celebration.

In his search, Ligere happened upon the memoir of a Grez-sur-Loing native named Monsieur Colombier. Colombier had chronicled the liberation of Grez-sur-Loing.

“We received archive books with which was given to me by the old woman from the village, and we start studying the document,” Ligere said. “In the book in the archives you know, I found a letter to explain the liberation of Grez-sur-Loing by the American in the 23 August, 1944. It tell it is the tragedy of the story of the soldier who drowned in the Loing river.”

About a month into his deployment, the private found himself liberating the small French village of Grez-sur-Loing, a village the Nazis were using to feed their soldiers. Upon hearing that American soldiers were coming, the occupiers destroyed the bridges that lead into the village.

Undaunted, the U.S. soldiers needed to cross the Loing, the river that runs along the west side of Grez-sur-Loing. The people of the village offered their boats to ferry the soldiers across.

As soldiers were being ferried across, the private’s boat capsized due to being overcapacity. All the soldiers but one made it to shore.

The private got tangled in the weeds just below the river’s murky surface and drowned.

The name of the drowned private, according to Monsieur Colombier, was Walter Williams. After looking into the name Walter Williams, Ligere found nothing.

Digging deeper, Ligere found war-time photos of Army Jeeps that identified those who liberated the town as being from the 10th Infantry; 5th Division. From there, he went through a list of soldiers from the 10th Infantry; 5th Division who had died, and found Pvt. William Walters, Gerri’s father.

The memoir author had switched Roy's first and last names around.

“Now I say I know where the soldier, where he is born, in Syracuse, Nebraska. Where he in the cemetery in Weeping Willow, and where he got to go to work, near Omaha in Plattsmouth,” said Ligere.

Ligere found out through an ancestry website that Roy had a daughter, Gerri. That's when he reached out to the Syracuse mortuary.

“The name was correct, the date of birth and the date of death were correct,” Gerri said. “And I got back in touch with the gentleman in France that had sent it, and told him that, yes, I knew that person.”

Coincidentally, the day that Ligere reached out was two days after the 80th anniversary of Walter’s death.

Moore happened to be visiting Gerri the day the email correspondence started.

“I had just stopped in to say hi and visit with her, and she said 'I have to show you what I got.' And that's when the world changed,” Moore said.

Gerri showed Moore the email, and they saw attached to it a flyer talking about how for the 80th anniversary celebrations, they were going to celebrate the soldier who died in the liberation. The celebrations were in one month.

Gerri, her son Allen Eisenhauer and Moore immediately began planning their trip to France.

With a nudge from Ligere at the US Embassy in France, those who needed passports had the process expedited and they were on their flight to Paris for the Sept. 21-22 celebrations.

Once they got to France, they took an hour’s train ride south to Grez-Sur-Loing, where Ligere met them at the train station.

“He puts us in his car, and he takes us to the town, and he took us right to the river,” said Moore. “It was very emotional to see the place.”

The following day was the exhibition, where photos and old footage from the war were on display. Gerri was gifted the key to the city, as well as a framed photo of the bridge by the acting mayor.

During the festivities, a man named Marc Perrot approached the family. Perrot was there when Grez-sur-Loing was liberated in 1944.

“He came and shared with us what he had seen and done. I found out that he was 13 and had helped get my dad's body out of the edge of the water to a place to rest in the grass,” Gerri said.

“He knew we were coming, so he wanted to meet us,” Moore added. “And it was his father's boat that had capsized. So, we were just astounded, once again, to be with somebody that was there that day, that was part of that Liberation Day.”

Excerpts from Monsieur Colombier’s memoir were read aloud in the town hall, chronicling how, after being removed from the river, the townsfolk proceeded to cover Walter’s body in flowers as the day went on.

As the family was saying their goodbyes in Grez-sur-Loing, Ligere asked them to come back next year.

“You must come back, our celebration will be even bigger, and we're going to name a street after your grandfather,” said Moore, repeating what Ligere told them. “We'll have a memorial that our children can pay tribute to him every year.”

A few days later, the family was getting back on a plane to fly home.

“It just doesn't hardly seem real, and on the other hand, it just makes me smile in peace that we know what happened when we knew nothing,” Gerri said.

About a month after they returned, Gerri, Jan and Allen said the journey was amazing.

“I'm just extremely blessed and lucky that we were able to somehow get this gift that was just laid on us all of a sudden, and then we get these answers, because I do know there are families that don't get them,” said Moore.

For Gerri, it wasn't a trip she thought she would ever get to take, but she feels grateful for the opportunity.

“To just know the kindness of those people and that he was surrounded with that kind of respect and love is overwhelming…yep, yes, that is worth so much to me.”

*Excerpts from a French film documenting the liberation of Grez-sur-Loing, and the adjacent village of Bourron* (Courtesy of Christophe Ligere)