Vinton soldier killed in WWII POW camp laid to rest 84 years later

SULPHUR, La. (KPLC) - For 84 years, a Vinton family kept a promise: they never let Gurnie “Tutie” Joseph Richard’s memory die.

That promise came full circle Saturday, as the World War II soldier killed as a prisoner of war more than eight decades ago was finally laid to rest.

Richard, a Technician Fifth Grade, grew up in Vinton, where he is remembered as a star athlete and a devoted son. Before he shipped out, he wrote letters home to his mother.

“His last letter to his mama, he was sending her $20 to go buy a dress she had looked at that she would never buy. He just had a kind, generous heart,” said Gaye Alexander, Richard’s great-niece.

Richard enlisted in the Army Air Corps from Louisiana in 1940. He was serving in the Philippines when Japan invaded, and when U.S. forces surrendered in the spring of 1942, he became a prisoner of war.

Richard was one of the survivors of the brutal Bataan Death March, but he eventually died of starvation on November 26, 1942, inside the Cabanatuan Prisoner of War Camp on Luzon. He was 22 years old.

For decades, his remains went unidentified.

“I wasn’t born, of course, when he left, and when he died, my great grandparents made sure that we knew the story of him. He was just my great grandmother’s baby boy, and she never quite got over him leaving and never coming back, his remains never coming back. They knew he had been lost but never identified,” Alexander said.

Richard’s family never stopped waiting.

His remains had been buried overseas as an “Unknown,” his name inscribed only on a wall for the missing. Military researchers exhumed unidentified remains connected to Richard’s unit as part of a renewed identification effort.

Using DNA samples from Richard’s family, along with dental and skeletal analysis, investigators found what his family had spent decades looking for.

“I can’t thank our government and our military enough for never giving up and putting forth every effort they had to identify him, and thank goodness for DNA and the wave of the future that they were able to use these analyses to identify him,” Alexander said.


Richard’s burial with full military honors took place Saturday afternoon at Big Woods Cemetery in Edgerly.

Now, surrounded by the ones who always believed he would come home one day, Richard is home. A promise 84 years in the making, finally kept.

KPLC