SEARCHING FOR ANSWERS; DISCOVERING FATE OF ITS MISSING PATRIARCH.

Byline: Deborah Sullivan Daily News Staff Writer

A tangled hairbrush, some old envelopes, Mormon documents and two leg bones are clues that may help Albro Lundy III and his family uncover the truth in the case of their father, a one-time sports star from Sherman Oaks and Air Force pilot who was shot down over Laos 27 years ago.

``It's both an adventure and a mystery,'' said Lundy, 38, ``one that we're working very hard at solving.''

The mystery wends through the Laotian jungles to state-of-the-art military labs in Hawaii, where bones believed to be from Lundy's father now await DNA analysis.

Before the mystery is solved, Lundy could trek to the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn., in search of maternal relatives needed for the DNA match. Or to Salt Lake City, Utah, where the Mormon Church's sprawling genealogical archives might hold hints to that lost side of the family.

The search for an answer has consumed Lundy, a Palos Verdes attorney, and his family since they learned in 1990 that the father they had mourned in 1970 had in fact survived a plunge into the Laotian jungle.

In the past five years, Lundy and a brother each spent time in Laos trying to piece together the puzzle of their father's fate.

This month, military officials told them that the Laotian government returned a dog tag and I.D. cards belonging to their father, along with two leg bones that might be his.

By studying their shape and size, forensic experts determined the bones are those of a tall white or black male - possibly of Lundy, a 6-foot, 3-inch tall sports star who joined Van Nuys High School's athletic hall of fame and played basketball for UCLA.

But only DNA can tell with greater certainty whether the two tibiae are his. Those tests involve the meticulous extraction and analysis of fragile DNA strands from the jungle-ravaged bones and will take months to complete.

Despite 27 years of uncertainty, the family is in a hurry to identify the remains. They're plagued by fears that if the bones aren't their father's, he might still be alive.

``Truly it's a living nightmare,'' Lundy said. ``The possibility that he is alive in a (prisoner of war) camp in the jungles is a thought that you don't want to have but that you can't avoid.''

Earned medals

A decorated career fighter pilot, Albro Lundy Jr. earned the silver star, two distinguished flying crosses and 13 air medals. He was completing a 10-month tour of duty in Southeast Asia when his plane was shot down over a small mountain hamlet - just 12 days before he was due to go home.

``He was missing in action for three days, and the U.S. government told us he was dead, that he went down in his plane and was incinerated,'' Lundy said. ``And we believed them.''

In 1990 that belief was shattered.

Laotian freedom fighters issued a letter naming their father's correct rank and serial number, along with fingerprints. Six months later they produced hair samples.

``It gave us an indication that he was still alive, and certainly that he had not perished in the crash,'' Lundy said.

The news was stunning.

``We had spent 20 years just trying to get over his death,'' Lundy said. ``So we spent a lot of time saying it wasn't true.''

But reports that the U.S. government had given up on some missing servicemen galvanized the family.

``God had given us a mission,'' Lundy said. ``These men had been abandoned and my father could be one of them.''

Lundy's brother, William, opened a construction business on the Thai border across from the Laotian capital of Vientiane and spent the years between 1992 and 1996 tracking the fate of his father. Albro Lundy joined him for 12 days in 1994.

During that time William Lundy spoke with the brother of the man who blasted his father's plane from the sky with a carbine rifle. He talked to villagers who confirmed seeing a U.S. pilot land by parachute and who recalled seeing a man taken prisoner.

And he met a local official who produced etchings of his ID cards and dog tags and offered the real ones at a price - an offer William Lundy declined.

``He said `If you've got my father, and he's alive, you can name your price,' '' Albro Lundy said, ``but, `I'm not interested in buying any of his possessions.' ''

Recently, the Laotian government returned those relics to the U.S. government, which confirmed that the Geneva Convention card, the military ID card and the dog tags appear to be legitimate, according to retired Col. Johnie Webb, who is overseeing the case.

Questions raised

The articles raise more questions than they answer, though. Who held them? Lundy wondered. Why did they wait so long to return them? And what did the objects tell the family about their father?

``It's pretty obvious that somebody took these things from my father, and our question is whether they took these things from him alive or dead,'' Lundy said.

Along with the objects came two leg bones, but nothing else that could lead to an easy identification of the remains. No skull fragments that could be superimposed on a photograph. No teeth that might be matched to dental records.

Any hope of identification now rests with DNA analysis - a procedure scientists say is reliable but not infallible.

The Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory analyzes about 120 sets of bones a year through a program funded by the military, said Director Mitchell Holland.

These analyses don't confirm positive matches of remains to missing servicemen. Instead, the results yield a range of probability. For instance, a certain DNA segment might be present in as many as one in 100 people, or as few as one in 100,000. The lower the probability, the more likely that a match is correct.

Of the bones returned each year to the laboratory, about 85 percent can be successfully analyzed, Mitchell said. The rest have deteriorated so severely that scientists can no longer extract enough DNA to analyze them.

Even in bones that still contain enough fragments of genetic material to analyze, the hot, humid jungle conditions generally have wiped out much of the original DNA.

So in the bones that might be from Lundy's father, the two copies of DNA contained in the nucleus of cells have probably disappeared. That means scientists must seek remnants of DNA from the bone cells' mitochondria, or energy factories, which may house a thousand copies of the genetic segments.

To extract it, they ``amplify'' the genetic strands in a machine called a thermal cycler, which divides and reproduces the DNA much as a cell itself would do. It then marks the segments which are the unique signature of each individual. The procedure takes about a month, Holland said.

Because mitochondrial DNA is passed down only by the mother, the bone DNA must then be matched to a blood sample of the subject's mother or a relative from her side of the family.

Searching records

For the Lundys, that's no easy task. They lost touch with the maternal branch of their family tree long ago.

So now they are mounting a genealogical investigation to track down family members through the Mormon archives in Salt Lake City and birth records in the twin cities, where Lundy's mother lived.

``We're going through the Mormon records that are available,'' Lundy said. ``They have a very large resource for genealogy. We're also looking through the birth records for 1890 through 1900,'' the decade their grandmother was born.

If that search proves futile, they must resort to the scraps and mementos they saved of their father - his hairbrush, some envelopes he licked and mailed - each of which contains minute amounts of his genetic material.

Unlike blood samples, which can easily be mined for DNA, the hair and envelopes must be subjected to the same laborious process as the bones, further delaying the amount of time before results are obtained. Mitchell estimated that results won't be available until at least early next year.

So to expedite identification, Lundy plans to travel to Hawaii with a forensic scientist or anthropologist to examine the bones, hoping to glean new clues about his father's fate. With the help of a friend, he's now researching the field to find the premier expert in identification of human remains.

Years of waiting and wondering may culminate in those results. Lundy is torn between his hope that identification of the bones will prove his father is no longer suffering, and the lingering chance that he never died at all.

``It's a strange set of mixed emotions,'' he said.

``On the one hand you certainly don't want him to be living in that nightmare. On the other hand, if he's alive, you want to be bringing him home.''

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos, Box

Photo: (1) Air Force pilot Albro Lundy Jr. was shot down by small arms fire over Laos in 1970.

(2) Albro Lundy III, a Palos Verdes attorney consumed by the plight of his father, holds a photo of the pilot, a one-time area sports star.

Hans Gutknecht/Daily News

Box: DECODING IDENTITY FROM DNA IN BONES

Dionisio Munoz/Daily News