Okinawa Crown Mystery Defies Leads After Nearly 70 Years: Patty Sternfelt remembers her grandfather filling volumes of handwritten books with accounts and keepsakes from his time in the Navy Reserve. She spent her childhood south of Boston playing with kimonos and sashes that Cmdr. Carl Sternfelt brought home from his tours of Japan and the Pacific in the 1940s. “I saw every artifact he brought back,” said Sternfelt, who was named trustee of her grandfather’s books after he died in 1976. “I admired him and looked up to him.” Far away on Okinawa, her veteran grandfather is remembered differently. He has long been the main suspect in one of the island’s most enduring mysteries: the looting of the Ryukyu Kingdom’s royal crown during World War II. “I chased him all the way to his grave — I was tempted to even open his grave one time to see if it was in there,” said Alex Kishaba, an Okinawan who tracked the artifact for years. But investigations on both sides of the Pacific finally appear to have wound down. For more than a decade, no new evidence linking the U.S. sailor or his surviving family to the crown has surfaced. Time is testing the theory that the Sternfelts or a museum have stashed it away somewhere in Boston since the war — and raised the possibility the crown might be lost to history.
Posted on: Fri, 20 Sep 2013 11:47:25 +0000
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