An Oregon woman located the son she gave up for adoption a half-century ago, sadly finding that he died in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing.
Carol King-Eckersley was only 19 when she had the baby boy, who grew up as Kenneth Bissett and went on to Cornell, according to a BBC documentary.
She kept a promise not to look for him for 45 years, after giving him up for adoption in New York.
Then earlier this year, the woman’s search led her to a website honoring 35 students who been part of a study abroad program and who were on board Pam Am 103 on Dec. 21, 1998.
“I looked and I said, ‘My God, it’s him!'” said on the BBC’s “Living with Lockerbie.” “It was his birth date, he looked just like my dad. I looked in the mirror and I said, ‘He looks like me!'”
King-Eckersley recalled phoning her sister to share the joy of finding her baby’s name and birth date on that website. That jubilation turned to horror, moments later, when King-Eckersley realized what she was reading.
“I called my sister and I said, ‘But why are they only showing a part of his life? They’ve got December 1967 but then they’ve got Dec. 21, 1988. That’s not right,’” she recalled.
“And it finally dawned on me that it was right and I just said, ‘My God, my baby’s dead!’ I realized that it was the Lockerbie Pan Am 103 remembrance page and I said ‘My God, he was on that plane!’”
King-Eckersley, 65, called the shocking discovery a “double tragedy.”
“[There were] 270 people [who] died in that tragedy and one of those happened to be the only child I ever had,” she said.
“So it became a kind of double tragedy. I found him and I lost him on the same day.”
Pan Am Flight 103 blew apart shortly after takeoff from London. All 243 passengers, 16 crew members and 11 people on the ground in Lockerbie, Scotland, died in the Libyan terrorist attack.
King-Eckersley recalled her last moments with the baby, as they were driven to a lawyer’s office in Manhattan to complete the adoption.
“There was this little bundle wrapped up in the front seat and all I could think, all the way from Queens in New York to mid-Manhattan, was ‘Please don’t cry,’ ” she said.
“I knew that if he cried I would not be able to do it. I never held him but now I get to grieve for him.”