A Mother’s 21-Year Quest Ends : Families: The struggle for Billie Jacox ends at graveside of her son, killed during a rescue mission in the Nigerian province of Biafra.

Just over 21 years after the death of her son in a long-forgotten American rescue operation in Africa, a San Fernando Valley woman will visit his grave at Forest Lawn this week and place a single rose on the grass.

The ability to observe the anniversary of his death at the graveside for the first time will mark her victory in a struggle with two governments for more than two decades.

Until two months ago the body of Richard Jacox lay in a deliberately unmarked and obscured grave in the Nigerian province of Biafra, where he died in the crash of a C-97 cargo plane loaded with fish and cornmeal as it tried to land on a jungle highway at night.

Jacox was one of the volunteers who flew for the United States as part of an international airlift to bring food to the starving Biafrans during their unsuccessful war to secede from Nigeria. Many of them, such as Jacox, belonged to a California Air National Guard unit based until recently at Van Nuys Airport.

Ever since the crash, his widowed mother, Billie Jacox, has badgered the State Department, the Nigerian government, United Nations diplomats--anyone she thought could help return her son’s remains. They have included every U.S. President since Lyndon B. Johnson. She acquired drawers and boxfuls of correspondence and stories about her campaign in American and Nigerian newspapers, all leading nowhere.

“Dick was my life,” Jacox said. The walls and shelves of her home are filled with photos of her son. She could not live with the thought that he would not be buried in the family cemetery plot with her and her late husband, she said.

The Nigerians regarded the airlift mercy pilots as mercenaries who prolonged the civil war. Until this year they rejected all Jacox’s overtures.

“They wouldn’t even let me have a visa to get into the country to see the grave,” she said.

Jacox’s quest took a turn for the better after she told her saga to Santa Barbara attorney Edward Medvene last year.

“My wife knew Billie as a friend,” Medvene said recently. “She was at a stalemate and asked me to take a look at this thing. It was an incredible story.”

Medvene contacted John W. Foley Jr., a retired State Department officer who had tried several times to help Billie Jacox. Foley was connected to the airlift as director for Nigerian affairs during the Biafran War. He had located the graves of Jacox and about 25 other airmen who died in the airlift before he left Africa in 1972.

“Foley confirmed that her story was accurate and that he had been to the cemetery and seen the grave,” Medvene said. “He thought a letter to the State Department from someone prominent in the government might help.”

The U.S. portion of the airlift--organized by an interdenominational religious group called Joint Church Aid--had received support from the Nixon Administration.

And Medvene had an old friend, Herbert W. Miller, Nixon’s Washington attorney. “I called Miller last October and asked if Nixon would help,” Medvene said.

According to Miller, Nixon wrote to Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger, suggesting that relations with Nigeria had become sufficiently friendly to ask for the return of Jacox’s body on humanitarian grounds.

Eagleburger’s intervention succeeded, Miller said. Foley, coming out of retirement for one mission as a favor to Billie Jacox, went to Nigeria with State Department backing in June, located and disinterred the body, Miller and Medvene said.

Foley declined to comment, saying “the State Department made a commitment to the Nigerians that we wouldn’t talk about it.”

In an earlier interview, Foley had described finding the graves near St. Teresa’s, a Catholic Church in the jungle next to the two-lane road that was once a makeshift airstrip, Biafra’s only link with the outside world.

A caretaker “still had a diagram that showed where the graves were, and he took me to the site, way back in the boondocks,” Foley said.

The food airlift was one of the most dramatic chapters of the Biafran war of 1967-70, in which the oil-rich eastern provinces of Nigeria tried to secede.

Nigerian federal forces occupied the ports and food became critically short in Biafra. Western newspapers and TV screens were filled with pictures of starving children, emaciated stick figures or with bellies bloated by kwashiorkor , a wasting disease caused by protein deficiency. Most of the estimated 600,000 to 1 million deaths in the war were blamed on kwashiorkor.

Pressure mounted from world public opinion to do something for the starving Biafrans. Church groups and the International Red Cross massed cargo planes on Portuguese-held islands off the coast of Nigeria, a few hours flying time from the improvised airstrip at Uli.

Because gunrunners flew the same routes, Nigeria regarded the airlift planes as legitimate military targets and sometimes attacked them with MIGs and antiaircraft guns. The threat from fighters restricted the airlift to night flights. Landing on the thinly paved road, by the light of kerosene torches or auto headlights, was perilous.

At the height of the airlift in the summer of 1969, after the United States had become involved, 40 flights a night carried 500 tons of food into Uli.

Richard Jacox, then 25, died there because he did a friend a favor.

A Glendale native and 1961 Birmingham High School graduate, he joined the Air National Guard’s 146th Tactical Airlift Wing at Van Nuys Airport in 1965. Because the wing had been equipped with the C-97 cargo planes being used in the airlift, dozens of its members volunteered for it, saying they were acting as civilians.

Jacox’s mother knows far more than she otherwise would have about her son’s last hours because of a remarkable coincidence: Her brother, Robert J. Leigh, an aircraft mechanic at Van Nuys Airport, was with him.

About sundown on the evening of Sept. 26, 1969, Richard Jacox was reading a paperback book on the steps of Fat Freddy’s, a bar on the Portuguese island of Sao Tome where the airlift crews hung out.

A fellow cargo-handler from the Air Guard back in the Valley asked for a favor.

Would Jacox switch planes with him that night? If the friend flew on the plane Jacox was supposed to be on, the pilot would let the friend log training time as a flight engineer.

Sure, Jacox said. He headed for the flight line, tucking his novel into his pocket. It was “Fate Is the Hunter,” a book by Ernest K. Gann about how casual decisions lead airmen into peril.

About three hours later, the plane Jacox had volunteered to work on crashed into the jungle and exploded, killing all five men aboard.

Leigh, whose job was to work on the planes in Sao Tome, saw them take off and return each night, but he had never been to Biafra. Not until he heard his nephew had been killed.

He volunteered to join a crash investigation team of four Americans who went in on a West German DC-6 the following night, because he wanted a death certificate for insurance purposes.

“If it wasn’t for the fact that he was my nephew, I wouldn’t have tried to be a hero and get in there,” he said. “There was antiaircraft firing at us on the way in and on the way out.”

The wreckage was scattered over a large area covered with debris. His nephew’s body apparently had been hurled clear of the plane as it disintegrated. It had not been found.

“The plane cartwheeled and busted open and exploded,” he said. “They had about 35,000 pounds of beans and grain and stuff in burlap sacks. It flew all over. A nun found the body the next day. It was burned pretty bad, but she recovered his wallet with it.

“They had a grave dug for Dickie in the churchyard. The bodies were in little plywood boxes. The hole wasn’t too deep.”

That is where Foley found the body in June. He escorted it as far as London, from where it was shipped to LAX.

On the afternoon of July 3, about 30 people, including Medvene’s wife, attended a reburial ceremony at Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills. The minister who conducted the service paid tribute to Billie Jacox’s long struggle.

“I waited there until the grave was all filled in,” she said.

“He has a tombstone now with his name on it. It bothered me all those years to think of him in an unmarked grave.

“I finally have peace now.”