Desperately Searching for Answers : Missing: Lynn Shardlow’s husband has vanished, and their disability income has disappeared until his fate is learned.

Lynn Shardlow exists in a world in limbo.

She and her husband, Dr. W. Basil Shardlow, had lived on federal workers’ compensation checks since he contracted chronic hepatitis while operating at the Bronx Veterans Administration Hospital in 1971. For the rest of his life, Basil Shardlow would receive two-thirds of his salary. And if he should die because of the disease, his wife would receive half of his salary.

But since the 63-year-old surgeon disappeared May 28, he has been, to the federal government, neither dead nor alive, leaving Lynn Shardlow with no husband and no money.

“This is not right,” said Lynn Shardlow, 47. “I have taken care of this man for the last 19 years. I have been there for him as a nurse, a friend, a lover.”

The U.S. government stopped sending his monthly checks in September, saying Basil Shardlow no longer resides at his Laguna Beach address. Yet until a body is found, his wife cannot receive widow’s benefits.

“This case has left us disconcerted as well,” said Frank Faragasso, a federal supervisor in charge of the case, which is the first of its kind he has experienced in 22 years on the job. “But we have lots of other people to take care of. We have no obligation to her.”

Lynn Shardlow last saw her husband when she left home to run an errand that May morning. In the last few years the couple had never spent more than a few hours apart, she said, especially since his liver transplant operation a few weeks earlier. But that day, she came home to an empty condominium. She has not heard from her husband since.

Basil Shardlow apparently left the condominium wearing gray sweat pants, a turquoise long-sleeve T-shirt and green baseball cap.

Police Detective Jason Kravetz said the case is the most heart-wrenching in the years he has worked missing persons cases.

“You know, the first thing they teach you in training is not to get personally involved” Kravetz said. “Well, I’ve broken that rule in this case.”

Kravetz said he has looked at every body found in California that has any resemblance to the 6-foot-2 surgeon who had brown hair and blue eyes and weighed 175 pounds.

The case has taken Kravetz all over Southern California, chasing leads that might put to rest the nagging question that often keeps the detective awake at night: Where is Basil Shardlow?

“I just want to give her an answer,” Kravetz said. “Things are just tough all over for her right now.”

Officials from the U.S. Department of Labor said they would like to help Lynn Shardlow, but their hands are legally tied until she can produce a death certificate. Under California law, a missing person cannot be presumed dead until five years after the day a disappearance.

So this holiday season, Lynn Shardlow will mourn not only for “the love of her life,” she will also be near broke and looking for a job.

For months, she joined police and more than 100 volunteers in combing the coastal cities from San Clemente to Laguna Beach. The search party scoured the hills and beaches where Basil Shardlow went for walks, Kravetz said. Dozens of divers scanned the ocean floor and underwater caves for signs that he might have drowned, he said.

Thousands of copies of Basil Shardlow’s photo were distributed throughout the state, Kravetz said. Several people called, but none of the leads panned out.

“He just walked off the face of the Earth,” Kravetz said.

A cashier at a supermarket six blocks away from his house said the doctor was seen on the same day he was reported missing, Kravetz said.

And about two months later, two people called the Police Department to report that a person matching Basil Shardlow’s description was seen walking across a golf course. The callers told Kravetz that the man she saw seemed disoriented, which was consistent with his medical condition at the time.

The drugs that kept Shardlow alive after his liver transplant were left on the counter of his house. Without them, Lynn Shardlow said, he would have been “a bit out of it.”

Doctors at UCLA Medical Center, where the operation was performed, said the chances are not likely that someone in his condition would survive more than few weeks.

Lynn Shardlow says she believes her husband died. She recalled a strange incident three days after he disappeared when a morning dove walked into her condominium from the patio door, which faces the ocean. As she sat on the couch with a friend, the dove came up to her, then flew to eye level. Then it turned and flew away. She looked at the television, which was broadcasting Memorial Day events.

“I saw thousands of doves being released in the air,” Lynn Shardlow said. “At that moment, I knew somehow that he’s gone. He’s not in pain anymore. I closed my eyes, then I hugged myself.”

The Shardlows were married in 1976, about a year after their first date in which they shared a pizza after a Cary Grant movie.

“I fell in love with him,” she said. “Besides the fact that he was so cute, I knew that he could do anything he wanted.”

William Lawson, a doctor at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York who met Basil Shardlow in 1965 as a fellow resident, said patients loved the convivial Englishman. Basil Shardlow was born in Liverpool and had served as captain in the British 16th Parachute Brigade, Lawson said. He later had a practice on Park Avenue as an ear, nose and throat specialist.

Rosemarie Accardi-Mangione, who is married to jazz musician and composer Chuck Mangione, met Basil Shardlow in 1977 after the Shardlows moved to California from New York. Accardi-Mangione and Lynn Shardlow had been friends years earlier, and when Accardi-Mangione underwent an operation following a heart attack, her old friend’s husband visited her at the hospital.

“He sat in a chair by my bedside and listened to my problems until I saw myself through it,” she said. “It was like he came to me as a saint and took care of me.”

The two had stayed in touch since. She last spoke to him when he was in the hospital last winter anticipating a liver transplant, which was later canceled when the wrong organ was shipped, Lynn Shardlow said. A heart valve was supposed to be shipped to Atlanta while a liver was meant to go to UCLA. Somehow, the orders got swapped.

At the same time, Accardi-Mangione said, she was recovering from open-heart surgery.

“We were joking about having to replace our parts,” she said. “He sounded very upbeat, very funny, but I also felt a tone of fear in his voice.”

That fear manifested in suicidal tendencies after the liver transplant in the spring, Lynn Shardlow said. He had been taking “mood elevation” pills, but stopped days before he left home, she said. It is unclear whether he was suicidal when he disappeared, but Lynn Shardlow said given his condition, it is a possibility.

She organized a memorial service on his birthday, Dec. 3, but canceled because she “couldn’t go through with it.”

She now is looking for a job teaching, which she once did for the L.A. Unified School District, she said.

Meanwhile, her battle for disability payments seems all but lost. Even after Basil Shardlow is declared legally dead, his widow will have to prove that he died from the hepatitis that he contracted when he pricked his finger while handling commercial blood, which then was not screened for viruses.

Without a body, it isn’t likely that she can do that, said Max Gest, an attorney who specializes in federal workers’ compensation laws.

Faragasso said, “We don’t want to leave anybody out in the cold, but until we know what has happened to him, we’re in limbo.”