Obituaries : Deborah Bardsley; Activist for Missing Soldiers

Deborah Robertson Bardsley, 41, activist in the controversy over American miliary personnel missing in action in the Vietnam War. Bardsley spent much of her adult life in a futile attempt to uncover the fate of her father, Air Force fighter pilot John L. Robertson, after his plane was shot down over Vietnam in 1966. In 1990, she received a photograph purportedly showing Robertson and two other U.S. fliers in captivity in Vietnam. The photo touched off headlines and unleashed a war of words between the Pentagon, which branded it a phony, and the Robertson family, which believed it to be genuine. Bardsley traveled to Vietnam and talked her way into the notorious Son Tay Prison near Hanoi, where fliers were imprisoned, and visited the site where her father’s plane crashed. On Jan. 4 in Orange County of pneumonia resulting from influenza.