KELLER, Texas — In the basement of the Parker County District Courts building, at the back of an old file cabinet, District Attorney Jeff Swain stumbled upon the biggest mystery of his career.
“We’re having to try and find something, anything, that might be a clue as to what it was,” Swain said.
Inside the cabinet was an envelope and inside the envelope were two rings: one, from the Air Force, the other a 1956 Dupo High School class ring with the initials P.W.
It left Swain searching for answers.
“When you’re trying to find something these days what do you do,” Swain asked. “You go get on Google, right?”
He learned that Dupo High School is in Illinois and the only person with the initials P.W. who graduated in 1956 was a woman named Peggy Wall.
“Which is great,” said district attorney investigator Wendy Bravo. “It was a great lead, however, there’s several Peggy Walls in the United States, so that didn’t really help narrow it down.”
“And when it’s class of ’56, I thought there was a real good chance we might not find the actual person this belonged to, but maybe their children,” Swain added.
Swain asked investigator Bravo to dig deeper.
After getting a copy of the 1950 census, Bravo located Wall’s family. She reached out and discovered that not only was Wall alive, she lived just an hour away in Keller.
“I was shocked,” Wall said. “I looked at my daughter and I said, ‘really?’”
Wall never knew what happened to her rings. One was her high school ring, of course, and the other honored her ex-husband’s service in the Air Force.
She says, one day, they were just missing. She thought they’d simply been misplaced during one of their many military moves.
Turns out, they rings had been stolen and admitted as evidence in a 1986 drug trial.
When the case closed, they were put in the back of that file cabinet and forgotten.
While cleaning, a clerk found them late last year and notified Swain. Finally, just after the new year and 36 years after they were admitted as evidence, investigator Bravo returned the rings to Wall.
Wall put her class ring on immediately, which put a smile on everyone else.
“Another prosecutor I know says, ‘we don’t sell butterflies and rainbows. We sell justice,’” Swain said. “This is butterflies and rainbows. This is an uplifting, positive story out of the DA’s office. You don’t have that every day.”
Said Wall: “I just figure people like that have a special heart wanting to do what’s right."
Justice comes in many forms and when you do what’s right, it always has a familiar ring.
More stories from WFAA's Sean Giggy: