High school, Air Force rings used as evidence in 1986 Texas trial finally returned to owner

An Air Force ring and one from a 1956 class graduation that were admitted into evidence for a 1986 Parker County trial have been reunited with their owner after she was tracked down by an investigator with the district attorney’s office.

Wendy Bravo, an investigator with the Parker County District Attorney’s Office, had only one clue to go on when trying to find the owner: the high school class ring. It was from the Dupo High School (in Dupo, Illinois) graduating class of 1956 and had the initials P.W. engraved.

District Attorney Jeff Swain said in a news release that his office at first didn’t even know anything about the case or why the jewelry was still in evidence.

“It just fell on our laps,” Swain said in a news release. “When we got to looking at it and found a class ring and a military service ring, I thought it was important that we try to get it back to its rightful owners.”

They didn’t even know the gender of the owner.

During the search for the rings’ owner, Bravo learned the jewelry was in evidence from a case in which a woman was sentenced to life in prison for “an aggravated possession of methamphetamine,” according to the news release. The rings were admitted into evidence during the trial and stayed there through appeals and until the first week of this year.

That’s when Bravo met with the owner.

She found the owner by starting with an email to the principal of Dupo High School, who got back to her quickly with the name Peggy Wall. It was a good place to start, but there was no telling if Wall had changed her name for some reason like marriage. She didn’t have a criminal record, which meant using an approximate age and first and possibly changed maiden name wasn’t going to turn up a lot of results.

Bravo was about to sign up for Ancestry.com to aid in her search when she learned that census data is released to the public archive every 72 years. Using raw census data from 1950 and a mention in the high school’s yearbook that Peggy Wall had moved to Dupo from St. Louis, Bravo was able to find relatives including a brother, Leroy.

Leroy had already died, but Bravo found his children and reached out. From them, she learned Peggy Wall became Peggy Korte after marrying a man named James Korte, then after a divorce changed her name to Peggy Tucker.

Tucker was born in East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1937. After she graduated from Dupo High School, she and her family moved to Florida where, in 1957, she met and married Korte. James Korte, who was enlisted in the Air Force, moved to several bases with Tucker until his final assignment at Fort Worth’s Carswell Air Force Base, which has since become part of the Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base.

They had seven children together before they divorced in 1987, according to Bravo’s research. Korte died in October last year.

In the first week of 2023, Bravo was able to meet with Tucker and her daughter, Pamela Alcon, at their home in Keller. Tucker recognized the class ring, two large matching “P” lapel pins she and her mother both used to wear, four other rings, two watches, a necklace and other jewelry, along with Korte’s commemorative Air Force ring.

The Air Force ring was given to Alcon and Tucker and Korte’s other children, along with a buck knife and Air Force pendant.

The Air Force ring was identified as a Vietnam-era Strategic Air Command B-58 Hustler commemorative item to remember Korte’s military service.

“Usually, as a DA Investigator, when I’m using my people locating skills, I’m looking for a victim, witness, or defendant,” Bravo said in the news release. “This search was kind of fun because it required some new skills and was geared toward giving people back some of their things they hadn’t seen in decades. I knew that the end game was going to bring smiles to people’s faces, which is not something we get a lot of with our regular felony cases.”