MAN FOUND DEAD WAS NO DERELICT ADM. BYRD’S ONLY SON DIED IN OLD WAREHOUSE
The old man found dead in the vacant, debris-strewn warehouse Monday looked like a derelict.
He was wearing what appeared to be green workman’s clothes and one shoe. The custodian who found him recalls having run him off the property a few days earlier. He had seemed a polite nuisance, just another drifter looking for a dry place to sleep.
But the man, who died of malnutrition and dehydration according to early tests, was not one of Baltimore’s homeless. He was Richard E. Byrd Jr., 68, of Boston — Harvard graduate, father of four grown sons, grandfather of six and the only son of Adm. Richard Evelyn Byrd, the polar explorer and national hero.
How Byrd came to die in a seedy mill-district warehouse is a mystery. Where he was and what he did over the last three weeks is unknown.
“I don’t think we’ll ever know,” Leverett Byrd, one of Byrd’s sons said Friday from his home in Needham, Mass.
On Sept. 13, Byrd left Boston by train, bound for a Washington ceremony to honor his father. He never arrived.
“I put him on a train and my wife was supposed to meet him,” Leverett Byrd said. “What happened in between, I don’t know.”
“He idolized his father,” Leverett Byrd said.
His dream, a family member said, was to establish a museum to the admiral, who in 1926 was the first man to fly over the North Pole and three years later led an expedition to the South Pole.
Baltimore police said Byrd had apparently been dead for several days when his body was found Monday. Police identified him from a Boston Transit Authority identification card that had been pinned to his undershorts.
The only person so far who remembers having seen Byrd since he left Boston was the custodian, who shooed him away together with an unidentified man Wednesday, Sept. 27.
“The first time I came across him, he said, ‘Somebody take me to Baltimore. I want to go to Baltimore,’ ” recalled Burt Gayleard, the on-site manager for Time Realty, owners of the property. “He was trying to sleep when I found him. He didn’t have any teeth, and he spoke like a vagrant. But he pronounced ‘Baltimore’ properly, not like someone who lived here. You know what I mean?” Gayleard said.
Richard Byrd Jr. was 6 years old when his father reached the North Pole, 9 when his father traveled to Antarctica. In the 1940s, Leverett Byrd said, Richard Byrd joined one of the admiral’s expeditions to the South Pole.
The admiral’s son supported himself through “a few little trusts,” Leverett Byrd said.
He always hoped to be able to create a museum in the family’s Beacon Hill home.
Family members said Byrd had no drinking problems. But they were concerned about his increasing vagueness.
“We’d bring up something from one of the expeditions and he’d pull the information right out of the hat,” Leverett Byrd said. “It was amazing all the details he knew. But in the present, he was more vague on things. He never wandered away or anything, but he had trouble remembering day-to-day things and was missing appointments and stuff.”
The last time his family saw Byrd was the night of Sept. 13, when Leverett Byrd drove him to Boston’s South Station and put him on a Washington-bound train. He wore a tan shirt and brown pants and carried a black bag.
The son asked an Amtrak employee who turned down the beds in the sleeper car to keep an eye on his father. But police later found Byrd’s bed apparently had never been slept in.
The Washington ceremony went on without Adm. Byrd’s son. His children hoped he had decided not to attend and instead was visiting someone in the capital. On Sept. 15, his son and daughter-in-law, Cathy, called the Needham Police Department to file a missing person report.
Cathy Byrd said she called Washington and tracked down the Amtrak worker who had seen Byrd when he boarded in Boston.
“She didn’t remember anything. She didn’t see him after the first 30 minutes,” she said.
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/1988/10/09/man-found-dead-was-no-derelict-adm-byrds-only-son-died-in-old-warehouse/