Please Don't Cry For Me

About the Book

Guam, Marianas Islands, December 11, 1948 at 2020 hours.  Ruth Farnsworth (soon to be married to a Staff Sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps), was working part time in the MARBO  area Jade Shop.

During that evening a tragedy count down clock began ticking.  There were five distinct count down times running on the clock before she was brutally beaten unconscious and taken to the jungle where she was raped and left to die.  Beginning at 1900 hours and ending at 2135 hours, a few minutes of time or a changed routine could have saved Ruth’s life.  She lost all five chances for life and never regained consciousness to tell what happened to her.

The subject of a forty-hour search, Ruth Farnsworth’s bloody unconscious body, gasping for air, was found in a jungle clearing at 1100 hours on December 13, 1948.  Ruth died eight minutes after midnight on December 14, 1948 at the 22nd Army  Hospital, Guam, Marianas Islands.

A month later in January 1949, three U.S. Air Force airmen  were apprehended and charged with the rape murder of Ruth Farnsworth a 27-years-old U.S. Navy civil service worker. The murder and courts-martial (three separate trials) in May and June of 1949 made national news coverage from December 1948 through 1954.

Now over fifty years later, unpublished official data related to the murder and trials, obtained under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act can be told. The story is based on information from 5,000 pages of official documents (many formerly classified as confidential or secret) and a construction supply supervisor who worked on the Andersen Air Force Base, Guam Project.

The setting for the crime and trials was Guam, the largest and most populated of the mid-pacific Marianas Islands.  The island was a land of coral reefs, jungles, barren land, fertile valleys, military airfields and bases, and sunken World War  II ships in harbors.  A United States Possession it fell into Japanese hands on December 12, 1941 and was liberated by the landing of U.S. Marines on July 20, 1944.      

In less than two years after the defeat of Japan, with the threat of the cold war, it was the site of massive military construction of airfields and deep water harbors.  However the  civilian population of the United States, tired of war, paid little attention to the construction of strategic airfields, missile launching sites and harbors in the mid-pacific islands.

As unincorporated territory of the United States its 1948 population was estimated at 55,000 to 58,000 persons.  Of the total population 27,000 were Guamanian and Filipino ancestry and most of the remaining being American military and civilian  workers. Even though the WWII occupation by Japan had ended several years earlier a small number of Japanese soldiers, who  never surrendered, remained in the hills and jungles.  Guam, an  outpost of the American system of defense had been administered by a U.S. Navy Governor since early 1899 following the Spanish American War...

About the Author

Master Gunnery Sergeant Robert Leland Athey, UCMC Retired, enlisted July 13, 1942. Served in World War II, The Korean War, The Cuban Missile Crisis and at many duty stations. Retired from active duty at the Marine Corps Supply Activity, Philadelphia on July 14, 1969. A native son of Kings County, California he is active in the preservation of local history. Lives with his wife Nadine in the attractive city of Hanford, California.