Lockerbie officer finally learns truth over tragic toddler
‘As though they were asleep’ ‘Person I need to remember’
FOR nearly three decades her identity remained a mystery to the teenaged police officer who was handed her tiny lifeless body.
The 20-month-old girl, the first to be recovered from the wreckage of Pan Am Flight 103, was passed to rookie constable Colin Dorrance when he was only 18.
It was one of many horrifying sights Mr Dorrance had to endure in the aftermath of the most deadly terrorist attack on UK soil – but the one that haunted him.
Now Mr Dorrance, from Lockerbie, Dumfriesshire, has finally been able to find some form of closure after discovering the child’s name in a chance meeting.
Bryony Owen was just a toddler when she and her mother Yvonne, from Carmarthen, Wales, died in the disaster on December 21, 1988.
In the aftermath of the tragedy, the young constable was handed Bryony’s body by a farmer who drove down from the hills in a pick-up truck with debris from the plane wreckage.
She was the first to be brought into a makeshift mortuary for the 259 passengers and crew who all perished on board the flight after a bomb went off. A further 11 on the ground also died.
Mr Dorrance, who was on his first period of home leave just weeks after passing out of police college, said he thought it would be unprofessional to use police systems to try to discover the names of those involved.
So he had to wait almost 30 years for a fateful meeting on Friday to finally learn the truth.
Mr Dorrance, 48, said: ‘It was the body of a child he’d found in a field at the back of his farm.
‘It was a young child, under the age of five is all I can really remember at that time.
‘The child looked as though they were asleep. It didn’t seem obviously injured at first.
‘It was a shock to realise this was a passenger from Pam Am 103. At the time it all happened so fast.’
The former police officer added: ‘There were hundreds of passengers brought into the town hall.
‘It was just a case of moving on then, but in the years since it was something that bothered me. It was such an extreme, intense moment that I can’t explain why, but naturally you want to find out who that was.
‘It took me 25 years to find out who the farmer was – but I gathered that he suffered quite terribly as a result of what he experienced that night, and I didn’t want to awaken any bad feelings, so I left it alone.’
It was during a visit to the farm with the family of another passenger who died on board the doomed plane that Mr Dorrance met the farmer’s son.
He said: ‘Fate just fell into place. The farmer was there and it was his father who’d brought the child to the town hall.
‘He said it was a child by the name of Bryony Owen who was 20 months old and it had affected his father very badly over the years. The mystery – if that’s what you want to call it – was laid to rest.’
Bryony was travelling to the United States with her mother for Christmas. They were laid to rest in a single coffin in the village of Pendine, Carmarthenshire.
Mr Dorrance added: ‘I didn’t lose anyone in this. People lost everything in some cases.
‘But there’s a sense of peace, a sense of conclusion to it that I now know the person I need to remember.’ Mr Dorrance, who has now retired, is taking part in a transatlantic fundraising cycle ride to mark the 30th anniversary of the atrocity.
His is one of five representing the emergency services who cycled from Lockerbie to Edinburgh Castle at the weekend, accompanied by 70 supporters.
They will now cycle 600 miles from the Lockerbie memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, in Virginia, to Syracuse University, New York, which lost 35 students in the bombing.
Former Libyan spy Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, who was jailed for the bombing, died of cancer in 2012 after being freed from Greenock Prison on compassionate grounds.