BBC Scotland to air new Lockerbie Bombing documentary
BBC One Scotland is to air a new documentary on the Lockerbie Bombing. However this time it takes on a personal story as the cameras follow the American mother of one victim and her journey to the place her son’s body was found.
Carol King Eckersley, who only discovered last year that the son she gave up for adoption was a Lockerbie bombing victim, has made an emotional journey to the place where his body was found.
In My Lost Son Carol pieces together the story of Ken Bissett’s life in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Carol, from Oregon, in the United States, is probably the last mother to have found out that her child was killed when Pan Am 103 was bombed over Lockerbie in 1988 – the deadliest act of terrorism on British soil.
In a BBC Scotland programme last year marking the 25th anniversary of the bombing, BBC journalist Glenn Campbell revealed that Carol, 66, had just made the shocking discovery that her only child was killed in the terrorist attack.
“This powerful documentary follows Carol’s emotionally challenging journey since that traumatic moment to find out more about the boy she never held but whom, she says, she kept in her heart over the years.” – BBC Scotland
Carol meets a friend of Ken’s who was at school with him in New York; she travels to London where she meets the man who taught Ken photography in the last months of his life; she meets another mother who also lost a child to adoption and who has proved a powerful support to her. And finally Carol ends her journey in Lockerbie at the spot where Ken’s body was found… one of the 270 killed in the atrocity.
She is guided around the town by Colin Dorrance, a serving police officer, who was the youngest policeman on duty the night of the crash in December 1988. He takes her to the spot where Ken’s body was found and in a highly emotional visit to Dryfesdale Cemetery she lays flowers to her lost son.
As she sees Ken’s name on the Lockerbie memorial, Carol says: “Oh, there’s Ken. It shouldn’t have happened. It shouldn’t have happened. You shouldn’t be there. He was so ready to be a grown-up and live a good life and be a good person and he never had the chance.”
Later she says: “All the horror and the sorrow just kind of all came together and at one point I thought ‘I just want to wail and wail and not stop’ but I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to stop.”
Before travelling to Scotland, Carol meets Ian Hessenberg, Ken’s photography professor from the time he spent in London in the autumn of 1988 with the campus of Syracuse University. He tells Carol his memories of Ken as a delightfully ‘cheeky student’ and as she walks the streets of west London she says: “I felt like he was right there with me and I was walking with him… not just where he had walked.”
On a visit to Edinburgh Castle, a guide shows her the spot where a cherished photograph of Ken was taken when he visited the Scottish capital with fellow photography students from Syracuse.
Carol is aware that she is one of many women who lost children to adoption in the 1960s. In her case, as the daughter of a school principal in 1967, she felt it would have been socially unacceptable for her to keep him as he was born out of wedlock.
The couple who adopted Ken told him they were not his birth parents. They are both dead but left a detailed account of Ken’s childhood in the Syracuse archives.
During her visit to Scotland, Carol goes to stay with Marion McMillan near Glasgow. Marion runs a support network for women separated from their children and the two women share the keen loss of children they never saw grow up. In doing so, Carol hopes to make it easier for others to talk about adoption and loss.
At the end of her journey, she concludes: “I’ve learned the adoption process is something that is not understood enough. I know I didn’t… I gave Ken for adoption for what I thought were all the best reasons… but I didn’t know what it was going to do to me and how it would affect me for the rest of my life.”
My Lost Son airs on BBC One Scotland on Monday 18th August at 7.30 pm. Viewers outside Scotland can access BBC One Scotland on Sky 141 (HD) & 951, Freesat 108 (HD) & 960, Virgin Media 108 (HD) & 862.