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Greg Stoeger recovered a wallet lost 25 years ago while he was searching for Civil War relics with his metal detector in Suffolk.

Greg Stoeger recovered a wallet lost 25 years ago while he was searching for Civil War relics with his metal detector in Suffolk. (Stephen M. Katz)

(Tribune News Service) — A Virginia Beach metal-detecting hobbyist was scouring the woods of Suffolk for Civil War relics in March. Instead, he solved a mystery.

It was not gold. Or money. Or a rare relic.

It was a mud-crusted Dockers wallet seemingly held together by roots that had grown between the folds found near Lake Kilby.

“It was maybe 8 inches down, mostly covered by 25 years worth of foliage falling on it,” said Greg Stoeger.

Inside was a Department of Defense access card issued to active-duty service members. The only indicator of how long the wallet had been lost in the woods was the card’s expiration date: July 4, 1999.

“But it was not just the wallet. It was finding the story behind the wallet,” Stoeger said.

Stoeger decided to try to locate the owner. He shared his find in Facebook groups, and it was only a matter of days before he was connected with 25-year-old Shaelynn Heffernan, the daughter of the wallet’s owner.

“I thought it was a scam. I immediately thought — you know, this is not real. There was a picture attached to it, but the picture was blurred out because when someone sends you a message and they aren’t your friend, it blurs the images. I was scared to click on the image,” Heffernan said.

Stoeger had sent Heffernan a picture of the DoD-issued and state-issued identification cards in the wallet. When she clicked on the image, unblurring it, Shaelynn said she immediately recognized the man on the ID cards as her father.

She sent the message to her parents — Robert and Nelly Heffernan — who were in disbelief.

“It was like it brought me back to 25 years ago. Boom, I was there and I just couldn’t believe it. I got back all the memories of that time and what we were going through,” Nelly said.

In 1998, the family was going through an anxious time.

Robert was a 23-year-old Marine. He and Nelly, who was pregnant at the time, were stationed at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point in North Carolina when Robert was diagnosed with late-stage testicular cancer.

“It was already all the way up into my lungs and my abdomen when they caught it,” Robert said.

He was scheduled for surgery. But the day before, Shaelynn was born about six weeks premature.

“I saw my daughter get born and that night I had to leave to drive up to Norfolk to the Naval Medical Center for major surgery. They cut me all the way down the middle and sat there for about 15 hours and just picked all the cancer out,” Robert said.

Robert needed continued care following the surgery, treatment he was unable to receive in North Carolina. So the Marine Corps transferred Robert and his family to Hampton Roads, assigning him to work at Portsmouth Naval Hospital as an assistant chaplain for 18 months while he was medically separated.

“We were young,” Nelly said. “Our whole family was in New York, so we didn’t have any support in the Virginia area. The military was all we had — that was our identity, our safety net — and we couldn’t count on that to take care of us in the long term.”

To make ends meet and brace for his medical separation, Robert took a job with Chanello’s, delivering pizzas in the evenings. That’s how he found himself at the wrong end of a shotgun barrel one night in Suffolk.

“It was a very traumatizing experience. Three young men, teenagers, came with shotguns held at my head. Detectives told us that I was pretty lucky not to have been killed because there were gang initiations going on,” Robert said.

The three robbers took his wallet, a gold crucifix and two supreme pizzas.

“We lived in fear knowing someone had our address. We slept with a chair under the door,” Nelly said.

A month later, the family moved to Greenville, North Carolina, so Nelly could study at East Carolina University.

When the Heffernans were contacted about the wallet, Nelly said it brought back all the uncertainty and helplessness she felt 25 years ago.

“We were young, had already faced cancer, a premature baby and another move after he had to end his military career. Life seemed so full of twists and turns and the path was not exactly clear,” Nelly said, adding, “But it also made me so thankful about how everything turned out.”

These days, the Heffernans are preparing for Shaelynn’s wedding, which will take place in Italy this May. They also have a 15-year-old son, Keaghan.

“We are so grateful to Greg Stoeger for returning (Robert’s) lost IDs and allowing us to go back in time for a moment,” Nelly said in a Facebook post. “We are thankful for all the trial and smile, the tears and the fears, the friends and the lessons, our family and our father.”

Stoeger, a member of the Tidewater Coin and Relic Club, said he has found many unique and cool items over the past three years that he has been metal detecting. His finds include a 1735 King George II half-penny, 1912-18 City of Norfolk train token, and countless three-ring .59 caliber Civil War bullets.

But the wallet, Stoeger said, will remain his most memorable find.

“Say I find a .59-caliber this week, and in a couple months, I will find five more. And one looks just like the other,” he said. “But how many wallets will I find that has this story to go with it?”

©2023 The Virginian-Pilot.

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