Remains of Errol Flynn's Son Spark Feud in Cambodia

In the late 1960s, American Sean Flynn abandoned a lukewarm film career to join a band of intrepid journalists documenting the civil wars in Vietnam and Cambodia. At first, Flynn drew international attention merely by virtue of being the even-more-handsome son of his movie-star father entering a combat zone. He and his colleagues' brazen lifestyle and daring work in the field became the stuff of legend and inspired a cast of colorful characters in war films and literature. More significantly, their photos, shot within the frenzied theater of combat, became pivotal in exposing Americans at home to the brutality and ambiguous profit of their military's involvement in the region. But the contribution was not without cost: At least 37 journalists were killed or went missing in Cambodia during its 1970-1975 war fought between the U.S.-backed military government and the North Vietnamese-supported Khmer Rouge.

Flynn was among them. In 1970 in Cambodia, Flynn, 28, was on assignment photographing for TIME with fellow American Dana Stone, who was shooting video for CBS. The pair left the capital Phnom Penh on motorbikes for the front line — pushing each other, the account goes, to get the ultimate story. They were never heard from again. Cambodia had already descended into full-blown civil war, but little was known yet about its unique breed of communist Khmer Rouge revolutionaries. The world would only find out later that the group had no appetite for compromise with their enemies or captured Western journalists.

Numerous reports about how and when Sean died have circulated over the years; the most widely repeated theory is that he was captured by Vietnamese communists, turned over to Khmer Rouge, and then held with other Western journalists before being crudely executed. The commercial value of the Sean Flynn story — a dashing, brash son flying headlong into war to stake out a reputation independent of his movie idol father — has not escaped Hollywood's eye. A film company has purchased the rights to Two of the Missing, an account of Flynn and Stone's saga. Heath Ledger was reportedly considering taking the role of Flynn before his own death in 2008.

Despite the fabled search for Flynn, the two men who believe they found his remains have not exactly been thanked for their work. Australian David MacMillan, 29, and Briton Keith Rotheram, 60, turned over a skull, teeth and bones to the U.S. embassy in Phnom Penh, which sent them on to the military office in Hawaii in charge of finding missing Americans from past conflicts. This outfit's initial assessment was that the bones may be those of a Southeast Asian, but further testing is underway. They have emphasized that amateur digs are discouraged because they can damage evidence, noting that in this case, "The remains are badly fragmented due to the manner in which they were recovered." The office's spokesperson stopped short of saying MacMillan and Rotheram had broken any laws, but contrary to standard protocol for exhumations, the pair used a mechanical digger with a serrated scoop to remove a layer of topsoil covering what they believed to be Sean's gravesite. The military described the area as "disturbed" when a team was sent there for a follow-up excavation, and said they found additional bone fragments in the hole of the previous dig.