General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the notorious Saigon police chief, undoubtedly took many secrets to the grave after his death in quiet exile in California last week.
Among them was a snippet of intelligence which could have lifted the spirits of an old peasant woman still living on the outskirts of the city he once ruled with a brutality considered shocking by even the standards of the Vietnam War.
Nguyen Thi Lop's husband Lem was the man he executed with a snub-nosed pistol on a Saigon street during the Tet Offensive of 1968.
The picture - later to win a Pulitzer Prize - was splashed on front pages across the world and for generations has captured the horror of the conflict.
In the chaos of that bloody week, Mrs Lop never found out what happened to her husband's remains. To this day she has been denied the chance to perform the rites allowing his soul to rest according to Vietnamese tradition.
'All these years I have been waiting and waiting to hear from him [Loan], and now he has died,' she said. 'I always told myself that if I ever had the chance to meet him and he told what happened to the remains, I would have forgiven him. If he didn't tell me, I would have killed him and ripped his heart out.' Ms Lop, now a 66-year-old great-grandmother, has no interest in putting the past to one side. Her simple whitewashed house is surrounded by a vast graveyard and she even re-named her daughter Loan in a bid to cleanse the soul of the man she calls 'evil'.
Yesterday she wept beneath an altar devoted to her husband as she recounted her personal struggle during 1968 after he was captured leading a raid on American naval ships docked on the Saigon River.