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Instead, he gave them to Walker. He blamed himself for his nieces not knowing the man that his brother was; that all the girls ever had was a present Tommy gave to Connie: a stuffed red dog that had lost its eyes, mouth and an ear.
Walker, a 43-year-old Atlanta market research publisher, looked through her grandmother's possessions, fascinated by the glimpses of an uncle who might have played a large role in her life. She contacted her uncle's high school friends to find out more.
She worked long hours on the book, "Letters from Tommy J." She was leery of the family's reaction and kept her work a secret until it was finished. All those months, the apparition came to life by day, as she lingered over every word Tommy Holtzclaw sent home.
"I cannot believe I had a uncle who at the age of 18 did all this," Walker said. "I cannot believe I missed out on knowing him."
Walker knew that her grandparents argued so much about signing Tommy's enlistment papers that their marriage was threatened. They blamed each other for their son's death. She knew that "Mama Leila," especially, was never the same after the two men in uniform showed up at their Atlanta home one Sunday, just days before Tommy's 19th birthday.
She couldn't bear to open the door — her younger son Johnny had to do it.
"There was resentment, anger, blame," recalled Johnny Holtzclaw, an anesthetist at Piedmont Hospital. "We didn't know how to pick up our lives again."
Silence befell the Holtzclaw household as though tragedy could be erased by it.
Johnny Holtzclaw inherited his brother's black Chevy Bel Air. He graduated from O'Keefe High School, where his tall, scrubby brother had never missed a single football practice but kept up his A's and B's in class.
But even two years after he died, Johnny could not say his brother's name without crying.
Every April, Leila Holtzclaw fell ill, thinking about the dates of her elder son's birth and death.
Once in a while, she took the boxes from her closet and tried to read her son's letters. She could get through only one or two at most, then folded them up and put them away again.
"We just let it lie," said Johnny's wife, Cyn Holtzclaw.
Leila Holtzclaw did visit the Vietnam Wall memorial in Washington, D.C., once, when Walker offered to take her along on a 1986 business trip.
"It's not right that a mother should outlive her son," the stoic Leila told Walker then.