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The brothers of a long-dead Air Force officer are being forced to seek a federal court order to arrange for her remains to be transferred from Punchbowl to their family in Pittsburgh.

The unusual legal case opens up anew the tragic saga of what happened to Lindsay Helen Tyson, who was murdered in 1985 in Germany.

Tyson — intelligent, beautiful and athletic — was laid to rest at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl in November of that year.

Her parents, Robert Glenn Tyson and his wife Lesley, now both deceased, lived and worked in Honolulu at the time, and that’s why she was buried here. Robert was a veteran pediatrician from Pittsburgh who came to the islands to teach children’s medicine at the University of Hawaii’s John A. Burns School of Medicine. Lesley was a social worker who taught at-risk students.

Their daughter Lindsay died in the night on Oct. 30, 1985, when her husband, Richard Wagner, stabbed her to death while she was sleeping, the federal court filing says.

She had been unhappy in her marriage and wanted a divorce, according to a longtime friend.

Though Tyson came from a prominent family and she came to a disturbing end, there was very little news coverage of the murder at the time. It doesn’t appear to have made the newspapers in Hawaii. A short article on the murder and her husband’s arrest appeared in the bottom corner of page 2 in the European edition of Stars & Stripes, a military publication, in December 1985.

In those years, coverage of domestic violence was still in its infancy, with most assaults on women not deemed worthy of public attention. When a woman was killed by a husband or boyfriend, it was still not unusual for people to wonder what she might have done to make him angry.

I remember that era well. In 1988, I was working as a young reporter at the San Jose Mercury News in California when a man named Richard Farley shot a young co-worker, Laura Black, who narrowly survived, and killed seven others in their workplace, a tech company. It was described at the time as a thwarted love interest, though Black barely knew Farley. People back then speculated about what she might have done to provoke him.

Mass killings of that kind were new in America, and our coverage of the case revealed strange and obsessive behavior on his part. He’d been following and hounding Black for months, convinced that he could win her affection if she would give him a chance, while she tried to dodge him.

Psychologists we interviewed sought to explain it. “It’s a new term,” I recall someone saying. “They are calling it ‘stalking.’”

Farley was convicted of murder in 1991 and is serving a life sentence at a state prison in California. In 1993, the story became a made-for-TV movie, “I Can Make You Love Me,” starring Richard Thomas.

So it was not too unusual that although Lindsay Tyson had been well-regarded and held a responsible position as an Air Force captain in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, her murder didn’t get much ink.

European Stars and Strips reported she had been an attorney assigned to the 377th Combat Support Wing at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. Tyson’s husband, Richard Wagner, was charged with her murder and would be tried in a German court, according to the news account.

Even after all this time, American military officials are tight-lipped about Tyson’s death. An Air Force spokeswoman last month confirmed her name and role but declined further comment.

“Due to the circumstances surrounding the case, we don’t have additional details to provide,” said C.M. Travis of the Public Affairs Operations Press Desk, in an email.

The lawyer for the family, Johnathan Bolton, declined comment on the case as well. Efforts to reach her family were unsuccessful.

Although the federal court filing says Wagner was convicted, German courts tend to be protective of the privacy of criminals and their victims, and an expert on German law at the Library of Congress, Jenny Gesley, could find no digital record of the case. She said that that only about 1% of court decisions in Germany are published each year, and only since 2010.

One person who still remembers her well was a close friend, Rosamond Presby. Presby met Tyson soon after both arrived as starting law students at Villanova University in Philadelphia. In an interview, she recalled Tyson as competent, smart and good company, naturally upbeat, “sunny without being bubbly.” She was also striking in appearance, slim and trim, with an oval face and a crown of dark hair, naturally curly, sometimes piled on her head.

Tyson grew up in a public-spirited family in an affluent suburb of Pittsburgh and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. The two women became study buddies and roommates during the intense first year of their legal training and further bonded during the three years that followed.

Tyson passed the bar examination in early 1983 and enlisted in the military a few months later. She was maid of honor at Presby’s wedding in late 1983.

She had a romance of her own in the works. Tyson was an avid runner, hopeful of one day qualifying for the Boston Marathon. At a Philadelphia running club she met an attractive man a few years older than she was, also a serious runner and lawyer. His name was Richard Wagner. They married in March 1984. This time Presby was Tyson’s maid of honor.

Nothing seemed off at first, Presby recalled. Wagner didn’t seem odd during the courtship. But at their wedding ceremony, Wagner started to cry in “a highly emotional way,” Presby recalled. “The intensity of it was a little weird.”

The couple moved to Riverside, California, where Tyson was stationed at March Air Force Base. The base newspaper, the Team March Beacon, suggests she was popular on base, providing helpful consumer legal advice to soldiers and encouraging people to become more physically active by joining a running group she helped manage.

But Tyson became unhappy in the marriage and wanted a divorce, Presby said. She was transferred to Germany. She and Wagner drove across the country together, heading to Tyson’s new post of duty.

“She and Rich talked about it over and over during their car trip from California to Philadelphia, and Rich wasn’t taking it well,” Presby wrote later to a JAG officer involved in the case.

Wagner had threatened to kill himself if they split up, Presby said.

The couple had dinner with Presby and her husband the night before they left for Germany. The two women went for a walk and Tyson confided more details about how the marriage was unraveling. Presby, who was by now an assistant district attorney in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, asked Tyson if she felt she was at risk, and she assured her friend she was not. Wagner had never been violent with her, Tyson said.

Presby asked her if she thought she should allow Wagner to go with her to Germany. Tyson seemed to think it would be okay.

The two arrived in Germany. They rented a house off base, in Mackenbach, known as a musician’s village, in Kaiserslautern. Tyson wrote to Presby that Wagner was looking for a job and had some good prospects.

But on the night of Oct. 30, while she was sleeping, Tyson was stabbed to death. Presby didn’t find out about it for a few months. When she did, she reached out to Tyson’s parents and wrote to Tyson’s commanding officer, Capt. Thomas E. Atkinson, offering to provide background information and share letters Tyson had written to her.

In a letter, shared with Civil Beat, in February 1986, Atkinson told Presby that Wagner had made a “spontaneous admission” of his guilt to the German police shortly after the murder, and that there was “ample evidence” of their marital difficulties.

He said that U.S. authorities would have no jurisdiction over the case, and that it would be prosecuted in a German court. He said that Wagner would probably be sentenced to life imprisonment but, because “German parole rules are very lenient,” he would most likely be released after 10 years.

Tyson’s parents went to Germany for the trial, Presby said. She learned later that after Wagner killed his wife, he called the police and said he had done it. He said he had also intended to kill himself, “but it was a feeble attempt and he didn’t follow through,” she recalled in an interview with Civil Beat.

The German court moved quickly to the sentencing and Wagner was imprisoned. The federal court filing says “his whereabouts are currently unknown as is whether or not he even is alive.” If he is still alive, he would be in his 70s or 80s now.

Presby kept in touch with Tyson’s parents for the rest of their lives. She gave birth to a daughter and named her Lindsay. She came to specialize in domestic violence and elder abuse cases, situations “where I had the feeling I could make a difference if I caught things before they got weird.”

March Air Force Base dedicated its running track to Capt. Lindsay Tyson in April 1986 and upgraded the facility with the help of volunteers.

Tyson’s parents arranged for her cremated remains to be buried at Punchbowl, the military cemetery overlooking Honolulu, the city where they lived. Decades passed. Tyson’s father died in 2009 and her mother died the next year.

Now Tyson’s older brothers, Scott and Dane, would like to move their sister’s remains to Pittsburgh, where Scott now lives and where Tyson grew up.

It’s understandable. Although Punchbowl cemetery is beautifully manicured, some of the columbariums— the courtyard areas where cremated remains are housed — have become weather-beaten and dilapidated. The areas are being renovated but the courtyard that houses Tyson’s remains is closed off to visitors now. The letters on her niche are worn down and hard to read.

That transfer would seem to be simple. But under federal law, the physical remains in military cemeteries can only be removed by request of the next of kin. Legally, the next of kin is a parent, a child or a spouse — not a sibling.

Tyson had no children. So Richard Wagner, the man who murdered her, remains the legal next of kin for Lindsay. The family needs a court order to switch this role to her brothers.

“Brothers are not the next of kin, so they need to pursue it through legal means,” said Gene Maestas, a spokesman for the National Military Cemetery of the Pacific.

Maestas said these kinds of court orders are needed from time to time, such as the disinterment last year of Sgt. Rodney Yano, a Medal of Honor recipient whose siblings wanted his remains transferred to a military cemetery near where they live on the Big Island.

But a murderous husband? That’s unusual.

“Wow, I’ve never heard of a case like that before,” he said.

But, after double-checking, he found out that the request is in process, and as soon as the court order comes through, the cemetery will honor Tyson’s brother’s request.

“We’re happy to do it,” he said.

The court hearing is scheduled for Feb. 11, almost 40 years after Tyson’s death.