Elkins Park native's search for 'My Brother's Bomber'

* FRONTLINE: MY BROTHER'S BOMBER. 10 tonight, Oct. 6 and Oct. 13, WHYY12.

KEN DORNSTEIN'S story reads like a feature film.

A man who's spent his career behind the scenes of a TV news magazine decides to leave behind his wife and two young children and sneak into Libya, a country in turmoil, in search of the people who might be responsible for the murder of his older brother, and 269 others, in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103.

Starting tonight, you can watch Dornstein's investigation play out on PBS as "Frontline" breaks format to present the first installment of a three-part serial, "My Brother's Bomber."

Dornstein was 19 when his 25-year-old brother, David, an aspiring writer, died as his plane blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland. Both had grown up in Elkins Park and graduated from Cheltenham High School. Though their parents are dead and he now lives in Boston, his sister, Susan, still lives in this area, he said last month.

Dornstein had investigated his brother's life in a 2006 memoir, The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky, but it wasn't until after the 2009 release of Libyan Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the only person ever convicted in connection with the bombing, that he realized he still had questions about his death. (Megrahi was granted a compassionate release - after serving less than a third of what was to be a minimum sentence of 27 years - because he had prostate cancer. He returned to Libya, where he was greeted like a returning hero and lived for two years and nine months longer, dying at age 60.)

"Some 20-plus years after the bombing, no one had ever confessed to anything, and no one was in jail," Dornstein recalled.

"They indicted two people and it took 12 years and then they convict one person and that person's in jail. That's the shred of certainty that there is, and then . . . that one shred is taken away. They let the guy go. So you're left with a point of, like, wait a second - I lost my brother, all of these people were blown out of the sky at 31,000 feet, what's the story again?" he said.

At the time, he was working for "Frontline," whose correspondents travel to dangerous corners of the world, but "I never went into the field. My field was going into other people's edit rooms and helping them tell the stories," he said.

When civil war broke out in Libya in 2011 and Muammar Gaddafi's regime toppled, Dornstein saw an opportunity to knock on the doors of suspects.

In "My Brother's Bomber," he's "the guy at the desk, who suddenly has to figure out how to get around in a difficult place" after crossing the border from Tunisia.

It didn't hurt that he was working with another "Frontline" veteran, Timothy Grucza.

Grucza, he said, is "a fantastic camera person, but he's also someone who went at a very young age to Yugoslavia when they were having a civil war. He just gravitates toward that. He's gone to every dangerous place you can think of, and he's very comfortable there."

The other installments weren't yet available, so I can't say if "My Brother's Bomber" will yield the kind of hot-mic-in-the-bathroom moment that gave HBO's "The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst" its big finish.

Asked by a reporter last month if he'd found "closure," Dornstein noted he was still working on the story. Here's what he would say:

"I started with questions that were significant enough to get me to go over the Tunisian border into Libya, and I don't have those questions anymore."

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