Yeah. It sounds like you might have experienced the normal/expected result of d2 corpse collection… Though the end result is the same. You lost your item(S). Many of us have lost stuff caused by bugs in the game which are not part of the mechanics.
After talking with blizz this is what they told me about restoring items/characters that were deleted by any means… even if blizz deleted them.
So sorry to say… But those items are just gone gone.