Alone: Orphaned on the Ocean Read online

  Here the odd smell was more noticeable. Suddenly nauseated, it hit her that it was the sickly sweet smell of blood. Her screams brought the motel manager. He, too, was unable to force the bathroom door open against the dead weight that was holding it. The manager telephoned police. A young patrol officer responded and reached the scene at 12:14 p.m.

  The strong young officer put his shoulder to the bathroom door and shoved. It gave a little, then sprung back. He shoved again, harder, and forced it open just far enough to stick his head inside. A blood-covered body was sprawled face up on the tiled floor. The officer looked into the dead face of the man who had apparently slashed himself, with his blank eyes, and reacted in stunned amazement.

  “That’s Julian Harvey!” he exclaimed. The officer had previously been a Miami harbor patrolman, and had known the handsome charter-boat captain well, or as well, perhaps, as a great many people thought they did.

  The police were quickly able to reconstruct that when Harvey had abruptly left the Coast Guard building the previous day, he had gone to his car parked on the street nearby, removed a suitcase, then left his car there and waved down a cab. He had checked into the motel about 11 a.m., registering as “John Monroe” of Tampa. He had gone upstairs, carrying the suitcase and a small, brown paper bag. He had not been seen again by the motel staff.

  From the clues in the room, it was simple for police to piece together what had happened.

  Some time in the wee hours of that morning, Harvey got up from the bed. With the neatness that was apparently characteristic of him, he placed the empty whisky bottles that had been in the paper bag in the wastebasket, right side up.

  Then he went over to the desk, sat down, and began a letter addressed to a friend, James Boozer, a resident of Miami. They had been together during Air Force training days. Harvey wrote of his love for his fourteen-year-old second son, Lance, and he asked that arrangements be made for the boy’s adoption by a Miami family who had been watching him. He wrote with his usual clumsy scrawl, which looked more like that of an elementary school student than of a college-educated Air Force officer, and contrasted oddly with his neatness and his sophisticated demeanor.

  “I’m a nervous wreck and just can’t continue,” he scribbled. “I’m going out now. I guess I either don’t like life or don’t know what to do with it.”

  There was no reference to what had happened on the Bluebelle.

  He sealed the envelope. Then, almost as an afterthought he wrote on the back, “Cremate and bury at sea.” After more thought, he scratched out “cremate” and underlined “bury at sea.”

  He placed the envelope squarely in the center of the desk and, at one side, a briefcase containing a picture album – an album stuffed with images of his life. His clothes were hung neatly in the closet; his suitcase was in its proper place on the luggage rack.

  The police conjectured that first, he thought he’d kill himself on the bed. Sitting there, with his back against the headboard, he cut into a vein in his thigh with a double-edged razor blade. But as the first drop of blood stained the sheet, he had apparently decided this was not the way. He pulled on his trousers and moved toward the bathroom.

  He paused and turned back toward the bed, then pulled a $10 bill from his pocket and pinned it to a pillow – something for the maid, perhaps an apology for the unpleasant messiness of it all; a final act, perhaps, of one who still thought of himself as an officer and gentleman, and wanted others to think of him that way, too.

  Again, he turned toward the bathroom and, again, he paused. A bloodstain was spreading over his trouser leg. Wincing, he went to the briefcase and removed two pictures from the album, portraits of his second son, Lance, and of his wife, Dene. He carried them into the bathroom and propped them up carefully on the top of the toilet tank, where he could look at them as he sat down on the cold floor with his back to the door.

  Then he finished what he had started to do. He proceeded to slash his ankles, his wrists, his forearms, his thigh (this very deeply), and then even both sides of his neck. Hardened police officers gaped in amazement at the gory scene. He was slashed so badly that deep muscle was laid open to the bone in his thigh and his body had been drained of blood. No one had ever seen so many cuts – or such extremely deep ones – on a suicide before. Most suicides who die by cutting choose the relatively gentler method of getting into a warm tub, cutting their wrists, and letting life slowly ebb away. This was unspeakably violent.

  Those who saw Harvey’s body could only imagine what it took to cut oneself in this manner, and to continue to do it through horrific pain. In fact, he was cut so badly that some wondered at first if he had been murdered and then a clumsy attempt had been made to make it look like a suicide. The slash in his thigh was so deep that it seemed impossible anyone could have willingly inflicted that on himself, not to mention all of the other cuts. Officers shuddered to think of a man cutting and re-cutting and re-cutting with a small blade all the way through his muscular thigh to the thighbone.

  It also didn’t look at all like the way someone motivated only by intractable grief would kill himself. It was too extreme, more like a scene of horrible torture. If it was a suicide, how much self-hate must a man have to inflict such a thing on himself? And, if true, why such self-hate? Questions about just who Harvey was, the Bluebelle disappearance, and Terry Jo mounted. Why would this man have committed suicide on the heels of the appearance of one of the Bluebelle’s passengers who provided a sign of hope that there might be more survivors, including his own wife?

  Julian Harvey’s burial at sea, as requested in his suicide note.

  The discovery of the mutilated body electrified investigators probing the mystery of the Bluebelle. Had the captain killed himself because a half-dead child had returned like a ghost to confront him? But confront him with what?

  His friend James Boozer offered a possible explanation. “When he came to my home after the Bluebelle loss, he was in a state of shock and depression over the deaths of Dene and the Duperrault family,” he said. “He told me that as he sat in the lifeboat with the little girl’s body, he felt that he didn’t want to go on living.” The young officer who was first on the scene and who knew him also concluded that Harvey had “decided to kill himself before Terry Jo was found. He would have done it because of Dene. They were very close. After he married her, for the first time since I had known him, he seemed genuinely happy. She was the girl he had always wanted.”

  But although no one yet knew the full story of Julian Harvey, and no one had yet heard the story that Terry Jo had to tell, there was a second story that Harvey told Boozer that provided another version of what had happened. Perhaps it explained what Harvey was trying to hide with his dubious account.

  To reporters, Boozer insisted that Harvey had made his suicide decision before the rescue of Terry Jo. Because Boozer and Harvey had been such good friends, Boozer’s pleading on Harvey’s behalf was given less credence. However, one night he asked Lieutenant Murdock to meet him in the study of a local church. The minister was there. Boozer asked to make a statement under oath in the presence of the minister. He was sworn in by Murdock.

  What he was going to say was not easy, Boozer said. He was going to tell a story that he had sworn to Harvey he would never reveal.

  “The first night [Harvey] came back from Nassau,” Boozer said, “he had gone into detail with me about the accident. I asked him then when was the last time he saw Dene, and he said she was diving over the stern of the boat, along with Dr. Duperrault, as if to give aid to someone in the water. I heard his story three times, when he told it to his son, to me, and to Pegg. In its entirety, it seemed too perfect. Why couldn’t he help anybody else in the crisis? There were a few discrepancies and I [had seen] a doubtful look on Pegg’s face [when he listened to Harvey’s account]. I was pretty much convinced that Julian was still in a bad state of shock and wasn’t able to remember just what happened at the time of the accident.”

  Boozer conti
nued, saying that he had asked Harvey after his testimony if there was anything more to the story.

  “[Harvey] placed his hands on my shoulders and began to say over and over, ‘Why did it have to be them? Why couldn’t it have been me?’ His voice was full of regret – and guilt. I began to think about the conflicting stories he had told and I began to press the subject, not knowing how he would accept it. He stepped over and sat down on the bed. I was still standing in the middle of the floor.

  “I asked him if the strain could have been so great that he would have forgotten just what he did in the emergency. I reminded him that, more than likely, one or more of the others would drift ashore or be picked up somewhere. I told him I hoped that his story would match that of any survivor.

  “I seemed to be getting to him now. I reminded him of our years of friendship, of our many sails into the islands, the Gulf Stream and the Gulf of Mexico. I reminded him that he had always confided in me and I asked him if there was anything on his mind, any feeling of guilt.

  “At this point, I told him point blank, ‘Julian, why don’t you tell me what really happened out there? I’m your friend and I want to help you all I can.’

  “He stood quickly, looked me straight in the eye, and said, ‘Will you take a vow on [his son] Lance that you will never repeat what I am going to tell you?’ He was stuttering the worst I had ever heard. His left eye was straight but his right eye appeared to be moving around and the eyelid batted up and down. ‘When the mainmast snapped and the mizzen fell among us,’ Harvey said, ‘it knocked Dene and Doc overboard. I lost my nerve when I saw the blood and guts on the deck and jumped overboard, abandoning the ship. The next thing I knew I was pulling the little girl into the boat with me. Remember, Jim, you’re my friend. You took a vow.’

  “I asked him about the fire but he looked as if he didn’t see me. He slowly sat down on the bed and laid his head on the pillow. I kept talking to him, but he didn’t say a word. His eyes were closed, so I put his feet on the bed and went to my room. I felt quite relieved. I knew that he did also.”

  This account was dramatically different from his testimony, and it made Harvey’s suicide much more plausible. It smacked somewhat of a deathbed confession. He had not only lost his beloved wife, not only lost the Duperrault family on his watch, he also had panicked in a crisis, jumped overboard like a coward, and tried to save no one. Hardly the actions of the brave and heroic warrior most believed Harvey to be. No wonder it had seemed that he had something to hide.

  It now seemed clear that he was consumed not just with grief, but with remorse and guilt – and, for a military man as proud of his accomplishments and as concerned about his image as Julian Harvey, a deep and abiding shame. Was he such a proud man that such shame would have been intolerable and he had no alternative but suicide? Shame can, after all, make one want to disappear. And shame is, according to many psychologists, partly anger directed at oneself. Perhaps, then, Harvey had killed himself because, as a proud man, he had not only lost so much but had found himself so abjectly wanting in a moment of crisis. No wonder he had attacked himself so horribly in his suicide.

  Once this new story started to get around, a number of observers began to think that it explained Harvey’s strange account and was far more plausible than Harvey’s unsatisfactory formal testimony. For many it began to give closure to the sad story of the Bluebelle. His friend Boozer certainly thought so.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Dark of Night

  Whatever happened on the Bluebelle that night on the Bahama deeps, it had driven the captain to an apparent suicide. Only one survivor now remained who might be able to make clear what actually happened once and for all, and establish which, if either, of Harvey’s accounts was true.

  On the second floor of Miami’s Mercy Hospital, Terry Jo lay in a coma. At first, when the helicopter had deposited her at the hospital door, attendants had placed her in an airy room overlooking Biscayne Bay. But Dr. Verdon took one look out the window and ordered her transferred immediately, before she awoke, to a room across the hall, above the hospital’s parking lot. With such a landlocked view, visions of sinking sailboats with bloody decks, or floating bodies, or sharks lurking near tiny life floats, are not conjured up so easily. The job of saving the critically ill child would be difficult enough without added emotional complications.

  The sea orphan’s heartbeat was too fast, too erratic, and very weak. Dehydration had damaged her kidney function. Her temperature was too high; her blood pressure too low. For Terry Jo, rescue was no guarantee of survival. As glucose and saline were pumped into her system to restore fluids and electrolytes to her severely dehydrated body, Dr. Verdon said it would be thirty-six hours before he could accurately determine her condition. There was the threat of massive organ failure, pneumonia, or heart fibrillation.

  She had gone just about as long as a human being could go without water – four days – and still live. In fact, a person would be lucky to survive for three days on the ocean if it was hot and sunny every day. But the miracle that she was still alive testified to her toughness and an indomitable will, and the doctor said, “I believe she’ll pull through.”

  Doctors and nurses stood watch around the clock as she lay in a coma that first day, her pretty, almost classic, features composed. Occasionally, she stirred and her tongue crept out to lick burned and cracked lips. Sometimes, her brow furrowed and her features contorted, as though a dream was taking her back to some nightmare moment on the doomed Bluebelle, or on the raft during four days on the lonely sea. One could only imagine what kind of dreadful moment was in her thoughts.

  An extremely sunburned Terry Jo lies in a coma in the hospital after her rescue.

  But young bodies bounce back fast and on the second day she roused from her stupor. But she did not try to talk. The doctor would not have allowed her to speak of her adventure in any case – not yet, not until she was strong enough to cope with what certainly had to be tragic memories. The swelling was going out of her lips and the angry redness of her deep sunburn was beginning to fade.

  “In a case of dehydration like this,” one observing doctor commented, “if you don’t restore the body fluids in forty-eight hours, you lose your patient.” In Terry Jo’s case, this was accomplished by Saturday, her second day in the hospital, and the day after the suicide of Captain Harvey was discovered. Her body fluids were normal, the chemistry of her system unscrambled, her kidneys working, and her heart once again seemed strong and steady. Terry Jo had survived yet again, but her condition was still precarious. Many severely dehydrated people like her have died after being rescued, their organs too damaged to recover.

  She was offered a small portion of eggs for breakfast and an equally small helping of turkey for lunch, and she ate all she was given. On Sunday, November 19, she progressed to a regular diet. She ate, smiled, and acted like any normal child, and Verdon was overjoyed with her progress. Now she was out of the woods physically, with all danger past, but what of her mental condition?

  She never mentioned her parents, brother, or sister. She did, however, write her doctor several notes that said: “If I am asleep when you come to see me, PLEASE WAKE ME UP!” She had obviously latched on to him as a source of security – and maybe she didn’t want to sleep because of her fears of whatever demons might inhabit her dreams.

  She had other worries, too, that would occupy her mind as she lay in her hospital bed: How would she pay for all of this care now that she was all alone? How would she get back home to Green Bay all by herself? (She worried about this even though her aunt and uncle had rushed to Miami from Wisconsin.) Where would she live with no family? How would she buy food and clothes? All this worrying – but Terry Jo was anything but alone and had been embraced by so many, including medical staff deeply touched by her plight and moved by her grit, who would never dream of asking for payment. Many of the medical staff, most especially Dr. Verdon, put in long hours caring for the little girl from the raft. One sign
of how the story of the sea waif who had lost her family moved the entire country was the letters that arrived, written by dozens of families across the country who offered to adopt her. One of those offers came from the very same remarkable man who was treating her. Dr. Verdon and his wife already had seven children. Clearly, the attachment Terry Jo felt for him was reciprocated.

  Terry Jo’s worries were evidence of just how lost and abandoned she felt. She put up the bravest of fronts, however.

  One other thought occupied Terry Jo’s mind, and would for a long time to come: Where was her father? She had not seen or heard him that night, and he was the only member of her family she could not account for. (She had been told that her sister’s body had been found.) Maybe he, too, had jumped overboard and had miraculously made it to one of the many Bahama islands and was waiting to be found. Terry Jo, it would later be revealed, had seen her mother, and brother, dead and she had accepted that. She had not seen her father – and she needed him.

  Verdon was not concerned that she wasn’t talking about what she had been through. “I don’t want her to re-live what happened until she is ready, until she decides for herself,” he said. “I’ll let her take her own good time.”

  Her room was closely guarded, even after she was on the mend, though from what, no one had any idea. Up to now, no one had been admitted except the doctors; a private nurse; Terry Jo’s uncle – her father’s brother, Fred Duperrault of Milwaukee – and her Aunt Dotty – Mrs. Ralph Scheer, who was her father’s sister from Green Bay. Reporters were not allowed to talk to her.

  Dr. Verdon finally notified Coast Guard investigators that Terry Jo would tell her story to them the next day. This was the moment for which everyone waited.