And the Sea Will Tell

by Vincent Bugliosi

  When Eggers rested the Government’s case, there had been a total of sixteen witnesses for the prosecution.

  Jennifer was the only witness to testify for the defense. On the stand, she stuck mulishly to the story she’d told the FBI agent, including leaving the Iola behind on the channel reef after it got stuck there when she and Buck tried to tow it out of the channel behind the Sea Wind, etc.

  On cross examination, Eggers showed her the photos of the Iola and Sea Wind sailing together in the waters off Palmyra. “Would you explain, please, at what point in time when you and Mr. Walker were on the island of Palmyra were the Sea Wind and the Iola together under full sail out in the ocean?”

  “Never.”

  Shishido lowered his head so the jury could not see his smile. Unbelievably, Jennifer Jenkins had just denied something that had been conclusively proved before her very own eyes by the Government—that the Iola and Sea Wind were at sea together. Those five pictures shown to the jury did not lie.

  In his closing argument, Eggers asked rhetorically: “What does this all mean? Well, all the evidence, I suggest, means Jennifer Jenkins was a desperate individual. She had a leaking boat, she was stranded on a remote island with no food, and a stone’s throw away was the answer to both of these problems: transportation and food. She gave inconsistent stories after her return to Hawaii, and if the Sea Wind was properly taken possession of by her as a result of some unexplainable act of God or mishap that was caused to the Grahams, then would there be any need to tell inconsistent stories? She is guilty of stealing the Sea Wind, and she’s guilty of stealing the four hundred dollars from the boat, and she’s guilty of transporting these stolen goods in interstate commerce. I ask you to find her guilty as charged.”

  The jury swiftly returned a verdict. When it was read, Jennifer, waxen-faced, dropped back into her seat at the defense table. She had been found guilty on all counts.

  On August 18, Judge King sentenced her to two years in federal prison for the theft of the Sea Wind and five years’ probation on the other two counts.

  Buck Walker, paying close attention to press accounts of Jennifer’s trial from his jail cell, adjusted his story accordingly at his own trial in December. Testifying in his own defense, Walker did not make the same mistake of denying—in direct contradiction to photographic evidence—that the Iola and Sea Wind had sailed side by side off Palmyra. He told the jury that the Iola had indeed gone aground in the channel, but that he had been able to free her. Once on the ocean, Walker said, it was clear that the Iola had sustained significant damage and was leaking badly, so he and Jennifer abandoned their boat and sailed on in the Sea Wind.

  Special Agent Henry Burns took the stand and testified that Walker’s original version had been that he had failed to get the Iola free from the reef.

  Inevitably, Walker was also found guilty on all counts and sentenced to a term of ten years, not to commence, however, until he had finished serving his five-year sentence on the MDA drug charge.

  Walker’s defense attorney suggested to the media that his client had been unfairly convicted of theft because of “public opinion, speculation and innuendo” that the Grahams had been murdered for their yacht and food.

  In spite of the two convictions in the Palmyra boat theft case, the question of what had actually happened to Mac and Muff Graham was still unanswered.

  The mystery of Palmyra Island was far from solved. There were those who believed it would never be.

  CHAPTER 19

  PALMYRA

  SIX YEARS LATER

  THE JUNGLE HAD RECLAIMED its own. The clearing Mac had hacked out next to the Sea Wind’s anchorage was again a tangle of vines and trees. Also hidden by returning foliage was the site of Buck’s campfire, where Muff had confided in Jennifer one summer evening. The building Mac had used as a workshop still stood. Atop the workbench inside was a jar of rusted nuts and bolts, draped in the silken shroud of a spider’s weaving.

  Sharon Jordan and her husband Robert arrived on Palmyra the first week of November 1980. They had heard tales from other yachties throughout the Pacific about the disappearance of a sailing couple in the area. But they did not connect the incident with this island until they found, in a building in the jungle, some yellowed newspaper clippings about the case, apparently left by visitors who had stopped at the island because of the notoriety. The Jordans devoured every riveting word and offered each other various theories of what might have happened.

  “The Grahams had sailed around the world and they ended up disappearing here,” Sharon mused one evening as they sipped sherry aboard their boat.

  “It certainly sounds like they were murdered.”

  “How horrible.”

  At that moment, Sharon was very glad that they were alone on the island. “You know, it could just as easily have happened to…us.”

  They vowed not to let the incident detract from the enjoyment of their planned stay of several months before moving on. They were circumnavigating the globe on their sailboat, the Moya, which Robert had built himself.

  The following weeks passed quickly for the young, handsome couple from Johannesburg. Sharon, a fitness buff with a slim, taut body to show for it, walked barefoot several miles each day along the lagoon’s shoreline, often going entirely without clothes in the moist heat. Her tanned nimble figure, coal-black hair, and dark-brown eyes gave her the look of a Polynesian princess exploring her private tropical domain. Robert fished most mornings, did chores on the boat every day, and in the afternoon usually took a nap in a hammock secured in the shade between two sturdy trees.

  On January 4, 1981, the sun rose in a cloudless sky. After a light breakfast of granola soaked in fresh coconut milk, Sharon and Robert climbed into their dinghy to go fishing. Actually, Sharon wasn’t as interested in catching anything as she was in observing the schools of colorful reef fish—angels, butterflies, wrasses—that darted here and there in the lagoon.

  As they passed by an old seaplane ramp on the south side of Cooper Island, Sharon watched a strikingly beautiful scarlet fish zigzag beneath them.

  “Wait,” she said. “I see something.”

  Robert stopped rowing and joined her in looking over the side.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “A boat.”

  Sharon wondered aloud if the wreck might have anything to do with the missing couple from California.

  The next day, the Jordans began an ambitious salvage operation to raise the sunken boat. They collected a number of empty gasoline drums, filled them with lagoon water, and sank them next to the wreck. Wearing nothing but scuba masks, they dived the twenty feet to the bottom and began tying the drums to the boat, all the while keeping a wary eye out for sharks coming too close.

  It took more than an hour to secure the drums. Without tanks, they had to surface often to take a breath. There were also a few interruptions when they had to get out of the water until curious sharks moved along. When the metal barrels were finally in place—each tied to the sunken boat by six to eight feet of heavy rope—Robert went down with a hand pump and Sharon took along a wrench. One by one, they uncapped each drum, ran a length of hose into its opening, and pumped in air, displacing the water. When the tenth or eleventh drum became buoyant, the old boat rose a foot or two off the sandy bottom, as the Jordans watched excitedly, then stopped.

  Sharon arrowed to the surface to catch her breath. When Robert joined her, they agreed they needed more barrels to achieve the necessary buoyancy. They sank four more and pumped air into them. Thirty minutes later, the boat broke the surface of the lagoon with a loud whumph.

  Its metal hull was covered with yellowish barnacles, but the inscription “U.S.A.F.” was clearly visible. The Jordans bailed the water out of the boat and pulled it to shore for closer inspection. Cigar-shaped with low sides, it obviously had not been designed for ocean travel. Robert thought it was probably a rescue boat. Near the stern, four rectangular storage compartments, about three feet deep, were
built into the deck. Empty aluminum containers fit snugly inside two of the spaces.

  The containers for the other two spaces were nowhere to be seen.

  JANUARY 25, 1981

  SHARON JORDAN set out for her daily constitutional along the westward shore of the lagoon. When she left, her husband was lying in their hammock, reading a book.

  It was a beautiful afternoon, but hot, as usual.

  She headed up the western shore of Cooper Island, following the high-water mark along the sand and coral. She always preferred the beach to walking inland, since she was curious to see what might have washed ashore during the night. She was rarely disappointed on Palmyra.

  Spotting an especially pretty and unbroken shell, she kneeled down and brushed the sand away from it. Yes, she thought, a nice addition to her collection.

  Striding on, she passed the old seaplane ramp, which reminded her of raising the rescue boat. Such a lark. This place brimmed with adventure. Maybe it really was paradise, she decided. They were alone, and happy, the weather was consistently balmy, and the surroundings were exotically beautiful…she’d told Robert she was in no hurry to leave, thank you very much.

  About half a mile farther on along the shore of Strawn Island she noticed something glistening in the sunlight about ten yards away.

  Her interest piqued, she walked closer, then recoiled and screamed. A human skull lay on the sand in front of her, a gold-capped tooth in its jaw sparkling in the sun. Other skeletal remains were scattered nearby.

  Sharon dropped her shells and went down to her knees in the sand. It’s one of them. One of the missing couple. But she knew the bones couldn’t have been lying on the beach all these years.

  There was an aluminum container nearby. Lying next to it were a lid and some wire that presumably once had held the lid and box together. From the position of the bones, she recognized immediately that they must have fallen out of the container. Inside the lid was a small bone, and a wristwatch, which she picked up. Despite the corrosion, she could see it was a woman’s watch. The box could have been washed ashore by the latest storm, which had died down just the night before. Inside it, Sharon saw a small swatch of cloth. She also noticed charring on the box’s interior surfaces.

  Her gaze went back to the ivory skull. This must be the woman. One side of the skull was charred, too. She didn’t want to touch the grinning memento mori, but knew she must. If left here, it might be washed away.

  Gingerly, she picked it up and turned it over. In the left temple region there was a small round hole.

  Her mind raced. The poor woman had obviously been shot, put in the box, and then—set on fire! “Dear God, oh dear God.”

  There was something about the aluminum box. She looked at it more closely and recognized it as identical to the two containers stowed in compartments on the sunken rescue boat. But there had been two empty compartments. Two. Here was one box; the other was still missing. The man, she realized with a chill. The missing box must contain his body!

  Reluctantly, she looked down the shoreline ahead of her. Nothing. The second box, the one with…him inside…must still be underwater in the lagoon. She’d better get her husband right away so he could help her collect the rest of the bones before the next tide came and washed them away.

  Fastidiously holding the skull out in front of her, Sharon Jordan ran back to the Moya, a raven-haired Godiva carrying a death’s-head in paradise.

  CHAPTER 20

  LATE JANUARY 1981

  FBI HEADQUARTERS, HONOLULU

  CAL SHISHIDO WAS WORKING at his desk in the field office’s “bull pen,” the grungy squad room where agents worked at long tables, filling out reports, talking on the phones, and expelling enough cigarette smoke to produce the smoglike “vog” that lingers on the Hawaiian air after a volcanic eruption.

  Shishido had been assigned to Honolulu for ten years now, longer than anyone else in the office. It was rather unusual for an agent to spend so long in one locale, but he had consistently spurned all offers of transfer—even ones promising promotion—because he loved Hawaii. His sons were going to his old high school, his elderly parents had retired nearby, and most of his other relatives and many of his closest friends still lived in the islands. And then there were the golf courses, some of the most neatly manicured and beautifully situated in the world. When Cal Shishido teed off at the majestic, coast-hugging thirteenth hole at Oahu’s Klipper Marine Golf Course, with the surf crashing next to him and the fertile emerald hills of the Waiahole Forest Reserve in the background, he couldn’t imagine moving to Cleveland or Pittsburgh or Washington, D.C. He was home.

  It was an uncommonly slow afternoon at the office, and the bull pen was quiet. When all the agents were present, it was difficult to hear oneself think over the volume of chatter, let alone overhear a phone conversation. But now Shishido could clearly hear, from twenty feet away, the new guy manning the complaint desk, set up to handle calls from local authorities and the public.

  “They found bones?” the agent was saying.

  At that moment, Shishido’s extension rang. A federal prosecutor was returning his call about a recent bank robbery case. When he hung up a minute or so later, Shishido noticed that the complaint-desk agent was still on the same call.

  “Cannibals, maybe?” the young man chuckled.

  Shishido made a note in the bank robbery file and put it back in a file cabinet.

  “Give me the name of the place again. You’d better spell it,” Shishido heard the agent say.

  Cal looked at his watch. Maybe he’d head home early today. He had worked overtime on the weekend.

  “P…A…L…M…Y…”

  Shishido popped out of his chair and hurried to the complaint desk.

  “Yeah, Y as in Yankee…R…A.”

  “Let me have that!” Cal unceremoniously grabbed the phone.

  The new guy had only recently graduated from the academy in Quantico. He’d been in Hawaii barely six months. Christ, he’d been a college kid going to frat parties when the Grahams disappeared. He just wouldn’t know.

  “This is Special Agent Shishido.”

  The Coast Guard officer on the line reread the radio message that had been patched through from the yacht Moya. The officer, also new to the islands, knew nothing about the Palmyra case.

  Shishido scribbled a few notes.

  When he hung up, he pulled the Walker/Jenkins file.

  One of the first people Shishido called next was Bill Eggers. Both men had always feared that the bodies of Malcolm and Eleanor Graham, even a trace of them, would never be found. When they had learned that Muff Graham wore prescription glasses, there was a fleeting hope that the partially burned lens Eggers had recovered from the old fire pit in the November 1974 search might be hers. But Muff’s eye doctor had reported that it didn’t match her prescription.

  Eggers was elated at the reported discovery of bones and wished his old friend good luck on the next trip to Palmyra. Eggers would not be going along this time. He had left the U.S. Attorney’s Office a year earlier and was now in private practice in Honolulu.

  “My God, I can’t believe it,” he exclaimed. “The bones have got to be the Grahams’.”

  Shishido agreed. “I’d give my left nut to see the looks on the faces of Walker and Jenkins when they hear. They thought they had gotten away with murder.”

  NEWS OF the grisly discovery on Palmyra reverberated throughout the Hawaiian Islands. “Human Bones Found on Palmyra,” “Murder on Palmyra,” “Witness Describes Finding Bones on Palmyra,” headlines across the islands screamed out.

  On February 4, an FBI team headed by Cal Shishido left Hawaii for Palmyra. They were gone for six days. On the night they returned, television crews waited at the airport to film Shishido and another FBI agent as they stepped from the plane carrying the corroded metal box Sharon Jordan found on the beach. Up close, the rattling of bones could be heard inside the container.

  That night’s ten-o’clock news on KGMB
-TV led with this story:

  FBI agents returned tonight with a skull and bones found two weeks ago on Palmyra Island by a yachting couple from South Africa. The skeletal remains had been hidden inside a metallic container and apparently set afire and then weighted down and sunk in a lagoon. The container evidently broke free, and currents washed everything onto a coral-strewn beach, where they were discovered. The burning question now is, “Are those the remains of Malcolm and Eleanor Graham?” The San Diego couple disappeared mysteriously seven years ago on Palmyra, an idyllic island setting approximately one thousand miles south of Hawaii. Buck Walker and Jennifer Jenkins were subsequently convicted of stealing their yacht. Federal agents say it is incredible luck the bones and container were discovered at all.

  Referring to the fact that the next tide might have returned the bones to the lagoon, where they could have sunk to the lagoon bottom or been washed out to sea through the channel, the report noted that the bones “may have been visible and reachable for only a few hours, and then would have been gone, probably forever. If connected to the Grahams, a few moments of luck may help clear up a seven-year-old mystery.”

  The speculation ended on February 17 when William C. Ervin, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Honolulu office, announced that the remains found on Palmyra had been positively identified as those of Eleanor “Muff” Graham. A forensic odontologist had been able to make the identification by comparing dental charts and X-rays obtained from Muff’s dentist in San Diego to the teeth and fillings in the skull.