Alone: Orphaned on the Ocean

by Fassbender, Tere Duperrault; Logan PhD, Richard D.

  She was propped up on pillows, surrounded by flowers and dolls, when the Coast Guard investigators arrived. Her left arm hugged a huge, blonde doll sent to her by her saviors from the Captain Theo. Somehow the crew had gotten wind of the fact that Terry Jo’s beloved life-size doll (and her sister’s as well) had gone down with the Bluebelle. With her right hand, she ran a comb through her bleached hair.

  She greeted the officers with a gleaming, and very brave, smile. She was a portrait in innocence and courage. This brought sudden lumps to the throats of the officers when they thought about what this little girl putting up the brave front must have gone through. Little did they know.

  The doctor whispered, “Don’t be misled by that smile. She doesn’t fully realize at this moment what has happened.”

  In fact, Terry Jo realized a great deal, even if she didn’t let on. She was keeping most of her thoughts to herself.

  No one had told her yet that she was, barring another miracle, an orphan. But except for holding out hope that her father might somehow have survived, she knew. On the Captain Theo, she had pointed thumbs down, an indication that she realized everyone was dead. But, in the hospital, she never brought up the subject, not even to her aunt and uncle, and no one had dared to ask.

  At this point, no one had told her that Captain Harvey had survived the sinking. She did not know what he had told the Coast Guard, nor was she aware that he had then killed himself.

  The closed-door interrogation was conducted by Captain Barber and Lieutenant Murdock in the privacy of Terry Jo’s hospital room, with her doctor and nurse in attendance.

  “Terry,” Murdock said gently, “Captain Barber is going to ask you a question. Will you reply close to the microphone?” She nodded and smiled. Then, speaking in a low child’s voice, but clearly and distinctly, she told how her family had traveled to Florida on a dream vacation, chartered the Bluebelle, and embarked on the voyage to the Bahamas.

  “Can you tell us if everything went well and if it was a happy trip up until the night of the accident?” Barber asked. He chose the neutral word “accident” deliberately, so as not to influence the nature of her account and not to upset her. (In fact, for many years after, Terry Jo herself always referred to the Bluebelle tragedy as “the accident.”)

  “Yes, everything was OK.”

  “Now, this is a difficult part to tell us about,” Barber continued. “But would you, in your own words, as best as you can, tell us what happened that night on the Bluebelle? I know it is difficult.”

  Terry Jo’s story came out, then, in words strong and clear and not disrupted by the emotions that had to be there – a story that everyone had begun to dread ever since the skipper’s bloody body had been found on the floor of the motel bathroom.

  At about nine o’clock, on the last night of the Bluebelle’s existence, Terry Jo had retired below to the small cabin behind the main cabin and gone to sleep alone in its three-quarter berth. Ordinarily, her sister, René, slept there, too, but on this night René remained on deck in the cockpit with all of the others.

  Some time during the night, Terry Jo said she was awakened from a peaceful sleep, but not by the howling wind of a squall and the loud crashing of masts and rigging. She was jolted awake instead by a lone, screaming voice from inside the boat that suddenly penetrated her dreams in the quiet, comfortable darkness. It was her brother screaming, “Help, Daddy, help!!” As she heard that chilling scream, she also heard brief running and stamping noises. Then there was silence, except for some vague creaks and normal boat sounds. She lay there shivering, too disoriented and suddenly terrified to go out and see what was happening, and not completely sure that she hadn’t just awoken from a nightmare.

  After sitting for many minutes (she later estimated five to ten) and hearing no more sounds, she crept, trembling, out of her cabin and saw her mother and brother lying crumpled in the main cabin, a pool of blood collecting on one side of the cabin floor.

  Terry Jo had seen death before, but only in the innocent world and innocent way of a child. She had known the death of a grandparent who died in the natural order of things, of a beloved pet dog that she found beside the road where he had been hit by a car, and she had reverently buried the bodies of small animals that she had found in the woods. She knew, too, that another sibling had been stillborn a few years before. But this was far too much for her to absorb in one single, awful moment. Still, she instantly knew that they were dead. And within the shock and confusion and unreality that in one instant consumed her, somehow she still managed to accept the finality of their death right then and there without question. In that same instant, in the fraction of a second it took her to blink her eyes closed and then open again, she left the innocent and safe world of childhood behind – far behind – forever.

  In a dreamlike detachment, she watched herself slowly climb the companionway stairs. Fearfully, she poked her head out of the companionway hatch that faced aft into the cockpit. Looking out she saw more blood pooled on the starboard side of the cockpit, and possibly a knife. She stood upright and turned to look toward the front of the boat.

  Suddenly Harvey was rushing at her out of the night from the forward part of the deck. She started to say, “What’s happening?” but she saw as he got closer his right eye rolling hideously. Already terrified, she found herself in the next instant looking straight into the face of a nightmare, her nightmare. He struck her, shoved her roughly down the stairs and, in a deep, growling voice, commanded her to “Get back down there!”

  Her heart pounding, the terrified girl backed down the steps. She returned unsteadily to her cabin, averting her eyes from seeing the awful truth of her mother and brother again. Terry Jo crawled back onto her bunk and huddled, shivering, in the corner, her back against a bulkhead. Her being was so occupied by fear and confusion that she struggled simply to take in what was happening. The mental shock was so great that, even though she knew her mother and brother were dead, she could not marshal her thoughts enough even to begin to wonder about the fates of her father and sister.

  She heard water sloshing and she wondered if the captain was washing blood from the deck.

  After some more minutes, oily-smelling water from the bilges began to come into her cabin and cover the floor. But still she huddled there in a rigid, shivering silence, afraid to move even though she realized the ship was filling with water.

  Suddenly the dark form of the captain was silhouetted in the frame of her doorway. She could only stare, wide-eyed. Where minutes before she had clearly seen the very eye of the face of evil, now she could see only a faceless shadow. He held something in his hands across his body, and stood there for what seemed like ages, looking down at her. He said nothing and the only sounds in the room were his heavy breathing, the thundering of her heart in her ears, and the slap of the rising water against the bulkheads. She held her breath in rigid terror until her lungs ached.

  Then the captain simply turned and walked silently out of the cabin, and she heard him climb the companionway stairs back to the upper deck. Next she heard erratic pounding noises from somewhere in the boat.

  After an uncertain number of minutes, the oily water began lapping over the top of her mattress.

  Terry Jo had no choice but to leave the cabin again and face whatever fate awaited her on the dark unknown of the deck and in the person of the captain, so suddenly sinister and terrifying, who lurked above. Wading through oily, waist-deep water to the companionway stairs in the cabin where the bodies of her brother and mother now floated somewhere, and terrified with the thought that she would bump into a floating body in the dark water, she climbed back up to the top of the steps to the cockpit. There, she raised her head even more fearfully this time, looked around and saw in the illumination from the light at the top of the mizzen that the ship’s dinghy and rubber life raft had been launched and were floating beside the boat on the port side.

  “Is the ship sinking?” the confused girl cried.

  �
�Yes!” Harvey shouted from behind her toward the front of the boat. He rushed at her again and handed her a line, shouting frantically, “Here! Hold this!” Terry Jo, already numb from shock, stiffened in terror – and the line slipped through her fingers.

  Harvey hurried forward. Terry Jo could not see what he went to get. Since the boat was already well down in the water and it was the line to the dinghy that Harvey had hurriedly handed to her, clearly Terry Jo had interrupted him at the very instant he was getting off the Bluebelle. When he rushed back seconds later, he cried, “The dinghy’s gone!”

  The dinghy was now slowly drifting away into the dark from the sinking Bluebelle. With no further sound, he dived overboard, abandoning her on a now wave-washed deck. She saw him swimming after the dinghy, but couldn’t see if he caught up with it after he disappeared into the night.

  Remarkably, the girl from Green Bay who had pretended to be Tarzan and had played fantasy survival games in the woods dug deep and did not panic, and to this clear-headedness she would owe her life. She reported later that for the whole time after she was awakened by her brother’s screams, she felt as if she was outside of herself watching her own actions. Such detachment is not unusual in moments of extreme crisis. Yet somehow this young girl had the presence of mind to fight off the horrible unreality of her sudden nightmare, not freeze in panic, and focus on what she had to do: she remembered the five-foot by two-and-one-half-foot white, oblong cork life float that was kept lashed to the right side of the top of the main cabin, which was still just barely above water.

  Terry Jo scrambled to the float, over a deck now awash in water. She looked at the knots securing the float and quickly saw how to undo the four half-hitches. Keeping herself calm enough to work with deliberate speed, she carefully pulled the right end of each rope, undid each knot, and worked the float loose. In the very moment she got it free, the deck was falling away from beneath her feet into the dark depths, and the boat’s fallen mainsail was billowing on the surface. She had to push the life float, half crawling, half swimming, across the sail and over the cable safety line of the starboard deck rail to get to the open water. She climbed onto the tiny oblong cork, the only thing left that could save her from the depths. Just as she did, a line from the float snagged on the sinking ship. For one breathless moment Terry Jo and the float were both pulled under the water by the plunging Bluebelle. But somehow the line came free and Terry Jo popped back up to the surface, into a lonely world of ghostly darkness. She huddled low on the float, rigid with fear that the captain, who only a minute ago was on the other side of the Bluebelle, might find her.

  Captain Barber brought her thoughts back to her hospital room. “Terry,” he said, “when you woke and heard the screams, whose voice did you hear?”

  “My brother’s.”

  “Do you have any idea why he screamed?”

  “No.”

  “When you first woke, you heard running and stamping. Do you think it was on the deck overhead?”

  She said she thought it was down below in the main cabin right outside her cabin, where she had found the bodies of her mother and Brian lying curled up next to a pool of blood.

  “Terry, do you know what Captain Harvey had in his hand when he entered your cabin?”

  “I thought it was the rifle,” she replied. “We took a rifle [with us on the trip]. I’m not positive, but I think it was the rifle.”

  As the questioning went on, she remained alert and responsive. Her lips still were swollen and her burned face was greased. Barber, handsome and soft-spoken, turned to more probing questions. But he treated her very gently, moving quickly from one question to another, not allowing her to linger long on the more gruesome parts of her ordeal.

  During the Bluebelle cruise, before disaster struck, she said she heard no arguments between Captain Harvey and anybody else on board, and she had never seen him angry before that night. As far as she could remember, Harvey had spoken mostly to her father. Terry Jo had hardly talked with him, except to say hello when they were introduced. She did relate, however, that she had seen Harvey’s lazy eye one previous time, and that it had given her a momentary chill, but she had soon forgotten about it in the excitement of her family’s great adventure. She did not at this time refer to the moment when she had felt oddly uncomfortable, when she had seen Harvey staring at her as she stood in her bathing suit in the shallow water off a Bahamian island.

  In reply to other questions, Terry Jo said she had no idea how her mother and Brian got blood on them, and that she saw nothing like a club or other weapon lying near them.

  After seeing her mother and brother lying in the main cabin, Terry Jo was immediately certain that they were dead and she had gone right up to the companionway to the upper deck. When she saw the captain, he was coming at her from the forward part of the ship with what she thought was a pail in his hand.

  “Did you ask him what he was doing or what happened to your mother and brother?” Barber asked.

  “No, I just said, ‘What happened?’ And he said, ‘Get down there’!”

  “When he said that, did he seem to be angry or excited?”

  “He sounded real mad.”

  She saw no one on the deck but the captain, Terry Jo said. She did not see her father, sister, or Mrs. Harvey. It was pitch black out over the sea but the deck was lighted, and she remembered that there was no one at the wheel at the rear of the cockpit steering the boat. A moist wind rustled the shrouds, but it was not strong and the Bluebelle rode the swells smoothly.

  “Why do you think the captain was angry?”

  “I thought maybe there was something up forward that he didn’t want me to see. He hit me and shoved me down with his hand.” (The forward part of the boat was where the hatch that led to the Harveys’ forward cabin was located. In retrospect, Harvey might have been hiding any or all of three things: What had happened to his wife, what had happened to Terry Jo’s father, and how little René had died.)

  “When you went back to your bunk, about how long did you lie there?”

  “I think it was about fifteen minutes.”

  “And you lay there listening. You were frightened and you lay there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you hear anything unusual going on during that fifteen minutes?”

  “No.”

  Now Barber turned to a key point of Captain Harvey’s story, his recital of a sudden squall and how the main mast had broken inexplicably, plunging down through the deck and hull, and bringing the mizzenmast down in a tangle of rigging onto the deck and the cockpit. He asked Terry Jo if she saw a broken mast or fallen sails.

  “The main sail was all wrinkled and going all over, and the mast was leaning,” she said. “I wasn’t sure if the mizzen was up, but I think it was.”

  “You mean that the masts were up but the sails were all slack, is that correct?”

  “The masts were up, yes.”

  “You didn’t see any damage or broken part on the mast, did you?”

  “No.”

  “Now, most sailing boats lie over at an angle when the sails are up [and wind is filling the sails]. Do you think the mast was lying over further than it should have been?”

  Lieutenant Murdock speculated many years later that Harvey might have cut the shrouds on one side of the boat holding the masts firmly upright as part of a quickly abandoned scheme to make it appear that the Bluebelle had, in fact, been severely damaged by a storm. This would have caused the masts to be actually leaning and not just appear to be, especially if the boom was way out and pulling the mast over, as Terry Jo seemed to indicate. In addition, it is clear that Harvey must have lowered the mainsail hurriedly without bothering to stow it properly. This is why it was “going all over,” according to Terry Jo. The only reason for doing this is that he needed to quickly make the ship lie dead in the water in order to put the dinghy and life raft over the side. And if one is scuttling a boat, there is no reason to stow the sails.

  “You’
ve been sailing before, haven’t you, Terry?”

  “This was the first time.”

  Actually, it was only the first time she had been on a sailing cruise, not the first time she had been on some kind of sailboat.

  “You had been on board the Bluebelle several days when this happened?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you know that when you are sailing, the wind holds the sails firm and not fluttering. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now, you say when you first came up on deck that night the sails were loose and fluttering?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did you mean that the main sail was part-way down or just it was loose and fluttering?”

  “It was part-way down.”

  “Terry,” Barber said, “did you see anything on the deck that looked like there had been trouble?”

  “I saw blood.”

  “Where did you see the blood?”

  “On the deck near the cockpit.”

  “Did you notice anything lying around there like a club or anything that might have been used as a club?”

  “No.”

  “Did you at any time hear something that might have been a shot?”

  “No.”

  “You say you saw nobody on deck except the captain, but you saw the blood. Could you have seen others if they had been there?”

  “I suppose I could, because there was a lot of light. It was coming from lights on top of the sail.”

  Since she could see the entire cabin top, the deck on either side of the cabin top, and much of the foredeck beyond the cabin top from a standing position in the companionway, this suggests that if Harvey had also killed Dr. Duperrault and Mrs. Harvey, they were either already overboard, or had been put below in the forward cabin. There was no other place they could possibly be. It would make sense for Harvey to put them in the forward cabin if he wanted to cover a crime; i.e., not risk bodies with severe wounds on them possibly being found floating in the sea. The fact that there was blood in the cockpit leaves little doubt that there had been a murderous assault topside as well as below decks. The puzzle: where was René? If she was dead already, how did she die and where was her body? If she was still alive, where was she? Why did Terry Jo neither see nor hear her, either below decks or topside?