by Ann Rule
Women waiting for their seagoing men to come home once paced the widow’s walks atop their Victorian mansions, praying that their husbands and lovers would return safely to them. The more fortunate of those women would have them in their arms and beds again, but some inexplicable things can happen to a man at sea. He may disappear or go mad, or change in ways that no one could predict.
Many modern women choose not to wait; they go along on the wide-water journeys, experienced and proficient in handling the wheel and adjusting mainsails, jibs, and spinnakers. Jody Edwards was one of these modern women. Where her husband, Loren, went, Jody went, too. They were a love match, perfectly suited to one another.
They were not each other’s first loves—but they were their last. Jody was about five feet, three inches tall, a bouncy brunette. Loren was tall and spare, but tightly muscled. Although his hair would turn iron gray, he continued to wear it in a crew cut. His skin was usually suntanned to a dark toast color.
Loren was handsome in a Gary Cooper/John Wayne kind of way, masculine but not a pretty boy. He was born on November 24, 1927, in Tekoa, Whitman County, close to the Idaho state line on the sunny side of Washington. He was the youngest of three children. His parents—Ira and Ruby—struggled to wrest a living out of the community that counted on its wheat fields and pine forests, but by 1934, the Great Depression was at its lowest ebb. Loren was seven when Ira moved his family to Seattle, where there were more jobs than in Tekoa or Pine City. Not many, and the pay wasn’t good—but it was an improvement.
The Second World War brought an end to the depression, but it also cost many young Americans’ lives. Loren graduated from Roosevelt High School in Seattle in 1946, and he was safe from the war, which had ended the prior August. He joined the army and worked in the Signal Corps in Alaska. When he was mustered out, he entered the University of Washington’s School of Forestry under the GI Bill.
He tried to get his bachelor’s degree, but he had a wife by then and two young sons. With working and studying and spending time with his family, Loren couldn’t keep up and he dropped out before graduating.
He followed his interest and his talents and became a master carpenter and then a contractor, a profession he would work in for a quarter of a century.
Loren Edwards, who grew up in the rolling hills of the Palouse where thousands of acres of golden wheat thrived in the heat, had always been fascinated with boats of all kinds. When he was nine, he built a seaworthy kayak in the family garage. His dream was always to have his own boat, and when he got that, to have a larger craft.
Jody Peet grew up on the rainy side of the Cascade Mountain Range in the tiny hamlet of Preston. Preston is little more than a wide spot in the road just off I-90 as that freeway traverses the foothills of Snoqualmie Pass. Even those who regularly cross the steadily steeper pass on their way to Spokane and other eastern cities of Washington State are often unfamiliar with Preston. Unless they have business there, they are more likely to stop for lunch in Issaquah or North Bend.
Jody attended her lower grades in the small school in Preston and, later on, rode the school bus to Issaquah High School. With her dark hair and dimples, she was very pretty.
As young marrieds, Loren and Jody had known each other when they were part of the same loosely connected social group. Jody was married to Bob Peet then, and pregnant with her second child at the age of nineteen. The Peets’ future stretched out ahead with no real problems in sight.
That all ended tragically when Bob Peet died in an automobile accident in 1954. Her family feared for Jody, but she struggled to overcome her loss and provide a home for her children.
And then Loren Edwards and his first wife divorced. He became reacquainted with Jody Peet, and to everyone’s delighted surprise, they fell in love. They were married in 1956. Jody stayed home with their blended family, and Loren’s career as a contractor continued to succeed. He built a home for Jody’s parents, and she volunteered for the Red Cross and for support groups that helped handicapped children.
Both Jody and Loren were devoted to their parents—and to each other’s. Loren was particularly close to his father, Ira. Ira had gotten his family through hard times in a government job, and he wasn’t nearly ready to retire, not even when he was seventy-four. He simply started a new career in real estate.
Jody and Loren’s marriage was one of deep love and many shared interests. Jody loved boating almost as much as Loren did, and they graduated from kayaks and canoes to small powerboats. They joined a platoon of people with outboard cruisers who responded to a Seattle radio station’s promotion and traveled to Alaska and back. It wasn’t luxurious onboard living, but they had a great time.
Seattle seems to drift in the middle of water, and there are probably more boat owners there than in almost any other city in America. Some feel adventurous just to cast off their anchors in Lake Washington, while others venture out into Elliott Bay and Puget Sound and head to the San Juan Islands to the north or to the Pacific Ocean. Simply finding a place to dock a boat in the winter months is daunting; there is a long waiting list for every slip along every dock.
Jody and Loren Edwards shared a very ambitious dream: they wanted to build a magnificent sailboat, one they could sail on the high seas, a craft so powerful and perfect that it would be almost impervious to storms with driving winds. It was the midseventies, and their children were grown and doing well. They had saved their money and built up equity in a series of boats, so they finally felt ready to build a fifty-four-foot ketch. It would take years, and intensive labor on their part, but they were prepared to sacrifice whatever luxury they needed to.
The Edwardses weren’t rich, and this was a rich man’s boat. In the seventies, even with their doing much of the work themselves, it would cost well over $100,000. Today, it would be a million-dollar craft. They lived in a modest home in Preston, but that didn’t matter to them. Their ultimate home would be at sea.
They named their ketch before it ever existed. The perfect name—Spellbound—was magical, mysterious, and what they considered the best appellation for the craft that was to be the result of their consuming passion.
Because they were confident in their ability to create the Spellbound, the Edwardses quickly signed up for a slip on the waiting list of the Kirkland municipal dock in the Marina Park there. They knew it would take a year or more before their names came up.
* * *
Peyton Whitely worked as a popular reporter at the Seattle Times for forty-one years, often covering criminal cases. He was a superb researcher and a gifted writer. He was also a boat fancier, and he docked his boat at the Marina Park in Kirkland. He met Loren and Jody Edwards when they became his neighbors on the dock. They weren’t close friends, but they nodded and waved, and he admired their yellow-hulled fiberglass ketch. Loren’s skill and experience as a builder were evident. The Edwardses had lovingly varnished and rubbed the wooden parts of the boat, and every mitered corner was precise. The lamps and compass were gimbaled so that they would remain upright no matter how waves might toss and turn the craft. There was a ship-to-shore radio system.
Many people dream of an exotic cruise in a flawless sailboat, but the couple with the yellow-hulled ketch were actually going to do it. They were more than halfway there as they christened the Spellbound. She would soon be able to carry a good-size crew and a number of passengers.
It was August 1977 when Loren and Jody embarked on their extended cruise to the South Pacific. They had a crew that was mostly “homegrown”: their daughter, Kerry, twenty, and her friend Lori Huey, twenty-one, and they planned to pick up Loren’s son Gary—one of his sons from his first marriage—in Southern California.
This was meant to be a voyage to paradise, and it was… for a while. The Spellbound was seaworthy and proud, and they encountered no problems as they sailed a leisurely course off the coasts of Washington, Oregon, and then California, bound for San Diego. The winds grew warmer and every day was a vacation, with the four on boar
d taking turns at the wheel.
It was September 16 when Gary Edwards, twenty-seven, prepared to leave for San Diego and meet up with his stepmother, father, stepsister, and her friend Lori. Gary was very strong and familiar with sailing, and he would be an asset to help crew the ketch.
Gary worried his California girlfriend when he told her of the danger of pirates and smugglers off the Mexican coast. She had been concerned about storms at sea and shipwrecks, but she thought pirates had been gone for a hundred years.
Still, Gary Edwards was right about that danger. Although foreign waters weren’t as bristling with pirates and smugglers in the seventies as they would be in the first decade of the current century, they were something to consider. Gary Edwards felt there had to be some basis to the rumors he had heard.
Gary showed his girlfriend a handgun he had purchased to afford his family extra protection if they were attacked at sea. It was a menacing-looking weapon—a Walther PPK/S .380-caliber automatic pistol. The gun held seven rounds, Gary explained, and it was very accurate. It was heavy—weighing almost a pound and a half.
He tucked it into his seabag, confident that he could fight off pirates if they should attack his father’s boat.
The magnificent journey began with a jubilant crew They planned to be at sea for three years, with stopovers at exotic ports of call. They sailed serenely through Mexican waters without ever meeting pirate ships and were soon in the Pacific Ocean. The Edwardses had planned their journey carefully and thoroughly, with long-lasting provisions stored away. They could catch fish and buy fresh local produce and groceries whenever they landed somewhere big enough to have a store.
The Edwards family headed out to one of the most tantalizing and enchanting ports of call: Tahiti. There are thirty-five islands and eighty-three coral atolls in French Polynesia, but the total land there is only about 3,500 square kilometers. Located midway between Australia and South America, these South Pacific islands seem almost as mythical as Brigadoon. There are volcanoes, silky sand, and aqua lagoons, and the air smells of tropical flowers: bougainvillea, frangipani, ginger, jasmine, Chinese and Polynesian hibiscus, and the national flower tiare Tahiti, a type of gardenia.
The first Polynesians had arrived on the islands by 800 A.D. Many, many famous visitors came later. In the late 1880s, the Tahitians accepted the offer to be a protectorate of France. The islands were a natural draw for writers and artists, the perfect ambiance where one could escape from the world and create a masterpiece.
French artist Paul Gauguin settled on the island of Hiva Oa in the Marquesas in 1891, and in the dozen years before his death there, his brightly hued paintings of sultry, dark-eyed native women and the flora and fauna in Tahiti made that far-off paradise familiar to people all over the world.
Sometimes, the Edwards family had to pinch themselves when they realized that they would actually arrive in Papeete soon. They planned to shop at the morning market on the territory’s largest island and drive the 117-kilometer road that circled Tahiti, where visitors could view monuments and museums, beaches, waterfalls, cliffs, and temple ruins.
Seattle was so far away. Another world.
One day, they would go home, filled with enough memories to last a lifetime. They didn’t even think about the more mundane practices that separated the Emerald City in Washington State and the lushly beautiful tropical islands. The islands’ legal system alone was quite different. Whatever crimes that might occur in Tahiti would be handled by French law enforcement officers, and the law itself was different in Tahiti, and in France.
But the Edwardses had no reason to expect anything bad to happen to them. Aside from a little seasickness, and the kind of minor arguments all families have when they are together in a small space for too long, the voyage had been everything they could have hoped for.
Loren had charted the weather carefully, so they were aware that they wouldn’t be docking in the best of weather. Summer in Tahiti runs from November to April, and the air is hot and cloying, heavy with humidity. And then the trade winds blow from May to August.
The Edwardses would be landing six weeks into the hurricane season, but Loren assured them the Spellbound could take hurricane-force winds and blinding rain. He had designed the craft to withstand such storms.
By the middle of February 1978, the Spellbound was within a few hundred miles of Tahiti. It had been a wonderful trip so far.
And then, suddenly, the Edwardses’ fortunes changed.
They received an emergency message patched forward by several ham-radio operators. Loren’s beloved father, Ira, seventy-nine, was in a Seattle hospital in critical condition. He had been fine when they left Seattle, but now he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer in its very late stages. He might survive for a few months, weeks, or just days.
Any thought of continuing on their cruise as planned was abandoned. They had to get to Papeete. With its population of 70,000, it had an airport. Loren would disembark there and catch the first plane for the United States that he could. The rest of the crew would stay in Papeete until they could head for home, or until Loren rejoined them. Gary could sail the Spellbound, and Jody, Kerry, and Lori would be enough crew.
Fortunately, the weather was good, and there were no reports of hurricanes in the area. They kept a constant pace toward Papeete. The wind blew five to seven knots, and they agreed not to sink the anchor at all. Each crew member would have two hours at the helm, eight hours off. They were racing against death. They could not make the wind blow harder, but they were making steady progress.
No one heard from the Edwards crew for almost ten days. Then, on February 25, the captain of a charter boat moored on the island of Rangiroa in French Polynesia monitored a weak emergency radio signal. He finally determined it concerned a sailing ship called the Spellbound somewhere near Rangiroa. It was coming through a ham-radio operator in Los Angeles. The charter-boat captain could not determine exactly what was wrong, only that the ship was in trouble of some kind.
The charter boat notified authorities and set out to find the mysterious boat in distress. After several hours, they came upon a yellow-hulled sailboat drifting aimlessly sixty miles out at sea.
Four rescuers climbed aboard. They had been told that a captain and four crew members were supposed to be on board. But that was no longer true.
There were only three people on the sailboat—all of whom appeared to be in shock. The lone man identified himself as Gary Edwards and said the two women were his stepsister, Kerry, and her friend Lori.
One of Gary Edwards’s wrists was grotesquely swollen and looked to be broken. Kerry Edwards appeared to have a severe head injury. She had deep cuts over her right eye, which was blackened. Lori Huey said she wasn’t injured.
And yet no one knew exactly what had happened to them. Was it possible that Gary Edwards’s fear of pirates had come true? And where were his parents?
“They’re dead,” Gary said. “We buried them at sea—somewhere off Rangiroa.”
Asked how the couple had died, the three survivors all seemed confused. That was, perhaps, to be expected. Adrift at sea in a strange place, losing the two people who knew the most about how the ship ran and who were the parents of two of the survivors, it was no wonder they were stunned and bewildered.
The first order of business for the rescuers was to find medical treatment for the injured. The chance of locating the elder Edwardses’ bodies in the deep ocean was minuscule. There were sharks in the water, which brought horrible images to mind. That would all have to be sorted out later, if it was even possible.
The Spellbound, completely undamaged, was sailed into Rangiroa. Kerry was found to have a fractured skull, and Gary had his broken wrist set and cast in plaster. Lori hovered close by her friend, while the three who had emerged alive from the death ship waited to talk to authorities.
It would be difficult to say who had jurisdiction over the investigation. Coverage overlapped, and several agencies might step in. The French
police were in Papeete, 300 miles away. The U.S. Coast Guard might be involved, and perhaps the FBI. As a rule, a criminal offense on the high seas is not under any U.S. jurisdiction. Despite the number of bizarre deaths that have proliferated on cruise ships at sea in the last few years, not many mysteries have been solved.
As I write this, a television news broadcast headlines the story of a thirty-nine-year-old man who either leapt—or was pushed—from a Norwegian luxury cruise liner in the Bahamas. The captain ordered a 590-square-mile search of the rough water, but they gave up when they found no sign of him at all.
A few years ago, an elderly man was reported by his wife to have left the ship; a bridegroom vanished—with a pool of blood on the deck beneath his porthole; and his bride was strangely unemotional. A beautiful young woman, whose parents were frantic when she didn’t come back to their quarters after a night of dancing, never returned.
These stories were all in the top of the news for a few weeks, and then they disappeared, explained away by drunkenness, suicide, accidental falls from upper decks.
The public looks at the most likely suspects in cases of shipboard disappearance and violent death with misgivings, but any arrest is extremely rare. For some reason, unexplained deaths at sea don’t get the attention that stateside crimes do. At least not until the recent U.S. hostages taken by pirates in the Indian Ocean when the whole nation watched, breath held, as the captain of the container ship—the Maersk Alabama, with twenty Americans on board—was finally rescued, his captors killed instantly by American sharpshooters. Pirate attacks on Norwegian and Canadian ships followed within a week.
As for crimes in the sea off the South Pacific islands in the late seventies, U.S. authorities agreed to step in in only three instances: when arrests had been made; when the home residences of those involved were in the United States; or on direct orders to intervene from Washington, D.C.
Because Loren and Jody Edwards were American citizens whose usual residence was in Washington State, FBI special agents would ask some penetrating questions. But would they go further than that?
