by Bill Barich
The Fletchers soon came to depend on Jolly’s services. According to reports, Jim had begun drinking heavily, going ashore to buy a fifth of liquor almost every day. Often he passed out early, forcing Penny to cast about for company. Sometimes she toured the bars and rum shops with Jolly and called him her protector. They’d sit close to each other and chat intimately, and it was probably inescapable, given Jolly’s history, that some people assumed that they were having an affair. (Penny would deny this to the police.) When Jim was awake, he and Penny brawled in public, and they had an especially loud and ugly fight at the Gingerbread, a restaurant owned by the prime minister’s ex-wife. In fact, James Mitchell’s family owned the Hotel Frangipani nearby—he’d been born in room one—where Garfield Joseph, Jolly’s brother, had tended bar for years. The bonds among Bequia families were tight.
In late August the Fletchers flew back to Huntington to visit their families. They returned to Admiralty Bay at the end of September and resumed their routine. One afternoon, Penny drifted into a narrow Bequia saloon called Buddy’s Bar with Rudy Hanson, a new deckhand who’d replaced Benedict Redhead. She allegedly began arguing with three customers, insisting that she was a better navigator than any of them, and warning one fellow that he might lose his job just for the way he was looking at her. She boasted about her pistol and spoke of her desire to shoot a “nigger.” (“She was really out of control that evening,” Hanson said on Nightline.) The argument turned physical, and there was a scuffle that caused enough damage for Jim to have to pay for repairs.
A few days later, on October 6, around 9:35 p.m., Penny and Jim radioed Jolly Joseph at the Frangipani, where he was visiting with his brother, and asked him to take them to the Gingerbread for a late dinner. The restaurant was closed when they got there, however, so Jolly returned them to the boat. And that, they subsequently told police, was the last they ever saw of him. A single shot was heard on Bequia at about 2 a.m., and at dawn Jolly’s empty water taxi was found washed ashore directly downwind from the Carefree. Its fuel line was disconnected, and two live .22 bullets were rattling around on the floor.
The news traveled the island quickly, and an angry crowd had collected on the beach by that afternoon. “Murderers!” they reportedly shouted at the Fletchers. “You killed him!” Jim and Penny were frightened enough to weigh anchor and head for the open sea, but the St. Vincent coast guard intercepted them. (They claimed that they were only going to visit the other side of the island.) Two days later, a sea captain on his way to the southern Grenadines spotted Jolly’s ravaged body adrift near an area called Moon Hole. Although the Fletchers weren’t formally charged, the police brought them to Kingstown and questioned them in two separate sessions—for 51 and 54 hours straight—without the benefit of an attorney and without allowing them any food or sleep. They were steadfast in maintaining their innocence.
Four times the police searched the Carefree. They discovered a fiberglass storage chest with some reddish stains on it and a bullet-torn rubber dinghy, but the Smith & Wesson .22 was missing, along with 80 rounds of ammunition. (The live bullets in the water taxi matched the one in Jolly’s chest, but not the rounds still on the yacht.) Pressed for an explanation, Jim claimed that a disgruntled Benedict Redhead had stolen both the pistol and the ammo back in August. Redhead, working in St. Lucia again, denied it. When Jim was asked why he failed to report the theft, he said that he had reported it, although no such record was ever found.
* * *
On Monday, in the early morning, I joined a big crowd of islanders gathered outside the Kingstown courthouse. A light drizzle was falling, but some people were still dressed in their Sunday best in hopes of landing a seat in the gallery for the Fletchers’ trial. A U.S. consul from Barbados was also in attendance, dispatched by the Clinton administration to ensure that Jim and Penny would be accorded “full due process.” The Fletcher clan was present in numbers, too—Jim’s grown children, his sister, and a few other relatives. Bob Fletcher, who is 82, wore an old blue sport coat and a bolo tie and scarcely resembled the public’s idea of a multimillionaire. This was his third visit to Kingstown since his son’s arrest.
The accused were already in the courtroom and confined to a tight little dock. Jim was rail-thin, sallow, and blank around the eyes, but Penny acted animated and glanced nervously around at her in-laws and friends. They looked slack and harmless, a couple of suburbanites on holiday, he in a bland business suit that hung on his bony frame, she in the plainest of dresses. It was difficult to picture them as the scourge of the eastern Caribbean, and yet they’d had bad scrapes in almost every port. On St. Lucia, for instance, Penny had yanked out their .22 and terrorized some locals, and the police confiscated the weapon. On Antigua, she allegedly had made loud claims that a black man had raped her. And on Bequia, she and Jim had fought those bitter public battles.
The hum of anticipation in the gallery stopped with the appearance of High Court Judge Dunbar Cenac. He had close-cropped hair, owlish glasses, and an open expression that radiated intelligence and easy authority. He had been up since six o’clock, he said, and would tolerate no nonsense. Jury selection, the first order of business, went without a hitch. A clerk plucked numbered pieces of paper from a cylinder, consulted a list, and shouted out names. In less than 30 minutes, including preemptories, a jury of eight men and four women occupied the jury box.
Cenac then asked the jurors to leave, so that an important issue could be debated. I sat forward, wondering what was up, and studied the barristers grouped around some tables in front of the judge. They were the premier legal hands in the islands, and had tangled with one another many times before. To head the prosecution team—and perhaps to avoid any suspicion of bias—St. Vincent and the Grenadines had imported from Trinidad and Tobago the highly regarded Queen’s Counsel Karl Hudson-Phillips and his partner, Gerald Stewart. Judge Cenac had preemptively denied Hudson-Phillips’s motion for postponement, as well as a gag order on the media, so the counsel seemed frustrated as he strutted about in his flowing black robe and white bib.
The island’s papers, all weeklies, had criticized Hudson-Phillips for his gambits and branded him a carpetbagger, but they showed no ill will toward Richard “Johnny” Cheltenham of Barbados, who was defending Penny Fletcher. Cheltenham was a veteran of 96 murder trials, and his interrogatory style was spare and effective, like a boxer who relies on his jab. But the real star in the room was Ralph Gonsalves, Jim’s attorney, a Vincentian of Portuguese descent. Known by some as Comrade Ralph for his support of Cuba, he led his country’s labor party, battled corruption, and hoped to be the next prime minister.
Judge Cenac presented the issue of the moment. He had to rule whether or not Penny’s statement about wanting to shoot a “nigger” should be part of the evidence that the jury would hear. At a preliminary inquiry, the three men from Buddy’s Bar had described Penny’s behavior. “She said she wanted to shoot a nigger because she’d been raped in Antigua,” went their testimony.
Richard Cheltenham, the first attorney to speak, proceeded from logic. Penny had not threatened a particular black man, he pointed out—that is, Jolly Joseph. Rather, she had tossed out an idle barroom threat against a class or category of people. Such a general threat couldn’t be construed as evidence of murder, Cheltenham continued. It was a non sequitur and simply didn’t follow! In rebuttal, Hudson-Phillips adopted a folksy idiom: If you find an egg missing from your henhouse and your dog, a known egg sucker, has been in the vicinity, isn’t it fair to assume that the dog may be guilty?
“When you marry it [Penny’s statement] to the circumstance of a nigger shot,” Hudson-Phillips concluded, wiping his brow with a hankie, “it is a highly relevant bit of information.” The barristers in their formal attire turned in a marvelous performance. There was something very stylized and old-fashioned about the way they conducted themselves that had the effect of shoving the victim, Jolly Joseph, far into the background; it was as if the players were more interested in upholdi
ng the dignity of St. Vincent than they were in determining the Fletchers’ guilt or innocence.
But perhaps all trials revolve around fine points of language in the end. As for Judge Cenac, he was busy taking down the arguments by hand, in pen and ink, instead of relying on a court stenographer. He deliberated briefly before making his decision. There were gasps in the courtroom when Cenac announced that the prejudice of Penny’s statement would outweigh its probative value. He would refuse to admit it as evidence.
Then the trial began in earnest. A string of witnesses paraded before the jury to relate discrete bits of information that combined to form a narrative. Their story was thin in places, but it was never wholly unbelievable, even though the evidence, as advertised, was circumstantial. They were, in essence, the prosecution’s case, and they laid out the grim tale of the murder and the Fletchers’ damning behavior in the days preceding it.
The defense team did its best to nullify the potentially damaging testimony, casting doubts and poking holes. Couldn’t Jolly’s water taxi have drifted to the same location from elsewhere, rather than from the site of the Carefree? Possibly. Didn’t other residents of Bequia have .22s? Probably. More than 30 of them? Yes.
It was impossible for a spectator to distinguish the truths from the half-truths and the lies, but I felt the prosecution’s case had some credibility. Who else on Bequia had been so recklessly courting disaster? If the Fletchers’ gun had indeed been stolen, how had Penny, as reported, shot up the Carefree’s dinghy in a birthday revelry just days before the murder? Was Rudy Hanson around on the night of the murder, as he had been at Buddy’s Bar? There were plenty of suggestive and unanswered questions, but that didn’t mean a jury would or should vote to convict the Fletchers in the absence of any hard evidence.
As the hours passed in the courtroom, I began to understand where Hudson-Phillips and his partners were directing the narrative—toward Benedict Redhead, their key witness. Although Redhead had been fired by Jim and Penny during a dispute and couldn’t be considered objective, he was, Hudson-Phillips intimated, the only person who might provide a reasonable motive for the killing: Redhead told the police he had proof that Penny Fletcher and Jolly Joseph were romantically involved. But he wasn’t scheduled to recount this proof until Friday, so I took a break from the trial and visited Bequia again myself to see what, if anything, I could find out.
* * *
On Wednesday morning, Slim came to fetch me at the Grand View and drove me to the Kingstown dock, where I again caught the ferry to Bequia. I’d made an appointment to meet with Tom Hopman, one of the publishers of the Caribbean Compass, a monthly yachting paper, and an old Bequia hand; he knew as much about the island as almost anybody, and might help describe the often awkward interaction between tourists and locals.
An American from Indiana, Hopman had sailed into Admiralty Bay 23 years ago and could never bring himself to leave for good. With his partner and companion, Sally Erdle, Hopman still lives on a boat, in fact—a 41-foot Phillip Rhodes “plastic classic” anchored in the bay. He’d known Jolly Joseph well, but he wasn’t particularly eager to talk about him.
“Jolly was reliable and honest,” he said, repeating what I’d heard from others. “He had the longest-established operation here. He never cut any corners. He wasn’t a perfect angel, but who is?”
I asked Hopman about rumors that Joseph had dealt drugs to tourists. He was reported to have died with a substantial savings account in an island bank. Could the murder be the result of a drug deal gone wrong?
Hopman shrugged. He doubted it. “That’s an easy enough equation to make,” he said. “But Jolly worked really hard. In winter high season, there’ll be about 150 boats in Admiralty Bay, and a guy who hustles can earn $1,000 in a single day.”
We left Hopman’s office after a while and headed to a neighborhood cafe for lunch. Hopman went barefoot and greeted friends along the way. As a waitress took our orders, the sky grew dark and broke open, with the rain falling so fast and in such thick sheets that both the ceiling and walls of the cafe began to leak. An inch of water, a little flash flood, spread across the floor and washed into my sneakers and socks, and I realized that Hopman’s feet were bare for a reason.
We moved to a table in a drier part of the cafe. Again Hopman seemed reluctant to speak, and I had a sense that most people in St. Vincent and Bequia (and probably in the U.S. State Department) wished that the whole affair would disappear and allow things to go back to normal.
“They were total loonies,” Hopman finally said, shaking his head at their curious actions. They had professed their love for Bequia and hoped to start a charter business with their yacht and also to donate $25,000 to buy books for the impoverished island schools, yet at the same time Jim was capable of offending Rotary Club members by showing up for a meeting so drunk that, according to some Bequians, they had to ask him to leave.
“We’ve never had any violence here,” he went on. “It’s the Americans who bring the guns. We had a boat show last May, and the Bequians wouldn’t let their children go aboard any of the yachts because they were scared the kids might get shot.”
“Bequia’s changed in 25 years,” I said.
“Yeah, we’ve got an airport now, and more tour boats are stopping in the port. Bequia used to be for travelers, not tourists.”
I asked him if he knew the Joseph family, if they might be willing to talk with me.
“Not now,” Hopman said, with some regret. “Everybody here was friendly to the media at first. But they got hurt by all that television stuff. Nobody trusts an outsider now.”
I checked into the Hotel Frangipani and looked up the Josephs in the phone book, but they weren’t listed. I tried strolling up into the hills, where the roads are rutted and the houses are simple and often in need of repair, thinking I might get lucky and locate them. Families run big on Bequia, sometimes with as many as ten children, so there were lots of boys and girls playing in the streets. They kicked around a soccer ball and dashed after one another, but when I asked about the Josephs, they turned shy and looked away.
That night, I hung around the hotel bar and also hit the Gingerbread and Buddy’s Bar, but I soon tired of making inquiries. I felt bad about intruding on people’s privacy. They had a right to silence in their time of sorrow, so I finished a last Hairoun, watched the stars blinking above the indigo sea, and admitted that Tom Hopman had been right. On Bequia, for whatever reason, nobody wanted to talk about the murder of Jolly Joseph, at least not yet.
* * *
The evening before Benedict Redhead’s court appearance, I visited with Bob Fletcher at The Camelot, the most luxurious hotel in Kingstown, and the most oddly situated, in that it overlooks the slums of the city rather than the Caribbean. Fletcher and his family were sitting on a patio and giving interviews to three reporters, all from West Virginia. Bob still wore his bolo tie, and his thick white hair made him look younger than his years. He knew how to assess a messy situation and tackle it head-on. I had a feeling that he’d cleaned up after his son before, maybe more than once.
There was no arrogance in Fletcher, despite his fortune. That $100,000 payoff looked cheap to him now, he told me with a smile, as we sat down at a table. He must have spent close to half a million dollars on attorneys, hotel bills, and plane fares so far.
Bob Fletcher said he’d always loved sailing, even back when he was navigating a humble sailing canoe around Lake Michigan. He bought his first real yacht from a boatbuilder on Long Island in 1965. It was a 35-foot sloop constructed entirely of fiberglass, and he called it Manana and sailed it happily for 23 years until he traded up to the Carefree, which had cost him $250,000. He was very fond of the eastern Caribbean and had passed 11 winters touring the same islands that had brought Jim to grief. He praised the beam wind and the lines of sight, the fine anchorages and the excellent snorkeling.
Bob was at a cancer clinic in Mexico, where his wife was being treated, when he first got word of Jim and Penny�
��s arrest. He jumped into the fray and soon learned what the State Department could and couldn’t do on his behalf. The prison conditions were truly awful. His son told him that there were inmates inside who weren’t even aware of the charges against them. He wished he could do more for Jim, but he couldn’t—his hands were tied. Jim would need the courage to make it through on his own. Meanwhile, SVG was going to have to change its ways if it wanted to join the twenty-first century, he felt.
I wondered if Bob had any thoughts about why Jim and Penny had run afoul of the law. He took a minute. “Well, I think Jim was unfortunate,” he said, in a measured voice. “He didn’t get on the right side of certain people down here, for reasons beyond his control. I’m real proud of how he’s conducted himself. Once you get involved in this kind of thing—and it could happen to anybody—there’s no way out.”
“Do you think they’ll be convicted?” I asked.
“I don’t see how,” he said. “They’ve got no gun, no blood evidence, and no motive. Mind you, we’re not out to hurt the people of St. Vincent. We think a lot of the country and the location.” There was a pause. “I’m just afraid the trial might go to the jury box.”
* * *
All the Fletchers were in the courtroom, of course, when Benedict Redhead took the stand in the morning. He looked sheepish about his status as the key witness, hauled reluctantly back to St. Vincent. In a new pair of khakis and a clean polo shirt, with a gold chain around his neck, he appeared tense but forthright as he recounted how Jim Fletcher had hired him “to run small errands for alcohol and cigarettes.” He had sailed with them from St. Lucia to Antigua and on to Bequia, and he explained how there, in Port Elizabeth, he had come back from town very late one night and seen Jolly Joseph in the cockpit of the Carefree with his arm around Penny “in a lovemakin’ position.”
Lovemakin’ position! The gallery exploded. Hands flew up to cover mouths and muffle all the laughter, while a broad-beamed, stern-faced police matron pounded the floor with a staff and cried, “Order in the court! Order in the court!” until a relative calm was restored.
