Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries

by Jon Ronson

  “You see this young boy walk up to her to ask her if she’s all right,” her father, Mike, told me a few weeks ago, sitting in the family’s back garden in Chester. “She said, ‘Yeah, fine.’ Then she put the phone down. She turned around. She had her hands in her back pockets, which she always did. Then she put her hands to her head like this, pushing her hair back. . . .” Mike did the movement. It looked normal. “And then she walked off.”

  And that’s the last anyone has seen of her. She just vanished.

  When she didn’t report for work at 9:00 a.m., the crew Tannoyed her. They searched the ship and called the Mexican coast guard, who searched the waters, all to no avail. That was seven months ago.

  “Now, whenever we call anyone, all they say is ‘The investigation is ongoing,’” Mike said. “We’ve tried e-mailing, telling them how we feel, how it’s getting harder . . .” He pauses. “But nothing. Just ‘It’s ongoing.’”

  Mike and his wife, Ann, have created a website, Help Us To Find Rebecca (rebecca-coriam.com), and have organized fund-raising events. The day I visited, the house was filled with raffle prizes, chocolates, board games, and soft toys, donated by well-wishers. Mike said on some days they were just functioning, but on others they didn’t know if they were coming or going.

  They said only one police officer has ever been assigned to investigate Rebecca’s disappearance. He flew in from Nassau in the Bahamas, fifteen hundred miles from the ship—just one man charged with conducting a forensic investigation and interviewing three thousand passengers and crew. He took charge because the ship is registered in the Bahamas, for tax reasons. It wasn’t deemed relevant that it’s based in Los Angeles, the company’s head office is in the UK, Rebecca was British, and she went missing in international waters between the U.S. and Mexico. (For European passengers, this holds true for all cruise liners, but a law passed last year means if a U.S. citizen disappears on a cruise ship, the FBI now has jurisdiction.)

  Mike and Ann have met the Bahamas officer only once. They flew to Los Angeles on March 25 to meet the ship as it arrived back. The Disney people showed them the CCTV footage and introduced them to the policeman.

  “I asked him, ‘Are you going back on the ship now?’” Mike said. “He said, ‘No, I’m going back to the Bahamas.’ I thought, ‘Hang on, you only got to the ship on Friday.’ He had just Saturday there and that was it. The passengers weren’t questioned.”

  “Not at all?” I asked.

  “No. Not many of the crew, either,” Ann said.

  I told Mike and Ann that I would book myself onto the cruise, ask a few questions, just see what I could find out. They said they’d be pleased for whatever help they could get.

  In the atrium on deck 3, passengers queue for Mickey Mouse’s autograph. I overhear an adult passenger ask a crew member, “Exactly how many Mickey Mouse symbols are there on board?” He looks taken aback. There are about twenty within our immediate vicinity—art deco mouse ears on the frosted-glass doorways, swirly mouse ears on the carpet. “I don’t know,” he replies. The passenger looks annoyed that his question can’t be answered. “I can point out some hidden Mickeys,” the crew member adds. It’s a Disney tradition to embed tiny mouse symbols into the architecture. Fans love to spot them.

  I wander into one of the bars and get talking to a waiter. “What’s it like working here?” I ask.

  “It’s all about the show,” he replies. “When you’re out among the guests, you’re always on show. Even if you’re a waiter, or a cleaner, or a deckhand.”

  “How long have you been on board?” I ask.

  “Seven months. I’ll be going home in forty days—forty-four, to be exact.” He laughs. “Seven months is long enough. Being away from your family is hard.”

  “Were you on board when Rebecca Coriam vanished?” I ask.

  “I don’t know anything about it,” he says. There’s a long silence. “It didn’t happen,” he says. He looks at me. “You know that’s the answer I have to give.”

  It’s a beautiful, clear night outside on deck 4. Ahead of us are the lights of another cruise ship. A few days later—when we reach Puerto Vallarta—I spot it again. It’s called the Carnival Spirit. Forty-three people have vanished from Carnival cruises since 2000. Theirs is the worst record of all cruise companies. There have been 171 disappearances in total, across all cruise lines, since 2000. Rebecca is Disney’s first. A few days ago, Rebecca’s father e-mailed me: “Would like to inform you the number of people missing this year has just gone up to 17. A guy has gone missing in the Gulf of Mexico. The Carnival Conquest.” By the time I get off this ship, the figure will have gone up to 19.

  When someone vanishes from a cruise ship, one of the first things that happens to their family members is they receive a call from an Arizona man named Kendall Carver. “When you become a victim, you think you’re the only person in the world,” Carver told me on the phone. “Well, the Coriams found out they aren’t alone. Almost every two weeks someone goes overboard.”

  Carver says the numbers have reached epidemic proportions and nobody realizes it because it’s in the industry’s power to hush it up. He lost his own daughter, Merrian, back in August 2004, from the Celebrity Mercury. Even though the cabin steward reported her missing on day two, Carver said, no alarm was ever raised. “He reported her missing daily and they told him to forget it.”

  So the chocolates piled up on her pillow. When the Mercury docked in Vancouver—as Carver later testified at a U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing—nobody from the ship said anything: not to the police, the FBI, nobody. They just quietly placed Merrian’s belongings in storage, then gave them to charity. “If we hadn’t eventually traced her to that ship, she would have vanished,” he said.

  At the time, Celebrity Cruises issued a statement saying, “Regrettably, there is very little a cruise line, a resort or a hotel can do to prevent someone from committing suicide.” But as Carver points out, the case is still open. Later the company added, “There is probably nothing we or any company could do that would make the parents feel the company had acted sensitively enough.”

  Now Carver leads a lobby group called International Cruise Victims. Over the phone, he told me theories of murder, negligence, and cover-ups. Sometimes he sounded angry and xenophobic; at other times he was compelling.

  “Think of where those cruise workers are from,” he said. “They’re low-paid, from Third World countries, on those ships for nine months at a time. The sexual crime rate is fifty percent higher than in the average American city.”

  It’s true that passengers on just one ship—the Carnival Valor—reported nine sexual assaults to the FBI in less than one year. “You’re on a ship,” Carver said. “There’s no police. Once you leave the port, you’re in international waters. Who do you think is attracted to working on those ships?”

  “Do you think your daughter was murdered?”

  “The answer’s yes,” he said. “That’s the story among the crew.” He paused. “Put murder to one side. Just think about the drinking. Royal Caribbean has just started a policy of unlimited drinks for one price. Celebrity is doing it.”

  I don’t think drunkenness is an issue on the Disney Wonder. You’d have to drink a frozen piña colada the size of a glacier to get drunk, such are the measly measures they serve here.

  “There’s a man in Ireland had a fifteen-year-old daughter,” Carver said. “One cruise served her eight drinks in an hour. She went to the balcony and threw up and went overboard. She was gone.”

  He’s talking about Lynsey O’Brien, who went missing on January 5, 2006, while on a cruise with her family off the Mexican coast. The cruise liner, Costa Magica, conducted its own investigation into her disappearance and decided there was “no evidence of an accidental fall,” that Lynsey had shown the bartender ID stating that she was twenty-three years old, and that her death was caused by “underage drinking.” While they “continued to extend their deepest sympathy” to the family, they claimed t
heir report cleared them of any wrongdoing.

  “In other corporations, police get involved,” Carver said. “On cruise ships they have, quote, security officers, but they work for the cruise lines. They aren’t going to do anything when the lines get sued. We came to the conclusion cover-up is the standard operating procedure.” He paused. “And the Coriam girl. Where is the CCTV footage?”

  According to articles published at the time of Rebecca’s disappearance, in the Los Angeles Times and Cruise Law News, Disney claims to have no footage of Rebecca going overboard. They refuse to “disclose the number of CCTV cameras or their locations for security reasons.”

  “If there’s a video that shows your daughter going overboard,” Carver said, “that’s the end of the story. There’s no way someone can go off a ship and it not be recorded.”

  At 7:00 a.m. on Tuesday morning, I stand on deck 4 as we pass the stretch of ocean where Rebecca went missing. A school of dolphins leap into the air, doing backflips. Passengers around me gasp. A young crew member from Ireland passes and I ask her about life in the crew cabins. “It’s like being inside Harry Potter’s closet,” she replies.

  She means it’s magical, but tiny and dark. Their cabins are windowless, below sea level, like steel boxes. Crew members are contracted to work seven days a week for four-, six-, or eight-month stretches (according to how high up the ladder they are) before being allowed a few months off. At 10:00 p.m. one night, I see some women from Rebecca’s department, Youth Activities, playing with kids on the stairs. It seems they’re on duty as long as there are kids who need entertaining. A former member of staff, Kim Button, has written a blog about life on the Wonder: “I don’t think it’s possible to imagine how tiny a crew room is without actually seeing it! Seriously, your mind can’t even fathom such things. We had staff meetings at 2am, the only time when one of us wasn’t working, so even if your work day ended at 10pm, you couldn’t get much sleep because you had to be in a meeting at 2am. . . . The crew pool is literally one of the few places where crew members can just hang out and be themselves, without fear of acting improperly in front of guests.”

  Even though life on board is, for a guest, assiduously magical, with constant Broadway-style high-budget shows, bingo, origami and acupuncture classes, films under the stars, and shore excursions to snorkel with tropical fish and ride horses through Mexican rain forests, from time to time I detect tiny flashes of cabin fever. I watch a children’s entertainer try out a move in which he throws a stuffed pelican to his assistant. It accidentally hits her in the face. “You’re supposed to catch the pelican!” he snaps.

  “My boss,” she mutters, looking embarrassed.

  On a shore excursion, a Mexican crew member asks some passengers to stand in a straight line, two by two, while we wait for the bus. Every passenger feels the need to say something facetiously passive-aggressive in response.

  “Oh, a straight line!” one says.

  “Can it not be a little crooked?” says another.

  And so on, practically all the way down the line. The crew member looks upset and embarrassed.

  I’ve decided the only place Rebecca could have fallen from is the deck 4 jogging track. The railings everywhere else are just too high. She was a keep-fit fanatic. My theory is that after the 5:45 a.m. phone call, she went for a jog and slipped. So I’m surprised to spot four CCTV cameras on deck 4—two on the port side, two on the starboard—evidently capturing every inch of the deck. They’re hard to see at first, as they’re shaped like long tubes and look like some kind of nautical equipment.

  A man in yellow overalls is varnishing a railing. I glance inside the atrium. There’s a big Cinderella party going on. Someone is singing a song about how we have to have “faith, trust, and pixie dust.” There’s a crew party going on somewhere too—I hear screeching and laughter from behind a steel door. It sounds very different from the guest parties, like a pressure cooker letting off steam.

  I sidle up to the man doing the varnishing. “That girl who went missing back in March,” I say. “She must have fallen from this deck?”

  He looks surprised: “No, she went from deck 5.”

  “But there’s no outside space on deck 5,” I say.

  “Go to deck 10, walk to the front of the ship, and look down,” he says. “You’ll see the crew swimming pool. That’s where she went from. The starboard side.”

  “How do you know this?” I ask him.

  “I was on the ship that day. Everyone knows.”

  “How?” I ask.

  “They found her slipper,” he says.

  I walk up to deck 10 and look down. And I see it. The crew swimming pool looks nice—bigger than some of the guest pools. But it’s the swimming-pool equivalent of an inside cabin. There is no view of the ocean because behind the railings is a high steel wall. It reaches well above head height. There is no way someone could accidentally fall from there. You would have to make the effort to climb up. It would be difficult. It would take time.

  Back on deck 4, the man is still varnishing.

  “I saw it,” I say.

  “God bless her,” he says.

  “It must be a very intense life, working on the Disney Wonder,” I say. “You’ve got those tiny, claustrophobic cabins. The passengers are very demanding. You work every day for six months. You have to be a Disney-type person the whole time, even when you’re varnishing railings. . . .”

  He looks at me as if I’m nuts. “We don’t spend any time in our cabins,” he says. “We just sleep and shower there. We spend our free time in the mess hall or by the crew pool.”

  A group of his fellow deck workers joins us. “Disney aren’t slave masters,” one says. “We get to go onshore. We get breaks. Everything you’ve got up here, we’ve got down there.” He points to the bowels of the ship. “We’ve got a library, a gym, a games room, a swimming pool. I don’t have a flat-screen TV or a gym at home. I have them here. The only thing I miss is my family.”

  “But all that having to be on show for the guests all the time . . .” I say.

  “All the big smiles and happiness,” someone replies, “it’s all real. You couldn’t act that.”

  “Disney wouldn’t hire you if you weren’t that sort of person,” someone else says.

  “But what about Rebecca Coriam?” I say. “Did you know her?”

  A few of them nod. “She was a lovely girl,” one says. “Not emotional. Just like everyone here. Nice and friendly and happy.”

  “Then why . . . ?” I say.

  “I don’t know,” he shrugs. “But there’s nothing dark or sinister going on. This is Disney.”

  Over the next few days I ask more people, and every time I get the exact same response: She jumped from the front of deck 5, at the crew pool.

  “Disney knows exactly what happened,” one crew member tells me. “That phone call she had? It was taped. Everything here is taped. There’s CCTV everywhere. Disney have the tape.”

  “What’s in the tape?” I ask her.

  “I don’t know, but I know someone who knew her well. Would you like me to introduce you?”

  And so, after everyone has gone to bed, I have a brief conversation with one of Rebecca’s closer friends from the ship.

  “Do you know what was in the tape?” I ask him.

  He shakes his head. “Not exactly. I know she was having a fight with her partner.” He pauses. “What’s it ever about? It’s about love, relationships. There’s no mystery. She was just a lovely girl with underlying sadness.”

  The next morning, as we sail back into the Port of Los Angeles, a crew member beckons me over. He says he’s heard I’ve been asking questions about Rebecca Coriam and he wants me to know that suicide is not the only possibility. Maybe, he says, after the phone call she took a walk to clear her head and the wind lifted her away.

  “But the steel wall is so high down there,” I say.

  “I was on the ship that day,” he says. “It was a rocky day. One time a frien
d of mine was called early in the morning. The deck by the crew pool was really windy and slippery, and someone was walking there, and my friend was called to get them inside. Disney took it really seriously. The guy got sent home.”

  “So she could have fallen?” I ask.

  “She could have fallen,” he says.

  We pull into the port. This is where Mike and Ann came on March 25 after receiving a call from Disney executive Jim Orie to say Rebecca was missing. They were here in time to see the passengers disembark.

  “We were hoping we could have spoken to some of them, but we never got the opportunity,” Mike told me back in Chester. Ann added: “They kept us in a car with the windows all blacked out.”

  “Did you get the feeling they were deliberately keeping you away from the passengers?”

  Mike: “Well . . .”

  Ann: “Probably.”

  “But Disney were being polite and helpful and sympathetic?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah,” said Mike.

  After the passengers had disembarked, Mike and Ann were taken on board. They were put in a room that quickly filled with Disney executives and the girl Rebecca had spoken to on the phone at 5:45 a.m.

  “Did you ask her what they’d talked about?” I asked. “Why Rebecca had been upset?”

  They shook their heads. “We would have liked to have asked more, but by the time we’d flown over we were jet-lagged,” Ann said. “We hadn’t slept since the Tuesday. We flew out on the Friday. We hadn’t eaten. . . .”

  “With hindsight, it might have been better if we’d gone out a little later,” Mike said.

  “When you were more able to ask questions?”

  He nodded. “But your daughter’s missing, so you don’t think like that, do you? Also, we wanted to be quick to meet some of the passengers.”

  Mike remembered thinking, as he sat in that room on the ship, that their uselessness at getting information wouldn’t be a problem because there would be plenty of other opportunities to ask questions. They had no idea they would never have another chance.