An Angle on the World

by Bill Barich

  When the trial began, I flew down to attend it. I’d been intrigued by the Fletcher case from the start. It had all the elements of an outdoor film noir—drink, drugs, sex, sailing, and betrayal—plus a whodunit at its core. I had no idea whether the accused were guilty or innocent. Had they really pulled the trigger, or were they—as they claimed—merely unfortunate victims who’d made some powerful enemies on Bequia?

  Jim Fletcher’s family had hired an attorney to massage the State Department in Washington and spin the media, and there’d been so many charges of corruption and mistreatment that it was impossible to decipher the truth. The people who live in St. Vincent and the Grenadines—or SVG, as it’s known—were in shock. The tiny country consists of 32 islands and cays stretching almost to Venezuela, and its residents had never been touched by a problem of such magnitude, or forced to wonder about the nature of justice—or, for that matter, tourism and its own power to corrupt.

  Kingstown, the nation’s capital, is a densely populated city of about 17,000, where only a few buildings are taller than a coconut tree. The airport can’t handle big commercial jets, so I arrived from San Juan on a turboprop and stared in hypnotic fascination at the vast expanse of sapphire-blue water below and muttered the usual prayers. In an hour or so, St. Vincent came into view, green, mountainous, and rugged, with a semidormant volcano at its northern tip. In the nineteenth century, British sugar plantations dominated the landscape, but now the chief cash crops are bananas, coconuts, arrowroot, and high-grade marijuana.

  At the airport, a light breeze was blowing. There were just a dozen or so passengers on the plane, and we walked into a busy terminal together and lined up at a couple of simple tables, where two customs officers stamped our passports. Outside, taxis were parked at the curb, and I cast my lot with a cabbie called Slim. He wasn’t slim, not at all, but he laughed and explained that everyone in town had a jokey nickname, including the prime minister, James “Son” Mitchell, who’d been in office almost since independence in 1979.

  Slim showed me around before taking me to my hotel. It was a Saturday, and the downtown streets were thronged and noisy. Hundreds of shoppers pulsed through a huge central market at the edge of the sea. Because of the English connection, I’d expected Kingstown to be somewhat stiff and formal, with the locals and the tourists keeping a polite distance, but instead the atmosphere was raucous and freewheeling. Tinny radios blasted reggae music at maximum volume, while children chased one another through a maze of wooden stalls and rowdy traders bargained with their customers. Skinny dogs nosed about in the open gutters, and a handful of rum sots slept off their fevers in the shade.

  For decades, the island has been the breadbasket of the eastern Caribbean, and when yachting types stop at all, it’s only for a day or two to lay in provisions and have a few drinks at Basil’s bar before sailing on to the Grenadines, where the beaches are far more beautiful and the anchorages rival any in the world. When the Fletchers boarded the Carefree, their 47-foot yacht, for a sailing idyll they hoped would last several years, the Grenadines was one of their prime destinations.

  Slim, like most Vincies, was well versed in the particulars of the Fletcher case and wanted to know if I had anything to do with it.

  “I’m here to write about it,” I told him.

  “That woman did the crime!” he said with authority, leaning on his horn to scatter some chickens in the road. “The husband, he’s just a drunk. But Penny Fletcher—I tell you, mon, she did the crime!”

  “You think so?”

  “Oh, yeah. Even before comin’ here, she had problems in St. Lucia for wavin’ around a gun. On Bequia, she was runnin’ about and saying she wants to shoot a nigger!”

  I hadn’t seen the word “nigger” in any of the newspapers I’d read, though some reports alleged that Penny had wanted to shoot “a black man.” Otherwise, Slim’s version jibed with what I already knew. Jolly Joseph had indeed been shot; his body was discovered floating in Admiralty Bay, off Bequia. He’d been missing for two days, and the Fletchers were among his last known contacts. His skin was peeling off, and small fish had eaten away his eyelids, nose, and lips. A single .22 bullet was lodged between his ribs, having pierced his lungs, his aorta, and his heart.

  “The police never found a murder weapon, did they?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “But the Fletchers had a .22, mon. They sayin’ a deckhand stole it from ’em, but probably they threw it overboard. That’s a big ocean out there. Can swallow a lot of things.”

  Slim made it clear he didn’t judge all Americans by Jim and Penny’s supposed antics, but he was still angry with the U.S. government. Recently, American drug-squad helicopters had come in and sprayed the marijuana fields, and what had SVG gotten in exchange? Exactly nothing!

  “Then those Fletchers bring us all this negative publicity,” Slim continued, in disgust. “Nightline and everything.”

  The stateside publicity, including a locally infamous episode of Nightline, had certainly been negative, with SVG portrayed as an evil, backward country that tourists should avoid, while Jim and Penny were depicted as the objects of a witch-hunt who’d been jailed on flimsy circumstantial evidence. The validity of such charges was still at issue, but nobody denied that the Fletchers had suffered in Kingstown. At the men’s prison, Jim shared a 16-by-20-foot cell with 17 other inmates. On a diet of rice, beans, bread, tea, and scraps of meat, he had lost some 30 pounds and claimed that he might be dying, while Penny suffered from malnutrition and complained about the scuttling rats that kept her awake at night.

  “You think they’re guilty?” I asked.

  “I tell you, that woman did the crime.”

  “Will a jury here convict them?”

  “No, I don’t think it,” Slim said flatly. “They Americans, you know?”

  The Grand View Beach Hotel, where I’d booked a room, occupied a bluff called Villa Point outside Kingstown. The main building had once been a cotton-drying house on a colonial estate, and it had lovely, airy rooms and was done everywhere in the lush colors you see in Winslow Homer’s island watercolors, the greens and blues of the sea and the bright reds and oranges of tropical flowers. Here, too, the Fletchers turned out to be the chief topic of conversation. The desk clerk mentioned them shyly, and I chatted about the case later with Tony “Miler” Sardine, who owns the hotel with his wife, Heather. Tony had been born and raised on St. Vincent and echoed Slim’s distress about all the bad press.

  “That prison isn’t any worse than the others in the eastern Caribbean,” he told me, adding that the guards were so lenient that they sometimes let the inmates slip into the Lyric Cinema across the street to catch a movie. The problem, of course, was that Jim and Penny Fletcher were rich tourists, not poor Vincies—the annual per capita income in SVG is about $2,100—and they weren’t accustomed to such hardship.

  In fact, it was a quirk of fate that they’d done any time at all. They might have been free and clear of Kingstown before Christmas if a bizarre set of events hadn’t prevented them from buying their way out of their cells. It happened that another murder had occurred in the islands shortly after the Fletchers were jailed at the end of October 1996. In early November, two intruders allegedly slipped onto a South African yacht anchored in Cumberland Bay, a remote spot on the leeward side of St. Vincent, and hacked to death Lorraine Heath, a tourist from Durban, with their machetes.

  Her husband, Alan, who summoned the police and suffered some superficial cuts, was the only eyewitness. Robbery was presumed to be the motive, but nothing appeared to be missing. Heath was outraged when the officers detained him for about three weeks while they investigated. He would later state that Hans Matadial, a well-connected lawyer in the city, finally approached him with a deal. If he’d pay $25,000 in legal fees, he would be released, and Heath complied.

  Word of Heath’s narrow escape reached Jim Fletcher in prison, and he informed Arturo Diaz, an attorney of his from Puerto Rico, the U.S. jurisdiction closest to
SVG, that he’d pay as much as $100,000 for his and Penny’s freedom. Diaz claims to have made the necessary initial arrangements with an unnamed “fixer” when the deal collapsed. “Things were very hot, hot, hot,” Diaz recounted on the Nightline program. He suggested that his fixer had developed cold feet.

  But it was actually Alan Heath who’d queered the deal. Home again in Durban, he had embarked on a one-man crusade to advertise the perceived horrors of St. Vincent and had scared off everybody, according to Diaz. The $25,000 was a bribe, Heath insisted—not “legal fees”—and he swore that the money had gone to Randolph Toussaint, the commissioner of police. (Toussaint denied it and has since resigned.) SVG was corrupt and had no justice system, Heath said on television, and his accusations made headlines everywhere.

  I had traveled enough in poor countries not to be shocked by the thought of corruption in Kingstown. Corruption exists at every level of every society, but it’s one thing to be a critic of your own people and another to be poked in the eye by foreign critics on worldwide TV. SVG was so new to the global village that hardly anybody could find it on a map, and now there were correspondents tramping around with cameras and notepads to capture its supposed vileness. Prime Minister Mitchell was understandably furious and offended. Heath had been set free, he said, simply because the police lacked the evidence to hold him any longer. But the destructive publicity snowballed anyway, and tourism began to decline.

  At any rate, Sir James had a mess on his hands with the Joseph murder. In the wake of the Heath allegations, SVG was about to be tried along with the Fletchers, and the country’s nascent tourism industry could hang in the balance.

  * * *

  That evening, I stood on the lawn at the Grand View and watched two guys knock breadfruit out of a tree with a stick. On my walk, I bumped into a young reporter from West Virginia, who was covering the story for his hometown sheet. He was friendly with Jim Fletcher’s father, Bob, and Bob’s wife, Kae—they, too, were in Kingstown and waiting for the trial—and offered to share some background on the family, so we repaired to the Surf Side Bar. It was an open-air place right on the water, where Vincies mingled with both tourists and expats and consumed countless bottles of Hairoun, a fine local brew. We ordered conch roti—a sort of whole-wheat burrito stuffed with curried onions, potatoes, and conch—and the reporter launched into his tale.

  Bob Fletcher had made his fortune in mining equipment, he said. J. H. Fletcher & Co. dated back to 1937 and currently had about 200 employees based in Huntington. Bob was known as a decent, stand-up guy with a passion for sailing, but his son had led a pampered life. Educated at Choate and DePauw University, where he majored in Spanish literature, Jim went to work for the Fletcher company right after graduation, starting in sales and winding up as its CEO. He was active in Republican politics and once served as the party’s chair in Cabell County, running for the West Virginia House of Delegates in 1984 and 1986. He lost both times.

  Jim would marry and divorce twice. In 1988, he was named (but never charged) in a drug sweep that netted a Fletcher & Co. accountant and also Penny Rhea Carter, his future third wife. Born Penelia Carter in Olive Hill, Kentucky, she ran with a fast crowd and acquired a nasty cocaine habit that was reportedly costing her between $500 and $800 a week during the late eighties. (After quitting coke, she switched to prescription pills, got strung out again, and wound up in rehab.) To beat the cocaine rap, she turned state’s evidence. Penny liked to brag that she carried a gun, and at least one Huntington tavern banned her for flashing it on the premises.

  By the early 1990s, Jim Fletcher had become a problem drinker. Friends described him as adrift, in need of challenge, which Penny seemed to provide. He had known her for years, but when the two began dating and frequenting bars together, their affair caught fire. In the autumn of 1993, out of the blue, Jim surprised his parents by phoning them from Bermuda and inviting them to a spur-of-the-moment wedding, where one of his daughters sang his favorite song, the Eagles’ “Desperado.”

  Apparently, Fletcher had second thoughts about the marriage, because he allegedly filed for divorce the following spring. There was a reconciliation, though, and shortly afterward Jim Fletcher retired at the age of 47 (Penny was 33); he and Penny intended to sail the Carefree, a Wellington cutter Jim had purchased from his father. The couple spent four months preparing it for an open-ended voyage. They had five children between them, including three school-age kids, but they planned to leave the youngest behind with relatives. The Fletchers set sail from Key Largo in April 1995 with an ample larder of food and booze, plus a Smith & Wesson .22 and 200 rounds of ammunition. The pistol was still in their possession and duly registered at customs when, on August 21, 1996, they entered St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

  From the hotel terrace on Sunday morning, I could see a preacher baptizing members of his flock by dipping them into the Caribbean. The downtown area was deserted, with not a single soul in the market, so I walked over to look at the courthouse, an old gray sandstone building that dates from the colonial era. It had a palm-fringed yard and high arched windows dappled with copious pigeon droppings. I peeked through some green shutters at the courtroom inside. It was all polished mahogany, with a gallery for spectators with rows of benches, like church pews. There were ceiling fans to circulate the humid air. Faded photographs of Queen Elizabeth and her consort decorated one wall.

  I found the men’s prison right behind the courthouse. It looked daunting and medieval, with “A.D. 1872” chiseled into a stone over the front door. The exercise yard was tiny and claustrophobic. Shards of broken glass were sunk into the high concrete walls to discourage the merest notion of escape. The sea was only 500 feet away, but Jim Fletcher never got a glimpse of it, nor could he hear the comforting roll of the surf; for his listening pleasure, he had the rattle of traffic and the braying of goats.

  So little was going on in the city I decided to have a look at Bequia, just an hour away by boat. While hymns roared skyward from a congregation on the second floor of a department store, I strolled down to the dock and boarded a ferry, stepping around bicycles and cargo crates and over bunches of green bananas. I headed for the passenger cabin, where an elderly Vincie woman in a Yankees cap sat by herself and watched a Bible scholar from Alabama on SVG-TV, the only island channel, which broadcasts a daily half-hour news program during the week and fills out its air time with shows donated by American evangelists, along with old movies, television dramas, and sitcoms.

  When I saw how intently the woman was involved with the TV set, I understood why the Nightline episode about SVG might have caused such a furor. It had focused on the Fletchers, and John McWethy, an ABC correspondent with close ties to the State Department—and another college classmate of Jim Fletcher’s—declared in no uncertain terms that he doubted the accused could get a fair trial in Kingstown. He interviewed Alan Heath and Arturo Diaz, and they reiterated their charges of bribery and corruption. McWethy located someone to allege that Jolly Joseph had sold drugs—Rudy Hanson, a deckhand from the Carefree and hardly an unbiased source. And to end the show, Ted Koppel raised the question why, if SVG was so dangerous, the U.S. government didn’t issue a travel advisory.

  The Bible program vanished in a few minutes, replaced by a psychedelic test pattern and some hot calypso music, and the ferry chugged away from the dock. There weren’t many passengers on board; Vincies look upon the Grenadines as too fancy and expensive, and they don’t feel all that comfortable on Bequia or its more exclusive neighbor, Mustique, where Princess Margaret, David Bowie, and Mick Jagger have estates. Some Vincies refer to the Grenadines as “The Land of the Rich and Famous” and regard the island chain as a place whose sole purpose is to cater to the whims of affluent visitors from elsewhere—a decadent and seductive place.

  In the Carib language, “Bequia” (pronounced BECK-way) means “island of the clouds.” It’s the largest of the Grenadines, at about seven square miles, and famous for its aura of romance. When Port Elizabeth,
the only real town, appeared on the horizon, the meaning of the name grew clear. It looked idyllic, strung along the great sweep of Admiralty Bay, on a beach of pure white sand. (St. Vincent’s beaches, by contrast, are mostly black sand.) The timbered hillsides were a vibrant green and draped with cottony clouds. Though summer is the off-season, some grand cutters and sloops were anchored in the bay. I noticed, too, the fleet of motorboats called water taxis, each ready and eager to do the yachties’ bidding.

  For a few hours, I explored the beaches and back streets of Bequia. I came upon a fine little bookstore, some good dive shops, and a pharmacy that featured a gigantic display of condoms by the front counter. You could probably get anything you wanted on Bequia, as long as you were quiet about it and didn’t disturb the peace. The doors of houses were open or unlocked, and the police didn’t carry any guns. In the many bars and rum shops of the port, people were drinking through the early afternoon—island men alone and in groups, island couples, and a few island men with white women. Music played in the background while boys splashed in the sea and fished from a small dock.

  Port Elizabeth had an overriding sense of calm about it, as well as an attitude of live and let live. I shuddered to imagine the Fletchers sailing into Admiralty Bay on their tide of noisy disruption.

  They had arrived in Port Elizabeth in August 1996. With them aboard the Carefree was a Benedict Redhead, a Grenadian deckhand they’d hired in St. Lucia. When they anchored, the island’s water-taxi operators circled them, yelling and competing for their business. These locals made their living from tourists and would do almost anything for a price—fetch ice, haul garbage, pick up liquor, or provide transportation. They were hustlers engaged in an aggressive game, and one of Bequia’s most accomplished players was Jerome “Jolly” Joseph, a 30-year-old Bequian who lived with his parents on a ridge above the bay. Jolly was well liked, reliable, honest, and good-looking, and he had a solid reputation as a ladies’ man.