“Harvey panicked,” the detective continued. “He struck Duperrault. The doctor ran and Harvey chased him and killed him. The other boat pulled away and Harvey was left with his problem. He killed the others to protect himself.”
Although it seems improbable that Harvey would risk such a rendezvous at night with passengers on board (and, remember, Terry Jo earlier said that her father had wanted to stay on deck all night, and that Jean and René might stay there, too), subsequent and seemingly unrelated events have given some added credibility to this smuggling theory. In 1998 it was reported in Florida newspapers that the two sons of Bluebelle owner Harold Pegg had been involved in a major drug-smuggling operation for many years, dating back at least into the 1970s, though there was no evidence of activity before then. All told, the brothers had amassed a fortune of some $46 million that they secreted in various offshore accounts.
The problem with the botched drug-smuggling theory is that no evidence at all exists to corroborate it, and it is well known that serious drug smuggling was not yet underway in 1961. Nevertheless, investigators did clearly establish that the Pegg brothers had been using their charter-boat business as a cover for their smuggling, and that they did make their drops in and around the Bahama islands. So an earlier smuggling operation gone bad cannot be totally ruled out.
Perhaps there will always be a Bluebelle mystery. Certainly there will be much mystery surrounding who Harvey really was, and just what happened that fateful night.
The one thing that will never be a mystery is what the young girl on the raft was made of.
Terry Jo, as captured by a crewman aboard the Greek freighter Captain Theo, just before she was rescued.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Mask of the Hero
It is September 20, 1944. The war-weary B-24 Liberator comes in low and slow over the James River near Newport News, a flotilla of military boats filled with brass drawn up to observe. World War II is still raging, and brave men are still dying. Because some of those brave men are dying in B-24 ditchings, this is a test of the survivability of the high-wing four-engine Liberator in a water landing. The B-24 has a sorry history of breaking up and sinking when ditched, leaving too little time for crews to escape. This seems to be because the bomb bay doors collapse on impact, allowing tons of water pressure to explode into the plane, hammer the bulkhead at the back of the bomb bay, and violently pull the plane apart from front to back. This test plane has had its bomb bay doors and bulkheads reinforced, and the Army Air Corps needs to find out whether this will make it more survivable. The pilot and copilot have volunteered for this dangerous test.
The great lumbering machine slows to a near-stall speed of ninety-seven miles per hour and noses up slightly as its pilot skillfully flares out only feet above the water, eases the aircraft down, and planes the bottom of the aft section smoothly onto the surface. Within a second the drag on the rear of the bomber makes it nose up and slow down. In the next instant the wings lose all lift and the plane drops. The left wing catches water first, a split second before the B-24 noses in violently to a nearly 3G stop, pushing up a great wave. As the massive splash subsides and the plane wallows in the water, rescue boats rush up. Even after a skillful touchdown on smooth water and despite reinforcements to the fuselage, it is evident the bomber’s back is broken and that this was truly a deadly dangerous exercise. The plane is literally bent in two, a great “V” in the water, both the nose and the aft section pointing toward the sky. So much for reinforcement.
But what of the crew? After a minute or two, the first of the brave volunteers, gray-haired copilot Col. Carl Greene, a twenty-eight-year veteran test pilot who first flew World War I biplanes, climbs out of the top hatch unharmed. After another long minute another survivor climbs out. It is the pilot, twenty-seven-year-old war hero Maj. Julian Harvey of the Army Air Corps, veteran of more than thirty bombing missions in B-24s and winner of the Distinguished Flying Cross for safely crash landing a shot-up B-24 after one of those missions. Once he is fully upright atop the plane, the strikingly handsome young pilot reaches into his shirt pocket. He pulls out a comb and runs it through his unruly, blond locks, as if to say that the worst thing this harrowing scrape with death did was muss up his hair. In one simple gesture he has told his war-besieged country, “You can count on me. I have what it takes. I will keep you safe.” If he is also a little vain and conscious of his image for the cameras, it is easily forgivable in a hero so handsome and so brave and so real.
Such was the image that most people had of Julian Harvey, especially when they first met him: the American hero pilot, exceptionally skilled, extraordinarily brave, the embodiment of the cool and confident nonchalance in the face of death that is so much a part of America’s image of its heroes. Here was the real deal, the guy John Wayne only pretended to be in the movies, except better looking. Many women and not just a few men looked at him and marveled at how a guy could be so exceptional: war hero, handsome, cool in a crisis, capable, dependable, confident.
But it is not hard to conclude that the very same Julian Harvey could have killed the people on the Bluebelle. And it is not hard to establish what his motive might have been: to kill his wife and claim her life insurance, apparently killing the others when his plan for cleanly and neatly disposing of her went awry, thus eliminating any witnesses.
The deeper “why” question goes to the kind of person Harvey really was. Clearly he wasn’t quite what many people thought of him. There was something far darker behind the knight-in-shining-armor image.
But how did a glamorous and decorated war hero, a man who had risen from second lieutenant to lieutenant colonel in three short years in the Army Air Corps, a man of such skill and apparent courage and promise once tapped by top brass as a future leader, come to this end? Where had the darkness come from? One can begin to answer that question with the knowledge that, despite the attractive persona and magnificent feats of Julian Harvey, not everyone who had known him over the previous twenty years was entirely surprised at what apparently happened on the Bluebelle.
So who was Julian Harvey? He did not have an easy life in the beginning. He was born in 1917 in New York. His parents – his mother a chorus girl – divorced when he was one year old.
He lived alone with his mother until she married a well-known vaudeville producer when he was six. His stepfather was very generous, giving him a sailboat when he was about ten years old, and he loved sailing from that moment. He sailed often as a child and teenager, and even built his own sailboat. But when the double whammy of Hollywood and the Depression killed vaudeville, his mother and stepfather were abruptly impoverished and could no longer afford to raise him. They sent him to live with a well-off aunt and uncle in upscale Scarsdale, just outside of New York City, when he was about thirteen. The uncle by marriage was a prominent banker with a leading New York bank.
His aunt and uncle apparently doted on him, especially his aunt. He lacked for nothing during the Depression. But Julian still faced two large challenges when he was young: he was physically a weakling; and he had an embarrassing stammering problem whenever he was anxious or agitated, and a lazy eye that would become more pronounced for the same reasons.
On the other hand, he was uncommonly good looking and his aunt’s pride and joy. In her eyes the boy could do no wrong. Embarrassed by his scrawny physique, a young teen Julian showed the kind of determination and dedication that would stand him well at times later in his life. He began to work with weights to build himself up. He soon became a superb physical specimen. This seems to have boosted his self confidence to the point where he felt more comfortable in social situations and was able to better control his stammering.
Although it seemed like Julian Harvey was growing into the kind of person who would not shy away from challenge and adversity, in his later teen years he learned that his uncommon good looks, plus his physique, meant that he didn’t need to face one kind of teenage stress: asking girls out. They came after him. Years la
ter, even after the Bluebelle story was everywhere, he was still remembered by former female classmates – indeed, by a legion of other women as well – as dreamy, and gorgeous, and sweet. They could not imagine that the Julian Harvey they remembered could be a killer. Former male classmates remembered him as a skilled and graceful athlete, especially in boxing and gymnastics, and a bit of a show-off.
One result of Harvey’s charms was a very early marriage while he was still in high school. His aunt and uncle managed to get it annulled within a year.
Harvey graduated from Great Neck High School in Long Island, New York, in 1937. The first job he found was in door-to-door sales. Unfortunately, this proved to be outside of his comfort zone. According to his younger sister, when a woman answered the first door he knocked on, he became so nervous that he stammered fiercely. Humiliated, he fled.
Clearly, interaction with customers could unnerve him. But in other potentially high-stress situations he showed remarkable cool, such as the time he calmly walked into the living room and suggested quietly that his grandmother might want to go for a walk. Then he returned and just as calmly got his mother. His motive, it turned out, was that the house was on fire and Julian did not want the women to panic.
Not liking the stress of sales, Harvey – in a move that might have helped influence how he lived the rest of his life – decided he would capitalize on his looks and physique. It wasn’t long before he was hired as a male model for the famous Powers agency. He worked there for a year or so.
In 1939 he entered the University of North Carolina to pursue engineering. He had shown an aptitude for this field in his study of boats and in building his own sailboat. The next year he transferred to Purdue. He had completed two years of college by the summer of 1941. By this time, everyone was saying it was only a matter of time before the United States would be in the war in Europe, and possibly taking on the expansionist Japanese in the Pacific as well. Rather than waiting to be drafted to serve as a lowly slogging foot soldier, Julian decided in August 1941, as a twenty-four year old, to join the Army Air Corps. (There was, as yet, no U.S. Air Force.) “That’s where the glory is,” he told some friends, in an early suggestion of how important glamour and image would be to him.
Harvey applied to Air Corps cadet training, providing glowing letters of recommendation from Purdue faculty. Those letters were so effusive in their praise of him that some wondered whether they might have been fabricated by Harvey himself, but there was no hard evidence of this and the Army had far too few resources to follow up on such questions. And they needed qualified personnel. With his engineering training and sailing background, Julian was indeed qualified, and he did exceedingly well as an air cadet, showing exceptional drive and talent for flying. He graduated as a skilled pilot and was commissioned as a second lieutenant, with a promising military future ahead of him. In the meantime, while he was in training, war had broken out, putting an even greater premium on promising young officers.
Even though Harvey had first trained in 1930s-era biplanes, his first assignment was to fly four-engine B-24 bombers. He was a quick study in learning to fly the great beasts and soon was flying anti-sub patrols along the southern East Coast from a base in Florida, looking for Nazi subs that were torpedoing coastal shipping on a daily basis. Many Americans have forgotten that in the earliest days of the war, the front lines were just off our beaches. There is no record of Harvey having engaged any subs, but there is a record that on one of his breaks from flying he attended an upscale social event where young officers mingled with young socialites. There the handsome aviator, resplendent in his dress uniform, met a beautiful seventeen-year-old debutante named Ethel Fohl who was from a wealthy south Florida family. She was smitten and fell for him immediately, she said. A few months later they were married.
Years later, after the Bluebelle case had flooded the papers, Ethel told reporters at the time she had never met anyone who came so close to matching her image of the ideal man, and she had been captivated by the pilot from central casting with such an abundance of boyish charm. She was also taken by his worldliness and his dynamic personality, but looking back she realized that she saw him through very young eyes. She did note that even back then, she could tell that he was “terribly egotistical” and “so proud of his beautiful body.” But even though they had divorced years earlier and she had seen his cold side, she still could not believe that Julian could be a killer.
In the fall of 1942, Harvey was ordered overseas. He spent seven months in England flying B-24s across the English Channel on bombing missions over Europe. On one mission his plane was badly shot up, but rather than having his crew bail out, he managed to fly it back to England and land it safely. His entire crew survived. His superiors regularly wrote excellent reports on his actions, but some of his colleagues began to see him as accident prone because he had at least two other crash landings.
In 1943 he was transferred to Libya to fly missions across the Mediterranean against Nazi-controlled southern Europe. He was one of the pilots slated to fly in the famous and, ultimately, very costly raid on the Ploesti oil fields in Romania. However, official records of that raid show that Harvey’s B-24 Hellsadroppin aborted and returned to Libya because of “engine trouble.”
It was not the first time that Harvey had aborted a mission, leading to scuttlebutt about him among fellow pilots, but drawing no official notice from superiors. Perhaps they thought he was from central casting, too. Harvey completed some thirty missions altogether, and by January 1944 he was back in the States, at Eglin Field in Florida. Because he had shown great skill as a pilot, especially in that one remarkable crash-landing of a severely wounded aircraft, he was chosen to work as a test pilot helping to improve the aircraft in which young American men were flying, and dying.
While Harvey had been overseas, his wife, Ethel, had given birth to a baby boy she named Julian Jr. Shortly after the baby was born, she had taken him to live for a time with Julian’s aunt. She ended up staying there only two weeks because the woman made it clear that Ethel was not nearly good enough for her beloved and perfect nephew. Devastated and angered by this experience, she moved out and into a small apartment to raise her son alone.
Despite their having a child together, Julian abruptly in formed his wife shortly after his return that he no longer loved her and wanted a divorce. She could keep the baby. Their divorce was final in early 1945.
So, Harvey became a bachelor again as he took up his assignment as a test pilot. It was on this assignment that he ditched the B-24 bomber for an audience. For this feat he received the Air Medal, adding still more luster to the image of Julian Harvey, the war hero. It struck some as odd, however, that immediately after the ditching, Harvey asked to be transferred from bombers to fighters.
Some other pilots wondered whether the ditching, in the end, had been too close for comfort and that Julian Harvey, who already had avoided some of the most harrowing missions he should have flown, had finally begun to lose his nerve completely. The ditching wasn’t just a glamorous feat; he could have died. These same pilots were among those who viewed Harvey as egotistical and more concerned with the glory and glamour than with the job at hand. One of his fellow pilots at the time, who was also assigned to the test ditchings of B-24s, said of Harvey,
“Because of his wartime record in those early days, his good looks and his many decorations, he had a very egotistical air. He wore the special-cut Eisenhower jacket, pearl-pink chino trousers, and a yellow scarf. … Harvey was considered a hero and no one challenged him in his wearing of his unconventional uniform.”
Source:
National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics
(NACA - predecessor to NASA) Oral History Project
The note not only tells of Harvey’s self-centeredness, but also alludes to the power his image and reputation had over others. That same pilot went on to note that some even doubted Harvey’s story about his safe crash landing, although that does seem to be a matter o
f record – and no one ever questioned that Harvey was an extremely skilled pilot.
After the test-pilot assignment, Harvey was transferred a few times to other bases on a number of assignments, including a very brief stint on Okinawa immediately after the end of the war. He also was promoted to temporary lieutenant colonel and assigned to an administrative job in the Pentagon. He was soon restless “flying a desk” and asked for Air Force support to finish his college degree. So he went back to Purdue as an active Air Force officer for two more years, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in Aeronautical Engineering in 1948.
By this time, Julian was thirty-one and had been single for three years. Ever active in the dating scene, he met yet another socialite, twenty-one year old Joan Boylen. After another very brief courtship, they married. Their son, Lance, was born in late 1948. Meanwhile, Harvey was transferred yet again, this time back to Eglin Air Force Base on the Florida panhandle. Married or not, it was well known around Eglin that Harvey continued to have affairs with many women. Joan told friends at the time that she knew about them but she still loved Julian, even though he showed a frightening flash of temper the one time she brought up his philandering.
Then, on April 21, 1949, Harvey was driving back to base from town on a rainy night with his wife and mother-in-law after seeing a movie. Harvey told officers afterward that despite driving very carefully, at about forty miles per hour, when he drove onto a narrow, old wooden bridge over a deep bayou, for some odd reason the car swerved sharply to the right. He said he cut hard back to the left and the car struck the left bridge railing, rolling and turning upside down as it went up and over the railing. The car dropped, twisting into twenty feet of cold, murky water, and sank immediately.
While the car was still rolling over in the air, Harvey said later, he was able to open the door and jump out, landing in the water. He swam to safety, but his wife and mother-in-law never surfaced, trapped in the sinking car.
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