by Colin Evans
Despite her tender years, Lynn had already packed a fair chunk of life experience into her résumé. She came from a comfortable background—her father was a well-to-do Chicago businessman—and after attending private school, she won a place at prestigious Smith College in Massachusetts, one of the so-called Seven Sisters of the Ivy League. It was on a home visit that she met and later married Arthur B. Tucker, who was stationed in Chicago with the army. When he was assigned briefly to Alaska, Lynn went with him. Shortly after this, Tucker received his military discharge and the couple moved to St. Louis, where he qualified as a lawyer, and Lynn resumed her academic studies. But the marriage soon foundered, and in 1956, while Lynn was still a junior at Washington University, she joined the ranks of the freshly divorced. She was just twenty years of age. Curiously, despite the divorce and reverting to her maiden name, Lynn always insisted on being called Mrs. Kauffman.
Moving in with the Spectors brought Lynn a whole raft of job benefits, not the least of which was a chance to see the world. In the course of his work, the forty-five-year-old Spector frequently traveled abroad, and the summer of 1959 saw him undertake a lengthy research program in Asia. It was a great chance for his family to do some sightseeing, and Lynn, too, went along. The trip went well and the family booked return passages to the United States on the Utrecht. But, when the ship left Singapore on August 5 and chugged out into the Main Strait, the professor was not on board. He still had plenty on his academic plate in Singapore and elsewhere. Eight days later Spector flew out of Singapore to continue his research studies, first in New Delhi, then on to Tashkent, Moscow, and Prague. In Prague he suffered a serious knee injury. Unable to get the medical attention that he required in communist Czechoslovakia, he decided to cut short the European leg of his tour, and on August 26 he flew back to St. Louis.
While Spector crisscrossed Eurasia by plane, the Utrecht steamed steadily northwest across the Indian Ocean, with its cargo of sugar, on a course for the Red Sea. Although the languid lifestyle of a passenger on a tramp steamer had many pluses, there were drawbacks. Unlike cruise liners, the ship’s itinerary was not designed to thrill tourists. The Utrecht was first and foremost a working vessel and that meant taking the most direct route at the most economical speed and avoiding unnecessary stopovers. This mandated long stretches at sea, with little else for passengers to do except read or take the sun. And the one commodity you can guarantee in the Red Sea in the middle of August is blistering sunshine. A sultry tropical ennui settled over the steamer as it nudged toward the Suez Canal. The ship carried just nine passengers. Besides the Spectors and Lynn, there was a fifteen-year-old Chinese boy named Lee You Kah, whom the Spectors hoped to adopt, and one other family, an army sergeant named Arden Brown, his wife, and two children.
One way of filling up the hours, Lynn found, was by practicing her Mandarin on the largely Chinese crew. At night, over the dinner table, it was conversation of a different stripe. Lynn’s natural vivacity always shone through. She was attractive and knew it. Her close-cropped brown hair framed an oval face that sparkled when she smiled, which was often, and although barely five feet two inches tall, and rather less than one hundred pounds, she exuded a natural effervescence that seemed to fill every room she entered. This ebullience was even reflected in her correspondence. At the northern end of the Suez Canal, when the Utrecht docked at Port Said, Egypt, she mailed a long, happy letter to Spector, saying how much she was looking forward to returning to St. Louis and working with him on his latest book.
But as the ship trudged its way westward through the Mediterranean, Lynn’s sparkle seemed to fade. Perhaps this was only to be expected. Hour after interminable hour on the long, flat sea, with little in the way of diversion, can sour the sweetest disposition. By the time the ship cleared Gibraltar, the voyage had already lasted for well over a month, and there was still that last featureless slog across the Atlantic to overcome.
Even so, no one had been prepared for such a marked deterioration in Lynn’s mood. From being the life and soul of the ship, she had slumped into a moody torpor so bad that when the Utrecht finally docked in Boston on September 18, she refused to come out of her cabin. At 12:55 P.M. Juanita Spector knocked, to see if she was coming down for lunch. Lynn opened the door an inch or two, looking utterly miserable. No lunch today, was the response. She wanted to lie down. Rotten headache, you know.
As that evening was the last night of a voyage that had begun forty-four days earlier in Singapore, Lynn, together with all the other passengers, was invited to dine with the captain in the lounge at 7:00 P.M. Five minutes beforehand, Juanita again knocked at Lynn’s cabin door. From behind the door, which this time remained firmly closed, Lynn cried out in a broken voice that she was still not hungry and would not be attending the meal. When Juanita reached the captain’s table and passed on this news, the ship’s second steward, Lubertus van Dorp, excused himself and went to investigate. It was 7:05 P.M. when he reached Lynn’s cabin. Again she refused to open the door, insisting that she would be fine if everyone just left her alone. Beneath the muffled protestations, van Dorp thought he detected a sound of sobbing. He, too, then returned to the party.
About nine o’clock, the chief purser, Andreas P. van Oosten, became worried enough to intervene personally. He knocked at Lynn’s door and got no answer. When he tried the door, he found it wedged tight but unlocked. He shouldered his way in. The cabin was empty and both portholes were wide open. Immediately he raised the alarm.
The ship was searched from bow to stern. Nothing. As a last resort, Captain Albert de Bruijn ordered an emergency lifeboat drill. The ship’s whistle blasted. This was the signal for everyone on board—passengers and crew alike—to proceed to a designated spot. Had Lynn been in someone else’s cabin, this should have flushed her out. Still, she remained resolutely missing.
Even though a high rail on the deck outside the companionway that led to Lynn’s interior cabin reduced the likelihood of anyone’s falling overboard accidentally, Captain de Bruijn feared the worst. He was especially alarmed by the two open portholes. At midnight, he ordered the radio officer to send a message to the Boston and New York coast guards, informing them of a passenger missing, feared overboard. As a precaution, he ordered that Lynn’s cabin be locked, until such time as the authorities could investigate the disappearance.
As we have already seen, the search for Lynn Kauffman was over in a matter of hours. A message radioed back to the ship allowed the Utrecht to continue its short somber voyage to New York, docking at Pier 1, Bush Terminal in Brooklyn at 1:00 P.M. on September 20. Police met the vessel when it tied up and immediately sealed Lynn’s cabin. For three hours they questioned the twelve officers, the crew, and the other passengers, without uncovering a single clue as to how Lynn ended up in the water.
Although a Boston detective, Captain Joseph B. Fallon, was putatively in charge of what was already shaping up to be a tricky investigation, he and his New York counterparts agreed to coordinate their efforts through the U.S. Coast Guard. With this arrangement in hand, Fallon and two subordinates headed to New York to conduct their own interviews of the crew.
In a strange quirk of fate, Dr. Stanley Spector was actually decorating Lynn’s room at his St. Louis home, in anticipation of her arrival, when he received the telephone call. Dropping everything, he caught a flight to Boston, and to him fell the grim task of identifying his young assistant’s body.
An autopsy had already been carried out by the Boston medical examiner, Dr. Michael A. Luongo, and his findings would turn the investigation on its head. Even though he recorded the cause of death as drowning, the scale of injuries to the head, brain, and body left him in no doubt that Lynn had been beaten severely at some time immediately prior to death, probably to the point of unconsciousness. If this were true, it drastically diminished the chances of her having fallen overboard accidentally. Luongo was in no doubt: Lynn Kauffman had met her “death by violence.”
Cross-purposes seemed to
be the order of the day, with Luongo saying one thing, and Fallon another. Although the detective initially went on the record with his belief that the death had been accidental, now he told a press conference, “We have not ruled out suicide.” In a sidebar, he added that “the injuries Mrs. Kauffman suffered could have been caused by a fall from the vessel.” Noticeably absent from Fallon’s press briefing was any mention of murder. And certainly there was nothing on board the Utrecht to indicate foul play. Lynn’s compact eight-by-ten-foot cabin was immaculate, with no sign of a struggle having taken place. A search of her foot locker revealed some Chinese, Indonesian, and English manuscripts, while a bittersweet reminder of that last missed dinner engagement came in the form of an unworn cocktail dress hanging from a clothes hook.
As Fallon struggled to keep the investigation on an even keel, a flock of federal narcotics agents began swarming all over the ship, after receiving a tip-off that Mrs. Kauffman had been murdered after stumbling on evidence of a drug-smuggling ring. Fallon’s protests were brushed aside. Only after the gung-ho agents had fruitlessly interviewed every crew member and wasted hours of valuable time did they accept what Fallon had told them all along: forget it, you’ve been sent on a wild goose chase.
The confusion only worsened as doubts began to emerge about what exact route the Utrecht had taken on the night in question. According to the ship’s log, Spectacle Island was rounded at 6:45 P.M. Another twenty minutes passed before van Dorp went to Lynn’s cabin and spoke to her through the door. So far as anyone knew he was the last person to speak to Lynn, by which time the Utrecht would have steamed several miles past Spectacle Island. However, drawing on a report by the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey on the prevailing winds and currents at the time of Lynn’s disappearance, Captain James J. Crowley, harbor master for the Boston police, said that for the body to have washed up on Spectacle Island, it must have gone into the water within six hundred yards of the shoreline. Any further away, and the body would have been washed out to sea, most probably to be lost forever.
Although ocean currents can never be entirely predictable when talking about the disposition of a single object, this finding—if accurate, which Fallon doubted—clearly raised several possibilities: (1) the ship’s log was incorrect, (2) several people had been mistaken about the time, or (3) the voice heard was not that of Lynn Kauffman.
Despite these anomalies, four days into the inquiry, Fallon was still repeating his mantra that Lynn’s death was “either an accident or suicide.” He returned to Boston with three trunks impounded from Lynn’s cabin, intending to study the papers and manuscripts contained therein to see if they provided any evidence to support the idea of suicide.
Three days later everything had changed. Fallon was back in New York, in hot pursuit of a case he now declared to be “wide open.” Close study of Lynn’s papers had made it apparent that some passengers and crew on board the Utrecht had been highly economical with the truth. In fact, this was beginning to sound very much like one of those Agatha Christie murder mysteries, where almost every character might be a suspect.
For many older Bostonians the death of Lynn Kauffman had resurrected memories of Starr Faithfull, the twenty-five-year-old New York socialite whose drowned body had washed up on Long Beach, Long Island, in June 1931. Murky hints that ex-Boston mayor Andrew Peters was somehow involved in her death only added spice to an already juicy saga of sex and intrigue. According to the scandalmongers, several years earlier the horny Peters had coughed up thousands of dollars in blackmail to bury allegations that he had seduced Starr while she was still a juvenile. It was one of those stories with plenty of gossip and precious few facts, and in the end, Starr’s death—like much of her life—remained a mystery, without any firm evidence to say if it was an accident, suicide, or murder. Many now wondered if the death of Lynn Kauffman was destined for a similarly ambiguous conclusion.
Fallon had no intention of allowing this case to slide. But he was cagey. On his return to New York, all he would tell reporters was that forty-eight hours before her death, “[Lynn] was in a very depressed state after receiving certain information.” But the reporters had also been digging, and they wanted clarification about an alleged spat between Lynn and Mrs. Spector on September 17, the night before Lynn’s disappearance. It had reportedly begun while the ship was still docked in Halifax, Nova Scotia, at a party to celebrate Mrs. Spector’s birthday. Allegedly, Juanita had confronted Lynn with news that she was no longer welcome at their St. Louis home, triggering a sharp argument that spilled over into the following day, as the Utrecht entered Boston Harbor. Had this rejection been the catalyst for Lynn’s suicide? Clearly Fallon hadn’t excluded the possibility, going on record as saying that Lynn “had received some distressing news that day, which would have affected her life profoundly.” So, had she been kicked out of the Spector household?
When phoned by reporters, Stanley Spector hotly denied any such thing, adding that even if his wife had said this, it would hardly have driven Lynn to suicide. “Lynn was an intelligent girl. She would at least have waited twelve hours to ask me what I thought about it.” Spector did offer one clue as to how this rumor might have got started. While in Singapore, the family had discussed the possibility of Lynn’s moving to another apartment when they returned to St. Louis, because young Lee was joining the household. Apparently the potentially divisive issue had surfaced again at the start of the voyage, but it was all settled amicably, Spector told the reporters, with Juanita’s agreeing that Lynn should continue to live with them.
At this point Spector handed the phone to his wife. She recalled that on the day of her (Mrs. Spector’s) birthday, Lynn had gone ashore in Halifax and purchased several presents, including a bathrobe, and that relations between the two had been nothing but harmonious.
Neither clarification poured much water on the flames of speculation, which by now were raging like an inferno. What else, reporters conjectured, might have caused the alleged rift between Lynn and her employer’s wife? Might it center on that other rumor, the one about a shipboard romance? Maybe Mrs. Spector had disapproved of Lynn’s reported affair with one particular young officer?
This story had also reached Fallon’s ear. The first inkling had come when he’d examined Lynn’s cabin and found a neatly pressed uniform belonging to Willem van Rie, the ship’s slimly built thirty-year-old radio officer who had broadcast the message of Lynn’s disappearance to the outside world. At the time Fallon had played down the significance of this discovery, after hearing that during the long voyage, as a means of alleviating the boredom, Lynn and Mrs. Spector had volunteered to mend and press clothes for all the officers, several of whom availed themselves of this generosity.
Juanita Spector continued to stir the pot of intrigue. In a revised statement she now said that at 6:05 P.M. on September 18—while the Utrecht was still moored in Boston—she had been in her stateroom and heard a voice coming from the adjoining cabin, which was Lynn’s. “Nita, Nita,” the voice had cried through the steel bulkhead that separated the two cabins. “What do you want?” Mrs. Spector had asked. On getting no reply, she had wondered if the incident had been a figment of her imagination. Interestingly, she now claimed that the voice she heard at 6:55 P.M.—which she’d earlier said belonged to Lynn—was actually so muffled as to be unidentifiable.
Fallon watched all these developments with a disdainful eye. He had already sidelined the harbor master’s assertion that Lynn’s body must have been in the water at the time when two persons claimed to have spoken to her, dismissing the report as “just a theory.” And he refused to be budged from his belief that Lynn’s death had been a suicide. He based this on careful questioning of the crew. Between the hours of 6:00 and 8:00 P.M. it appeared as if each crew member, from the captain on down, had been under surveillance by someone else, and none had the opportunity to commit the murder—if murder it was.
Behind the scenes, though, a bitter dispute had erupted over the circumstances of L
ynn Kauffman’s death. Luongo was emphatic that she had been beaten half to death by someone’s fists before being thrown into the water; Fallon could find no evidence to support that theory. He took the view that Lynn, after feeling ill all day, might have gone to the rail of the ship for some fresh air, fainted, and fallen overboard. When Fallon stuck to the suicide/accident scenario, Luongo dug in his heels and refused to sign a death certificate. Ten days after the discovery of Lynn’s body, Fallon was still insisting that this was no homicide.
On the eleventh day he charged Willem van Rie with murder.
The change of heart had come about after Fallon had suddenly flown down to New York and boarded the Utrecht. Originally the ship had been scheduled to sail for Philadelphia, but because two hurricanes, “Gracie” and “Hannah,” were chasing each other up the eastern seaboard, de Bruijn decided to ride out the weather. Gracie had already made landfall in the Carolinas on September 29, and Hannah was expected to do likewise a day or so later. De Bruijn opted for caution.
This delay allowed Fallon, under orders from his superiors, to arrest the handsome radio officer, and whisk him off to a Brooklyn precinct station where for the next fifteen hours he was grilled nonstop. Van Rie later claimed that being forced to speak in English had placed him at a disadvantage and that in his confusion he had been bullied into giving a damaging statement.
Van Rie, the son of a Roman Catholic school headmaster, had been on board the Utrecht for a little over a year. Although he had a wife back in Holland, like many a naval man before and since, he was not averse to the chance assignation, and when, a few days out of Singapore, Lynn had asked him if he liked sleeping alone, he had replied, “Not necessarily.” Van Rie wasn’t about to pass up the chance of bedding the delectable Lynn, and thereafter they visited each other regularly in their cabins. As he put it to the interviewing officers, “I don’t go looking for romance, but when it comes my way, I don’t turn it down!”