Delivered from Evil

by Ron Franscell

  The Bluebelle, a sleek, two-masted sailboat, was a former racing yacht, and its lines recalled an elegant past. A 60-foot (18.3 meter) tall mainmast and 45-foot (13.7 meter) tall mizzen mast towered over the graceful, snow-white hull. The boat’s white wooden dinghy and black rubber life raft were stowed to the port side of the cabin; an oval cork life float—essentially a white, canvas-covered life ring with rope netting—was lashed starboard.

  With a 13-foot (3.9 meter) main cabin that contained two sleeping areas, a kitchenette, and a head, plus an aft sleeping berth, the Bluebelle would be perfect for the five Duperraults and their hired skipper.

  In early November, Arthur chartered the Bluebelle for the Duperraults’ first cruise, a week’s journey to the Bahamas and back. It was to be the first test of the family’s seaworthiness, the first hint of whether life on the water for long periods would be smooth sailing—or a shipwreck. Either way, Arthur would know quickly within a few days at sea.

  JOHN GALANAKIS, A SEAMAN ABOARD THE GREEK FREIGHTER CAPTAIN THEO, SNAPPED THIS PHOTO OF 11-YEAR-OLD TERRY JO DUPERRAULT ON HER LONELY CORK RAFT JUST MOMENTS BEFORE HIS SHIPMATES PLUCKED HER FROM THE SEA.

  John Galanakis

  THE DUPERRAULT CHILDREN, FROM LEFT, BRIAN, RENE, AND TERRY JO, KEPT UP WITH THEIR SCHOOL LESSONS BY STUDYING UNDER THEIR MOTHER’S WATCHFUL EYE AT A FLORIDA CAMPGROUND WHILE THEIR FATHER SHOPPED FOR BOATS AND ARRANGED THEIR MAIDEN VOYAGE ABOARD THE BLUEBELLE.

  Courtesy of Tere Fassbender

  On November 8, 1961, the Bluebelle was ready to sail. Early that balmy Wednesday morning, the Duperraults arrived at Bahia Mar Marina in Fort Lauderdale with food, clothing, and all the provisions they would need for the week. The children played on deck while everything was made ready.

  The Bluebelle’s owner, a swimming-pool contractor named Harold Pegg, met them at the slip with a load of ice and introduced them to their captain and his “crew,” who happened to be the skipper’s wife.

  The captain was a strapping man, muscular, tanned, and movie-star handsome. His wavy hair gave him a hero’s air. He didn’t make small talk, and when he spoke, he spoke in a dignified, proper way—except for a slight stammer and a bit of a lazy eye. His blonde wife, who was very pretty, slender, and more expressive, would be his first mate and cook. She said her name was Dene, and she, too, was originally from Wisconsin, a former airline stewardess who had married the captain only three months before. This voyage was to be a kind of honeymoon for them, too.

  So the time had come for Arthur Duperrault and his family. While Brian helped throw off the lines that tethered them to land, the skipper powered up the Bluebelle’s 115-horsepower Chrysler engine, and they motored toward open water. Soon, they were under sail into an 18-knot southeasterly wind, slicing through the warm waves toward their first stop: Bimini.

  If Arthur had any lingering doubts about his children’s sea legs, they were dashed as he watched Terry Jo and Brian scramble out on the bowsprit like old shellbacks to feel the sea-spray in the face and to watch the razor-sharp bow carve through the chop. They were laughing and happy. It’s how he had always pictured it. His fantasy mariner’s life was under way.

  But in his dreams, Arthur had never imagined someone else at the helm. And this captain, a man named Julian Harvey, was plotting a nightmare course.

  CHARMING DEVIL

  By all outward appearances, Julian Harvey led a charmed life.

  Born in New York City in 1917, he was five when his parents divorced. While his mother became a chorus girl at Shubert’s Winter Garden, a Midtown Manhattan theater where some of the biggest names on Broadway played, Julian and his younger sister were raised by a wealthy aunt and uncle on Long Island.

  Young Julian—he hated his name because he thought it was unmanly—grew up extraordinarily handsome, funny, and bright. He dressed impeccably, was outgoing, and became a graceful gymnast. Athletic and popular with the girls, he led a privileged childhood, even as a teenager during the Depression.

  In high school, he fell in love with boats. He built several boats of his own and sailed them in Long Island Sound.

  He also fell in love with women, with more complicated results. A brief high school marriage had been made necessary by such romantic abandon—the first of many in Julian Harvey’s future.

  After graduation in 1937, Harvey worked for a time as a door-to-door salesman, but cold-calling often set off a nervous stammer and caused his lazy eye to roll uncontrollably, so he quit. For about a year, he modeled for New York’s prestigious John Robert Powers Agency, where his portfolio noted his “magnificent build.”

  He briefly attended the University of North Carolina in 1939, then transferred to Purdue, majoring in engineering. But like Arthur Duperrault, he saw war clouds gathering on the horizon in 1940, and rather than wait to be drafted as a grunt, Harvey enlisted in August 1941—four months before Pearl Harbor—as an air cadet in the U.S. Army Air Corps, which was the precursor of the Air Force.

  “That’s where the glory is,” he told friends.

  While training to fly, war broke out. Twenty-four-year-old Harvey—already an “old” man among the patriotic kids streaming into the service after the bombing of Pearl Harbor—was commissioned as a second lieutenant and assigned to fly B-24 bombers. At first, he flew sub-hunting missions along the eastern seaboard, in which he found no U-boats but played the role of the dashing aviator superbly: He met his second wife, a wealthy seventeen-year-old debutante, at a social function for officers and married her a few months later.

  In the fall of 1942, Harvey was sent overseas, where he flew thirty bombing missions from England and Libya. He racked up an impressive file of commendations and an equally impressive number of crashes. But even as his crews and commanders increasingly saw him as accident-prone, his heroic looks and manner always carried him through any turbulence he might have created for himself.

  How odd it was, the passersby said later,

  that this extraordinarily fit young man

  had made no effort to rescue his wife and mother

  -in-law who were trapped below him, even

  when other Samaritans tried.

  While Harvey was bombing Nazis in Europe, his wife bore him a son, Julian Jr. Shortly after being sent back stateside in 1944, Harvey told his young wife that he wanted a divorce. She kept the child and he kept his freedom.

  Even before the war had ended, Harvey became a test pilot, adopting a jaunty, unconventional uniform of “a special-cut Eisenhower jacket, pearl-pink chino trousers, and a yellow scarf”—an outfit nobody challenged because he was a war hero and he virtually oozed the gallant aura that endeared him to women and generals alike.

  After the war, Harvey became a jet fighter pilot, which only enhanced his legend. Now thirty-one, he met and married another young socialite, twenty-one-year-old Joann Boylen. In 1948, they had a son, Lance, but Harvey knew he was too smart, too handsome, and too damn charming for one woman. He continued his affairs with abandon. And Joann was enraged by them.

  ARTHUR AND JEAN DUPERRAULT OF GREEN BAY, WISCONSIN, DREAMED OF A RETIREMENT AT SEA IN THE TROPICS, SO IN OCTOBER 1961, THEY LOADED UP THEIR THREE CHILDREN FOR A “TRIAL RUN.”

  Courtesy of Tere Fassbender

  ALWAYS A TOMBOY, TERRY JO DUPPERRAULT ADORED HER ADVENTURESOME FATHER ARTHUR, AND SHARED HIS LOVE OF THE WATER.

  Courtesy of Tere Fassbender

  On a rainy night in April 1949, Harvey, Joann, and her mother were driving on a rain-slicked highway near Valparaiso, Florida. Their car skidded, crashed through a bridge guardrail, and plunged into a dark, deep bayou.

  A few minutes after the wreck, passersby found Harvey looking down into the water from the old wooden bridge, unhurt and strangely unemotional. He explained in vivid detail how he had seen the accident unfolding, and, even as the car was tumbling through the air, he opened his driver’s side door and leaped to safety. How odd it was, the passersby said later, that this extraordinarily fit young man had made no effort to rescue
his wife and mother-in-law who were trapped below him, even when other Samaritans tried.

  A rescue diver and the highway patrolman who investigated the crash were equally suspicious. Harvey’s story just didn’t sound right to them, but they had little hard evidence to prove their belief that Harvey had staged the accident.

  Joann’s father demanded a military investigation of the young flier’s story, but there was nothing to be done. Nobody looked further into the curious case, and no charges were ever filed. But a base doctor—not a psychiatrist—took a personal curiosity in Julian Harvey, and after a few informal visits, he concluded that the outwardly glib, charming, and suave Harvey was, in fact, a sociopath who was incapable of love, addicted to danger, a promiscuous liar, and a grandiose narcissist. His assessment was never a part of Harvey’s file.

  So Julian Harvey collected his wife’s life insurance payout, and within a few weeks, he was living with another woman.

  He collected women at an equally astonishing rate. In 1950, he married his fourth wife, a Texas businesswoman whom he divorced three years later. And in 1954, he married his fifth wife, a bright young woman he met in Washington, where he was again billeted as an Air Force staff officer.

  Still fascinated with sailing, Harvey bought a 68-foot (21 meter) yacht called the Torbatross. One day, he set sail with friends on the Chesapeake Bay and rammed into the submerged wreckage of the famed battleship Texas, a Spanish War hulk that had been bombed by air ace Billy Mitchell in 1921 to flaunt American air power. Harvey and his crew escaped safely, but the Torbatross went down, and Harvey collected a $14,258 claim against the U.S. government. One of his passengers, however, found it strange that Harvey had deliberately circled the dangerous Texas wreck twice before ramming it directly.

  Harvey’s Air Force career continued, apparently impervious to his behavior. He flew 114 combat missions in Korea, and over the course of nineteen heroic years, earned the Distinguished Flying Cross with cluster, an Air Medal with eight oak leaf clusters, and fifteen more decorations.

  But he’d also crashed three airplanes and built a reputation for having an unusual number of in-flight mishaps. His renowned unluckiness was credited with an inordinate number of dead-stick landings, midair flameouts, and engine trouble—some of which got him out of dangerous dogfights and flak-filled bombing runs. But never did anyone suspect that the dashing, dauntless Harvey could possibly be shirking his duty. He was just unlucky, that’s all.

  CAPTAIN JULIAN HARVEY, THE DASHING SKIPPER OF THE CHARTERED KETCH BLUEBELLE, WAS A WAR HERO AND FORMER MODEL WHOSE CHARM HAD GOTTEN HIM OUT OF MANY TIGHT SQUEEZES.

  Courtesy of Associated Press

  Major Julian Harvey retired in 1958 with a medical discharge, but because he had served briefly as a temporary lieutenant colonel, he kept the superior title.

  Around that same time, his fifth wife filed for divorce, claiming Harvey’s infidelities and secret anger were intolerable. Escaping the messy business of another split, he sailed his new 80-foot (24 meter) luxury yawl, the Valiant, to Havana—but 10 miles (16 kilometers) off the Cuban coast, the Valiant caught fire and sank. Harvey and a crewman both escaped unhurt, but again, he collected a $40,000 insurance settlement.

  “Julian told the Coast Guard a beautiful story,” one of Harvey’s sailing friends said years later. “He was a real expert at storytelling because he had had so much experience talking himself out of trouble. He told me he set the fire himself because he was in a financial jam and needed the insurance money.”

  For the next few years, Harvey drifted through South Florida’s sometimes shady sailing underworld, where gun running, drug smuggling, and insurance scams were common. When investigators went calling, Harvey’s name often came up. Increasingly, his good looks and charisma were no longer enough to float him above suspicion.

  In 1960, in Miami, he spied a shapely woman sunning herself on the beach and boldly introduced himself. She was Mary Dene Jordan Smith, an attractive blond TWA stewardess and aspiring writer. Harvey led her to think he was rich, but he was, in fact, flat broke. They married in late July 1961, but their relationship was stormy from the beginning, and their arguments were usually about money. One such fight erupted after Dene had promised to send $25 a month to her ailing father back home in Wisconsin, just to help him pay his medical bills, but Harvey refused to let her.

  That fall, Harold Pegg hired Harvey and Dene to crew his ketch, the Bluebelle, where they could live and earn $300 a month by taking on Pegg’s paying customers. The first charter would be the Duperraults, a nice little Wisconsin family who paid $515 to sail for an idyllic week in the Bahamas.

  But they had enough money that on September 8, Harvey was able to take out a $20,000 double-indemnity life insurance policy on his sixth wife, Mary Dene.

  After all, a man with his prodigious record of accidents couldn’t be too careful.

  LITTLE GIRL ALONE

  Terry Jo Duperrault was in heaven.

  For five days, the Bluebelle traversed endless, open tropical seas. Her father traded off with Harvey at the helm while the children played on deck. Rene played with her dolls and Brian fished while their mother read books and absorbed the pure sunlight.

  They could swim in the mesmerizingly clear blue water around the boat or row the dinghy ashore to explore beaches and jungles. They swam, snorkeled, and fished for lobster. Every night, they anchored off serene island beaches from Great Isaac Cay to Gorda Cay, away from people and light and the cares they left behind.

  Terry Jo, an eleven-year-old girl who’d never known a dark day in her life, couldn’t believe life could be so carefree. The turquoise water, the striped fish, the lonely beaches piled with perfect conch shells, the azure sky, and the billowing clouds—she absorbed it all and never wanted to give it back. She even wrote a letter home to her school classmates that said she never wanted to come back.

  She was becoming a young woman, too. Her breasts were just beginning to develop, and she felt awkward in her new swimsuit, especially around the handsome Harvey, who seemed to watch her more than the rest. They’d spoken very little, except when they met, and she thought he was nice enough, although his odd eye bothered her.

  Her mother, who dabbled in art, fell in love with the colors of the islands, and she imagined coming back. So did Arthur, who told a Bahamian bureaucrat that he intended to build a winter home on Great Abaco Island someday.

  On Sunday, they spent their last day at Sandy Point. Arthur met a seventeen- year-old fisherman named Jimmy Wells on the beach and invited him to dinner aboard the Bluebelle, where Dene had prepared chicken cacciatore and salad in the galley. The meal was pleasant enough, and everyone was happy.

  Afterward, Jimmy left the boat, and as the sun set, Harvey headed for open water, toward home 200 miles (322 kilometers) away. Arthur and Harvey planned to anchor for a few hours in the lee of Great Stirrup Cay, get three or four hours of sleep, then push on to Great Isaac, where they’d again anchor in the lee for a little more sleep, then reach Fort Lauderdale Tuesday night or Wednesday morning.

  The Duperraults and the Harveys sat in the Bluebelle’s cockpit past dark, reliving the adventure and enjoying the night air. Around 9 p.m., Terry Jo, always the first to bed, went to her main cabin bunk beside the stairs from the deck above, while everyone else stayed up talking. She fell asleep in her clothes, an embroidered white cotton blouse and pink corduroy pedal pushers.

  Sometime in the night, she was startled awake by her brother’s screams and loud stomping.

  “Help, Daddy, help!” Brian shrieked. Then silence.

  Terry Jo laid in her bunk, paralyzed with fear. She heard loud thumping noises outside. When she finally summoned the nerve, she opened a little door into the center cabin. To her horror, she saw the bodies of her mother and brother lying on their backs in pools of blood. There was no doubt they were dead. She quickly climbed the stairs to the empty main deck, where she saw more bloodstains.

  Then she saw Harvey. He was carryi
ng a bucket. When he saw her, he shouted at her to go back to her bunk.

  “What happened?” she cried out.

  “Get down there!” Harvey growled as he shoved her back down the companionway. His crazy eye seemed to be swirling in his skull.

  Waves were breaking over the deck now.

  The Bluebelle was sinking fast.

  Terrified, Terry Jo hid in her bunk, where she waited for maybe fifteen minutes, shaking with fear. She wanted to keep her cool. She felt as if she were outside her body, looking down on herself. Rene wasn’t in the bunk they shared, and she hadn’t seen her father. She could hear water splashing on the deck above.

  Suddenly, Harvey threw open her door and stood watching her, a silhouette against the dwindling lights. He was holding a rifle in his hand, but he didn’t speak. His evil shadow just stared at her, then left.

  Terry smelled the acrid, oily smell of diesel fumes. Then to her horror, she saw water sloshing on the floor of her cabin. It was slowly rising.

  When it had risen high enough to float her mattress, she waded out of the cabin in knee-deep water, fearing she’d bump into her mother and brother’s corpses, and back to the top deck. Harvey appeared out of the dark.

  “Are we sinking?” a frightened Terry Jo asked him.

  “Yes,” he said. “Here, hold this.”

  Harvey threw her a rope as he rushed forward, but she missed the rope and it fell into the dark water.

  Harvey looked around in a panic. “The dinghy’s gone!”

  Terry Jo saw the dinghy drifting away off the port side. Harvey leaped into the water and swam toward the dinghy until Terry Jo could not see him anymore. He wasn’t coming back.

  Waves were breaking over the deck now. The Bluebelle was sinking fast. Terry Jo remembered the cork life ring on the starboard side and unlashed it just as the boat sunk out of sight, a ghost ship that would never be found.