Delivered from Evil

by Ron Franscell

  Terry Jo was alone in the deafening blackness of the sea. She held tight to the canvas-covered float, afraid of being sucked down by the sinking Bluebelle. She lay low on the rotting ropes that formed the bottom of her life raft and stifled her crying, afraid of being heard by Harvey, who she now believed was a killer.

  Worse, she had no food, no water, no protection against the elements or predators, no way to signal for help.

  There was only darkness.

  Until the rain came later that night and the sea lit up for a little girl alone.

  “SOMETHING IS KIND OF WRONG HERE”

  A little past noon the next morning, Seaman Dennis Gochenour was sitting watch in the poop deck of the tanker SS Gulf Lion when he spotted a life raft and dinghy 4 miles (6 kilometers) out. There was a man aboard, waving his shirt.

  When the Gulf Lion came alongside to rescue the barefooted man wearing khaki pants and a flower-printed shirt, they made a gruesome discovery hidden beneath a small sail: the corpse of a little blond girl, wearing red shorts and a greenish short-sleeved shirt. The raft also contained a survival bag full of flares, food, and water-purifying equipment.

  Once safely aboard, the man identified himself as Captain Julian Harvey, master of the ketch Bluebelle.

  The boat, he told his rescuers, had been caught in a freak squall around midnight. Everyone—the five Duperraults, his wife, and Harvey—was on deck when a rogue, 40-mile (64 kilometer)-per-hour gust snapped the main mast, which pierced the deck and ruptured a fuel line below. It also pulled down the mizzen mast in a snarl of wires and rope, wounding some of the passengers.

  A fire erupted and spread so quickly that he couldn’t quell it with extinguishers. Soon, he was cut off from the others, who had taken refuge on the stern, were tangled in ruined rigging, or had already jumped overboard.

  The Bluebelle was quickly consumed by flames and went down before Harvey could rescue anyone. He said he circled the area of the wreckage for several hours, looking for survivors, but found nobody, except the drowned body of a little girl in a life vest—he thought her name was Terry Jo—floating facedown in the sea. He claimed he tried to resuscitate her but couldn’t.

  Harvey, who bore no wounds of any kind, seemed unusually cool to the sailors who listened. They thought he might just be in shock. Neither Harvey nor the little girl smelled of smoke; their clothing wasn’t scorched; the raft and dinghy showed no signs of fire.

  His best guess was that everyone drowned as the boat sunk, even though the children all wore life jackets in Harvey’s account.

  He even cast some of the blame on the Duperraults themselves.

  “I don’t have any use for city folks,” he said. “They’re not my kind of people anyhow. They get panicky. I run regular in the winter months—I’m about the only boat that runs between Miami and Nassau. I get them out in the boat and it gets rough and I’ve even had to lash them down to the deck.”

  The old sailors on the Gulf Lion had plenty of questions for Harvey, none answered. They couldn’t imagine how a broken mast might pierce the deck and hull the way Harvey said, or why the lighthouse just 14 miles (23 kilometers) away never saw any fire on a dark night, or even why Harvey never asked about survivors.

  Seaman Gochenour, the man who first saw Harvey’s raft, had an unsettling feeling about the Bluebelle’s skipper.

  “I looked at him back in the mess hall,” Gochenour said a few days later. “You know, there are people you can look into their eyes, and you might look right down into the depth of them, and I looked at him just about like that. It looked like I could see clean down into his body and soul, you know. He shook his head and he turned and looked away. And I just thought to myself, ‘Something is kind of wrong here.’”

  Harvey answered every question,

  although his answers seemed pat and

  unemotional. He expressed no remorse

  about the accident, even though his beloved

  new bride had likely perished.

  Back in Miami, the news of the Bluebelle’s sinking was already hitting the papers. The death of six people and the survival of one in a squall was national news. So by the time Harvey returned to Miami, the Coast Guard, reporters, insurance men, and Bluebelle owner Harold Pegg were waiting with questions of their own.

  On the morning of November 16, 1961, Coast Guard Lieutenant Ernest Murdock convened the official Coast Guard hearing into the Bluebelle wreck. He and Captain Robert Barber had been assigned to investigate the tragedy, which seemed to them to be much deeper than Julian Harvey’s account. No debris, victims, or survivors had yet turned up almost four days later.

  A smiling, cordial Harvey took the stand as the first witness. As the questioning began, so did his stammer and rolling eye, but Murdock attributed it to the ordeal he had survived, nothing more.

  Harvey retold the story about the squall, the broken masts, the fire, and the sinking. He explained how he had searched two hours for survivors but found none. He claimed the radio was broken before he could radio an SOS, and he hadn’t thought to send up emergency flares.

  The more Harvey talked, the more incredulous Murdock became.

  “Was everyone awake at the time of the accident?” the lieutenant asked.

  “Everyone was awake,” Harvey said. “The little eleven-year-old girl was screaming. I tried to keep her quiet. She probably had a nightmare or something. She didn’t know what was going on. She woke up and wasn’t wildly hysterical but with a little bit of shock.”

  Harvey answered every question, although his answers seemed pat and unemotional. He had a glib answer for every question, even when the answers were inconceivable for any experienced sailor. He expressed no remorse about the accident, even though his beloved new bride had likely perished.

  But his story differed slightly from the tale he told after swearing a friend to secrecy the night before. In that version, Harvey claimed the masts fell on Arthur Duperrault and Dene, cutting them horribly.

  “I lost my nerve when I saw their blood and guts on the deck,” Harvey told his friend tearfully, “and I jumped overboard. The next thing I knew, I was pulling the little girl into a boat with me.”

  Murdock excused Harvey from the stand and called Harold Pegg, the Bluebelle’s owner. Harvey took a seat at the back of the room to listen to his boss’s testimony.

  Pegg hadn’t been on the stand long when Captain Barber burst into the room.

  “They’ve found a survivor!” he announced. “A little girl is alive.”

  Harvey looked stunned. “Oh, my God!” he blurted out. “Isn’t that wonderful?”

  A few moments later, Harvey asked to be excused so he could make arrangements to explain the tragedy to his missing wife’s family. He agreed to meet with Murdock and Barber the next morning to answer any further questions.

  Harvey didn’t go far. Using the name John Monroe of Tampa, he checked into the Sandman Motel, about 2 miles (3 kilometers) up Biscayne Boulevard from the Coast Guard offices, a little before 11 a.m. He went straight to his room and never came out.

  In the room, Harvey unpacked photographs of his son, Lance, and of his wife, Dene. He propped them on top of the toilet tank and sat down naked on the cold tile with his back against the bathroom door.

  Around noon the next day, a maid stumbled into a bloody mess. Harvey had slashed his left thigh and wrists with a double-edged razor blade, smeared his warm blood on the bathroom walls in grotesque scrawls, then slashed his own carotid artery. He was forty-four.

  His two-page suicide note asked a friend to care for his son, Lance, then a fourteen-year-old student at Miami Military Academy.

  “I’m going out now,” Harvey wrote. “I’m a nervous wreck and just can’t continue.”

  The Bluebelle was never mentioned. Investigators found a pile of unpaid bills and dunning letters among Harvey’s papers, along with the insurance policy on Mary Dene’s life, but no more solid answers about the Bluebelle. Whatever secrets Harvey kept were as lost
as the Bluebelle itself.

  Except that now there was another survivor and one more story to be told.

  SOLE SURVIVOR

  For three cold nights and blistering days, Terry Jo floated. She didn’t sleep at all the night of the killing, afraid she’d bump into Captain Harvey somewhere in the dark. She forced herself to stay awake until dawn, keeping quiet and small.

  She was adrift in the Northwest Providence Channel, a 1-mile (1.6 kilometer) deep underwater canyon threaded among the islands and dumping into the Gulf Stream between the Bahamas and Florida. If she wasn’t found, her raft would be carried north and east, farther out to sea, deeper into the North Atlantic. The likelihood of her delicate raft surviving Atlantic seas was as infinitesimal as a little girl on a great ocean.

  Her first morning adrift was sunny. Parrot fish nibbled at her buttocks and legs through the float’s rope mesh, which was slowly disintegrating after years of being exposed to sun and saltwater. So she tried to balance as much as she could on the edges of the canvas-covered ring itself to keep from breaking through the ropes entirely.

  When she saw distant islands on the horizon, she paddled with her little hands toward them. That’s where my dad is, she thought. She imagined finding him and drinking wine, which she had never tasted, but because her parents drank it, it must be a comforting thing. But wind and currents made it difficult, and she drifted farther, not closer.

  Sleep was difficult and erratic. Terry Jo could

  see ships’ distant lights at night, but she had

  neither enough strength nor hope to try to

  Paddle toward them in the dark.

  That night she slept for the first time. She dreamed of an airfield with blue lights, and as she ran toward it, she realized she had abandoned her life ring and was flailing about in the dark water. She feared sleeping after that and prayed for the morning to hurry.

  When daylight finally came, the sky was overcast, and the water was rough. Ships and planes passed close, but they never saw her. She saw what she thought were sharks nearby, and she was barely able to cling to her fragile little raft as wave after wave crashed against her.

  Sleep was difficult and erratic. She could see ships’ distant lights at night, but she had neither enough strength nor hope to try to Paddle toward them in the dark. And when she fell asleep, she dreamed of crashing into rocks or falling off her float into shark-infested water.

  By the third morning, her salty skin was badly burned by the sun, which blinded her as it reflected off the surface of the sea. Her legs were cramping, and she felt as if every part of her was on fire. She hadn’t eaten or drunk any fluid since before the Bluebelle disappeared, and her tongue and throat were drying out, her saliva thickening. Great clusters of sargassum floated all around her, but the idea of putting the salty weeds and their berries in her mouth sickened her.

  The sea grew more dangerous, too. Winds picked up, and whitecaps crashed over the float. It was everything she could do to balance herself on it and not be thrown into the deep. She felt feverish and weak, but she clung to the ring with everything she had left.

  Terry Jo had been adrift for eighty hours when the Coast Guard cut its search-and-rescue operations back. The chance of finding survivors was too slim to justify the costs of the planes and ships they had been sending out since Julian Harvey was found.

  They were wrong.

  A sailor aboard a Greek freighter, the Captain Theo, bound for Houston saw a white raft bobbing in the channel, a mile (1.6 kilometers) out. It had been all but invisible among the whitecaps. And the girl sitting in it, her legs dangling over the side, wore a white blouse. If he hadn’t been looking directly at the raft, he might have missed it in the endless camouflage of white waves.

  The crew of the Captain Theo plucked the dazed little girl from the sea. They carried her up a rope ladder to the deck and asked who she was and what had happened. She could muster only a hand sign—a thumb’s down—before she fell unconscious.

  When Terry Jo regained her wits thirty minutes later, she answered only a few crucial questions before lapsing into a deep sleep. The Captain Theo quickly telegraphed the Coast Guard in Miami:

  “Picked up blonde girl, brown eyes, from small white raft, suffering exposure and shock. Name Terry Jo Duperrault. Was on Bluebelle.”

  A Coast Guard helicopter was immediately dispatched to the Captain Theo to bring Terry Jo to Miami’s Mercy Hospital, where a throng of reporters waited for their first glimpse of the “sea waif.”

  She was comatose. Her skin was badly burned and her delicate lips had swollen and split open, but those were the least of her problems. She had survived about as long as any human could go without water, and the dehydration had damaged her kidneys. Her heart was beating erratically and could barely push her thickened blood through her little body.

  Her doctor said one more day adrift would certainly have killed her.

  If she had been exposed to the broiling sun for the entire time—nearly four days—she would likely have died, her doctors said. Periods of overcast skies and rain may have delayed her death long enough for the Captain Theo to find her.

  Intravenous lines were replenishing Terry Jo’s lost fluids and electrolytes, but her body temperature was too high and her heartbeat too weak. Her doctor feared she might suffer a heart attack, massive organ failure, or pneumonia. Only time would tell.

  In the meantime, police guards were posted outside her hospital room. Too many unanswered questions swirled around Julian Harvey’s accounts to leave the only other Bluebelle witness unprotected.

  Terry Jo emerged from her coma on the second day in the hospital but remained in critical condition. She couldn’t speak, but she ate a little, and her vital signs were improving.

  The world was waiting to hear from Terry Jo, but her doctor wouldn’t let her speak to anyone—nor anyone speak to her. Her physical state was too precarious to endure the news that her entire family was likely murdered and that Captain Harvey had survived the sinking, and that he had just been found dead a few hours before in a gory suicide.

  But she knew. Even before anyone told her the gruesome details, Terry Jo sensed she was alone in the world. She began to fret about how she would get home to Wisconsin on her own, how she would live without a family or money, and how she could possibly pay for her hospital care.

  When someone finally told her that Rene’s body had been found, Terry Jo did the macabre math. She’d seen her mother and brother dead on the Bluebelle, so only her father was unaccounted for. She began to imagine all the scenarios in which her father might have survived, swam to a nearby island, and was waiting to be rescued, too. It obsessed her because now more than ever, she needed her father.

  By her third day in the hospital, letters and gifts began trickling in from a world that had been touched by the rescue of “brave little Terry Jo.” Headlines began to call her the “sea waif” and “sea orphan.” The crew of the Captain Theo sent a life-sized doll—much like one she had lost when the Bluebelle sank. Others sent money and offers to adopt her. One day, a rosary from Pope John arrived.

  DARK DETAILS

  On the same day Harvey’s corpse was found, Coast Guard investigators Murdock and Barber were allowed to interview Terry Jo.

  Speaking with a calm detachment into a tape recorder, she recounted everything she had seen and heard that night—the stomping, her brother’s cries, her mother’s bloodied body, the permeating smell of diesel, Captain Harvey with the rifle, the rising water, Harvey jumping overboard, her scramble for the cork float—the dark silence.

  “Terry Jo, did you see a broken mast or fallen sails?” Captain Barber asked.

  “The main sail was all wrinkled and going all over, and the mast was leaning,” she said. “I wasn’t sure if the mizzen was up, but I think it was.”

  “You mean that the masts were up but the sails were all slack, is that correct?”

  “The masts were up, yes.”

  “You didn’t see an
y damage or broken part on the mast, did you?”

  “No.”

  In a word, a little girl had unwittingly shot down Harvey’s wild story about a snapped mast and a tangle of wires. And she wasn’t finished.

  “You say you saw nobody on deck except the captain, but you saw the blood,” Barber said. “Could you have seen others if they had been there?”

  “I suppose I could, because there was a lot of light,” Terry said. “It was coming from lights on top of the sail.”

  A light at the top of the main mast was always burning at night, and a pair of lower floodlights would have illuminated the deck. Barber and Murdock knew immediately that if the main mast had really collapsed, there would have been no lights.

  “Did you see any fire at any time?” Barber continued.

  “No, but I smelled oil.”

  THE SEA HAS ALWAYS INSPIRED A SWEET MELANCHOLY FOR TERE DUPERRAULT FASSBENDER, WHO BARELY SURVIVED FOUR DAYS ADRIFT AFTER HER FAMILY WAS MASSACRED ON A CHARTERED YACHT NEAR THE BAHAMAS IN 1961.

  Ron Franscell

  “But you did not see any fire at any time, is that correct?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And you did not smell any smoke? You recognize the smell of smoke and fire, don’t you? You did not smell anything like a fire?”

  “No.”

  Terry Jo had no idea that the story she was telling differed significantly from Harvey’s. The interviews continued over the next several days, and Barber and Murdock became more convinced that they were dealing not with a tragic accident at sea, but with a mass murder.

  Terry Jo remained in the hospital for two weeks. During that time, she learned that her family was lost, that Harvey had survived and told a vastly different tale, and that Rene had been buried in Green Bay, alone.

  The newspapers reported that Harvey, according to his last wishes, was buried at sea in a red velvet shroud because he wanted to be with his dead wife. Dark details of his enigmatic life began to surface, including the numerous boat disasters and the suspicious 1949 car accident that killed his third wife and mother-in-law.