by Ann Rule
The public looks at the most likely suspects in cases of shipboard disappearance and violent death with misgivings, but any arrest is extremely rare. For some reason, unexplained deaths at sea don’t get the attention that stateside crimes do. At least not until the recent U.S. hostages taken by pirates in the Indian Ocean when the whole nation watched, breath held, as the captain of the container ship—the Maersk Alabama, with twenty Americans on board—was finally rescued, his captors killed instantly by American sharpshooters. Pirate attacks on Norwegian and Canadian ships followed within a week.
As for crimes in the sea off the South Pacific islands in the late seventies, U.S. authorities agreed to step in in only three instances: when arrests had been made; when the home residences of those involved were in the United States; or on direct orders to intervene from Washington, D.C.
Because Loren and Jody Edwards were American citizens whose usual residence was in Washington State, FBI special agents would ask some penetrating questions. But would they go further than that?
What could have happened?
And why had both Loren and Jody perished at sea? The first reports that seemed to have any substance, after being filtered through the morass of rumors, came from the ham-radio operator in Los Angeles who had picked up the Spellbound’s distress call and sent rescuers to the ship. He was thousands of miles away, but somehow the cry for help had come to him, rather than to anyone in the South Seas. He had taken a personal interest in the crew, and he met Kerry Edwards and Lori Huey on March 1 when they came through the LAX airport to change planes for Seattle. He saw them safely through the bustling airport to the correct departure gate, and talked with them until they boarded.
Kerry told him that she and her father had been in the cockpit of the ship at about four in the morning on February 24. “We were working there,” she said, “and suddenly the boom came loose.”
(The boom is an extremely heavy horizontal pole along the bottom of both a fore and aft rigged sail. It helps to control the angle and shape of the sails, and serves as an attachment point for more complicated control lines. During some sailing maneuvers, the boom swings rapidly from one side of a boat to the other, and sailors have to be extremely careful that their heads are out of its path. If they don’t duck, the boom’s impact is always dangerous.)
“Somehow, it got loose,” Kerry said faintly, “but I don’t remember much else.”
She was quite sure that she had been struck on her head, and that the boom had dealt her father a fatal blow when it hit him. Although her memory was fuzzy, she believed that her mother, Gary, and Lori were below decks at the time. She didn’t think they had witnessed the fatal accident.
When Jody Edwards learned that her husband had died from being hit by the out-of-control boom, she was wild with grief. Loren was her world, and he had been her beloved companion for twenty-two years. She couldn’t believe he was gone.
Since Kerry was so badly injured, and Gary had to be at the wheel, Lori Huey stayed up all that endless Friday night, trying in vain to comfort Jody. Jody couldn’t understand why someone with Loren’s skill as a sailor would ever get in the way of a swinging boom.
The next morning, Jody finally fell into a fitful sleep. The others hoped she could stay asleep for hours because she was totally exhausted and in deep shock.
But that didn’t happen. While they thought Jody was sleeping, Kerry, Lori, and Gary were working in another location on the ship. Suddenly, they heard a single shot sound belowdecks.
They rushed to Jody’s bunk, meeting there at the same time.
They were horrified to find that Jody had taken her own life. Kerry trembled as she described to the Los Angeles radio operator the shock at finding her mother shot to death.
The three survivors talked for hours about what they should do. Should they keep the elder Edwardses’ bodies on board, hoping they would be able to land soon? Or should they let the sea embrace them? The weather was warm, and they had to face the fact that their remains would begin to decompose.
Finally, they voted to bury them at sea. They wrapped Loren and Jody in heavy chains, and committed them to the ocean that both of them had loved.
Kerry told the man who had saved them from so many miles away that she and Lori had sensed that the police in Papeete suspected them of foul play. Interrogated through a French-English interpreter, she recalled at least seven detectives asking questions.
In extreme pain from her fractured skull and cuts, and in shock, Kerry had been through a tremendous ordeal. She and Lori wanted only to go home to America. Gary Edwards volunteered to stay with the Spellbound in Papeete to keep it from being vandalized.
Finally, on February 28, four days after the double tragedy, the young women were allowed to leave and fly out of Tahiti.
Two and a half hours after their short stopover at LAX, Lori and Kerry arrived in Seattle. They were met by a phalanx of relatives and friends. Port Authority police whisked them through a crowd of reporters and curious bystanders at SeaTac Airport into a secluded area.
At first glance, Kerry and Lori appeared to be ordinary tourists returning from a tropical vacation. They were tan, and they wore brightly colored skirts with Tahitian prints, and strands of island beads, but the girls’ faces were strained and hollow, there was terror in their gaze, and Kerry had a deep cut over one eye.
They insisted they had nothing to say to the reporters who were anxious to hear what had happened in Rangiroa. Soon, Lori and Kerry retained attorneys to represent them, and the lawyers advised them not to give any media interviews.
Of the five people who left San Diego on the Spellbound, only Lori Huey was uninjured. On March 3, Kerry Edwards was admitted to Overlake Hospital in Bellevue and underwent surgery to repair her fractured skull. She, too, had come close to dying of her injuries—but physicians felt she would survive.
Larry Edwards, Gary’s elder brother, flew to Tahiti to join Gary in protecting the magnificent sailing ship that now had no destination and was only a sad reminder of a trip to paradise that never happened, at least not in the way the Edwardses had planned. The ship was now worth almost $200,000, and one man couldn’t stay awake twenty-four hours a day to patrol it.
The Edwards family was being torn apart, all within a period of nine days, as if some evil presence stalked them. On March 5, Ira Edwards, the beloved patriarch of their family, died of cancer.
Jody, Loren, and now Ira were gone. Their family had been blessed, and it seemed as if a curse had fallen upon them.
Early in April, six weeks after the tragedy, a federal grand jury met in Seattle to begin a closed-door investigation into Loren and Jody’s deaths. Kerry Edwards and Lori Huey testified at the secret hearing, but they continued to decline to comment publicly on what had occurred in the sea off Rangiroa. Gary remained far away on board the ill-fated ship.
Peyton Whitely, the Seattle Times reporter who had once shared a dock with the Edwardses, was more curious than most about what had happened to his friends, casual acquaintances though they were. He knew they had been inordinately proud of the yellow-hulled sailboat that had once dwarfed most of the other boats at the Marina Park in Kirkland. Most of the details of the deadly twenty-four hours on board that boat were still hidden. That was, of course, tantalizing to an investigative reporter.
Whitely pitched the story to his editor and said he was ready to travel to Tahiti to see what he could find out. His concept of the coverage was right on target, but his timing was off. As it happened, another Times reporter was already scheduled to go to Papeete for a different kind of assignment. Her editor figured Eloise Schumacher could do double duty and see what she could find out about the crew of the Spellbound. Whitely told Schumacher everything he had found out about the Edwardses, even though he was frustrated that he wouldn’t be making the trip himself.
Eloise located the Spellbound and Gary Edwards. And he agreed to an interview. Later, she would admit to being somewhat leery of being alone on the deat
h ship with Gary, probably because no one knew what had really happened in February. She shivered involuntarily as she saw what looked like dried bloodstains on the deck.
The tall, tanned son of the deceased couple wore sunglasses, and it was impossible to read his feelings when she couldn’t see his eyes.
Gary Edwards was a handsome man who had both a mustache and a beard and apparently hadn’t cut his hair for months. He posed for a photograph to accompany her article—leaning against the mast, wearing cutoff jean shorts and without a shirt. He looked half hippie and half Indiana Jones.
Probably she couldn’t have read his feelings even if she looked deep into his eyes. In the four-hour interview aboard the sailboat, Gary spoke volubly as his mood changed with mercurial speed. One moment he laughed, and the next he was choking back tears. He said he was anxious to correct some erroneous reports about the time frame in which his father and stepmother perished.
First of all, he said, his wrist wasn’t injured at the same time the boom hit his father. “I hurt it four days earlier,” he pointed out. “On February 20. A winch handle hit it. I didn’t think it was broken, but the winch tore some ligaments, and that injury prevented me from doing a lot of things on the boat.”
Gary Edwards said that another misstatement revolved around Kerry and the comments the ham-radio operator in Los Angeles had passed on.
“Kerry wasn’t hurt when my dad was killed. It was four a.m., before my dad died, and I was in the cockpit at the wheel. I heard her moaning and screaming from her bunk—that’s three steps down from the cockpit.”
Gary said he had gone to Kerry and found her with a pillow over her head. “She kept saying her head hurt. She had been asleep and she had no idea how she got hurt. I think she might have gotten up, fallen, and hit her head on the corner of the bunk.”
Having Kerry injured had further upset the carefully planned schedule they were trying to adhere to to traverse as many miles as possible to Papeete so that Loren could catch a plane to see his dying father.
“So you were injured first—four days before your father and Kerry were?” Eloise Schumacher asked.
“Yes. First me. Then Kerry, and then my dad.”
Gary explained that his stepmother—Jody—had come up from the master cabin before dawn on February 24 so she could take care of Kerry.
“My dad took over the helm,” Gary went on. “We were just disoriented then, because it was night and dark, and we weren’t keeping track of where we were going.”
Gary Edwards drew a deep breath as he continued to recall the events of the early morning hours of February 24. “Two hours after Kerry’s mishap—whatever happened to her—I was steering in the cockpit and I thought I saw an atoll. I climbed up on the bow to see better. I called to my father—who was inside—to climb up on the stern to see if he could see the atoll.
“All of a sudden, the boat jerked. I turned around and saw my father lying in the cockpit.”
For just a moment or two, Gary took off his sunglasses, and Eloise Schumacher saw that his eyes brimmed with tears. Still, he kept on talking, remembering that bleak dawn as if he could actually see it play out before him. He explained that the sailboat was running with only two sails, and the mainsail hadn’t been unfurled at the time of the accident.
“He was either hit by the main boom, and then fell backward into the cockpit, hitting his head on the steering wheels—or he lost his balance and fell,” Gary speculated.
He recalled that his father had been suffering with dizziness almost from the beginning of their voyage. Loren Edwards was planning to see a doctor about this when he got back to the States.
With a three-year voyage planned, that would be delaying treatment for a very long time. There were many things that could cause a sense of imbalance, some dangerous and some transient. He might have had high blood pressure, Ménière’s syndrome, or a middle-ear infection. He might even have had a brain tumor. And maybe he was only suffering from sporadic seasickness.
Gary continued his recall of the morning of February 24. Loren Edwards was lying on the cockpit floor, bleeding heavily. Jody had rushed up from tending to Kerry, to kneel beside her husband. While Gary and Jody tried to help Loren, Lori Huey had taken over the helm.
“We tried to stop the bleeding,” Gary continued, although he didn’t specify where the blood was coming from. “I gave him artificial respiration while my mother did a chest massage.”
But nothing helped, and Loren died soon after.
“After that, my stepmother sat in the cockpit all day Friday with Lori, just staring and talking. She was in shock, of course,” Gary said. “She would say, ‘Why me?’ or ‘Not again …’ ”
Still, Gary told Eloise Schumacher that none of them ever thought that Jody might be suicidal. She had always been a strong woman—both physically and emotionally. Jody stayed with Lori almost all the time, leaving only to check on Kerry, get a blanket, or go to the head.
The long day and night passed, and Lori and Gary kept sending out distress signals on the radio. Kerry wasn’t able to do much because of her head injury.
And then, almost exactly twenty-four hours after her husband died, Jody Edwards was gone, too. “I heard a shot and I ran across the deck,” Gary said. “Jody had shot herself with my pistol.
“I’d been setting a sail, Lori had gone to the head, and Kerry was lying in her bunk when it happened.”
In shock, with the South Pacific sun beating down on them, they drifted, becalmed, in the heedless ocean. Except for Lori Huey, they were all injured, and Lori couldn’t stay at the helm all the time.
Gary Edwards said he didn’t know where they were. “My injured hand was so swollen that I couldn’t adjust the sextant properly.”
Gary and the two girls talked over what they should do. They didn’t want to bury Loren and Jody at sea so far from home, but they didn’t know how long it would be until they were able to reach shore—some kind of shore. They didn’t even know how far away they were from land, and the sun grew hotter. And so, just as Kerry had told the ham-radio operator at the LAX airport, Gary, Kerry, and Lori had wrapped the couple in their sleeping bags and then bound the cocoonlike “coffins” with heavy chains. They said a prayer and watched the bodies slip silently into the sea.
“All I can tell you,” Gary told Eloise Schumacher, “is they’re buried at sea someplace north of Rangiroa.”
Kerry Edwards and her half brother both appeared to be telling believable, straightforward stories—and yet they differed in many instances. Kerry believed that she and her father had been struck at the same time by the wildly swinging boom, but Gary said she was mistaken. “Kerry was in her bunk asleep when she got hurt—and I don’t know how she got hurt. She doesn’t remember, really.”
In another interview, Kerry agreed that her father had been “dizzy” during the trip, but she felt she knew why. Before they hit the open sea, he had stepped from his boat to another and injured his shin. It had become infected, and she thought that had probably caused him to have an ear infection, too.
That was highly unlikely, but it seemed apparent that Loren’s balance had been compromised. There was no longer any way to determine whether he suffered from an ear infection, soaring blood pressure, or other ailments. There could be no autopsy. His body drifted in the sea, lost forever.
And Kerry’s own skull fracture could have clouded her judgment. She had admitted that she slept through most of the vital period after she and her father were injured.
It’s almost impossible to put oneself in the place of the three shocked and frightened survivors of the Spellbound’s tragic voyage. To be adrift at sea, not knowing where you were, and faced with one calamity after another, would leave almost anyone with post-traumatic shock.
Gary Edwards was adamant that he wasn’t anxious to return to the United States. “I won’t leave Tahiti until I’m ready to,” he said flatly. “I don’t think about leaving. It could be two days or two years before I take o
ff.”
Eloise Schumacher was puzzled. She thought he would have been eager to get away from the far-from-home spot where his family had virtually disintegrated. He pointed out that there were several practical reasons why he could not leave what he called his “tropical prison.”
The search party on the charter boat, and the search plane that had been called in, still had to be paid for their time, fuel, and expertise. That would cost $3,500. Gary said he didn’t have that at the moment. Moreover, his visa had expired, and the French police were withholding his passport until he could pay the debt.
The Seattle Times reporter asked Gary about the investigation of his parents’ deaths that was currently being carried on by a federal grand jury, the FBI, and the Coast Guard.
“They know I’m here. What can they do to me?” Gary answered angrily. “If they want me, they can come down here and get me. I’m not going anywhere. I’m in no hurry to argue with anybody at home. I don’t care what’s going on there. I don’t want to go argue with a grand jury which has no idea what it is like to be in the middle of the ocean with two bodies in the hot sun all day. My going back and debating won’t solve a thing.
“They can believe whatever they damn well want.”
It was hard for Eloise Schumacher to judge the man. He was certainly bitter, and perhaps he felt guilty because he hadn’t been able to save his father or perceive his stepmother’s suicidal state. He knew that he was under suspicion; he’d been questioned enough by French police. He had suffered great personal losses, too.
Gary Edwards admitted that remaining in Papeete was an escape of sorts, a way to postpone his grief about his parents. Once he was back in the States, the awful reality of the tragedy couldn’t be denied.
And still, living on the sailboat gave him an eerie feeling, especially when night settled. “I walk through the places where my mother and father lay. I see the bloodstains on the floor and on the deck. I see the places where the FBI and the Coast Guard drove holes to get blood samples …”