by Ann Rule
In essence, Gary felt he was trapped in paradise, bound by his burden to protect the Spellbound, which had meant so much to his parents. The ketch had been a shining dream, but now it was an albatross.
“Do you feel ostracized?” Eloise Schumacher asked. “The Tahiti Bulletin seems to have a story about your family’s loss in their paper almost every day.”
He shook his head. “No, I don’t feel unwelcome or ostracized. People here are kind.”
Gary wasn’t alone. An old friend of his from Canada had come over to live aboard with him, and he had a French girlfriend he’d met in Tahiti.
“I’m not worried about running out of money. It only costs about $3.60 a day to moor my ship at the quay, along the main road.”
Ironically, Gary Edwards had found work as an extra in a TV movie being filmed in Tahiti: Overboard. It was based on a book about a sailboat that had met with a disaster at sea.
Like his father, Gary Edwards was a skilled carpenter, and he worked other jobs painting and repairing boats. When he wasn’t working, he spent his time swimming, visiting the colorful native markets, and working on the Spellbound. Except for his injured wrist, which he said was healing rapidly, he was in excellent physical shape.
Even so, he dreaded the thought of sailing his parents’ sailboat again. Papeete and Rangiroa were so far from American territory. Sailing to Hawaii would require a month or more.
“I can’t face the ocean again so soon. The trip from here to there [Hawaii] would kill me.”
Gary wanted to sell the Spellbound. He couldn’t visualize himself ever sailing her again. “It will always be my parents’ boat, and it will always have their bloodstains. The only way to get rid of them is to replace the boat.”
He sounded like Lady MacBeth saying “Out, damned spot!” as she tried to scrub the imagined blood from her hands. If he had to, he could live for a year in Tahiti for a thousand dollars, but he would have to live on what had become a ghost boat, surrounded by gruesome reminders of two incomprehensible deaths. And money to pay off the search parties and to sail the ship away wasn’t that easy to come by. In the initial frantic days after they landed in Rangiroa, he had requested funds from home, and he’d received $2,500 from his parents’ estate.
The elder Edwardses’ bank in Kirkland had called Papeete and asked that that money be returned because it was part of their estate. No one had been able to find a will. Gary said Loren had told him once that he’d written a will, and built a secret compartment in the fifty-four-foot sailboat for important papers.
“I would almost have to destroy the boat to find that compartment,” Gary sighed. “I have looked in all the obvious places and I haven’t found it.”
A long time later, that will and insurance papers were located back in Seattle, but it would be years before the probate case could be closed.
One thing investigators discovered was that there had been several guns on board the Spellbound. None of them had been declared to customs for fear that they would be seized. Jody Edwards had known where they were. Beyond the Walther automatic handgun that Gary brought in his seabag, there were two rifles and a shotgun.
“My father made the decision not to declare our guns when we went through customs in the Marquesas Islands,” Gary recalled.
When he was asked if he knew how long the survivors had drifted at sea after Jody Edwards died on February 25, he felt it had been only about fourteen hours before the rescuing chartered boat found them, and that they made port in Rangiroa by 10:30 that Saturday night. His father had been dead for forty hours then, and his mother only since the wee hours of Saturday morning.
“The girls were very messed up mentally,” Gary recalled. They had been flown to Papeete the next day—Sunday—where they were questioned by French detec-tives. Gary had arrived on Monday. When the police saw how seriously Kerry was injured, she was hospitalized.
“Lori and I were kept separated, and questioned for hours.”
Gary adamantly denied that the rumors and innuendos that were floating around Tahiti and beginning to appear in the local paper bothered him. The reason was simple: the gossip wasn’t true.
“Let everyone talk,” he said. “I know what I did was right, and I’m not ashamed of it. I don’t care what happens now. When I decide to come back to Seattle, I will. But I may sail around the world first. You never know.”
Back home in Washington State, Lori Huey and Kerry Edwards struggled to pick up the ragged threads of their lives. They knew that relatives and friends were baffled over discrepancies in their recall and Gary’s. But shock, severe injury, grief, panic, and being viewed as murder suspects in a foreign country would certainly unhinge anyone. One moment, they had almost reached their exotic destination, and the next blood ran on the decks of the Spellbound.
Kerry told reporters that the FBI special agents had warned her against making statements on the tragedy. She would say only that she was feeling a great deal better, and was well enough to start working part-time in a pizza parlor.
Lori sought a peaceful escape from her memories of horror by taking a hiking and camping trip high in the Cascade Mountains. It was a totally different ambiance there from the tropical islands of the South Pacific. The wind in the Cascades smelled of fir, spruce, and pine, and the soft patter of raindrops on her tent helped to erase her memory of the relentless heat off Rangiroa.
Lori’s attorney had told her she didn’t have to talk to reporters, and even though she had no guilty knowledge of what happened on the Spellbound, he said it would be better to avoid talking to the media.
She hoped to find a job when she climbed on down the mountain pass, and somehow get on with her life.
Lori’s friends, however, told the Seattle Times that Lori had described the events of February 24 and 25 just as Gary had. Loren had died almost instantly when struck by the boom, and Jody had committed suicide in her overwhelming sorrow. There had been nothing any of them could do.
For those who found truth in the paranormal, it was easy to believe that the Spellbound was under an evil spell, covered with a suffocating blanket of bad luck.
There were so many questions left unanswered. Why would Jody Edwards have chosen to commit suicide, leaving her children adrift in the open sea? Most mothers will overlook even the most intense pain and grief to be sure their children get to safe harbor. Kerry needed her on that dread dawn of February 25; her twenty-year-old daughter was critically injured, and no one on board seemed to know what had happened to her. Perhaps Jody believed they were all lost anyway, perishing from disorganization and panic without Loren there to calm them with his strength and common sense.
With Jody dead, there would be only Gary (with one useless hand) and petite Lori to bring their boat safely into harbor, where Kerry could get medical care. Wouldn’t Jody have chosen to stay with them—at least until they were all safe?
Again, it’s almost impossible to judge the state of mind of someone suddenly plunged into disaster.
There was also the puzzle of Kerry’s memory. She was sure she’d been with her father when he was struck in the head, and that she had been struck, too. But Gary contradicted her and insisted she had suffered her skull fracture when she was sleeping below deck in her bunk. When the sailboat lurched with sudden wave action, she could have been going to the head, or getting a drink of water, and fallen, striking her brow on something hard and sharp. But Gary insisted she was in her bed when he first heard her whimpering in pain. How had she managed to crawl back into her bunk?
As always, when witnesses refuse to talk publicly, there was suspicion. Grand jury hearings are secret, held behind closed doors, but most laymen weren’t aware of that. They wondered if the Edwardses had family skeletons or volatile relationships that had exploded into violence. That was the romantic notion of true gothic tradition and soap operas, but if there was any substance behind the whispered questions, the grand jury would surely have returned indictments against someone.
A
nd they did not.
A few people who were not on the Spellbound that night wondered aloud if it was possible for pirates to have killed Loren and injured Kerry, strangers bent on robbery who had glided silently up to the sailboat in the dark and crept aboard, unseen.
If so, why hadn’t they attacked the other three people on board, too? That explanation was a long shot—but possible.
One couple who lived on Papeete had known Loren and Jody and their family well, after they went on several cruises with a platoon of sailboats in American waters. They didn’t know what to think about the Edwardses’ deaths. They had heard the rumors that said Gary had killed them, but they tried to be fair with him and often invited him over to supper. He was always polite and grateful for a home-cooked meal.
On one of those nights, their daughter, Gwen,* who was in her early twenties, was visiting them.
“I didn’t approve of their associating with him, because I thought he might be dangerous,” Gwen recalled. “I think he sensed that.”
According to Gwen, when her parents invited Gary over for supper, he had glared at her throughout the meal. After he finally left, she made her parents promise never to ask him again.
“He scared me,” she said. “I felt as though he hated me—or maybe he just hated women in general.”
Several months later, Gwen was in Hawaii when Gary and two men he’d hired to help him bring the Spellbound there showed up. The two crewmen were pleasant enough, and they didn’t seem to have any alliance with Gary Edwards beyond being hired for a pickup job.
“It was the oddest thing,” Gwen explained in 2009. “I was walking up the dock, talking to the two guys, and I saw Gary coming toward us. He looked surly, as usual, but he didn’t say anything. When he came abreast of us, he picked me up by my wrists—with just one hand—and dangled me over the edge of the dock, banging me into the logs and concrete there.
“I was afraid he was going to drop me, but he was so strong. He pulled me back up and dropped me on the dock. I was bruised and hurt, but he just walked away.”
Gary Edwards’s crewmen were shocked by what their captain had just done. They helped Gwen up and dusted her off, and walked her to a safe place.
“They quit crewing for him right then,” Gwen recalled. “They didn’t want to get back on the boat with him.
“I never saw him again, and that was fine with me.”
In the fall of 1978, Gary sailed the Spellbound into Richmond, California. He had taken care of his visa difficulties and was finally free to head for the United States, where the ketch would undergo repairs. Gary stayed with the boat.
He hoped to sell it. It had been a millstone around his neck for eight months, a constant reminder of what happened in those ghastly predawn hours in February.
Two years after the tragedy occurred, Larry Edwards signed an affidavit accusing his brother of being “the slayer” of their parents. The motive was rumored to be for financial profit, and to cover up an attempted sexual attack on Kerry Edwards as she slept. Because of her fractured skull, she didn’t remember what had happened.
If Loren and Jody’s deaths were engineered by their son, how could it be proven? There were no witnesses—at least none who cared to talk about it. There were no bodies to be autopsied for cause or time of death.
The elder Edwardses’ estate consisted mainly of their modest home and their magnificent sailing craft, which was dry-docked in California. There was a good chance that it would always be considered a “bad-luck” boat, and sailors are notoriously superstitious. Would anyone risk sailing it?
The Spellbound’s value had plummeted, but it was probably still worth over $100,000. Despite its original $200,000 value, the ship was not insured. Gary Edwards said his parents had decided against buying insurance when they learned it would cost 20 percent of the boat’s value in premiums each year. Only very wealthy boat owners could afford $40,000 a year for insurance. And while they were sailing around the world, Loren’s income would have been much reduced.
The Spellbound was sold in the summer of 1979 for $110,000. And that amount was, according to Loren and Jody’s wills, to be divided equally five ways—to their children.
Faced with his brother’s accusations, Gary Edwards renounced any claim to his share of that money on Friday, December 21, 1980.
“I already know I am innocent,” he said. “Whatever share of the estate I might receive would probably be exhausted in a long and bitter legal battle. To fight this selfish battle for the sake of convincing others is not worth it. I will not be a part of a ghoulish rehashing of details for the sake of blood money.”
For five years, Jody and Loren Edwards had worked on the Spellbound. They built it, outfitted it, sanded and varnished it again and again, laid out its huge sails, always dreaming of the day they would sail into the balmy breezes of the South Pacific— even while Northwest rain pounded down on them.
Had they had any way of knowing how it would all end, they surely would never have laid the keel. All the sanding and varnishing of the deck of the ship that languished in Papeete for so long could never quite erase the blood shed there.
No one was ever arrested, and the investigation into Loren and Jody’s deaths sank into oblivion decades ago. Gary, Kerry, and Lori have slipped into obscurity—as they wanted to. He would be almost sixty now, and the two young women in their fifties. I’ve tried, but I cannot find them. Even the Seattle Times reporters who came as close to unraveling the secrets of the Spellbound as anyone—Eloise Schumacher and Peyton Whitely—had to take a few beats to remember the story because they wrote it so many years ago.
Whitely said he was startled a few years ago to walk down the dock where he had once known Loren and Jody as neighbors.
And there it was: the Spellbound. It had a different name, but he recognized the yellow fiberglass hull. There was no question that it was the same ketch. The people working on it were unfamiliar to him, but Whitely introduced himself and asked the man if he was the owner. He nodded.
“Do you know the history of this boat?” the longtime reporter asked.
“Can’t say I do.”
But the current owner was curious to know more about the thirty-year-old sailboat. Whitely hesitated, wondering if he should tell what he knew.
The man listened avidly, but when he learned of the Edwardses’ fatal cruise, it didn’t alarm him. Indeed, he found it intriguing.
Where the Spellbound is today I don’t know. But I will always think of her as the symbol of a lost dream.
SHARPER THAN
A SERPENT’S
TOOTH
I’ve probably mentioned this before, but it’s worth repeating. After several decades as a true-crime writer, I still find myself stumped by legal terms from time to time. We all do. Most laymen still believe that the term “corpus delicti” refers to the body of a murder victim. It doesn’t. This misconception has been perpetuated by the fact that corpus is the Latin root word for “corpse.” But, in correct usage, corpus delicti doesn’t mean a victim’s body at all. Instead, it refers to the body of a crime—all the elements that indicate a crime has been committed. Detectives and prosecutors have to prove to judges and juries that they have enough evidence—both physical and circumstantial—to show that a crime has been committed.
An actual corpse may or may not be part of the corpus delicti. If an adult disappears, he or she may have left of their own accord, and they are free to do that. But if there are eyewitnesses to violence to tell their stories, or a purse or keys left behind, or traces or even puddles of blood evident at a possible crime scene, then a rational person would tend to believe that that missing person did not choose to step out of his life. Probably the most telling evidence is the fingerprint of a victim or a suspect left in dried blood. One or both of them were there when that blood was wet.
Did someone have a motive for the absent person to come to harm? There are myriad variables that can prove a homicide has been committed: Has the suspect
ed target for violence been seen anywhere? Has he cashed a check, drawn money out of a bank, used a credit card, made calls on a cell phone, or attempted to collect Social Security? We all leave paper trails that we are unaware of. If there is no trail at all, investigators begin to believe the person who has vanished is no longer alive.
They don’t have to find a body to prove murder, and more and more homicide cases have been solved in recent years without any part of the victim’s body being found.
There are other ways.
Even so, it takes a prosecutor with a lot of guts to file murder charges against a suspect when the corpse of an alleged victim is missing, hidden under water, in the ground, or beneath cement.
There is always the chance that the victim may show up, alive and healthy, or that he has simply chosen to disappear for his own obscure reasons.
Convictions in homicides in which no body was discovered and identified are still rare, but the advent of DNA as an investigative tool has made identification much easier than it was before the eighties and nineties. Perhaps I’ve written about a dozen “no body” cases in my career. Not that many out of the hundreds I’ve researched.
Columbia County, Oregon, District Attorney Marty Sells did obtain a successful conviction in the case of school bus driver Vicki Brown in the midseventies, although her corpse is still missing today. That defendant was the first to be found guilty of murder in Oregon—though no body was found—in eighty years.
One conviction in the state of Washington where no body was ever found occurred in 1965 in Snohomish County, when Joel A. Lung was found guilty of murder in the death of his estranged wife.
When Lung appealed, State Supreme Court Justice Matthew W. Hill wrote: “The production of the body or parts thereof is not essential to establish that a homicide has been committed. All that is required is circumstantial evidence sufficient to convince the minds of reasonable men to a moral certainty of the fact of death to the exclusion of every other reasonable hypothesis.”