by Albert Jack
Although the most famous, the Mary Celeste is by no means the only ship to have been found deserted at sea. In April 1849, the Dutch schooner Hermania was discovered floating off the Cornish coast, near the Eddystone lighthouse, without her mast. In this case, the lifeboat was still firmly lashed to the deck and all personal belongings were in the cabins. However, the captain, his wife and daughter, and all the crew members were never seen again. Six years later another ship, the Marathon, was found adrift with no hands on deck and in perfect condition.
So what became of the most famous ghost ship in history? After being released by the authorities in Gibraltar, she returned to New York, where J. H. Winchester promptly sold her. On January 3, 1885, she ran onto the razor-sharp rocks at Rochelais Bank in the Gulf of Gonave and was wrecked. Unfortunately for her new owner, Gilman Parker, his insurance company decided to send an investigator to inspect the wreck before paying his claim for $30,000. The investigator found the cargo to have no value at all, made up as it was of cat food, old shoes, and other rubbish. It turned out that Parker had unloaded the small part of the cargo with value and then had set fire to the Mary Celeste. Parker was promptly charged with fraud and criminal negligence, a crime punishable by death in 1885. Then a legal technicality forced prosecutors to withdraw the charges laid against Parker and his associates and they were released, but the Mary Celeste still exacted her revenge. Over the next eight months one of the three conspirators committed suicide, one went mad, and Parker himself was bankrupted and died in poverty. And so the story of the Mary Celeste ends, leaving us with not only one of the best-loved and most intriguing mysteries in seafaring history, but also one of the most tragic.
Two men they couldn't hang and one man
miraculously cured of his war wounds
As John Lee was being led from his cell in Exeter Prison in En gland on the morning of February 23, 1885, he had approximately two minutes left to live. He was making the condemned man's walk to the gallows, having been convicted of the murder of the elderly woman he worked for, Emma Ann Keyse, who had been discovered with her throat cut and her head battered. Lee had protested his innocence, but his criminal record, obvious hatred of his employer, and lack of alibi had sealed his fate. As his jailers led him to the scaffold, his arms were strapped behind his back, a white hood was placed over his head, and a noose was secured around his neck. His executioner asked if he had any last words or confession to make, and when John Lee replied, “No, drop away,” the sheriff of Exeter gave the order to proceed.
But when the executioner, Mr. Berry, pulled the lever to the trapdoors, nothing happened. They didn't open, and Lee remained standing, alive if not exactly well, in the same location. Without removing the noose, the executioner's men shuffled Lee to one side and tested the doors, and this time they opened smoothly. Lee was then edged back into place, directly in the middle of the trapdoors, and the lever was pulled for a third time. Once again he stood on the unsecured trapdoors, just a few feet away from eternity, waiting for them to open. But yet again, they refused to do so.
The sheriff of Exeter then ordered the condemned man back to his cell while a full examination was made of the gallows. The hangman himself stood on the trap and held on to the rope with both hands. As soon as the lever was pulled, he fell through. John Lee was once more brought from the condemned man's cell, restrained, and placed into position in the center of the trapdoors. But once again, when the lever was pulled, the doors refused to budge. The gathered crowd of witnesses, including news paper journalists, were by that time shivering with cold, as was the condemned man standing upon the unsupported trapdoors awaiting his rather prolonged fate.
John Lee was then led back to his cell while further tests were made to the trapdoors, which, each time, worked perfectly. Completely baffled, the sheriff then wrote to the home secretary in London for further instructions. Newspapers across the world reported the story and John Lee found fame as “the man they cannot hang.” The home secretary, Sir William Harcourt, ordered a stay of execution, the unprecedented event was discussed in the House of Commons, and John Lee's death sentence was commuted to one of life imprisonment.
The official explanation given was that the damp weather had caused the trapdoors to swell and become jammed, despite all the tests confirming the mechanism worked smoothly. The mystery of the man they could not hang was never solved, and John Lee was eventually released from prison in 1907. He later married and lived quietly in London until his death in 1943, a full fifty-eight years longer than was expected when he made that early-morning walk at Exeter Prison all those years ago.
A few years after the failed execution of John Lee, in 1894, a young American farmer named Will Purvis was sentenced to be hanged on February 7, for the murder of a farm owner in Columbia, Mississippi. As he was secured upon the platform of the gallows, a priest read out the last rites and the lever was pulled. The trap opened with a crash and Purvis plunged through, emerging from below covered with dust but otherwise unharmed. The noose had somehow become untied and slipped from his neck. Shocked, yet undeterred, deputies led him straight back up the steps and once again re strained him, carefully checking that the knot was secure this time. But the crowd gathered below, of around three thousand people, was by then singing and shouting that Purvis had been reprieved by the highest power of all, the Lord Himself, and threatened to become unruly if the hanging went ahead.
Sheriff Irvin Magee, very wisely under the circum stances, had the murderer escorted back to his cell instead of attempting to carry on with the execution. Purvis's defense team made several appeals to have his death sentence commuted, but without success, and a new date for the execution was set, December 12, 1895. Purvis then escaped from jail and went into hiding, but when Mississippi elected a new governor who was sympathetic to the young man's plight, Purvis surrendered himself and immediately had his sentence reduced to one of life imprisonment. By then Purvis had become a statewide hero and received thousands of letters of support demanding that he be considered for a full and complete pardon. The new governor agreed, and in 1898 Will Purvis was a free man.
And it was just as well, because in 1917 one Joseph Beard announced on his deathbed that he was responsible for the murder of the farmer, and not Will Purvis after all. Other details were given that proved his story, and Will was finally exonerated. He had always protested his innocence and, as his death sentence had first been announced in 1893, had broken down in tears and cried out to his accusers: “I will live to see every last one of you dies!” When he finally died, peacefully and without assistance, on October 13, 1938, it was noted that the last of the jurors to have found him guilty of murder had himself passed away only three days earlier. Nobody could ever explain how, without help of a supernatural kind, the noose had managed to slip from his neck, allowing him to cheat certain death.
During the First World War, a soldier from Liverpool, Jack Traynor, was serving in the trenches when he was hit twice by enemy fire. The first bullet hit his head, smashing his skull, while the second bullet hit his right arm, severing vital nerves that even the most skilled surgeon of his day was unable to reconnect. Jack's skull injury refused to heal—indeed, doctors believed he would soon succumb to the wound—and he became virtually paralyzed in his damaged arm. Consequently, he was awarded a full disability pension. It is recorded that a few years after the war, in 1923, Jack began to suffer from severe bouts of epilepsy, as a result of his head wound, and lost the ability to walk. During that year he was taken on a religious pilgrimage to Lourdes in France, where he was lowered by his family into the supposedly healing waters. After a short ceremony he was taken back to the hospice he had become confined to and placed gently back into bed. However, four days later Jack awoke and sprang from his bed, miraculously made whole again. He then washed, shaved, and dressed himself, packed his bags, and walked out of the hospice, never to return.
When Jack arrived back home in England, he set up in business as a coal merchant, me
t a young lady, fell in love, got married, and fathered two healthy children. He lived a normal, happy life for the next twenty years until he sadly died, in 1943, of pneumonia. Jack's well-being and prosperity must have been all the greater since throughout this time the Ministry of Pensions had refused to believe he could have made such a recovery and continued to pay his disability pension in full. Nobody has ever been able to explain Jack Traynor's remarkable and mysterious recovery.
The famous bandleader vanished without a trace
en route to entertain Allied troops in 1944,
but what happened to him?
At the end of the 1930s, just as the Second World War was breaking out in Europe, Glenn Miller's band introduced America to the new, unique style of brass-band music they had been working on for a number of years. It was a smooth, upbeat sound that struck an instant chord both with the middle-aged and with optimistic youth learning how to jive and swing.
Radio stations across America played Glenn Miller records all the time, and Hollywood was quick to sign up the new star and his band. Two films were released: Sun Valley Serenade in 1941 and Orchestra Wives in 1942. The Glenn Miller Orchestra were the Beatles of their generation (or, for the younger reader, Oasis; and if you're thinking of the Arctic Monkeys, then you should be in bed by now). By early 1942, America had entered the fray, joining the Allied forces in their efforts to repulse the Nazis. Miller enlisted later that year, on October 7. On completion of his basic training, he transferred to the Army Air Corps; his first military assignment was to gather another orchestra, the Glenn Miller Army Air Force Band, with a brief to entertain Allied troops in Britain. He was delighted to be back in touch with his old Hollywood friend David Niven, whose job it was to arrange entertainment for the troops across Europe.
Eighteen months later, the D-Day landings signaled the start of the liberation of Europe, and by November 1944, Paris was finally free of German soldiers. Even though Allied bombers were still pouring across the English Channel on their way to tackle targets farther into Europe, the Parisian party was now in full swing. David Niven organized a six-week tour for the Glenn Miller Orchestra that was to begin in the French capital on December 16, 1944. The band was due to arrive on the sixteenth, but Miller wanted to travel earlier to attend what he called a “social engagement.” Arrangements were duly made for him to fly from the airfield at Twin wood Farm near Bedford in a small American-built, propeller-driven craft called a Noorduyn Norseman that would be piloted by John R. Morgan. Lieutenant Don Haynes, a show-business agent drafted into the U.S. Army Air Force to manage the Glenn Miller Orchestra while on tour, drove his famous charge from London to RAF Milton Ernest Hall to prepare for his cross-Channel flight the following day. According to Haynes, John Morgan arrived in the Norseman at Twinwood Farm at 1:40 P.M., collected Miller, and, in spite of poor weather conditions, took off again at approximately 1:45 P.M. This was the last anyone saw of Glenn Miller: he had vanished from the world and into the history books.
The alarm was raised when he failed to meet up with Don Haynes and the band in Paris a day later. After a frantic search of the entire city's likely haunts, the Glenn Miller Orchestra had to play the show without their famous bandleader, announcing that “Major Miller cannot be with us tonight.” Nobody ever saw him again, or at least could prove that they had. The puzzle began in earnest when, just three days later, the United States military announced his death, which was extraordinary in itself, given that in the confusion of a recently liberated France many people went missing for much longer periods, often “absent without leave” (AWOL).
The question was, Why would officials make such a final announcement so soon after the musician, albeit a world-famous one, simply failed to show up at a few concert performances? Pete Doherty does that all the time these days and nobody declares him dead as a result. It was a question Helen, Miller's wife, also asked, but not until over a year later, in February 1946, when Colonel Donnell wrote to inform her that her husband had been flying that day in a combat aircraft, not the Norseman, and that the plane had taken off from Abbots Ripton airfield near Huntingdon in Cambridgeshire, many miles from where Haynes had left Miller.
The mystery deepened when it was claimed that the flight had been bound for Bordeaux, far from Miller's intended destination. There was no explanation of how he would be traveling the remaining distance within France. In fact, no further information was given at all, and so speculation raged about whether Miller had lied about his movements to his friends and the rest of the band, changing his stated plans at the last minute, or had gone AWOL, or even that he had been shot down by enemy fire. A military cover-up seemed increasingly likely. Imagine that: the military might not be telling the truth about something!
After the war, John Edwards, a former RAF officer, set out to prove Miller had been on board the Norseman, for which all he needed was a copy of the official accident report from the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. But he drew a blank: that office maintained the records had been “lost in a fire,” while the Department of Records in Washington, D.C., denied such a file had ever existed. Edwards's efforts to prove the absence of a military cover-up began to convince him that the reverse must be true.
What he now wanted to know was why. And when some documents were finally discovered, they were found to be written illegibly, the signatures blurred and indecipherable. This, strengthened by the fact that the military had initiated no search of any kind for the missing bandsman, began to fuel speculation that the U.S. government knew exactly what had happened to Glenn Miller and had known it immediately, hence the early announcement of his death. After all, imagine Oasis singer Liam Gallagher going missing on a morale-raising visit to troops in Iraq, there being no search for him, and the British government firmly announcing he was dead only three days later, but without producing a body. Furthermore, no records of what had happened to him would ever be released, while every government agency claimed to know nothing about it.
What is known is that the Norseman had crashed into the sea, as it was discovered by divers in 1985 six miles west of Le Tou-quet on the northern coast of France, but there was no evidence that Miller, or indeed anyone else, was on board at the time, and the reasons for the accident remain unknown. It was revealed that the propeller was missing, but not when or how it fell off.
In 1986, the novelist and former RAF pilot Wilbur Wright took up the challenge and asked the U.S. Air Force Information Center in California for the accident report on the missing Norseman. He was informed that no accident had been reported on that day and, in fact, no Norseman aircraft had been reported as missing throughout December 1944. Another mystery and another lie, as Wright subsequently discovered that eight Norsemen had been reported missing that month.
Wright then repeatedly wrote to every U.S. State Department and records office he could find, requesting information relating to the disappearance of Glenn Miller. But he was ignored until his letter of complaint to President Ronald Reagan encouraged a response out of the Military Reference Office. They confirmed there were several documents relating to the accident, but then failed to produce them. However, other departments continued to insist all records had been lost, destroyed, mislaid, or had never existed in the first place. When Wright telephoned George Chalou, the man in charge of the records office, to complain, he was alarmed by the latter's reaction during the conversation. According to Chalou (in a taped conversation with Wright): “They will never get them [the files] back either. Those files have been under lock and key for years and that is where they will be staying.” There had been a cover-up after all.
After extensive research, Wilbur Wright's eventual conclusion was worthy of one of his own novels: that Glenn Miller probably had arrived in Paris the day before his band, where he was met by David Niven. Niven then set off to dramatically rescue Marlene Dietrich from the clutches of the Nazis, while Miller holed up in a brothel in the Parisian red-light district awaiting their return. Unfortunately, w
ith time on his hands (and plenty of alcohol), he ended up becoming involved, and badly injured, in an unseemly bar brawl. The American authorities were horrified to discover the world's best-loved musician in a seedy brothel with a fractured skull. Miller was immediately airlifted back to Ohio, but he later died of his injuries.
Wright proposes three main strands of evidence. The first is based on the fact that David Niven makes no mention of Miller in his auto biography The Moon's a Balloon, published in 1971, despite the pair knowing each other well. Wright sees this as indicating Niven's awareness of the incident and his decision, for the sake of good grace and the Miller family honor, never to mention it again. (Indeed, he never even mentioned the name Glenn Miller to either his biographer, Sheridan Morley, or to his second wife.)
The second line of “proof given by Wright is that Helen Miller soon moved to Pasadena, California, where she bought a burial plot with room for six graves. As her immediate family consisted of five people—herself and her son, daughter, and parents—it is therefore assumed that Miller himself occupies the last grave. When asked, the cemetery administrators denied Miller's presence but took a full fifteen months to reply to Wright's letter of inquiry, suggesting to Wright that both the family and local gravediggers were in on the cover-up. For him the clinching piece of evidence is that in 1954, a Parisian prostitute—still plying her trade opposite Fred's Bar, the brothel bar where Miller was alleged to have been drinking the night he went missing—revealed that her then boyfriend had told her what had happened to Glenn Miller, confirming the whole Parisian brothel story.