Four Friends

by William D. Cohan

  Rick tried several times on Monday to try to reach Harry on his cell phone without luck. He and Pam decided to go to the media with the news that Harry and the girls were missing. Rick called the local radio and television stations, shared the news, and asked them to put the word out. “Rick pulled the pin out of the grenade on this press thing and then left, and so I became the family spokesman and that got more intense,” Tom Kyros said. “I never once thought anything other than This is all going to get resolved, but somebody has got to help Pam from going crazy until this all gets figured out, because everything’s fine,” he continued. “We talked about that and I told her everything was going to be fine, I was positive. She wasn’t hysterical freaking out. She wasn’t crying and wailing. She was worried. But she’s pretty tough.” They decided that Tom had better call their parents, who were then in Arizona, before WGN-TV, a local superstation, started reporting the news nationally. Tom told his parents they might be hearing something in the media about Harry and the girls but not to worry. “My father was worried but he said, ‘All right, well, keep us up to date. I’m sure it will be fine.’” However, half an hour later they called back and said they were leaving Arizona and flying to Chicago.

  On Monday evening, Rick called the North Point Marina, to see if the Semper Spero had been there on Sunday night. But the marina could not confirm whether Harry had been there or not. Rick also called the Waukegan Port District to see if it could confirm that Harry had been “at a transient dock” on either Sunday or Monday. He had no luck there, either. Of course, Rick explained, on overnight sailing trips, it was not the least bit unusual for his brother to pull into harbors during the evening hours “for the purpose of avoiding paying transient slip fees.”

  Rick said his brother had some idiosyncratic “boating habits.” He liked to leave the 9.9-horsepower motor in gear when the motor was off. He also liked to drop the jib onto the forward deck, in an unsecured fashion, when swimming off the boat. He and the girls liked to swim off the stern, most often without wearing life preservers. Rick said the girls were “reasonably proficient” in swimming. Sometimes, for “safety purposes,” Harry would attach a “flotation device” to a mooring line and throw it off the stern so that if the girls “became tired” while swimming, they could grab onto something. Harry’s father said that when Harry and the girls would swim off the sailboat, the ladder would be down, the main sail would be stowed, the jib would be down on the deck, the motor would be in the water, life jackets would be tossed into the water but not worn, and the fifteen-foot mooring line would be tied to a flotation device. He had been swimming with Harry and the girls in Lake Michigan a month earlier. Rick’s wife, Cele, also said she had been swimming with Harry and his girls on numerous occasions from the boat. “Harry knew how quickly the boat could drift away even when the sail was down,” she recalled. “Harry would never be far away from the boat if he was also in the water with the girls.” She said both girls were very good swimmers and belonged to Salt Creek Club, a private swim club in Hinsdale, near the Bulls’ home. “During the summer, the girls would swim almost every day.”

  Rick said that over the years his younger brother had reformed the somewhat reckless behavior of his youth and had become the “most prudent of men” as an adult, except in two ways. One was his daredevil approach to downhill skiing. He was like “greased lightning on skis,” he said. “Fearless. Harry would just come screaming by me.” Rick could not recall an instance when another skier passed him—except for his brother, Harry. The other “imprudent” thing Harry did was to swim off the back of the little sailboat even if someone had not remained behind on the boat. “He’d just dive over the side,” Rick said, “and many was the time. It’s hot around here in the summer and you’ve got wonderful fresh water all around, so frequently we would just swim over the side into the sacred swimming grounds. The ‘sacred swimming grounds’ were right below wherever we were at that instant.” There was no anchoring a boat in Lake Michigan, of course, where the depth of the water can reach 925 feet. “This started early on between me, Harry, and Dad,” he continued. “Dad and I would be in the water and Harry would cannonball over the side.”

  On those occasions, Rick recalled reminding his brother, “There’s no one on the boat, you moron.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about it,” Harry said.

  But Rick worried about it. “Well, I’d immediately zip over and up the ladder,” he said. “This just went on for a decade. I’d go, ‘Harry what are you doing?’ He didn’t get it. He didn’t see the danger.”

  Rick figured that since it was a hot, summer day in August, “I’ll bet you one John Lennon guitar” that Harry said to his girls, “Hey, let’s go swimming, let’s take a dip.” He’s sure this is what happened because that’s “what he did every time, ‘Everybody in the sacred swimming grounds.’”

  On Monday night, around nine o’clock, Rick called the Coast Guard at Calumet Harbor in Chicago to report that the Semper Spero was twelve hours overdue and had not returned home as expected. The next day, at 10:29 a.m., the Coast Guard asked the Lake County, Illinois, Sheriff’s Office Marine Unit to help it with the investigation. Their mission was to find the boat and to find Harry, Maddie, and Lexi. To Pam, the search seemed like an eternity. “It was crazy,” she said. “It was horrible.” Planes were searching. Boats were searching. Friends in their boats were searching in the area off the coast of Lake Forest. Several boats from the Lake County Sheriff’s Office were dispatched; one searched north, between Waukegan and Winthrop Harbor, another south between Waukegan and Highland Park. Each boat moved farther and farther offshore as the search widened.

  The Bulls gave a picture of Harry and the girls to the media. “The idea was to make it a news story so people are talking about it, so people are out there looking, and it really did become a news story,” Tom Kyros said. “It was the CEO of this old-line Chicago company and his two little girls are lost. Then there were TV trucks parked out in front of Pam’s house, and there were people with microphones in their hands surrounding me out on her front lawn.” The TV reporters did live stand-ups from the Bulls’ front lawn for the ten o’clock news. “It was crazy,” he said. “It was really, really a different world.”

  The news media camped out on Pam’s front lawn. There were cops at the house and reporters everywhere. Pam didn’t even dare to look outside the front door of her house. “I do remember one night I went out the back door and cut through the neighbor’s yard and went for a walk,” Pam said. “I never even went out the front door ever. And coming back and seeing the lights were on, it was nighttime, all these people, I was thinking, Whose life is this?” A month before, on July 16, the world had just witnessed the media firestorm that resulted from the disappearance of JFK Jr.’s plane off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. Pam remembered that she and Harry had been at the family’s cabin that weekend in Brown County, Indiana, to celebrate his parents’ forty-ninth wedding anniversary. CNN was in a continuous loop over the missing plane. “He’s like, ‘Oh, he’s toast,’” Pam remembered. “And his mother said, ‘Harry, that’s horrible to say.’” Of course, the Bulls all knew that Harry had known John at Andover.

  Mary Ellen Bull remembered being at her parents’ house and sick with worry. “There was this sense of concern and horror before we really knew what was going on,” she remembered. “Just initially Harry hadn’t checked in and it was twelve hours later and nobody was really sure where they were. I remember being on the phone because I couldn’t sit still, I had to do something, I had to take control in some way, and being on the phone with like private boating people trying to hire other people to help go out and search, because I thought at the time that was the right thing to do, to get more people out there on their boats trying to find them.”

  At 7:09 p.m. on Tuesday, the Coast Guard located the Semper Spero about twenty-seven miles off the coast of the North Point Marina, in Lake Michigan. Nobody was on it. Pam and Tom were on the phone with the Coas
t Guard. They could hear the report coming through on the Coast Guard radio. Tom was convinced Harry and the girls were sleeping down in the cabin. “We had this tortured twenty minutes,” he said.

  Two Coast Guard officials boarded the boat and quickly “determined that the boat was unoccupied and abandoned.” They took photographs of the boat before they boarded as well as while they were on it. Nothing unusual had obviously happened on the boat and there was no indication of “force, trauma or wrongdoing.” When the boat was found, the mainsail was stowed and the jib was down but not secured. The engine was in the water and the throttle was engaged. The gas tank near the engine was empty. The swimming ladder was down. Six adult life jackets and two child life jackets were found stowed away on the deck of the boat. Whereas often when Harry and the girls would swim off the stern, he would throw the fifteen-foot line out the back, tied to a flotation device, this time the line was found inside the boat.

  The next day at 10:55 a.m., four members of the Lake County Sheriff’s Office boarded a Marine Unit boat and headed out to Harry’s boat. The idea was to tow it back to Waukegan Harbor. At 12:43 p.m., while the deputies were on their way to where the Acacia, a Coast Guard cutter ship, was holding the Semper Spero, another Coast Guard boat reported that it had found Harry’s body floating on the surface of the water about seven miles east of Lake Forest, Illinois. The deputies decided to go to where Harry’s body was found, and another Marine Unit vessel was sent to tow the Semper Spero back to the harbor. He was wearing his bathing suit, but no life jacket. He had left his shirt on the boat; his brother said he would only take it off to go swimming, because of his sensitivity to the sun. While the deputies were en route to rendezvous with the Coast Guard boat that had found Harry’s body, a Coast Guard helicopter had located what seemed, at first, to be seven-year-old Maddie’s body floating four feet below the surface of the water, also about eight miles east of Lake Forest. She was not wearing a life jacket, either. One report stated that Maddie’s body was a mile and a half away from her father’s, but the sheriff’s report put their distance apart at two hundred yards. She was found at 12:59 p.m. on August 18. Their bodies were loaded onto the Coast Guard ship and brought back to the Waukegan Harbor south fuel dock, where the Lake County Coroner’s Office took possession. Meanwhile, the search for Lexi continued. Tom Kyros remembered that “every time something would happen, I was the one that would go and report it to Pam.”

  The bodies of Harry and his daughter arrived back at Waukegan Harbor around 2 p.m. “Unfortunately the image that sticks with me the most is when the Coast Guard had retrieved Harry’s body and him in a body bag with them taking him off a boat onto a dock, and that was on the news and that was so horrible,” Mary Ellen Bull said. “You don’t realize, until that happens to you personally, the horrific things that we see on the television all the time that impact people. It doesn’t occur to you how those loved ones are going to have to see that over and over again. So that was pretty horrific.”

  Prior to performing autopsies, the coroner’s office met with Harry’s father. After viewing Polaroid photographs of the two bodies, he identified them as his son Harry and granddaughter Maddie. Autopsies were ordered. At 3:45 p.m., a pathologist in the Lake County Coroner’s Office performed an autopsy on Maddie. She was wearing a one-piece pink, yellow, and orange bathing suit. Just prior to the autopsy, one sheriff’s deputy saw no signs of trauma on her body, either before or after her bathing suit was removed. Harry’s autopsy began at 4:40 p.m. He had been wearing only a purple, green, black, and maroon swimsuit. There were no signs of trauma to his body, either before or after his bathing suit was removed; the sheriff’s deputy noted he had a large bruise inside his right biceps, but it appeared to be from an older injury. Dr. Witeck observed that, in his opinion, both Harry and Maddie had died of asphyxia due to drowning from an unspecified “boating/swimming mishap.” A subsequent toxicology report found no drugs or alcohol in Harry’s body.

  The next day, the two bodies were brought to the funeral home. There, it turned out, Harry’s father had misidentified his granddaughter’s body. The found body was not that of Maddie, age seven, but rather that of Lexi, age five.

  Mary Ellen Bull had asked to view the bodies at the funeral home. “I actually had a dream that it was wrong, that it wasn’t Maddie,” she said. “I don’t know why, and even now I don’t know if it matters or why I did it, but the next day I went to the funeral home and made the guy show me her body, and it wasn’t Maddie. It was Lexi.” She told Pam, who had been sleeping in Lexi’s bed, hoping that by doing so Lexi’s body would be found. “All that Pam did was switch beds,” Mary Ellen said. “For me personally those early days, and even weeks, were hoping against hope that somehow Maddie was still out there. That, who knows, that somehow she’d be returned to us.” But Maddie’s body was never found. “It’s just a huge, deep lake,” Pam was told. “It’s like how hard it was to find the boat, think of finding one little body.” She thinks Maddie’s body “sank” and now she’s in “heaven somewhere.”

  There are many theories about what may have happened aboard the Semper Spero. Rick Bull thought that everyone went swimming on a hot day—at his brother’s urging—and then the unanchored boat drifted away. “It was pretty darned hard to swim over a mile an hour, even in a panic situation, for any distance,” he said, “and the boat just got away from them.” He said Harry was “pretty buoyant at this time in his life”—he weighed 250 pounds—and probably could have somehow swum to shore. “But as Pam said, ‘He wasn’t coming home without those girls.’ And so this prudent, thoughtful, caring guy, who thought through almost every mundane decision in a methodical fashion, had a fatal error in judgment. It changed my religion. Prior to that day I was more concerned with staying out of hell. Now I’m more concerned with getting to heaven so I can kick his ass.’”

  Mary Ellen Bull posited that a gust of wind might have blown the boat beyond their reach. “The girls had been on a swim team that summer, and so they were—even though they were young and little—they were pretty strong swimmers,” she said. “I sort of imagine that either they were all in the water swimming and a gust of wind kind of pushed the boat farther away from them, or [it] drifted away from them. And Harry couldn’t get back to the boat. Or that maybe one of them fell in and Harry jumped after that one and the second one got scared and jumped in the water, too.… The boat was getting farther away so she jumped in, too. I don’t know. Every family has losses and illnesses. But people are supposed to die when they’re old and sickly and not when they’re young and healthy, and certainly not when they’re children. I mean as horrible as that is, I just remember my mom, of all people, saying we just have to remember how lucky we are that we had known them at all. How blessed our lives are that we had them even for that short period. Because that was the only thing that could give me any sort of peace at all.”

  Karna Bull’s theory of what happened was slightly more nuanced. “Lexi, the younger daughter, was sort of a defiant kid,” she said. “And I think Harry was saying, ‘Yes we’re going to go swimming, wait, wait, wait,’ and she decided to jump off the boat. Now, they could swim, but normally what would have happened is he would have put the anchor out, he would have thrown the life preservers out, and that kind of thing because they were out in the middle of the water. She jumped the gun. He went in because she probably didn’t seem safe and I think what happened was that he swallowed a lot of water. This is my picture: that Maddie was on the boat watching this and that’s why her body wasn’t found, she was separate from them, and she went in to save them. After all, she knew how to swim. She could save them. They had planned to go swimming and she got ahead of the game. But there are no witnesses and we really don’t know what happened.”

  Pam said her intuition is that they all died together. “I know whatever happened, Harry died trying to save them,” she said. “There’s no doubt in my mind about that. It was a calm day. I think they—I hate to think about it, truth
fully—but I think maybe they went swimming without their life jackets, just like a dip, and something happened and one of them was in trouble and then they all…”

  There had been some speculation in the media about foul play or something “untoward” happening, but she rejected those suggestions. “There was nothing suspicious about him or creepy or anything,” she said. He would pack at most one or two beers in the cooler to drink once the boat had docked for the night, she said, so he hadn’t been drinking. “I don’t know how to solve the mystery,” she said. She can’t explain why none of them were wearing life jackets or why one “flotation device”—a U-shaped yellow buoy—belonging to the boat was later found by Paul Wanamaker, of Waukegan, around noon on Tuesday, August 17, straight east of Waukegan. She said when she was on the boat in prior years, she would make sure everyone was wearing life jackets. But she acknowledged that lots of people would swim in the lake without wearing them.