War Stories: Crime on the High Seas

Written by Jim Cavanaugh – Some of the other capers I investigated during my career with the FBI included crimes on the high seas which are a federal violation. I was called out to sea once with the Coast Guard to board a sailing yacht where a doctor was found dead.

They called when they found the boat sailing in circles out in the Atlantic. I took a chopper ride and dropped by harness to the boat. The Coast Guard first thought the guy was a murder victim. He was lying on his back in his berth, but most of his head was gone, as if he had been shot. I searched the cabin and found a folded suicide note where he said he had terminal cancer and wanted to go out on his own. He put the boat on “auto” and took some pills. With the cabin being locked up and secure, the heat of summer sun had simply caused his head to pop. I had to ride the boat all the way back to Riviera Beach with the Coast Guard towing because of high seas.

In another winner, we got a call from a cruise ship out in the Atlantic. They had a Recreation Director that had been hired to help organize entertainment for the passengers. She was a young, pretty female that had never worked for the line before. After they got to sea, the gal left her cabin one morning and there was a yellow post-it with the words “I Got Ya” written in a felt tip pen. She told the co-workers as she thought it was some type of prank, but didn’t tell the Captain.

The next morning when she got up there was another post-it with the same words, but this one was on the inside of her cabin door. Now she was upset. She went to her supervisor and ultimately to the Captain. A notation was made in the ship’s log about it, but not much could be done. They still believed it might be a prank.

On the third morning the gal didn’t get up. He co-workers were concerned and alerted the security officer of the ship. He went to her cabin, which was locked, and found her unconscious in her bed. She slept in the nude and she was lying on her back. On her chest the words “I got Ya” were carved. The cuts were really shallow and superficial. They appeared to have been made with a razor blade and one was found on the floor.

I flew out on another helicopter and dropped to the ship. They were not expecting to make port for another day and didn’t want to chance having a nut-job aboard ship. Tony was with me and we started off by interviewing all the co-workers and crew members. The gal was in the sick-bay under a doctor’s care. We did all the preliminary work and were set to talk to the gal. It took all of about 30 minutes to solve this one.

She confessed. She did it all to herself.

Using the ship phones we ran a check on her and found she had prior mental issues. When we confronted her she rolled over totally. She had no idea that the FBI would be involved, and she only did it to call attention to herself. The ship docked in Jamaica the next day, and the gal was flown back to the US. No charges were ever filed and the ship line was content to just keep it out of the papers. Unfortunately, Tony and I had to fly back, too.

We also investigated several Bermuda Triangle cases where ships and planes disappeared. Heaney from our office had the duty one weekend and he got a call from the Coast Guard. They had found a small freighter registered in Liberia with no one aboard. The ship was totally void of a crew. The cargo was still there and the mess hall had food and drink on tables, but there was no body on it. There was a lot of blood on the deck in several places but all the lifeboats were still there and there had been no distress calls monitored.

A bunch of us went to the docks after it was towed in to do a crime scene. We got zilch. In the end we all were glad that Heaney got the case assigned to him. The boat was from Liberia. The missing crew was from the Philippines and the cargo came from Germany. Heaney was the Counter-Intelligence expert. We let him sort it all out.

He never did.

The history books are full of stories about ships, planes and people simply vanishing in the Bermuda Triangle. There is one about a squadron of Army Air Force planes that vanished during a training mission off Fort Lauderdale back in the 1940’s. They were never seen or heard from again.

While I was assigned to West Palm Beach, I worked several airplanes that left for the Bahamas and vanished as well. One was the father of a friend of ours. He had his own plane and ran a small television store that we had purchased several TV’s from. He left one morning to fly over to fish in Bimini and simply vanished. We never found him or his plane.

Another was a charter flight that was nothing more than a party. It was a DC-3 that flew over to Paradise Island nightly with passengers that wanted to hit the casinos or see some nightclub action. For a lousy $25, they would fly over about 7 p.m. and come back around 1 a.m. One night it took off with 34 people and was never heard from again. I got a call at home when the office got a call from the tower at Palm Beach International Airport. The plane had departed for the 15 minute flight and never indicated a problem. The last communication was that they saw Bimini lights and were descending to land. It never happened, and the blip on the radar simply vanished. Bahamian boats and our Coast Guard searched for hours and never saw any wreckage or bodies.

A couple of days later, four bodies were seen floating in the ocean and recovered by the Coast Guard. We determined they had been aboard the flight, but there was nothing to say how or why they died. When there is a plane crash we normally find pieces floating or at least an oil slick. This time there was nothing. I had that case open for a couple of years and never solved it.

We had many more cases, but they were solved. The people that chartered boats on their own were often hijacked by pirates working the seas between the US and all of the islands. Many were dopers that wanted the boat to run loads into the US and others just wanted to rob, rape and/or kill the tourists. Local South Florida folks always carried guns on their boats for just that reason.