Authors: Ron Franscell
Tags: #True Crime
Sometime in the night, she was startled awake by her brother’s screams and loud stomping.
“Help, Daddy, help!” Brian shrieked. Then silence.
Terry Jo laid in her bunk, paralyzed with fear. She heard loud thumping noises outside. When she finally summoned the nerve, she opened a little door into the center cabin. To her horror, she saw the bodies of her mother and brother lying
on their backs in pools of blood. There was no doubt they were dead. She quickly climbed the stairs to the empty main deck, where she saw more bloodstains.
Then she saw Harvey. He was carrying a bucket. When he saw her, he shouted at her to go back to her bunk.
“What happened?” she cried out.
“Get down there!” Harvey growled as he shoved her back down the companionway. His crazy eye seemed to be swirling in his skull.
Waves were breaking over the deck now.
The
Bluebelle
was sinking fast.
Terrified, Terry Jo hid in her bunk, where she waited for maybe fifteen minutes, shaking with fear. She wanted to keep her cool. She felt as if she were outside her body, looking down on herself. Rene wasn’t in the bunk they shared, and she hadn’t seen her father. She could hear water splashing on the deck above.
Suddenly, Harvey threw open her door and stood watching her, a silhouette against the dwindling lights. He was holding a rifle in his hand, but he didn’t speak. His evil shadow just stared at her, then left.
Terry smelled the acrid, oily smell of diesel fumes. Then to her horror, she saw water sloshing on the floor of her cabin. It was slowly rising.
When it had risen high enough to float her mattress, she waded out of the cabin in knee-deep water, fearing she’d bump into her mother and brother’s corpses, and back to the top deck. Harvey appeared out of the dark.
“Are we sinking?” a frightened Terry Jo asked him.
“Yes,” he said. “Here, hold this.”
Harvey threw her a rope as he rushed forward, but she missed the rope and it fell into the dark water.
Harvey looked around in a panic. “The dinghy’s gone!”
Terry Jo saw the dinghy drifting away off the port side. Harvey leaped into the water and swam toward the dinghy until Terry Jo could not see him anymore. He wasn’t coming back.
Waves were breaking over the deck now. The
Bluebelle
was sinking fast. Terry Jo remembered the cork life ring on the starboard side and unlashed it just as the boat sunk out of sight, a ghost ship that would never be found.
Terry Jo was alone in the deafening blackness of the sea. She held tight to the canvas-covered float, afraid of being sucked down by the sinking
Bluebelle
. She lay low on the rotting ropes that formed the bottom of her life raft and stifled her crying, afraid of being heard by Harvey, who she now believed was a killer.
Worse, she had no food, no water, no protection against the elements or predators, no way to signal for help.
There was only darkness.
Until the rain came later that night and the sea lit up for a little girl alone.
“SOMETHING IS KIND OF WRONG HERE”
A little past noon the next morning, Seaman Dennis Gochenour was sitting watch in the poop deck of the tanker SS
Gulf Lion
when he spotted a life raft and dinghy 4 miles (6 kilometers) out. There was a man aboard, waving his shirt.
When the
Gulf Lion
came alongside to rescue the barefooted man wearing khaki pants and a flower-printed shirt, they made a gruesome discovery hidden beneath a small sail: the corpse of a little blond girl, wearing red shorts and a greenish short-sleeved shirt. The raft also contained a survival bag full of flares, food, and water-purifying equipment.
Once safely aboard, the man identified himself as Captain Julian Harvey, master of the ketch
Bluebelle
.
The boat, he told his rescuers, had been caught in a freak squall around midnight. Everyone—the five Duperraults, his wife, and Harvey—was on deck when a rogue, 40-mile (64 kilometer)-per-hour gust snapped the main mast, which pierced the deck and ruptured a fuel line below. It also pulled down the mizzen mast in a snarl of wires and rope, wounding some of the passengers.
A fire erupted and spread so quickly that he couldn’t quell it with extinguishers. Soon, he was cut off from the others, who had taken refuge on the stern, were tangled in ruined rigging, or had already jumped overboard.
The
Bluebelle
was quickly consumed by flames and went down before Harvey could rescue anyone. He said he circled the area of the wreckage for several hours, looking for survivors, but found nobody, except the drowned body of a little girl in a life vest—he thought her name was Terry Jo—floating facedown in the sea. He claimed he tried to resuscitate her but couldn’t.
Harvey, who bore no wounds of any kind, seemed unusually cool to the sailors who listened. They thought he might just be in shock. Neither Harvey nor the little girl smelled of smoke; their clothing wasn’t scorched; the raft and dinghy showed no signs of fire.
His best guess was that everyone drowned as the boat sunk, even though the children all wore life jackets in Harvey’s account.
He even cast some of the blame on the Duperraults themselves.
“I don’t have any use for city folks,” he said. “They’re not my kind of people anyhow. They get panicky. I run regular in the winter months—I’m about the only boat that runs between Miami and Nassau. I get them out in the boat and it gets rough and I’ve even had to lash them down to the deck.”
The old sailors on the
Gulf Lion
had plenty of questions for Harvey, none answered. They couldn’t imagine how a broken mast might pierce the deck and hull the way Harvey said, or why the lighthouse just 14 miles (23 kilometers) away never saw any fire on a dark night, or even why Harvey never asked about survivors.
Seaman Gochenour, the man who first saw Harvey’s raft, had an unsettling feeling about the
Bluebelle
’s skipper.
“I looked at him back in the mess hall,” Gochenour said a few days later. “You know, there are people you can look into their eyes, and you might look right down into the depth of them, and I looked at him just about like that. It looked like I could see clean down into his body and soul, you know. He shook his head and he turned and looked away. And I just thought to myself, ‘Something is kind of wrong here.’”
Harvey answered every question,
although his answers seemed pat and
unemotional. He expressed no remorse
about the accident, even though his beloved
new bride had likely perished.
Back in Miami, the news of the
Bluebelle
’s sinking was already hitting the papers. The death of six people and the survival of one in a squall was national news. So by the time Harvey returned to Miami, the Coast Guard, reporters, insurance men, and
Bluebelle
owner Harold Pegg were waiting with questions of their own.
On the morning of November 16, 1961, Coast Guard Lieutenant Ernest Murdock convened the official Coast Guard hearing into the
Bluebelle
wreck. He and Captain Robert Barber had been assigned to investigate the tragedy, which seemed to them to be much deeper than Julian Harvey’s account. No debris, victims, or survivors had yet turned up almost four days later.
A smiling, cordial Harvey took the stand as the first witness. As the questioning began, so did his stammer and rolling eye, but Murdock attributed it to the ordeal he had survived, nothing more.
Harvey retold the story about the squall, the broken masts, the fire, and the sinking. He explained how he had searched two hours for survivors but found none. He claimed the radio was broken before he could radio an SOS, and he hadn’t thought to send up emergency flares.
The more Harvey talked, the more incredulous Murdock became.
“Was everyone awake at the time of the accident?” the lieutenant asked.
“Everyone was awake,” Harvey said. “The little eleven-year-old girl was screaming. I tried to keep her quiet. She probably had a nightmare or
something. She didn’t know what was going on. She woke up and wasn’t wildly hysterical but with a little bit of shock.”
Harvey answered every question, although his answers seemed pat and unemotional. He had a glib answer for every question, even when the answers were inconceivable for any experienced sailor. He expressed no remorse about the accident, even though his beloved new bride had likely perished.
But his story differed slightly from the tale he told after swearing a friend to secrecy the night before. In that version, Harvey claimed the masts fell on Arthur Duperrault and Dene, cutting them horribly.
“I lost my nerve when I saw their blood and guts on the deck,” Harvey told his friend tearfully, “and I jumped overboard. The next thing I knew, I was pulling the little girl into a boat with me.”
Murdock excused Harvey from the stand and called Harold Pegg, the
Bluebelle
’s owner. Harvey took a seat at the back of the room to listen to his boss’s testimony.
Pegg hadn’t been on the stand long when Captain Barber burst into the room.
“They’ve found a survivor!” he announced. “A little girl is alive.”
Harvey looked stunned. “Oh, my God!” he blurted out. “Isn’t that wonderful?”
A few moments later, Harvey asked to be excused so he could make arrangements to explain the tragedy to his missing wife’s family. He agreed to meet with Murdock and Barber the next morning to answer any further questions.
Harvey didn’t go far. Using the name John Monroe of Tampa, he checked into the Sandman Motel, about 2 miles (3 kilometers) up Biscayne Boulevard from the Coast Guard offices, a little before 11 a.m. He went straight to his room and never came out.
In the room, Harvey unpacked photographs of his son, Lance, and of his wife, Dene. He propped them on top of the toilet tank and sat down naked on the cold tile with his back against the bathroom door.
Around noon the next day, a maid stumbled into a bloody mess. Harvey had slashed his left thigh and wrists with a double-edged razor blade, smeared his warm blood on the bathroom walls in grotesque scrawls, then slashed his own carotid artery. He was forty-four.
His two-page suicide note asked a friend to care for his son, Lance, then a fourteen-year-old student at Miami Military Academy.
“I’m going out now,” Harvey wrote. “I’m a nervous wreck and just can’t continue.”
The
Bluebelle
was never mentioned. Investigators found a pile of unpaid bills and dunning letters among Harvey’s papers, along with the insurance policy on Mary Dene’s life, but no more solid answers about the
Bluebelle
. Whatever secrets Harvey kept were as lost as the
Bluebelle
itself.
Except that now there was another survivor and one more story to be told.
SOLE SURVIVOR
For three cold nights and blistering days, Terry Jo floated. She didn’t sleep at all the night of the killing, afraid she’d bump into Captain Harvey somewhere in the dark. She forced herself to stay awake until dawn, keeping quiet and small.
She was adrift in the Northwest Providence Channel, a 1-mile (1.6 kilometer) deep underwater canyon threaded among the islands and dumping into the Gulf Stream between the Bahamas and Florida. If she wasn’t found, her raft would be carried north and east, farther out to sea, deeper into the North Atlantic. The likelihood of her delicate raft surviving Atlantic seas was as infinitesimal as a little girl on a great ocean.
Her first morning adrift was sunny. Parrot fish nibbled at her buttocks and legs through the float’s rope mesh, which was slowly disintegrating after years of being exposed to sun and saltwater. So she tried to balance as much as she could on the edges of the canvas-covered ring itself to keep from breaking through the ropes entirely.
When she saw distant islands on the horizon, she paddled with her little hands toward them.
That’s where my dad is
, she thought. She imagined finding him and drinking wine, which she had never tasted, but because her parents drank it, it must be a comforting thing. But wind and currents made it difficult, and she drifted farther, not closer.
Sleep was difficult and erratic. Terry Jo could
see ships’ distant lights at night, but she had
neither enough strength nor hope to try to
Paddle toward them in the dark.
That night she slept for the first time. She dreamed of an airfield with blue lights, and as she ran toward it, she realized she had abandoned her life ring and was flailing about in the dark water. She feared sleeping after that and prayed for the morning to hurry.
When daylight finally came, the sky was overcast, and the water was rough. Ships and planes passed close, but they never saw her. She saw what she thought were sharks nearby, and she was barely able to cling to her fragile little raft as wave after wave crashed against her.
Sleep was difficult and erratic. She could see ships’ distant lights at night, but she had neither enough strength nor hope to try to Paddle toward them in the dark. And when she fell asleep, she dreamed of crashing into rocks or falling off her float into shark-infested water.
By the third morning, her salty skin was badly burned by the sun, which blinded her as it reflected off the surface of the sea. Her legs were cramping, and she felt as if every part of her was on fire. She hadn’t eaten or drunk any fluid since
before the
Bluebelle
disappeared, and her tongue and throat were drying out, her saliva thickening. Great clusters of sargassum floated all around her, but the idea of putting the salty weeds and their berries in her mouth sickened her.