Delivered from Evil: True Stories of Ordinary People Who Faced Monstrous Mass Killers and Survived (41 page)

The sea grew more dangerous, too. Winds picked up, and whitecaps crashed over the float. It was everything she could do to balance herself on it and not be thrown into the deep. She felt feverish and weak, but she clung to the ring with everything she had left.

Terry Jo had been adrift for eighty hours when the Coast Guard cut its search-and-rescue operations back. The chance of finding survivors was too slim to justify the costs of the planes and ships they had been sending out since Julian Harvey was found.

They were wrong.

A sailor aboard a Greek freighter, the
Captain Theo
, bound for Houston saw a white raft bobbing in the channel, a mile (1.6 kilometers) out. It had been all but invisible among the whitecaps. And the girl sitting in it, her legs dangling over the side, wore a white blouse. If he hadn’t been looking directly at the raft, he might have missed it in the endless camouflage of white waves.

The crew of the
Captain Theo
plucked the dazed little girl from the sea. They carried her up a rope ladder to the deck and asked who she was and what had happened. She could muster only a hand sign—a thumb’s down—before she fell unconscious.

When Terry Jo regained her wits thirty minutes later, she answered only a few crucial questions before lapsing into a deep sleep. The
Captain Theo
quickly telegraphed the Coast Guard in Miami:

“
Picked up blonde girl, brown eyes, from small white raft, suffering exposure and shock. Name Terry Jo Duperrault. Was on
Bluebelle.”

A Coast Guard helicopter was immediately dispatched to the
Captain Theo
to bring Terry Jo to Miami’s Mercy Hospital, where a throng of reporters waited for their first glimpse of the “sea waif.”

She was comatose. Her skin was badly burned and her delicate lips had swollen and split open, but those were the least of her problems. She had survived about as long as any human could go without water, and the dehydration had damaged her kidneys. Her heart was beating erratically and could barely push her thickened blood through her little body.

Her doctor said one more day adrift would certainly have killed her.

If she had been exposed to the broiling sun for the entire time—nearly four days—she would likely have died, her doctors said. Periods of overcast skies and rain may have delayed her death long enough for the
Captain Theo
to find her.

Intravenous lines were replenishing Terry Jo’s lost fluids and electrolytes, but her body temperature was too high and her heartbeat too weak. Her doctor feared she might suffer a heart attack, massive organ failure, or pneumonia. Only time would tell.

In the meantime, police guards were posted outside her hospital room. Too many unanswered questions swirled around Julian Harvey’s accounts to leave the only other
Bluebelle
witness unprotected.

Terry Jo emerged from her coma on the second day in the hospital but remained in critical condition. She couldn’t speak, but she ate a little, and her vital signs were improving.

The world was waiting to hear from Terry Jo, but her doctor wouldn’t let her speak to anyone—nor anyone speak to her. Her physical state was too precarious to endure the news that her entire family was likely murdered and that Captain Harvey had survived the sinking, and that he had just been found dead a few hours before in a gory suicide.

But she knew. Even before anyone told her the gruesome details, Terry Jo sensed she was alone in the world. She began to fret about how she would get home to Wisconsin on her own, how she would live without a family or money, and how she could possibly pay for her hospital care.

When someone finally told her that Rene’s body had been found, Terry Jo did the macabre math. She’d seen her mother and brother dead on the
Bluebelle
, so only her father was unaccounted for. She began to imagine all the scenarios in which her father might have survived, swam to a nearby island, and was waiting to be rescued, too. It obsessed her because now more than ever, she needed her father.

By her third day in the hospital, letters and gifts began trickling in from a world that had been touched by the rescue of “brave little Terry Jo.” Headlines began to call her the “sea waif” and “sea orphan.” The crew of the
Captain Theo
sent a life-sized doll—much like one she had lost when the
Bluebelle
sank. Others sent money and offers to adopt her. One day, a rosary from Pope John arrived.

DARK DETAILS

On the same day Harvey’s corpse was found, Coast Guard investigators Murdock and Barber were allowed to interview Terry Jo.

Speaking with a calm detachment into a tape recorder, she recounted everything she had seen and heard that night—the stomping, her brother’s cries, her mother’s bloodied body, the permeating smell of diesel, Captain Harvey with the rifle, the rising water, Harvey jumping overboard, her scramble for the cork float—the dark silence.

“Terry Jo, did you see a broken mast or fallen sails?” Captain Barber asked.

“The main sail was all wrinkled and going all over, and the mast was leaning,” she said. “I wasn’t sure if the mizzen was up, but I think it was.”

“You mean that the masts were up but the sails were all slack, is that correct?”

“The masts were up, yes.”

“You didn’t see any damage or broken part on the mast, did you?”

“No.”

In a word, a little girl had unwittingly shot down Harvey’s wild story about a snapped mast and a tangle of wires. And she wasn’t finished.

“You say you saw nobody on deck except the captain, but you saw the blood,” Barber said. “Could you have seen others if they had been there?”

“I suppose I could, because there was a lot of light,” Terry said. “It was coming from lights on top of the sail.”

A light at the top of the main mast was always burning at night, and a pair of lower floodlights would have illuminated the deck. Barber and Murdock knew immediately that if the main mast had really collapsed, there would have been no lights.

“Did you see any fire at any time?” Barber continued.

“No, but I smelled oil.”

THE SEA HAS ALWAYS INSPIRED A SWEET MELANCHOLY FOR TERE DUPERRAULT FASSBENDER, WHO BARELY SURVIVED FOUR DAYS ADRIFT AFTER HER FAMILY WAS MASSACRED ON A CHARTERED YACHT NEAR THE BAHAMAS IN 1961.
Ron Franscell

“But you did not see any fire at any time, is that correct?”

“That’s correct.”

“And you did not smell any smoke? You recognize the smell of smoke and fire, don’t you? You did not smell anything like a fire?”

“No.”

Terry Jo had no idea that the story she was telling differed significantly from Harvey’s. The interviews continued over the next several days, and Barber and Murdock became more convinced that they were dealing not with a tragic accident at sea, but with a mass murder.

Terry Jo remained in the hospital for two weeks. During that time, she learned that her family was lost, that Harvey had survived and told a vastly different tale, and that Rene had been buried in Green Bay, alone.

The newspapers reported that Harvey, according to his last wishes, was buried at sea in a red velvet shroud because he wanted to be with his dead wife. Dark details of his enigmatic life began to surface, including the numerous boat disasters and the suspicious 1949 car accident that killed his third wife and mother-in-law.

A few months after Terry Jo’s rescue, the Coast Guard issued its three- hundred-page official report on the
Bluebelle
sinking. Its conclusion: A destitute Harvey had likely killed his wife and most of the Duperrault family before scuttling the
Bluebelle
to collect $40,000 on his wife’s double-indemnity life insurance policy. The report said the boat might lie as deep as 780 fathoms—almost a mile deep—making salvage operations available in 1962 nearly impossible and leaving many forensic questions unanswered.

The report also suggested a literal sea change that was soon adopted: All boats’ life-saving equipment should be colored bright orange to make them easier for rescuers to see.

Ironically, when Barber and Murdock finally told Terry Jo that Harvey had killed himself, she felt bad for the man. She hadn’t seen him hurt anyone, so for many years she didn’t see him for the monster he was.

But none of her feelings ran deep. Terry Jo floated along the surface of her emotions as she had floated at sea, overexposed and barely clinging only to the things that would save her life.

At eleven, one life had ended, and another one began.

She never got angry, never grieved.

And she never cried.

HEALING

Terry Jo went home to Green Bay to live with an aunt and uncle who shielded her from any reminders of the tragedy. She existed within a kind of protective bubble, where nobody was allowed to talk about “the accident.” No sadness, grief, or anger was tolerated, as if it were a sign of weakness.

Once, while attending a funeral, Terry Jo began to cry uncontrollably. She fled to a restroom where she could weep privately, but a relative came in and snapped, “Terry Jo, that’s enough.”

Her aunt and uncle deflected any intrusions that might conjure grief. Reporters often asked to talk to her, but they were always refused, except for one photo shoot in which nobody was allowed to speak, only snap pictures of a happy Terry Jo at play.

Depression crept up on her. She saved clippings from the letters strangers sent and read them when she could be alone. At parties, she heard other children complaining about their mothers and fathers, and she wished so badly she could say the words
mother
and
father
.

Only a couple of years after her rescue, “brave little Terry Jo” began calling herself “Tere” (pronounced the same as “Terry”) in hopes of becoming somebody other than the child who must always portray a happy face to the world. As Tere, she could cry if she wanted to cry, and nobody would care.

Using money from her parents’ life insurance and a $50,000 settlement from
Bluebelle
owner Harold Pegg, Tere enrolled herself in a swanky, all-girl private school in Illinois. When it became too lonesome, she went home and suffered a nervous breakdown.

She became obsessed with the notion that her father was still out there someplace. Maybe he had hit his head and lost his memory. Maybe he was stranded on a deserted island. Maybe he was looking for her, too.

She grew up—though in many ways, she never stopped being 11-year-old Terry Jo. After high school, she enrolled at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, spent a summer session alone in Spain, and then abruptly dropped out.

Tere became a rootless vagabond. She followed a ski-bum boyfriend to Colorado for a year. She tried a little more college but quit. She first married in 1971 and had a daughter, Brooke. After divorcing, she and Brooke lived in a tent at Jungle Larry’s African Safari in Florida. She married again in 1976 and moved with her Army husband to West Berlin, where she had two more children, Blaire and Brian—named after her dead brother.

That marriage, too, dissolved. So did a disastrous third.

In 1981, twenty years after the tragedy, Tere gave her first newspaper interview to the
Green Bay Press-Gazette
. She spoke candidly about how she never went back to the family home, how she desperately missed her father, how she retreated to her scrapbooks when she got too sad, and how she had lost a huge chunk of her childhood. She also pondered how her consuming fantasy about her father’s survival colored her search for a true companion.

Tere married again in 1995 to Ron Fassbender, whom she met while working for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources’ water management division. They moved to Kewaunee, Wisconsin, on the shore of Lake
Michigan—ironically, just 30 miles (48 kilometers) from where, in 1927, the
Bluebelle
was the first yacht ever built by the Sturgeon Bay Boat Works.

In 1999, at the urging of a psychologist, Tere agreed to be injected with sodium amytal, a “truth serum,” in hopes of recalling more details about the
Bluebelle
tragedy. But she also wanted to know with more certainty if she had told the truth back in 1961, too.

“I never felt afraid to confront the possibility that there might have been something I didn’t remember because it was too terrible, but I knew I had already remembered some pretty terrible things,” she wrote in her 2010 memoir,
Alone
. “When the psychiatrist decided that I hadn’t repressed anything, and assured me that I had told the truth, I felt a new level of peace in my life, another step in healing.”

But Tere has never stopped believing her beloved father is still alive, just lost. Her head, her family, and her lawyer have all told her it is impossible and that she should move on. But somewhere deep down in the heart of her heart, she has always hoped she will see him again.

Despite the ordeal that has defined her, Tere is drawn to the water. The sound of waves and the smell of the salty breeze take her back to happier times. And even in her late fifties, she holds out the faint possibility that she might look up one day and see her father walking down the beach toward her.