When someone vanishes from a cruise ship, one of the first things that happens to their family members is they receive a call from an Arizona man named Kendall Carver. “When you become a victim, you think you’re the only person in the world,” Carver told me on the phone. “Well, the Coriams found out they aren’t alone. Almost every two weeks someone goes overboard.”
Carver says the numbers have reached epidemic proportions and nobody realizes it because it’s in the industry’s power to hush it up. He lost his own daughter, Merrian, back in August 2004, from the Celebrity Mercury. Even though the cabin steward reported her missing on day two, Carver said, no alarm was ever raised. “He reported her missing daily and they told him to forget it.”
So the chocolates piled up on her pillow. When the Mercury docked in Vancouver—as Carver later testified at a U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing—nobody from the ship said anything: not to the police, the FBI, nobody. They just quietly placed Merrian’s belongings in storage, then gave them to charity. “If we hadn’t eventually traced her to that ship, she would have vanished,” he said.
At the time, Celebrity Cruises issued a statement saying, “Regrettably, there is very little a cruise line, a resort or a hotel can do to prevent someone from committing suicide.” But as Carver points out, the case is still open. Later the company added, “There is probably nothing we or any company could do that would make the parents feel the company had acted sensitively enough.”
Now Carver leads a lobby group called International Cruise Victims. Over the phone, he told me theories of murder, negligence, and cover-ups. Sometimes he sounded angry and xenophobic; at other times he was compelling.
“Think of where those cruise workers are from,” he said. “They’re low-paid, from Third World countries, on those ships for nine months at a time. The sexual crime rate is fifty percent higher than in the average American city.”
It’s true that passengers on just one ship—the Carnival Valor—reported nine sexual assaults to the FBI in less than one year. “You’re on a ship,” Carver said. “There’s no police. Once you leave the port, you’re in international waters. Who do you think is attracted to working on those ships?”
“Do you think your daughter was murdered?”
“The answer’s yes,” he said. “That’s the story among the crew.” He paused. “Put murder to one side. Just think about the drinking. Royal Caribbean has just started a policy of unlimited drinks for one price. Celebrity is doing it.”
I don’t think drunkenness is an issue on the Disney Wonder. You’d have to drink a frozen piña colada the size of a glacier to get drunk, such are the measly measures they serve here.
“There’s a man in Ireland had a fifteen-year-old daughter,” Carver said. “One cruise served her eight drinks in an hour. She went to the balcony and threw up and went overboard. She was gone.”
He’s talking about Lynsey O’Brien, who went missing on January 5, 2006, while on a cruise with her family off the Mexican coast. The cruise liner, Costa Magica, conducted its own investigation into her disappearance and decided there was “no evidence of an accidental fall,” that Lynsey had shown the bartender ID stating that she was twenty-three years old, and that her death was caused by “underage drinking.” While they “continued to extend their deepest sympathy” to the family, they claimed their report cleared them of any wrongdoing.
“In other corporations, police get involved,” Carver said. “On cruise ships they have, quote, security officers, but they work for the cruise lines. They aren’t going to do anything when the lines get sued. We came to the conclusion cover-up is the standard operating procedure.” He paused. “And the Coriam girl. Where is the CCTV footage?”
According to articles published at the time of Rebecca’s disappearance, in the Los Angeles Times and Cruise Law News, Disney claims to have no footage of Rebecca going overboard. They refuse to “disclose the number of CCTV cameras or their locations for security reasons.”
“If there’s a video that shows your daughter going overboard,” Carver said, “that’s the end of the story. There’s no way someone can go off a ship and it not be recorded.”
At 7:00 a.m. on Tuesday morning, I stand on deck 4 as we pass the stretch of ocean where Rebecca went missing. A school of dolphins leap into the air, doing backflips. Passengers around me gasp. A young crew member from Ireland passes and I ask her about life in the crew cabins. “It’s like being inside Harry Potter’s closet,” she replies.
She means it’s magical, but tiny and dark. Their cabins are windowless, below sea level, like steel boxes. Crew members are contracted to work seven days a week for four-, six-, or eight-month stretches (according to how high up the ladder they are) before being allowed a few months off. At 10:00 p.m. one night, I see some women from Rebecca’s department, Youth Activities, playing with kids on the stairs. It seems they’re on duty as long as there are kids who need entertaining. A former member of staff, Kim Button, has written a blog about life on the Wonder: “I don’t think it’s possible to imagine how tiny a crew room is without actually seeing it! Seriously, your mind can’t even fathom such things. We had staff meetings at 2am, the only time when one of us wasn’t working, so even if your work day ended at 10pm, you couldn’t get much sleep because you had to be in a meeting at 2am. . . . The crew pool is literally one of the few places where crew members can just hang out and be themselves, without fear of acting improperly in front of guests.”
Even though life on board is, for a guest, assiduously magical, with constant Broadway-style high-budget shows, bingo, origami and acupuncture classes, films under the stars, and shore excursions to snorkel with tropical fish and ride horses through Mexican rain forests, from time to time I detect tiny flashes of cabin fever. I watch a children’s entertainer try out a move in which he throws a stuffed pelican to his assistant. It accidentally hits her in the face. “You’re supposed to catch the pelican!” he snaps.
“My boss,” she mutters, looking embarrassed.
On a shore excursion, a Mexican crew member asks some passengers to stand in a straight line, two by two, while we wait for the bus. Every passenger feels the need to say something facetiously passive-aggressive in response.
“Oh, a straight line!” one says.
“Can it not be a little crooked?” says another.
And so on, practically all the way down the line. The crew member looks upset and embarrassed.
I’ve decided the only place Rebecca could have fallen from is the deck 4 jogging track. The railings everywhere else are just too high. She was a keep-fit fanatic. My theory is that after the 5:45 a.m. phone call, she went for a jog and slipped. So I’m surprised to spot four CCTV cameras on deck 4—two on the port side, two on the starboard—evidently capturing every inch of the deck. They’re hard to see at first, as they’re shaped like long tubes and look like some kind of nautical equipment.
A man in yellow overalls is varnishing a railing. I glance inside the atrium. There’s a big Cinderella party going on. Someone is singing a song about how we have to have “faith, trust, and pixie dust.” There’s a crew party going on somewhere too—I hear screeching and laughter from behind a steel door. It sounds very different from the guest parties, like a pressure cooker letting off steam.
I sidle up to the man doing the varnishing. “That girl who went missing back in March,” I say. “She must have fallen from this deck?”
He looks surprised: “No, she went from deck 5.”
“But there’s no outside space on deck 5,” I say.
“Go to deck 10, walk to the front of the ship, and look down,” he says. “You’ll see the crew swimming pool. That’s where she went from. The starboard side.”