Julian Harvey: The Bluebelle

Arthur Duperrault, a 40-year-old optometrist from Green Bay, Wisconsin, chartered the 60-foot ketch Bluebelle out of Fort Lauderdale in November 1961 for a week in the Bahamas. With him were his wife Jean, 38, and their children Brian, 14, Terry Jo, 11, and René, 7. The skipper was Julian Harvey, 44, a decorated former Air Force pilot, whose new wife, Mary Dene, cooked.

On the night of November 12, homeward bound from Great Abaco, Terry Jo woke to screams and found her mother and brother lying in blood below deck. Harvey ordered her back to her cabin, let the sea into the hull and left in the dinghy. Rescued by a tanker the next day with René’s drowned body, he blamed a squall, a fallen mast and a fire. On November 16 a Greek freighter spotted Terry Jo alive on a small cork float in the Northwest Providence Channel.

Told she had survived, Harvey checked into a Miami motel under a false name and killed himself on November 17. Terry Jo’s account took his story apart. In April 1962 a Coast Guard board ruled that Harvey had killed his wife and three members of the Duperrault family before scuttling the boat, and would have been prosecuted had he lived. Investigators pointed to a double-indemnity policy he had recently bought on Mary Dene. None of the four bodies was recovered.