Tale of a Man's Disappearance at Sea

Man Overboard, subtitled Inside the Honeymoon Cruise Murder, by Joan Lownds, is the tragic story of two local newlyweds whose wedding trip was a cruise into the eastern Mediterranean.

Many will recall at least the broad outlines of the story. A handsome young Greenwich High alumnus and football player George Smith IV, grew up in Glenville as a real home-town boy. George I had pitched for the Dodgers around 1917 and returned to teach math at Greenwich High. George II was a local dentist noted for giving care to people who couldn’t afford it. George III and his English-born wife Maureen owned Cos Cob Liquor Store on the Post Road, which George IV – who had a business degree from Babson – expected some day to run because he liked people and desk work as a computer guy bored him.

To be sure, Ms. Lownds feels the necessity to include the usual huff and puff about our town, “a privileged enclave on Fairfield County’s gold coast,” whose eponymous “Avenue gleams with tony stores” where women shop “dressed in fur coats.” So when George IV met beautiful Jennifer Hagel, a cop’s daughter who lived near the Berlin Turnpike, he “tried to bridge the gap between his wealthy, sheltered Greenwich world and blue collar Cromwell.” A kid from Glenville who aspired to manage a small liquor store from a “wealthy, sheltered … world” seems a bit of a gee-whiz stretch to me.

Anyhow, romance blossomed. In 2005, they married in Newport, RI at the hotel where they met, and headed off for a romantic dream cruise aboard the Bahamian-registered Brilliance of the Seas, one of those typical huge, in my opinion ugly, purpose-built cruise vessels. Ugly or not, it belonged to Royal Caribbean. So far, so ordinary. But on the night of July 4-5, the handsome, 26-year-old George IV disappeared.

It seems to have been a rough cruise in various respects, though not nearly as rough as the night George IV vanished. It appeared that the newlyweds had fallen in with a rough crowd on the ship, four Russians from Los Angeles. The snapshots show George and Jennifer rather less cuddly as the voyage progressed, and the night he disappeared, the couple and their noisy pals were gambling and drinking heavily. Jennifer was apparently flirty with some other guys, and when hubby remonstrated, there are reports (denied by her) that she kneed him in the groin. A little after 4 AM the passenger in the next cabin, the Deputy Chief of Police of Redlands, CA, heard a loud ruction among three or four males, followed by sounds of moving furniture and a big thud. It is fairly reliably reported that the crew found Jennifer drunken almost to the point of insensibility lying in a corridor, and brought her back to her empty room in a wheelchair. But no George IV, then or when she woke up and showed up for a 10 am massage appointment around 8:30.

There was blood in the room, blood outside the cabin door, and blood on the rail. The ship docked in the Turkish port of Kusadasi. Most of the passengers headed for a tour of Ephesus, and the Turkish cops, besides hinting that Jennifer might have shoved her husband overboard, made a desultory and incompetent investigation of an incident they rightly concluded had little to do with Turkey.  At this point peoples’ stories diverge. Jennifer claimed she was dumped ashore with some chintzy Carnival Cruise Line clothes and abandoned. The line said they were nice to her. Jennifer said she asked to call the Smiths back in Glenville but was refused. The line denied this too.

Ms. Lownds did her homework on the sorry tale of what happens when a corporation goes into full “risk management mode,” which can even involve a vigorous counter-attack; in another case which came to light thanks to the Smiths refusal to be fobbed off, the parents of a 12-year-old girl raped on a “Carnival” ship, were told that “if we didn’t settle they would send a team of attorneys to our small California town, secure a yearbook from the high school, and start interviewing each student in the hope of digging up any dirt on Jamie.”  (As some great philosopher once said, it’s 99% of the lawyers who give the other 1% a bad name!)  The Smiths’ campaign for transparency and accountability brought forth other cases of rapes and disappearances fobbed off as ‘suicides’ on scant evidence.

Space does not permit a full review of the back and forth, the schism between Jennifer, who is in some places portrayed as a pretty cold cookie, and the Smiths whom Ms. Lounds clearly admires. She also admires former US Rep. Chris Shays (R-CT) for taking on the cruise lines, which by clever foreign incorporation and registering ships in jurisdictions where regulation is a joke, generally contrived to avoid serious investigations of mishaps.

It’s an interesting story, especially for people in Greenwich since it involves a hometown victim.

Editor's note: This story was amended on Oct. 24 to reflect the correct ownership of the cruise ship.