The Terrible saga of the Bluebelle

2020-05-21

Text usIt began with a man in a boat and a little girl in a raft. On November 13, 1961, the tanker Gulf Lion was plying the waters of the Northwest Providence Channel in the Bahamas when it crossed paths with a small dinghy towing a life raft. The man in the dinghy shouted up to an officer on the tanker, identifying himself as Julian Harvey, captain of the ketch Bluebelle. The little girl in the raft, he said, was Terry Jo Duperrault, and she was dead.Harvey, a handsome war hero and charter boat...

Text us

It began with a man in a boat and a little girl in a raft. On November 13, 1961, the tanker Gulf Lion was plying the waters of the Northwest Providence Channel in the Bahamas when it crossed paths with a small dinghy towing a life raft. The man in the dinghy shouted up to an officer on the tanker, identifying himself as Julian Harvey, captain of the ketch Bluebelle. The little girl in the raft, he said, was Terry Jo Duperrault, and she was dead.

Harvey, a handsome war hero and charter boat captain, was hauled aboard the tanker, where he told his harrowing tale. He'd been taking the Duperrault family of Green Bay, Wisconsin, back to Florida after a week-long cruise through the Bahamas on the Bluebelle when a squall struck in the middle of the previous night. It damaged the yacht's mainmast so badly the post plunged straight through the cabin and hull of the boat, taking another mast with it and rupturing gas lines in the engine room, which caused a fire to break out. Harvey said his passengers—the five-member Duperrault family and his own wife, Mary Dene—were either caught in the felled rigging or jumped overboard as the Bluebelle went down.

It was the same story he'd tell Coast Guard investigators three days later in even greater detail; he described emptying two fire extinguishers onto the flames with little effect and, once in the dinghy, how he shouted over and over into the squall, trying to locate the other passengers. When he did spot little Terry Jo, she was floating face down in the water in her life jacket, already dead.

It was a horrific tale, to be sure. There was just one problem: At the very moment Harvey was telling his story to the crew of the Gulf Lion, the real Terry Jo was clinging to a small life raft several miles away, slowly withering under a murderous tropical sun.

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