A newlywed couple boarded a Mediterranean cruise for their honeymoon. Five days later, a teenager photographed blood splattered across a lifeboat canopy, and the groom was gone. His bride says she blacked out. Four men were the last to see him alive. What happened to George Smith puzzled his family for years until they finally started pulling at the threads.
TW: Mention of SA
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SOURCES
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2007/jan/18/cruises.g2.crime
https://thehustle.co/the-economics-of-cruise-ships
https://www.royalcaribbean.com/cruise-ships/brilliance-of-the-seas/things-to-do
https://www.nbcnews.com/video/who-was-george-smith-44585539705
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LNgE4vtk0g&t=13s
https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/timeline-the-disappearance-of-george-smith/20/
https://www.ibolaw.com/images/Murder-at-Sea-CBS-News.pdf
https://boards.cruisecritic.com/topic/256784-george-smith-update/
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/73577531/george_allen-smith
https://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/tragedy-at-sea/all
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/murder-at-sea-the-case-of-missing-honeymooner-george-smith/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fbi-closes-probe-into-vanished-cruise-ship-honeymooner/
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna9356611
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q29f8k7KYTw
https://charleyproject.org/case/annette-marie-mizener
https://abcnews.com/US/vanished-sea-baffling-cruise-ship-missing-persons-cases/story?id=15380865
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/jsonline/name/annette-mizener-obituary?id=3099954
https://websleuths.com/threads/mexico-annette-mizener-37-4-dec-2004-missing-on-cruise.17292/
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2007/jan/18/cruises.g2.crime
https://abcnews.com/Primetime/story?id=1542501
TRANSCRIPT
Someone once told me the bigger the cruise ship you’re on, the bigger the morgue is on board.
It’s a grim reminder that sometimes, not everyone who gets on the cruise ship gets of
And that is at the center of todays story. A pair of newlyweds that got on their honeymoon cruise together. But only one got off, and the fate of the other is a mystery even to this day.
But someone knows what happened, and I think if you listen to the whole episode, you might have a theory as to who that was
As always, I’m kaelyn, this is heart starts pounding, and if you’re a fan of cruise mysteries, mysterious disappearance, and even things like the true story behind urban legends, you’re in the right place, just like me, we both have a dark curiosity. I upload episodes every week so hit subscribe and join me here in the Rogue Detecting Society headquarters every wednesday
It was just after 7:30 in the morning on July 5th, 2005, and the Royal Carribean cruise line ship, the Brilliance of the Seas was easing into port in Kuşadası, koo-SHAH-dah-seh Turkey.
A sixteen-year-old passenger named Emilie Rausch stepped out onto her balcony to photograph the coastline coming into view. She lifted her camera. And that's when something a few decks below her caught her eye.
One of the ship's lifeboat canopies—the white metal awnings that keep the boats covered—wasn't white anymore. Stretched across it was a dark red stain. Parts of it had already dried in the morning sun. And smeared into it, near the edge, was what looked like a handprint.
She took a photo. Then she called security.
Turns out, she wasn't the only one. Other passengers had seen this horrible stain too, and the calls were stacking up. It looked like someone bled out on top of the canopy, they said, but the source of the blood, that is, the person the blood belonged to, was nowhere to be found.
this stain was directly below a row of cabin balconies—twelve of them, stacked up the side of the ship. So on the captain's orders, security started working out who was staying in each one.
That part was easy. Every passenger carried a Seapass card—Royal Caribbean's all-in-one room key that also tracked when you scanned on and off the ship. And by 7:30 in the morning, in a port town full of things to see, almost everyone in those twelve cabins had already gone ashore for the day.
Almost everyone.
The couple in cabin 9062 hadn't scanned off. They were A newlywed couple, six days into their honeymoon—George and Jennifer Smith. Security knocked, but there was No answer. So they let themselves in.
The room was a mess. Bed unmade, clothes everywhere—the room of two people on vacation. But George and Jennifer were nowhere to be found
So the crew started a quiet, ship-wide search, up and down the halls and through the ships electronic key card system for the couple without freaking out the other passengers. And they got a hit almost immediately, because Jennifer had made an 8:30 appointment for that morning. A couples massage.
When three security officers walked into the spa and found her, she was face-down on the table, mid-massage, completely relaxed. She had no idea anyone had been looking for her. And when they asked where her husband was, she seemed confused. She hadn't seen him since the night before.
And although he didn’t arrive for their couples massage. She didn't seem worried at all.
The security officers took her off the table and brought her to the ship's nurse, where the head of guest services broke the news as gently as he could: George was missing, and they thought he might have gone overboard. On top of that, it wasn't looking good. Even if they knew exactly where the ship had been when he went into the water—and they didn't—the currents could have carried him miles by morning. The odds of finding him alive were basically zero.
Jennifer had only been married to this man for 10 days, and now she was being told that he was most likely dead.
The couple had met a few summers earlier in Newport, Rhode Island, where George was renting a beach house with friends. One of the other renters had a sister—Jennifer—and the second George met her, that was it. His own sister later described him as a serial monogamist, but said this was different, that he got serious fast. Jennifer moved in not long after they started dating. They had a whole Monday-night routine, because George had Mondays off, and he'd grill Chilean sea bass for her—out on the grill in the snow if he had to. Eventually he gave up a tech job to move home to Greenwich, Connecticut and help run his dad's liquor store. Jennifer came with him. Soon he proposed. And the two of them planned the kind of big, cliffside, fairy-tale wedding you dream about.
The wedding was June 25th. Ten days later, George was gone, and Jennifer was standing in a nurse's office in a swimsuit cover-up trying to understand what she was being told.
Now, they needed to know more about how George could have possibly gone over the side of the ship, so they asked her, what happened last night?
Well, she didn’t remember, she told them. She knew they'd gone to the casino. After that, it got hazy—and then it just stopped. A blank wall. She knew She'd gotten back to the room a little before 5 AM and passed out, but she couldn't remember how she got there. She did know, though, that George wasn't in the bed. But she said that wasn't necessarily alarming to her, because they'd had a fight the night before, and she figured he'd crashed in a new friend's cabin and would turn up at the spa.
The authorities could not believe what they were hearing. Your husband of ten days is missing. There's blood on the side of the ship. And your story is: we were fighting, I don't remember anything, and so I went to my massage.
Jennifer sat in the nurses station waiting for someone to come get her, when all of a sudden the captain came in. He sat down next to her and told her that he thought he knew what happened.
He said he'd looked at the balcony himself and thought he could make out a mark in the morning dew on the railing—like George had been sitting up on it. His guess was that George climbed up there, maybe to smoke, a wave rocked the ship, and he went over.
So the captain made a call. The ship needed to keep moving. There were thousands of people who needed to keep their vacation plans scheduled, so they’d be off without investigating much more. I mean, why would they have to, it seemed like he fell off.
But he didn’t know that back in the room, investigators were taking a closer look. And that’s when they saw something that the crew had missed earlier….
On the bed sheets, so small you might miss them were two streaks of blood. They were each about two centimeters long, sitting right next to each other, almost like the number eleven. This wasn’t much. Nowhere near the amount on the canopy below. But it was blood, in the newlyweds' bed, that nobody could explain.
That didn’t seem tomatter though. The captain had already decided they needed to keep to schedule, so Turkish police took Jennifer ashore for questioning, while the ship got ready to depart. then she was taken to a hospital for a physical exam—in what she described as a rougher part of town, where, she said, a male officer looked her over with no female officer present.
By the time she got back to the dock, her and George's luggage was already sitting there waiting for her, hastily packed, George's tennis shoes poking out of a bag. Which meant that someone had gone into their room and cleaned it already. The Brilliance of the Seas sailed off that evening without her, and Jennifer was left in a port city where she didn't speak the language, waiting on her father to help book a flight home.
But then, when she arrived back home. Jennifer did something no one was expecting. She went completely quiet… George’s family expected her to reach out to them and talk about what happened, grieve with them. But no, nothing. She never called them.
And this was really confusing and upsetting for George’s family. But it also made them INCREDIBLY suspicious of Jennifer. Was there something she was trying to cover up? Is THAT why she wasn’t talking to them
So what was it?? Was what the captain said true, that George had gone out for a smoke and fallen off the railing, did his new bride have something to do with it?
Well, what they didn’t know was the investigation on the ship turned up much more than the family was told about. Specifically, information about where Jennifer was that night, and how what happened to George was likely no accident…..
The pages of the Royal Caribbean report painted a much clearer image of the trip George and Jennifer had taken leading up to his disappearance. Starting at the beginning of their journey.
June 29th, 2005, in Barcelona. George and Jennifer walked up the gangway of the Brilliance of the Seas for the first time. And this thing is a floating city. Thirteen decks. Nearly 850 crew. Restaurants, pools, a spa, a casino, a nightclub up top. The honeymoon off the front of the brochure.
And for the first few days, that's exactly what this twelve-day Mediterranean cruise was. and they fall into the rhythm of it fast—days off the ship exploring port towns, nights back on board with a rotating cast of other passengers they keep bumping into and befriending. They're tan and happy and toasting their good luck. By every account, the honeymoon was going beautifully.
But two things stuck out to the other passengers on this cruise.
The first is that George couldn't really hold his liquor, as evidenced by their second night at sea, when their own next-door neighbor filed a noise complaint about the honeymooners. George was incredibly drunk at the time.
The second thing was a group of young men on board. They were Russian and were also traveling on the ship with their families. and were quietly becoming the crew's problem child.There was Greg Rozenberg, eighteen. His cousin Zach. And their friend, Rusty Kofman. A few days in, they got written up for cursing out room service over the phone. On July 3rd, two days before George’s disappearance, they were caught drinking and smoking by the pool, and when an officer asked them to knock it off, one of them shouted back, "Nobody can stop me!" [VERIFY] It got bad enough that the ship pulled their parents aside and laid down an ultimatum—one more incident, and the whole group was getting off the boat at the next port.
And that leads us to the day before George disappeared. July 4th.
That day, the ship docked at the Greek island of Mykonos, and George and Jennifer had a beautiful day together. They wander the white-and-blue streets, they sightsee, they even grab a photo with the actress Tara Reid who happened to be travelling there as well. That afternoon they head back to the ship, have a romantic dinner, and toast their marriage while, somewhere below, the captain charts a course overnight for Turkey.
Around midnight, like just about every adult on the ship eventually does, the couple drift into the casino. Jennifer settles in at blackjack, George prefers craps, so for a couple of hours they gamble apart.
They weren’t ready to call it a night By the time the casino closed around 2:30, So George and Jennifer headed up to the deck-thirteen disco which was a revolving bar.
But now, there’s a group of guys with them who also don’t want the party to end. It included Josh Askin, a 20-year-old from Orange County they'd met days earlier on a shore excursion, and the three young Russian troublemakers, Greg, Zach, and Rusty.
And right around then, those same young men make one more room-service call—and this time, according to staff, they threaten to throw the operator overboard if their food doesn't come fast enough. Security gets involved, and the kitchen is told to stop taking their orders entirely.
The bartender remembered the whole group there around 3 AM—and remembered Greg buying a round of vodka shots, two of them for George and Jennifer. Josh has a bottle of absinthe he'd smuggled aboard, so they're drinking off the bar and off his bottle.
But then, just after 3am, something happens.
George looked over and saw Jennifer leaning on another man, the manager from the casino named Lloyd Botha. Now, George was pretty drunk at this point, and he called his new wife a "hussy." Now, even in the early 2000’s that was a weird and unserious thing to call someone, so there’s a chance that George was just joking. Jennifer though, who was also very drunk, does not take it well. She knees him, hard, tells him she's done, and walks out.
And according to Josh she leaves with the casino manager, a guy named Lloyd Botha
George stayed, and he kept drinking.
By about 3:45, George could barely stand. And the four men—Josh, Greg, Zach, and Rusty—walked him out of the disco and back toward his cabin, basically holding him upright. His Seapass opened the door of his room, 9062 at 3:52 AM. And as far as anyone has ever been able to prove, those four are the last people to see George Smith alive.
Now, By their own account, George had expected to find Jennifer in the room, still furious with him—and instead it was empty. Jennifer was still laying down in a hallway somewhere. So now he's drunk and worried about his wife, and he asks the guys to help him find her. They check the solarium, the hot-tub area up top, don't see her, and give up pretty quickly.
But it’s here where we get the one witness who changes everything…
See, the man in the cabin right next door was a Deputy Chief of Police from Redlands, California, named Clete Hyman. A guy who knew, professionally, that what he was hearing that night was not good.
This is Clete’s account of what happened after the men entered that room.
So Just after 4 AM, a commotion in 9062 wakes Clete up. Through the wall, he could hear Yelling, guys egging each other on, it sounded like a party (SFX yelling through wall). But Then it goes quiet for a few minutes. And just when he thought that maybe all of the men had gone to sleep, he heard arguing—out on the balcony this time, it was loud, and it wasn’t in english. Then somebody says "good night," in English. And The door opens.
Clete looks out into the hallway and watches a group of men walk toward the elevators. He counts them, 1, 2, 3, and then he checks his watch. 4:18 AM.
That’s Three men—when four had gone in with George. So that likely meant that someone was still in the room with George when the three walked out. But they were facing away from him so he couldn’t see who the men were.
But the cabin next to him still isn't quiet. Clete can hear someone moving around in there. He hears A man's voice. then a sound like furniture being dragged across the balcony.
And then—at 4:25 AM—one heavy thud. After that, nothing. Silence
A few hours after that, a teenage girl would step onto her balcony, lift her camera, and see that stain spreading across the lifeboat canopy.
Around noon on July 5th, almost 8 hours after the thud was heard, Turkish authorities boarded the ship and questioned the four men about what had happened that night. But the answer they gave really drove suspicion away from them.
They said that George was drunk and passed out on the bed, so they had taken off his shoes for him and left his cabin together, and gone back to one of their own rooms, and ordered a mountain of room service. They said they had a photo of the food, timestamped, to prove it.
They also told the story of the night before, how George’s wife had left with another man.
So, maybe authorities felt like they had their answer. George, who was known to not be able to hold his liquor, was drunk in his room after watching his wife leave with the casino manager. Maybe he was sad and threw himself off the balcony. Or maybe he went out for a cigarette and really just fell.
But what about what Clete had heard? And what about those two blood stains??
Well, the investigation was over for now it seemed. The men were released and those questions went unanswered. And George’s family just had to live with the not knowing.
That is, until years later, when someone finally started to pull on those loose threads.
Here's how they got pulled.
After George disappeared, Jennifer—as his wife and next of kin—settled a wrongful death claim with Royal Caribbean in 2006, for a little over a million dollars. George's family was furious with this. They were his heirs too, but they'd had no say in that settlement, and they thought she'd sold their son short and done it fast to avoid being deposed. So they hired their own attorney, a man named Mike Jones, and went after the cruise line themselves.
Now, Royal Caribbean and the FBI wouldn't hand Mike a thing at first, so for years he did it the hard way—subpoenaing witnesses, working off the public reporting, chasing those four men through their own lawyers. The interviews were maddening and basically went nowhere. When he finally got to Josh, he just plead the Fifth and wouldn’t tell him anything. The Russians weren't much better. But Mike kept pulling, and the more he learned about that night, the less it looked like a man falling off a balcony by accident, and the more it looked like something had been done to George.
the family's case finally settled in 2010, for $1.3 million, and sure, the money was part of the it, but there was something else they got in that settlement that they wanted more.
Royal Caribbean had to hand over its entire case file to the family. Keycard logs. Phone records. Room-service tickets. Security reports. Crime scene photos. Their own interviews with passengers and crew. It was massive—and it let Mike reconstruct that night minute by minute. And that’s when he learned some key pieces of information that changed everything.
Start with Josh, the 20 year old from Orange County. Remember, Josh had helped investigators piece together Jennifer’s night, the parts that she couldn’t remember. He’d insisted she'd left the disco with the casino manager, a South African guy named Lloyd Botha.
Except that had been a lie. Mike looked at the keycard logs and realized that was impossible. Lloyd Botha had swiped into his own girlfriend's cabin around 3:25 AM—before Jennifer had even left the disco. He was in for the night with someone else.
Jennifer had left the disco alone. Around 3:30.
A member of the cleaning crew actually watched her go—watched her stumble out so drunk she clipped her head on the wall, and got worried enough to ride the elevator down with her just to make sure she got off all right. And what this crew member saw actually helps us fill in some of the gaps that Jennifer didn’t remember.
See, Jennifer turned the wrong way down the hall. she never made it back to her cabin—she actually wandered lost around the halls until she dropped, and fell asleep in the middle of one of the hallways. A crew member would later find her and help her back to her room just before 5am.
That’s where she was when she had a flash of being in bed without George.
But Jennifer had left the disco by herself. George didn’t go with her.. The most she was guilty of that night was getting blackout drunk and kneeing her husband for calling her a hussy.
So Mike wondered why Josh invented a story he had to know wasn't true?
So then, he decided to look deeper into the men’s alibi - that room-service feast. Mike went looking for that order in the crew's records: the call logs, the kitchen's handwritten ticket book. The phone logs did show short calls placed from the cabin after about 4:13 AM. But the kitchen's records showed nothing delivered. And actually, the kitchen had been told SPECIFICALLY to not deliver to these men. Earlier that night they had called and threatened to throw one of the employees overboard if they got their order wrong. And at another point in the trip they had cussed out the staff taking the room service order.
So the men had called about 10 minutes before the thud was heard, but they hadn’t received a room service order.
When questioned, the men insisted they really had ordered a huge spread—tuna sandwiches, cheeseburgers, the works—and that the staff must have just forgotten to write it down.
And here's the other problem. The keycard logs show Zach and Rusty swiping into their cabins around 4:05, and Greg into his at 4:07—but Seapass doesn't record when a door opens from the inside, or when someone leaves. So those swipes don't actually prove anyone stayed put, or didn’t exit the room to go to George’s afterwards.
But then there was what Clete heard next door. The arguing between 4 and 4:18. The three men leaving. The dragging, the lone male voice, and the thud at 4:25.
And then there was Josh's own behavior after George disappeared, which the crew had documented. It turns out, At one point Josh asked a crew member whether there were cameras in the hallways. When the crew member said yes, Josh asked to be shown exactly where they were—and the crew member refused. A few days later, a cleaner overheard Josh in an elevator, talking to his girlfriend, saying things like, "Assholes almost got me arrested in Turkey," and, "I know more than they think I know." The way the cleaner told it, the girlfriend kissed him, mid-sentence, to shut him up.
So now the suspicion that had been parked on Jennifer for years swung, hard, onto the four men. But suspicious behavior isn't a motive, and it isn't a confession.
The case file was about to offer something that looked a lot like both.
Two days after George disappeared, while the ship was still at sea, an eighteen-year-old passenger went to the ship's nurse for a morning-after pill—and disclosed that she'd been sexually assaulted. She named men from that same group—Greg, his younger brother, and Rusty—and said Josh had been in the room but hadn't taken part. She said she'd been very drunk, that they'd taken her to their cabin instead of hers, and that the assault had been filmed.
The ship's lawyer called the FBI. The captain summoned the families of everyone involved to a meeting, and the men were confined to their cabins under guard and removed from the ship at the next port, in Naples—their families marched off as other passengers watched from the decks.
And here’s the part that makes me want to scream, Italian authorities apparently reviewed this tape and declined to bring charges. the tape was then sent to the FBI; and no charges were ever filed in the U.S. either.
But the tape had something else on it. Something that the men had filmed before the assault that turned George's "accident" into something else
Earlier that same day—hours after George had vanished—the men had filmed themselves at lunch. Laughing. Joking about George. On the recording, one of them says George had gone "parachute riding" off the balcony. And at the end, Greg looks into the camera, throws a hand sign, and says: "Told you I was gangsta."
To Mike, this was proof of what he felt like he already knew to be true. The men knew exactly what happened to George and had partaken in it. I mean it sounds like Greg is admitting to throwing him off the balcony.
And then, years later, Greg handed investigators a motive almost by accident.
By the time Mike Jones deposed the four men in 2010, three of them gave him almost nothing—two took the Fifth, one said over and over that he didn't remember anything, and the men who'd taken polygraphs during the investigation had failed them, but nothing ever came of those
But Greg….Greg talked. Greg talked a lot. He actually wouldn’t shut up. He was, by then, sitting in a Florida prison on a drug trafficking charge, and he was happy to talk smack about all of his former friends. I mean at one point he even called Josh a "spoiled, cry-baby type dude," and insisted that, no, he hadn't hurt George, but somebody had. "Dude did not kill himself," he said. "Somebody hurt the dude." His own polygraph had come back inconclusive, but he said it was because of his ADHD. and yes, I’m sure I have a bunch of ADHD listeners, ADHD gang rise, please don’t go committing crimes and then say that Kaelyn told you you could beat a polygraph, that’s not how it works guys…
But Greg denied the sexual assault to Mike, and Mike knew that was a lie, he knew the FBI had the tape, he knew it had changed hands and MULTIPLE agencies had watched the assault. And Mike knew that ADHD doesn’t make you a lying asshole so there was something else going on.
But then, Greg had a rare moment where he said something true, and it was something that made Mike’s blood run cold.
When Mike asked Greg how he'd ended up in prison, Greg said: "I'm fanatic with clothes, jewelry, watches—that's why I'm in here, man."
Watches.
The night George went overboard he was wearing a Breitling watch. The kind of thing that can run a few thousand dollars, or many times that. And here's the strange thing about Greg's read on George. In that same deposition, Greg kept calling George a "millionaire."
George wasn't a millionaire—his dad owned a liquor store. But you can see how the illusion got built. The guy's name was literally George Smith the Fourth, that’s the most millionaire name I’ve ever heard. He'd had a big Newport wedding, the same place where the Kennedy’s got married. He was wearing a Breitling watch, and he and Jennifer had been heard talking all week about the wedding-gift cash they were carrying to play at the casino. Jennifer was wearing her engagement and wedding rings. To a stranger sizing him up, this newlywed looked like money.
None of the jewelry was ever reported stolen, for what it's worth. But you don't have to successfully rob someone for a robbery to go wrong.
Which brings Mike Jones back to those two little streaks of blood on the sheets. His theory: the blood didn't come from a fight. It came from someone working a watch off George's wrist while he was passed out—the metal band's clasp nicking the skin. And so according to Mike the night probably went like this. Three men leave, like Clete saw. One stays behind to rob a drunk, unconscious man. George wakes up. There's a struggle. And a man too drunk to stand goes over the railing.
Now, I want to be clear that this is a theory. Nobody was ever charged. There's no confession, no body, no watch recovered. But it's the version that fits the blood in the bed, the missing fourth man, the alibi that falls apart the second you check it, and a guy who admitted he's obsessed with watches.
And that's where it stalls out. Forever.
In the days right after George vanished, there was at least a search. Because the ship was in the Aegean at the time, the Greek coast guard sent divers and helicopters out over the water looking for him. [VERIFY] After about four days, they called it off. They never found anything. No George, alive or otherwise. The sea just kept him.
The FBI investigated for nearly a decade and spent millions of dollars—by the family's count, the file ran to something like 97,000 pages. And in January of 2015, they closed the case. No charges. Not enough evidence to bring to anyone. George's sister Bree spoke for the family, and her question cut right to it: how do you put together 97,000 pages over almost ten years, only to land on the idea that maybe it was just an accident? 97000 pages is like 65 bibles!!!!
Because that's still the cruise line's version. The captain believed from the first morning that George had stepped out onto the balcony for a cigar and lost his footing, and as far as we know, he never changed his mind. George's family has never believed it for a second. They think their son was murdered, and that at least one person who knows exactly what happened simply chose not to say.
Jennifer, for her part, eventually moved on. She remarried a few years later, became a parent, and stayed out of the spotlight—she declined to take part when a true-crime show revisited the case. After everything, she just wanted out of the story. And I don’t blame her. She thought she was going to be spending her life with george and he was taken from her just a few days later, it’s devastating. George's family went the other direction: they've kept his case alive online for years, still pointing at both the Russian passengers and, at times, at Jennifer—never quite able to let go of the silence at the center of it.
And the one man who always seemed willing to talk can't anymore. On December 23rd, 2019—fourteen years after George disappeared—Greg Rozenberg was shot and killed in the driveway of his home in Davie, Florida. Police released surveillance footage of a vehicle fleeing the scene and called it a targeted hit. His murder, in almost an ironic twist of fate, is also unsolved.
No one has ever been charged with the death of George Smith, and there’s a lot of unanswered questions.
Who exactly was in the room with him that night, and was there someone in there when he fell overboard? Is there a chance this was just an unfortunate accident?
Well, here’s one detail that I keep coming back to. The bloodstain on the canopy—the thing that might have shown investigators what actually happened to George—got hosed off the side of the ship around 6 that evening, on the captain's orders, before the FBI ever set foot aboard. The stain was scaring passengers, and the ship had an image to uphold.
Then his room got cleaned. The ship sailed on schedule.
And once you understand how a cruise actually makes its money, that starts to look less like incompetence and more like incentive. Cruise lines run on thin margins on the tickets themselves—the real money is everything you buy once you're on board.A ship held in port for a death investigation is a ship full of thousands of paying passengers whose vacations are ruined, who want refunds, who'll miss their flights home. A murder is a catastrophe. An accident is paperwork. And out in international waters, with the FBI and a foreign government both technically in charge, it's easy enough for a problem to just... sail away.
George's case is part of why that's harder to do now. The outcry was loud enough that by the end of 2005, cruise executives were getting hauled in front of Congress to answer for how passenger disappearances were handled—Jennifer herself submitted a written statement about how she felt Royal Caribbean had treated her. That pressure helped push Congress to pass the Cruise Vessel Security and Safety Act in 2010, which finally required cruise lines to report disappearances and serious crimes to the FBI and the Coast Guard. The industry also signed onto a voluntary Cruise Passenger Bill of Rights. None of which brings George back. But it might mean the next family gets answers instead of a hosed-off deck.
But now I turn it over to you guys. Was this an unfortunate accident, or was someone responsible. And was the investigation that was done handled well? You can leave a comment wherever you listen
Until then, stay curious.
OOOoooOOOO