Rebecca Coriam: The Cruise Employee Who Vanished // DARK SUMMER VOL. 2
In 2011, a 24 year old woman vanished from a Disney Cruise that was heading back to LA. And what at first seemed like an open and shut “man overboard” case quickly started to seem like something much darker. Leaving us with the question, does Disney know more than they’re saying??
TW: Reference to Sexual Assault
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SOURCES
https://www.latimes.com/local/la-xpm-2011-jun-12-la-me-lost-at-sea-20110612-story.html
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/disney-settled-missing-cruise-worker-885398/
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-27816169
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Rebecca_Coriam
https://www.the-sun.com/news/13845726/mystery-missing-brit-disney-cruise-rebecca-coriam/
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/nov/11/rebecca-coriam-lost-at-sea
https://www.maritimeinjuryguide.org/blog/when-people-go-missing-on-cruise-ships/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Estonia
https://www.the-sun.com/news/13845726/mystery-missing-brit-disney-cruise-rebecca-coriam/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/27/rebecca-coriam-family-plea
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-manchester-34659505
https://www.latimes.com/local/la-xpm-2011-jun-12-la-me-lost-at-sea-20110612-story.html
https://disneycruise.disney.go.com/ships/wonder/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Wonder
https://www.undercovertourist.com/blog/disney-wonder/
https://internationalcruisevictims.org/stories/rebecca-coriam/
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/girlfriend-british-woman-who-vanished-11016694
https://www.bahamasb2b.com/news/2011/06/senior-cops-abusing-force-finances
TRANSCRIPT
In 2011, a 24 year old woman vanished from a Disney Cruise that was heading back to LA. And what at first seemed like an open and shut “man overboard” case quickly started to seem like something much darker. Leaving us with the question, does some know more than they’re saying??
If you’ve got a dark curiosity for things like mysterious disappearances, terrifying true urban legends, and dark history they wanted you to forget, make sure to subscribe to this channel, we upload once a week.
9am on March 22nd, 2011, a large cruise ship called the Disney Wonder plowed through the ocean waves off the coast of Mexico near the Baja California Peninsula.
It was supposed to be a normal, sunny day at sea—breakfast buffets, character sightings, families splashing around in the multiple pools on board. But that morning, below deck in the crew corridors, something was wrong.
A 24 year old ship employee named Rebecca Coriam hadn’t shown up for work that day, and no one could get a hold of her. Now, it was typical to see Rebecca first thing in the morning, big smile wearing her bright yellow employee polo. She was always on time, always in a good mood, she was a youth counselor on the ship after all. But that day she was nowhere to be found, and hadn’t alerted her team that she’d be absent.
one employee went down to her room in the crew quarters and knocked on the door… No answer. Another radioed her, thinking maybe she was somewhere else on the ship, but the line was completely silent.
So Her fellow employees started searching around the boat, careful to not make too much of a scene, they didn’t want families with young children to know they were searching the boat for a missing person. But the more they searched, the more scared they started to get. Because they were on a ship in the middle of the ocean, with no land in sight. People don’t just go missing on boats like this, unless…
And that’s when one of the employees looked out at the vast expanse of ocean on all sides of the boat, and they got a really bad feeling. But then they looked back at the ship,it was full of people, families, and crew members alike, and most importantly, it was covered in security cameras. If Rebecca was truly missing, someone knew what happened to her.
Welcome back to heart starts pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings and mysteries. I’m your captain on todays voyage, Kaelyn Moore.
As we dive further into deep summer here in the Rogue Detecting Society, I thought it was only fair to dig a little deeper into what I consider to be one of the most terrifying summer holidays one can take, Cruises.
So today, I want to tell you about one of the most unsettling disappearances to ever occur on a cruise ship, but also, why cruise ships are pretty much the worst place to go missing.
Before we dive In, I just wanted to give a shoutout to everyone who bought merch from our new drop, I’ve loved seeing you guys in your sweatshirts and Ts. If you’re a subscriber on Apple and Patreon, you’ll get 10% off your order, and if you’re a subscriber to the high council tier on patreon, you’ll get 20% off, which can basically pay for your membership.
And because i sit here in the rogue detecting society headquarters all day pouring through documents and research, I love reading all the messages you send to me. And this week, I got a message from our listener samantha that included a picture of the Annabelle the doll tattoo that she recently got, with the phrase, WORLD TOUR underneath. Very fitting considering the episode we just did on that very tour.
Alright, we have a big mystery to cover today and I want to get right back into it.
What started as a small scale search with a few crew members soon turned into a much larger operation. Entire sections of the ship were combed through: the crew gym, the mess hall, the deck five pool where off-duty workers liked to unwind. Rebecca was not any of those places, and there was no trace of her anywhere. Her uniform wasn’t in the laundry. Her room key hadn’t been used that day. She hadn’t even touched the breakfast that had been brought to her..
The ship had just departed the day before from Los Angeles and was now almost at it’s next destination: Cabo San Lucas in Mexico. so there wasn’t any way that she had gotten off the boat at a port. Her name hadn’t been logged for disembarking and her passport was in her room. And she had been seen the day before, the last sighting of her was 11pm by a friend, so she had definitely made it onto the ship.
Now, it’s important to note just HOW big this cruise ship Rebecca worked on is. the Disney Wonder consists of 11 decks, 875 guest cabins, and accommodates over 3,000 people. It’s an 83,000-ton cruise ship stretching nearly 1,000 feet from bow to stern. That’s about three football fields long.
The outside, in kind of a macabre way resembles the titanic. And The Inside is a labyrinth of theaters, dining halls, pools, spas, child play areas, crew quarters, and maintenance corridors, all connected by a complex maze of stairwells and restricted access zones. For guests, it’s a place of nonstop enchantment.
But for the people who work there, like Rebecca, the ship is something else entirely. Their world exists behind the scenes, in the liminal spaces of the ship: in tight, windowless cabins, down narrow back passageways, and in crew-only spaces like the mess hall, gym, and pool tucked away on Deck 5.
Rebecca had worked on this ship in some capacity since 2010, the year before her disappearance, when she was hired as a youth worker, she was a camp counselor of sorts. She was originally from Liverpool and had studied in this field while at Liverpool Hope University and had previous experience working at Camp America in the US before getting her job with Disney. As far as her parents could tell, Rebecca was enjoying the job and seemed to be in good spirits. The family had a close relationship and would talk every day.
And it seemed like everyone on the ship loved Rebecca, who was often called “Bex,” or sometimes Becky as her nametag read, A friend who calls herself “Melissa” described Rebecca as being “the most amazing little burst of energy. You were completely drawn to her. She loved life. Bouncing around all the time.”“Bex made hundreds of people happy. The passengers loved her. They all loved her.”
So crew members were devastated by the early afternoon, when they still had found no trace of her. And eventually, they had to tell the ship’s captain what was happening, and he made a formal announcement over the intercom. He told everyone on the ship that A young woman—one of their own—was missing. And the ship was now in lockdown mode.
BREAK 1
The Mexican Navy and US Coast Guard were called and told that a young woman had vanished from the cruise ship. And while they waited for them to arrive, the crew decided to do ANOTHER sweep of the boat for any clues. Maybe there was something they missed the first time?
Crew members spread out, some went back to Rebecca’s cabin, others went to the crew gym, and a few went back up to the staff pool on deck 5. And that’s when one of the crew members screamed that they had found something.
There, sitting by the crew pool was one, single women’s flip flop.
No one could really say how it stayed hidden during the initial search for her. If everyone was looking that carefully how did they completely miss this potentially helpful evidence?
This pool was an important part of the crew’s experience while on the ship. It was the one area where crew members could relax and hang out without being in view of the guests. The one place they could really let loose. What if Rebecca had been there right before she went missing? Leaving only a single flip flop as a small bread crumb as to what happened to her.
Because, based on where it was sitting, close to the railing, it looked like she could have gone overboard.
Music- “dark summer” mysterious pulsing synths
When a person goes over the side of a ship, especially a cruise, the crew implements a “man overboard” procedure. If you are a passenger on the ship when this happens you may hear “Oscar Oscar Oscar” (Let’s AI a scary intercom voice!) or “Code Oscar” blasted over the boat’s soundsystem. Another code used sometimes is “Mr. Mob”—MOB stands for “man overboard.” The entire ship will then turn around to attempt to go back to where the person would have landed in the water. There would be lights searching the water and also lit up emergency buoys thrown overboard. That’s only if the boat is able to turn around which depends on its size and the conditions of the water and waves.
When someone goes overboard off one of these huge boats, the chances of being found and rescued are pretty low. Some put the survival rate after a fall off a cruise ship at just 17%. And if it’s the middle of the night, I’ve seen estimates of around 1%. Since the year 2000, it’s estimated that 420 people have gone overboard from cruise ships, (most of them Carnival Cruises…) but none of these incidents were on a Disney cruise. I thought it was interesting When Rebecca went missing, no one had ever gone overboard on a Disney Wonder cruise, and no one has ever gone over after Rebecca vanished.
So it would be strange if that’s what had happened, and the crew honestly felt so too because they looked around at the crew pool, sure, it was on the fifth deck in the front of the ship, so the open ocean was just on the other side of a railing on three sides of the pool.
But maybe you’re picturing a railing like in the titanic movie, where Rose easily climbs over it, even in a floor length Edwardian dress. This was not that railing, this railing was much taller, about chest height for an average person. It was also just a wall of steel and was about as wide as it was tall. Meaning you’d have to reach pretty far over the railing to touch the outside of the boat. It wasn’t really a place where you would slip and fall over the side.
But still, the Coast Guard and Navy had to check the water. But there was no clear location in the water for searchers to look for her because no one knew when she would have gone over. It had been hours since she was last seen, which means the ship had potentially covered over 100 miles between her last sighting, and 9am when she didn’t show up for her shift. So the US Coast Guard and the Mexican Navy searched the ocean nearest to where she was last seen alive at 11pm the night before. and, they didn’t find anything, not that the odds were in their favor.
But because they found her flip flop at the crew pool on deck 5, some people felt like they had a pretty good idea of what happened, even without finding her in the water.
This is where things would get more confusing and creepy. A crew member was turning the flip flop over in their hands, maybe thinking about what could have happened, when they noticed something on the bottom of it. A cabin number and name scribbled next to it. For a person who was most definitely NOT Rebecca, this wasn’t her flip flop.
Because crew members now didn’t really have any idea what happened to rebecca, the next step was to call the authorities.
Let me take a moment here to explain a not so fun fact about cruise ships. When crimes happen on cruise ships, it can be VERY confusing who is supposed to investigate it. For instance, if a crime is committed while the ship is docked somewhere, the country where it’s docked has jurisdiction. So if the Disney Wonder had been docked in Los Angeles when Rebecca disappeared, the FBI would have gotten involved.
But it’s not so simple when a crime happens out in international waters. When that’s the case, the “Flag State” has jurisdiction, and the flag state is where the ship is registered. Now the big corporations that own these cruise ships like to take advantage of tax havens and countries that have less regulations, so a TON of cruise ships are registered in places like the Bahamas, Panama, and Malta.
So, what that meant for Rebecca’s case, which happened in international waters, was that the police from the Disney Wonder’s “flag state”, which was the Bahamas, were taking over. No one involved in this disappearance was from the Bahamas, the ship was not going to or from the Bahamas, Bahmanian police didn’t have any skin in this game.
And yet, the first officer on the scene was a Bahmanian officer named Paul Rolle (Roll).
When Officer Rolle made it onto the ship there was a LOT of work to be done, there was CCTV footage that needed to be meticulously combed through, all of the guests and crew were still on the boat and they needed to be interviewed and asked for witness statements. A detailed timeline of Rebecca’s movements needed to be accounted for. Her family was about to take a flight to LA from the UK and they’d be desperate for answers.
But that’s not what happened. Officer Rolle spent just 36 hours on the boat, and spoke to 6 of the 950 crew members and exactly zero guests. The interviews he had with the crew were quick and shallow, barely even asking them about their relationships to Rebecca.
At the end of those 36 hours, most of which was spent walking in circles around the ship, Officer Rolle announced that he had come to a conclusion about what happened to Rebecca.
He said that through his investigation, Rebecca HAD been up by herself at the crew pool sometime in the middle of the night. And that while she was up there…. The ship had been hit by a rogue wave and she was thrown over the railing.
I’m sorry… a rogue wave? Everyone who heard that conclusion kind of laughed, the boat had not been hit by a rogue wave in the middle of the night, not only did no one feel that but the ship had sensors and none of them indicated that had occurred.
Someone who worked on the boat explained to Paul that for a wave to be big enough to knock Rebecca off of the fifth level near the crew pool, it would have had to have been 100 feet tall. A wave of that magnitude would have caused damage to the ship, would have woken up nearly every passenger, and not to mention it would have knocked anyone who was on the decks off into the ocean. There was no way it was a Rogue Wave
I’m going to interject here because there’s a lot more that’s weird about this conclusion, other than the fact that it almost certainly didn’t happen. But while Officer Rolle was on the ship, Disney had released some of the CCTV footage from the night that Rebecca went missing.
And Rebecca is in that footage, but what the camera captured is…..very confusing but important.
The CCTV footage was taken in one of the back hallways, near the ship’s phone at around 5:45 in the morning. In the grainy footage, a distressed Rebecca wanders through the dimly lit, empty halls. She’s wearing clothes that look way too big for her. They look more like a man’s clothing than something Rebecca herself would have worn. She keeps pushing forward through the eerie hallway until she finds one of the ship’s phones. With a shaky hand she places a call. Then, she brings her hands up to the phone’s receiver, almost as if she didn’t want anyone around her to hear what she’s saying.
Suddenly, a man appears in the hall. Rebecca’s breath catches in her throat. She seems really startled, but then she sees that he’s not a threat, not someone she would be running from or scared of. He asks her if she’s ok—and Rebecca tells him yes, she’s ok. He appears to hesitate before accepting her answer and walking off, leaving her completely alone. The call goes through, and Rebecca starts speaking to someone on the other end, still upset. After the call ends, she walks off. That was the last time Rebecca was ever confirmed to be alive…
There’s obviously a lot that could have been learned from this. Who was the man that saw Rebecca in the hallway, and why wasn’t he interviewed? And most importantly, who was Rebecca talking to and what did she say? It was 5:45 in the morning when she made the call, which would have been later in the afternoon in the UK where she was from. Did she call someone back home? Was she scared for her life? In distress? Did she need help?
After this footage was found Rebecca’s parents Ann and Mike Coriam touched down in LA. They were able to confirm that it was not them on the phone with Rebecca in the video, BUT they had spoken with her the night before she went missing, and she seemed to be in her usual good spirits. She had told them she’d call them the next day—they spoke daily, but that call never came. Instead the call they got was from Disney telling them their daughter had disappeared.
They were given little other information, which made Ann and Mike all the more anxious to be there in person.
Maybe they thought that once they touched down they’d get a bit more clarity on the situation. When they landed at the airport, there was a black car from Disney waiting to take them directly to the ship.
But once they got inside, they saw that the car had fully blacked out windows. Like they couldn’t see anything outside of the windows, and no one could see in. When they finally got to the ship, they were driven on board through a hidden side entrance. It was like Disney was trying to hide the fact they were there.
They were held in the car for a few hours, and it’s unclear what was happening outside of the car during this time, the windows were blacked out, they didn’t know if someone was cleaning a crime scene or what. When they were finally allowed out of the car, they were met by Detective Rolle, who told them that The passengers had already disembarked. Rebecca’s parents asked what he had learned from them, and he told them that he …hadn’t ….actually…..talked to any of them. I can’t even imagine how badly the Coriams must have wanted to scream at this man.
But that’s when he told them his conclusion about the Rogue Wave. a conclusion that didn’t make sense to me, I’m sure it didn’t make any sense to you, and it for sure did not sit right with Rebecca’s parents.
But the most shocking part, is by the time this theory was relayed to Rebecca’s parents, Disney agreed with it, and accepted that as the reason for Rebecca’s disappearance. So they weren’t telling Rebecca’s parents to hear what they thought about the theory, they were telling them as if to say, we know what happened to your daughter and we’re sorry but there’s nothing else to look into.
And this rightfully infuriated Anne and Mike. if she did go overboard, then where is the CCTV footage of this happening? There was no reason for Disney not to have a tape showing this happen. Nearly every inch of the boat was covered by cameras, including deck 5. If this is what happened to her, then all Disney had to do to confirm it was to release the tapes showing it.
Rebecca’s parents weren’t the only people who didn’t buy Disney’s or Bahamian Detective Rolle’s stories. In October 2011—7 months after Rebecca went missing, 7 long months without any real answers for her parents—Welsh-American Journalist Jon Ronson decided to do his own investigation.
Ronson was appalled when he spoke to Rebecca’s parents. They told him about the blacked out windows and how they hadn’t been allowed to speak with anyone aboard the ship at the time that Rebecca went missing. They said they could even see the passengers disembark when they arrived at the ship, but their pleas to talk with any of them were immediately shot down. They thought they’d be given the chance to speak to passengers later, but that request never materialized. Requests for official information from the investigation were also ignored by Disney.
Unlike the Bahamian Detective or the Coriams, Ronson actually got to speak with people who had been on the boat at the time of Rebecca’s disappearance. One of those crew members was “Melissa” (a pseudonym) who I mentioned earlier. She was a close friend and coworker of Rebecca’s on the Disney Wonder. “Melissa” hadn’t wanted to talk to Ronson at first, but the Coriams asked her to—knowing about their close relationship. Melissa told Ronson about the “secret corridors” on the ship. She said “there’s a whole different world underneath the ship deck. We have parties down there, private showings of films. It’s absolutely brilliant.”
Ronson had heard rumblings of a relationship gone wrong, so he asked Melissa if she thought that’s what the 6am phone call had been about. Melissa sighed and said, “That ship absolutely seethes with rumours. Yes. She was in a relationship, and there were problems, and it was upsetting her. It was a very, very intense relationship. It was great and then it was awful. They were both fiery, passionate personalities…I can’t think of any other reason why she’d have been upset and wandering around by herself at 6am. From what I’ve heard, she was on the phone to a mutual friend. Not the girl she’d been having the relationship with.”
But Melissa didn’t think the tumultuous relationship would have been the direct reason for Rebecca’s disappearance. She could have imagined her going to the crew pool alone early on the morning of March 22nd, after her heated phone call. Maybe she sat up on the ledge—she had described Rebecca as a risk taker afterall. Rebecca may not have thought about how tall the wall was or that she could have fallen off. But maybe she did. Completely by accident.
As Melissa continued to talk with Ronson, some very strange things started coming up. Much of the story wasn’t adding up for her, she told him. She was quick to question why there was no CCTV footage of what happened. The entire ship was secured and covered by cameras. How is there no footage of what happened to Rebecca? Melissa whispered to him that she just wasn’t buying that Disney was in the dark. None of the staff were.
No, Melissa thought the company was hiding camera footage in order to protect the Disney brand. She told Ronson: “If it was 6am and they were doing their job and watching the front, someone must have seen her go over. Or if they didn’t, they’re covering up why they didn’t.” She falls silent. Then she says, “Rebecca made hundreds of people happy. The passengers loved her. They all loved her. You’d think Disney would give something back. They owe it to her to find out what happened.”
This information was really shocking to Ronson, why hadn’t Rebecca’s relationship been explored more by Detective Rolle? He tracked down more of the staff that were on the ship, and he realized that Melissa wasn’t the only person to find Disney’s actions after Rebecca’s disappearance to be odd and concerning. Another crew member, who didn’t want their name to be used, told Ronson: “Disney knows exactly what happened. Everything here is taped. There's CCTV everywhere. Disney has the tape.” And then another crewmember told him,: “I don’t know anything about it. It didn't happen. You know that's the answer I have to give.”
There seemed to be a consensus that everyone knew what happened, but no one was allowed to say. No matter how many people Ronson asked, the only story he got was that she went off the side of the ship from one of the crew decks. But remember, the only reason it’s believed she went off the side from the crew deck was because of the flip flop that was found by the crew pool, the flip flop that wasn’t even hers. For whatever reason, that remained the story.
Ronson decided to do his own examination of the ship. He retraced her steps starting at the ship’s phone where she made her distraught call. From there, he pictured Rebecca going over to the crew running track to blow off some steam. He noticed that the railings over there were much, much lower than they were by the crew pool. he could see Rebecca going for a run, slipping, and falling over the side of the ship.
Ronson, apparently, was very confident in this theory. So much so that when he spotted a crew member on the ship, he told him what he discovered. But the crew member just shook his head.
“I was there that day, everybody knows.” he said. Everybody knows what, Ronson asks. Everyone knows she went off of deck 5 by the pool, that’s where her flip flop was found. He told him that not long after the discovery, a bouquet of flowers was placed next to where it was believed she went over, a little make shift memorial for their fallen friend.
Ronson tried to explain everything we know, that the flip flop wasn’t actually hers, and that He had gone up to deck 10 and looked over the edge down to deck 5. The pool was surrounded by railings which were themselves surrounded by high steel walls that I described earlier. No matter which way Ronson looked at it, he didn’t see how someone could accidentally fall from there.. But the member just shook his head and walked off.
But Ronson didn’t believe that theory. Especially after he did a bit more digging. So that bouquet of flowers that was placed by where the flip flop was found? Yea, Disney put those there. Ronson didn’t think they put them there as a memorial, though. He thought they put them there so everyone would assume that was definitely the place she went over and would stop asking questions.
But Ronson’s official theory didn’t really feel definitive, either. That she slipped off of the boat near the running track. Like I said, no one had ever slipped off the boat before, and no one has since. Also, the track is on a part of the boat covered in surveillance, why is there no tape of her slipping.
No matter which way you looked at it, things still weren’t adding up. So people started coming up with their own theories as to what happened to Rebecca Coriam…
BREAK 2
The Coriams were pretty vocal about what they thought happened to their daughter Rebecca on that ship on March 22nd, 2011. Their suspicions? That Rebecca was the victim of foul play. They believe that someone else directly caused her death.
The Coriams are not the only people who believe this to be the case. Former City of Chester MP Chris Matheson believes Coriam was the victim of a crime and was possibly sexually assaulted or murdered. Former Commander of Specialist Operation at Scotland Yard Roy Ramm agrees with this hypothesis. That she was sexually assaulted and then thrown overboard. Roy Ramm was hired as a personal investigator on the case. He told The Sun: "Somebody on that vessel was unquestionably responsible for her death." He comments on the fact that she wasn’t wearing her own clothing—potentially a man’s clothes, and the clothes were ripped. To him, there’s no doubt that she was sexually assaulted. I think it’s important to note that he doesn’t make it clear why he thought it was assault outside of how she was dressed and that she seemed distressed on the CCTV captured phone call. Why does Ramm think Disney botched the investigation? Because they cared more about keeping the cruise on schedule than they cared about getting justice for Rebecca.
Another theory put forth is that Rebecca got off the ship alive and disappeared herself on purpose. People that believe this theory imagine that Rebecca chose to stay in one of the times the ship docked on shore. The ship was stopped at one of its planned locations where guests could get off and explore if they wanted to. Rebecca also left the ship, this theory goes. However, rather than going back before the ship set sail again, Rebecca never got back on. She decided to stay, and also decided not to tell anyone where she went. At least this is what some people theorize is what happened. But there’s actually some really wild evidence to support this idea.
According to some reports, and I want to add here that these have been hard to verify, her credit card hadn’t been found among her things in her cabin. Then, one day, nearly two months after Rebecca went missing, an email came through on her account. The message was the bank flagging that someone tried to use Rebecca’s credit card. Or rather, that someone had tried to gain access back on April 19th, which was just under a month after Rebecca went missing on March 22nd. That wasn’t the only thing pointing to the possibility of Rebecca being alive. On top of all of that, apparently the password to Rebecca’s Facebook account had been changed at some point after she went missing.
Was it Rebecca who had been the one to use her credit card and change her Facebook password? Could it just be that someone stole her information and credit card and it wasn’t Rebecca at all? If you remember, Rebecca’s passport was found in her crew cabin. Not having that on her even if she did in fact have her credit card with her would have made a planned escape from the ship difficult, not impossible, but difficult to do.
There’s one more piece of evidence that it was Rebecca herself, and it’s bizarre. It would take a while for this new information to come forward. Exactly one day before the year anniversary of Rebecca’s disappearance, Mike Coriam got an email that would shake his entire world. A year had already passed, and while her parents never gave up on finding her, that was a long time to carry the weight of the hope of finding her. So when the Coriams got this email, it must have been like rain after a drought.
Someone had seen Rebecca. And she was alive. At least they were pretty sure—85% to be exact—that it was her. Rebecca’s parents had started a website. A woman saw this website, and it brought forward for her the memory of seeing who she thought to be Rebecca. Oftentimes around the year anniversary of a missing persons case, there will be anniversary programs in the media in the hopes of bringing attention back to the case. The woman must have seen the website during one of these programs, and it sparked something for her. She claims she saw Rebecca with a dark haired man in Venice, Italy. I can only imagine the hope and excitement this instilled in the Coriams. Not only had someone seen Rebecca, but she was still alive. But tragically, this lead didn’t go anywhere, and the identity of the person the woman saw was never confirmed.
The ideal outcome of all of this entire story is, of course, that the theory about Rebecca still being alive is true. However, there are too many parts working against this theory for it to feel credible as of now. To start, it’s been 14 years since she disappeared. That’s a long time to stay hidden, especially without a passport. There are also conflicting reports on her credit card being used. Some sources say she did use it, but others say her credit card was found among her possessions in her cabin on the ship. Remember, Officer Rolle wasn’t great at his job and that might be why we dont have exact clarity on this even though it seems very important.
There’s one more prevailing theory that’s come up in my research. It’s, again, really important to note that the following information has not been fully corroborated outside of one witness’ statement and story. I want to be really clear that this also isn’t fully corroborated at this moment in time. It’s all based on the accounts of one woman, but I think it’s important to bring up.
The woman that came forward with entirely new information about Rebecca’s disappearance is Tracie Medley. Tracie came forward 7 years after Rebecca went missing to tell her story. That’s a long time to wait, but Tracie says she was getting death threats over Rebecca’s disappearance, so maybe this made her hesitant to share.
Ok so it had been 7 years since that day in March in 2011, the last time Rebecca was seen alive. Tracie says she was one of the last people to be with Rebecca. The two of them, according to Tracie, were in a relationship. There was mention of Rebecca having a girlfriend on the ship, by Melissa, but this was the first confirmation of who she was dating.
Tracie says that the two of them ended up spending a night with a man—the night, or early morning, just before that phone call captured on CCTV. The man the two women slept with wasn’t just a random coworker. Tracie said that he was someone she had been in a relationship with back when she first met Rebecca. She broke things off with him to be with Rebecca. He was off the ship for a while but ended up coming back onboard. He and Tracie reignited their relationship behind Rebecca’s back. But then Rebecca found out about it and was incredibly upset. Tracie said Rebecca was very depressed over it the two weeks leading up to her disappearance. Was this the relationship gone wrong that journalist Jon Ronson heard whispers of during his private investigation? Apparently, Things took a turn when the three of them spent that night together.
Tracie said Rebecca hadn’t felt good about the three of them sleeping together, and this caused Rebecca to spiral out. An agitated Rebecca got up to leave the room and asked Tracie to come with her, but Tracie said no and asked if she would be coming back. Rebecca left without answering. She then wandered the ship’s crew hallways until she found a phone. This was when she called to talk to a friend about how upset she was; the call that was captured on a videotape recording. Does that explain the men’s clothing she was wearing? Did she stumble out of bed with her girlfriend and another, male, crew member, in the pre-dawn hours of the morning regretting everything that had just happened? Tracie wonders if Rebecca was upset enough to possibly bring an end to her own life.
Tracie was absolutely wracked with guilt as she retold the story of what happened between them on the night of March 21st 14 years earlier. She wishes she had stayed by Rebecca's side all that night. She had been deeply in love with Rebecca who was also her best friend. Tracie said: “I hate that she was alone and that so many questions were left unanswered…I felt horrible and I just knew I should have gone with her when she asked me to go.” Rebecca’s disappearance has left a huge impact on those who loved her. The loss has been felt deeply by everyone in her life.
But this still doesn’t answer the question of why then, was there no CCTV footage of what happened to Rebecca? How did that tape just…disappear? And also, the person that Rebecca spoke to on the phone has never come forward to confirm or deny what the call was about.
The daily mail reported that Detective Rolle actually had notes about this reported relationship and fight that happened, and that those notes were eventually sent to Rebecca’s family years later. But that also brings up more questions for me. Why didn’t he consider that when coming up with his conclusion. And more importantly, was he influenced by someone, or some company, to put forward the rogue wave theory even though he maybe knew something else happened.
After years of searching for answers, Rebecca’s parents didn’t feel any closer to getting a real answer on what happened to their daughter. They even set up the website previously mentioned for anyone to submit any information that could help solve this mystery. But that website was later taken down, most likely because of the settlement they eventually signed with Disney. We will most likely never know the exact terms of that settlement, but one thing we do know is that they’re no longer allowed to talk about Rebecca’s disappearance publicly. Without her parents able to continue their search for answers and without Disney cooperating by releasing the CCTV footage they must have, we may never know exactly what happened to Rebecca Coriam.
But let’s not forget the girl at the center of all of this. The fun, bubbly smiley youth counselor that was universally liked by her colleagues and had a love of travelling the world. Something happened to her on that boat, and it’s not unreasonable to think that someone, or multiple people DO know what happened to her. But I just don’t know that the truth will ever come out.
That’s all I have for you this week.