Simultaneously, mother and daughter shook their heads no.
Muff had never told them of her fears.
AT 4:30 P.M. on November 1, some forty hours after Jennifer’s arrest at the Ala Wai harbor, the Tattarax, an oceangoing tugboat skippered by Martin Vitousek, chugged into the Palmyra lagoon he had earlier flown over at Curt Shoemaker’s request.
Aboard the dirty, rust-splotched hundred-foot tug was a ten-man search team that included the FBI’s Shishido and Tom Bridges, Honolulu Assistant U.S. Attorney William Eggers, a representative of the U.S. Department of the Interior, several Coast Guard divers, and Jack Wheeler, who would be their island guide.
The trip from Honolulu had not been easy. Climbing aboard a Coast Guard C-130 at 7:00 A.M. on October 31, the expedition had flown from Oahu’s Barbers Point Naval Air Station through an overcast that hung down the mountainsides like a dark, heavy blanket. Four and a half hours later, they landed at Fanning Island, where they boarded the tug for a twenty-two-hour trip to Palmyra, 175 miles to the northwest. Halfway there, a pump broke down and the toilets couldn’t be flushed. A compartment below deck offered half a dozen bunks, but no one had slept much as the vibrating old tug plowed through choppy seas.
When they moored at the dolphins in the Palmyra lagoon, there were no other boats there, nor could prosecutor Bill Eggers, from where he stood on the deck of the tug, see any sign of people on the island. He had already noted, as they came through the channel, that there was no sailboat hung up on the reef where Jennifer Jenkins had claimed the Iola had gone aground and been abandoned. Almost certainly, she had lied, and he was pretty sure he knew why.
Taking charge of the mission, Eggers suggested they immediately begin a thorough search, even though some of the others wanted to rest from their journey. Once ashore, they paired up to fan out in different directions. Their objectives were obvious. First and foremost, to find the Grahams—alive, or dead. And second, to gather any physical evidence that a crime had been committed.
The jungle rose only a few yards away, yet there was a collective pause before anyone in the search party made the first move. No one looked forward to whatever awaited them inside the dense growth. And the raucous squawking of the birds was somehow strangely daunting.
Eggers himself, a square-shouldered veteran criminal prosecutor with a boyish grin during happier times, had a nasty intuition about this stifling-hot place. He hoped he was wrong, but he believed, as Shishido now did, that a monstrous crime had been committed here. People didn’t give up a boat like the Sea Wind in a desolate place like Palmyra without a struggle. Whatever had happened to Mac and Muff Graham must have involved force and violence.
Eggers teamed up with Wheeler for the search. They walked around the West Lagoon’s shoreline to the Sea Wind’s former anchorage. When they came across an old campfire site, Eggers found a stick and poked through the charred mess. At first, he uncovered only some empty, unmarked prescription bottles.
Mopping his face with a rolled-up sleeve already soaked with sweat, Wheeler watched the prosecutor jab at the refuse.
“My God…” Eggers muttered.
They were both shocked to see what looked like a mass of human hair among the ashes.
Eggers reached cautiously for the hair. It was coal-black.
When he separated the hair from the other debris, Eggers was relieved to see it was actually a wig—a type of “fright wig” worn by Halloween tricksters.
Probing deeper, Eggers retrieved several bits of cotton cloth—possibly from a shirt that had been burned—and two eyeglass lenses, one from nonprescription dark glasses and one clear prescription lens. He placed the recovered items in a gunnysack he’d brought along.
Wheeler led the way to the site of Roy Allen’s camp, where the tent still stood. Inside, they found a bare cot, an armchair, and a bedside table upon which lay the beginnings of a homemade braided belt and a sketchbook with drawings of sailboat designs. In a corner of the tent a small bookcase held a variety of books and magazines.
Outside, on a bench, were quite a few tin cans and paper cups, all half-filled with dirt. Nearby, on the roof of the Refrigerator House, was a thriving garden of foot-high marijuana plants.
That afternoon, they all met back at the tugboat for ham and cheese sandwiches and chilled beer. Eggers asked the divers to gear up to check out the bottom of the lagoon near the dolphins. He didn’t have to spell out what to look for. Two Coast Guardsmen, outfitted with scuba tank, face mask, and flippers, dived off the deck, while another stood guard with an automatic rifle. The sharks of Palmyra could be seen circling in the blue lagoon.
When nothing was found near the dolphins, the divers took a dinghy to the small cove where the Sea Wind had been anchored and searched the bottom carefully. Arousing the aggressive instincts of the sharks, the dive was soon suspended for safety reasons.
Eggers assigned each team new quadrants to search. He and Wheeler took a dinghy across the lagoon and beached it, then set out to wade across a stretch of knee-deep water—too shallow, they thought, for sharks.
Wheeler was the first to notice a sleek, gray shark at least six feet long circling lazily in the crystalline blue of the lagoon. “I don’t think it’ll attack,” he said with a definite edge in his voice.
Suddenly, as if it had heard and was determined to disprove Wheeler’s assessment, the shark moved soundlessly toward them, its curved fin breaking the surface like a submarine periscope. The wide snout left no doubt the creature had a mouth big enough to amputate a leg in one quick chomp.
They could not outrun it to shore!
Wheeler spotted a coral head nearby, and they ran awkwardly toward it, splashing and floundering about like a flight of wounded birds fighting to get airborne. Their tormentor brushed closely against their coral perch. Eggers saw a pair of eyes beneath the surface reflecting an eerie golden light. Now that they were out of the water, could the shark still see them?
Apparently not. And for this big fellow, out of sight was out of mind, as it swam on and was soon gone.
When they regained their composure, Wheeler and Eggers waded quickly back to where they’d left the dinghy. There would be no more dips in the lagoon this day.
By dusk, the searchers were back at the boat, thoroughly drained by the hot sun, the humidity, and the jungle. Wheeler and Eggers mesmerized the others with the story of their run-in with the “man-eater.”
Gathered on the tug’s deck as sunset shimmered over the water, they discussed what they had and had not found. There was not one shred of evidence that the Grahams were still on the island, dead or alive, nor had anyone found any physical evidence of any kind that even vaguely suggested foul play. Eggers and Wheeler had found and photographed a hatch cover on the beach near the dolphins, and Wheeler was sure it belonged to the Iola. But that didn’t seem very helpful.
At dawn the next morning, the Tattarax left Palmyra. En route to Fanning, the tug sent a radio signal to a ham operator in Honolulu who had Mac Graham’s sister standing by waiting to hear from the search party. Calvin Shishido identified himself.
“This is Mary Muncey,” said a woman’s unsteady voice over the radio. “Are my brother and sister-in-law alive…or dead?”
“I don’t have an answer for you one way or the other, Mrs. Muncey,” Shishido said, not telling Mac’s sister, of course, that the searching party had expectantly brought along two body bags. “All I can tell you at this point is that we were unable to find any sign of either of them.”
Mac and Muff Graham had vanished, not leaving so much as a footprint on Palmyra.
DARK-HAIRED, ATTRACTIVE Mary “Kit” Graham Muncey had flown to Honolulu the day after Jennifer’s arrest. No one sitting next to her on the plane could have guessed that this self-contained woman was experiencing a family tragedy. Divorced (since 1969) and living in Seattle, she’d once been married to Bill Muncey, at the time the world’s most famous boat racer. After years of watching her husband—the father of her thre
e sons—hurtle across the water at two hundred miles an hour, Kit had learned to conceal her deepest fears beneath a placid exterior.
While waiting in Honolulu to hear word from the search party, Kit had surrendered to nostalgic reminiscences of her life with Mac. As a little brother, he’d been a terror. While growing up in Connecticut, they had been highly competitive and fought a lot. But everyone noticed that when Mac and Kit—shortened from Kitten, her father’s pet name for her—weren’t arguing, they were sharing toys and playing together like pals. They spent much of their time exploring the countryside around their home, using back roads and staying out of sight. When they’d come across a horse in a pasture, they’d climb aboard with no saddle or reins. “Oh, Mac, we had such great fun,” she would have liked to remind him now. As adults, brother and sister had remained close. Kit was so pleased when Mac had found, in Muff, a loving woman to spend his life with. Mac had been just as supportive of her. Bill Muncey was a man’s man—Mac’s kind of guy—and her brother had been pained by her divorce from Bill, but he’d let her know that her happiness was paramount.
She had last seen her brother and sister-in-law six months earlier, in April. Knowing they were preparing to leave for a long voyage to the Pacific, she’d flown down to San Diego to spend a few days with them. Mac had been feverishly excited about this new adventure, but Muff, in a moment of girl-talk candor, had confided to Kit that she really didn’t want to go. Alone with Mac, Kit gently chided him for not being more sensitive to Muff’s feelings. This trip was very important to him, he had replied, and he was confident that once they reached their island paradise, Muff would end up enjoying it, too.
For weeks now, Kit had been praying long and hard that Mac and Muff would be found on Palmyra—stranded, blazing mad over losing their boat, maybe a little hungry and parched, but alive. After hearing the distressing news from the search party, however, she realized she might never again see her brother or Muff.
Desperate for any information about what had happened on Palmyra, Kit agonized over whether she should contact Jennifer Jenkins in jail. She finally decided that she had no choice. She could not rest until she talked to the one person available who might know what happened to Mac and Muff.
Even if that person might have had a hand in whatever horrible fate had befallen them.
NOVEMBER 7, 1974
KIT WAS uneasy as she sat across from Jennifer in the Honolulu jail visiting room, looking directly into the wide-eyed gaze of someone who she felt probably knew everything but hadn’t admitted to anything. If at all possible, she was determined to hide her suspicions.
“Has anyone told you about the sharks?” Jennifer asked.
Kit nodded. “Yes, Mac and Muff wrote about them.”
“They’re real bad in the lagoon. I think, you know, that’s what might have happened. After they flipped their dinghy and fell into the water—well, the sharks—”
Kit tensed noticeably, clutching her purse.
Jennifer changed course. “As I said, we found the Zodiac turned over, upside down. I’m sorry.” She lowered her head. “I’m really sorry. It was such a tragedy. Mac and Muff were wonderful people. They were good to us.”
Kit could see that Jennifer had a bearing of unaffected friendliness. She obviously got along well with others—even the jail matron who brought her in seemed to like her. Kit could not easily picture Jennifer in the act of murder. Then again, she reminded herself, this could all be a very skillful act, the ploy of a manipulative little bitch who had always known how to use people. There was a slippery, evasive quality to Jennifer, or so Kit thought.
Mac’s sister left the jail more puzzled than ever. Jennifer’s story simply didn’t add up. Kit well knew that the Zodiac, designed by the famed French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, was reputed to be the most stable dinghy in the world. In fact, she had never heard of one flipping over, even in the hands of children or rank amateurs. Moreover, if Mac and Muff had actually disappeared in some sort of freak accident, why hadn’t Jennifer and her boyfriend reported the incident as soon as they reached Hawaii?
Kit was firmly convinced that Jennifer was holding something back.
NOVEMBER 8, 1974
HAWI, HAWAII
AROUND NOONTIME, Buck Walker sat down at the picnic table beneath the shade of a banyan tree and spread out that day’s Honolulu Advertiser. He was interested in only one story—and it was prominently featured on the front page, along with head shots of him and Jennifer. Even his two dogs had become media celebrities since being impounded by animal regulation officials. Dozens of people had called about adopting them.* Now that the FBI knew his real name, a detailed all-points bulletin had been issued for his arrest. The formal charge: boat theft. But the article focused on unexplained disappearances, rumors of conflict, and a possible double murder on an obscure, exotic island.
For ten days he’d been on the move. No one had noticed him come ashore after swimming the length of Ala Wai harbor. Luckily, he’d had some money in the swim trunks he’d been wearing under his trousers. He’d walked dripping wet into a clothing store and bought an aloha shirt, shorts, a straw hat, and wraparound sunglasses. Looking like a tourist, he’d lost himself in the large crowd of vacationers, occasionally glancing back to make sure no one had recognized him. He’d crashed at a friend’s apartment that night.
The next day, he’d taken a bus to the airport, bought a plane ticket under the name of J. Evans, and, right under the nose of a Honolulu cop holding his picture, passed through the gate and boarded an Aloha Airlines jet for the short hop to Hilo. When he arrived, he’d walked from the sleepy airport to the nearest hotel, about a mile away—cab drivers, he knew, were among the first people the police contacted when looking for someone on the run. The next day, he popped in on Gina Allen at her little frame house in a run-down section of Hilo. She had broken up with her boyfriend and seemed pleased to see Buck. They spent the night together. The following morning she lent him some camping equipment and went shopping for a few other essentials for hiding out—food, matches, cigarettes, hunting knife, eating utensils, boots, jeans, shirts, and various toiletries. Later that day, she drove him thirty miles up Saddle Road into the island interior and dropped him off in the Kohala Mountains.
Buck camped out for a week in the desolate volcanic range, which has peaks almost fourteen thousand feet high, reading Carlos Castaneda and smoking marijuana. Once, stoned out of his mind, he stripped off his clothes and ran joyously through the Kohala forest during a light, warm rain, dancing to his own internal rhythms, feeling as wild and free as the occasional white-tailed deer he spotted. He could look down upon smooth black fields of pahoehoe lava or imagine that a pile of stones was a heiau, an abandoned Polynesian temple. But his physical comfort soon became a priority, as on Palmyra. He decided to chance going into town to get a hot meal and a good night’s sleep on a real bed. He picked Hawi, the northernmost community on the Big Island, relatively isolated up near Upolu Point. Two roads led into the village—population 797—both unpaved and often impassable in bad weather. The sidewalks were wooden, suggesting a town right out of America’s Old West. After hitching his way down Kohala Mountain Road, Buck checked into Room 19 at the St. Luke’s Hotel, giving his name as Joe Evans. The unpretentious room cost $7.28 a night, and he paid for three nights in advance. It was Friday, November 8, as he perused the morning paper at the picnic table.
Though Buck hadn’t noticed—because he was new in town himself—several strangers were eating lunch right then at the St. Luke’s café. When they finished, they showed the waitress a photo of a man in a clerical collar.
“He’s staying here,” she said excitedly. “In fact, he bought a paper just before you came in.” Pointing out the window, she added: “That’s him right there across the street, sitting under the tree.”
By the time Buck looked up to see them coming, it was too late.
“FBI! Don’t move!”
Several revolvers pointed at his chest
.
“Are you Bob Walker?” an agent asked.
“Buck,” he corrected, closing the newspaper. “Yes, I’m Buck Walker.”
“You’re under arrest,” said FBI Special Agent Henry Burns.
“No shit.”
Buck was put in the backseat of a rented car, his wrists handcuffed under his legs.
Burns, thickset, about forty, climbed in beside Buck and read Buck his rights. That formality over, the agent sat back. “Mind answering a few questions?”
For Burns, the long moment that followed was tense with uncertainty. Stony silence is a suspect’s strongest defense.
But Walker shrugged flippantly, with an air of arrogance. “Depends on the questions.”
“Where’ve you been staying?”
“St. Luke’s.”
“Mind if we search your room?”
“I don’t care.”
Burns told two members of his team to search the hotel room.
“You forgot to tell me why I’m under arrest,” Buck said sarcastically. “J. Edgar Hoover wouldn’t approve.”
“Boat theft. We’ve also got a fugitive warrant charging you with failure to appear.”*
The old drug charge that had started it all.
“I’d like to ask you some questions about the Grahams,” the agent said, taking out a small, creased notebook. “We’re investigating their disappearance.”
“Who said they disappeared?” Buck asked coyly.
“Jennifer Jenkins has made a statement.”
“Ask away.”
“To start with, when did you meet Jennifer?”
“In late ’72, I guess.” Buck looked off into the distance. “Been together ever since.”
“You were living together?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How did you get to Palmyra Island?”
“By boat,” Buck said, smirking. “Know another way?”
“Your own boat?”
Buck nodded. “We bought her on Maui a couple years ago and fixed her up. Named her the Iola.”