COULD HE SINK ANY LOWER?
Conman and thief Lewis Bennett killed his bride on their yachting honeymoon, said it was an accident and put her family through hell. Most sickening of all? Now he’s finally admitted he WAS responsible for her death — but may only get 7 years’ jail
The circumstances had looked suspicious from the start. The sea wasn’t rough on the night Lewis Bennett’s wife disappeared during their honeymoon cruise around the Caribbean.
When the British yachtsman was found floating in a life-raft 1,000 yards from his half-submerged boat in May last year, he told the U.S. Coast Guard rescuers he believed the vessel had hit something in the darkness, the loud thud causing him to rush on deck, only to find that his beloved wife Isabella hellmann — mother to his young daughter — had disappeared from her place at the helm and the boat was sinking.
It may have been a calm night, but prosecutors quickly discovered that storm clouds had gathered over their marriage. his long and impassioned insistence that he was entirely innocent of her death ended in a Miami court on Monday when Bennett, 41, finally admitted he had been responsible when he pleaded guilty to a charge of involuntary manslaughter.
A handcuffed Bennett, from Poole in Dorset, admitted he ‘did unlawfully kill without malice’ his wife through ‘gross negligence amounting to wanton and reckless disregard for human life’.
Avoiding a murder trial due to start in December, he agreed a plea deal that will see him serve up to eight years in prison.
PROSECUTORS have demanded he spends at least seven years behind bars. Prosecutor Ariana Fajardo Orshan conceded that ‘nothing can ever erase the pain and suffering caused by Lewis Bennett’s criminal acts’ but hoped the ‘admission of guilt is a step toward justice for the victim and her family’.
After the hearing, Isabella’s mother Amparo Alvarez fought back tears: ‘None of us agrees with the decision in court today,’ she said. ‘I can’t get over thinking that I will never know what really happened to my daughter.’
Adriana Difeo, 46, one of Isabella’s sisters, added that the family were appalled by the change of the charge to involuntary manslaughter. ‘We will now be launching a civil action against Lewis Bennett over the death of our sister,’ she added.
Another sister, elizabeth rodriguez, 45, felt the system had let them down: ‘her body has never been recovered and we will never get over that. eight years is not long enough for what happened to my sister. Lewis Bennett has to live with what he’s done for the rest of his life.’
Bennett’s guilty plea of manslaughter means he will never have to explain in detail what happened to the Colombian-born estate agent.
however, prosecutors in the hearing had been convinced they had answers to the ‘why’ if not the ‘ how’ surrounding the mysterious disappearance of the 41-year-old woman.
A series of text messages between September 2016 and the following April that were backed up by the testimony of friends and family revealed she had been alarmed and puzzled by his increasingly temperamental behaviour and anger towards her.
It was a picture far removed from Bennett’s anguished claim after she disappeared that it was ‘absolutely devastating’ to lose a ‘soulmate’ with whom he was going to be ‘together for ever’.
U. S. prosecutors initially claimed Bennett murdered Isabella on his 37ft catamaran and then scuttled the vessel to make it look like an accident.
her body has never been found despite Bennett — a businessman and mining engineer — saying she was wearing a life jacket.
The yacht was discovered off the Bahamas and the couple had been on the last leg of a belated honeymoon cruise, sailing from Cuba back to Florida, where they lived.
Although Isabella had told friends she had no experience of sailing, Bennett — an experienced sailor — said he put the boat on autopilot and left her on watch while he went below to sleep.
According to court papers, Bennett, who also has Australian citizenship, said he was woken shortly after midnight on May 15, 2017 by a loud noise. he claimed that he went up on deck and found the sails and rigging were loose, the helm was unmanned and his wife was missing.
Bennett admitted he did virtually nothing to look for her and couldn’t remember if he even called out for her. While he insisted he threw out a life ring, he didn’t fire off flares to illuminate the water or turn the vessel. Nor did he activate his electronic homing device or use his satellite phone to summon help.
Instead, apparently discovering his yacht was sinking, he loaded a life-raft with food, water, a satellite phone and a homing device. only after he was safely in the raft — 45 minutes after waking up — did he finally raise the alarm.
There was evidence that holes had been knocked in both the catamaran’s hulls from the inside and two portholes opened below the waterline to scuttle the yacht.
Bennett was rescued by a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter.
And this brings us to another twist to the case. For it later emerged that Bennett fled his sinking catamaran with a trove of stolen rare coins he had been smuggling.
The crewman who pulled him onto the rescue helicopter recalled Bennett had an unusually heavy backpack. The weight, said prosecutors, was due to a large stash of the coins.
When investigators searched the catamaran, they discovered more he had left behind.
Bennett had in fact reported that these same coins — part of a gold and silver hoard worth £80,000 —had been stolen from a yacht he had skippered for
its owner in the Caribbean back in 2016. More coins were later found hidden in shoes in his Florida flat.
He was jailed for seven months in February after he admitted transporting stolen coins worth nearly £ 30,000. Prosecutors believed his wife’s death may have been linked to the stolen coins.
Text messages revealed in September showed the couple’s relationship had become toxic — particularly after she became pregnant with their daughter, Emelia, who was born in 2016.
Isabella said it reached the stage where she was ‘afraid to get home’ to the flat they shared in the Florida town of Delray Beach.
SHE told Bennett: ’I walked in and I was right. I found an angry person, this is very sad that I don’t want to be in the same place with you.’
Six months before she died, she complained: ‘ The way you treat me and yell at me . . . you don’t respect me any more.’
She accused him of ‘pushing’ her away, ‘shouting, yelling, swearing’. Later she appeared to acknowledge their relationship was on the rocks, plaintively texting him: ‘My heart is broken. If we don’t change, we have to take separate ways.’
Isabella abruptly decided to marry Bennett in February last year, hoping it could salvage their relationship. However, weeks later she was accusing her husband of ‘making me miserable’, the text messages show.
She also alluded to financial problems, texting him weeks before her disappearance to say: ‘We are delinquent on the taxes.’
As they later sailed through the British Virgin Islands to Cuba, she wrote on Facebook: ‘Another day in paradise.’ It was her last post.
Prosecutors claimed the couple’s crumbling marriage and his shady finances may have led Bennett to kill his wife. Documents filed in court show Bennett owed £1,800 in property taxes, and faced having the electricity cut off at the flat. The couple were struggling to pay off thousands in credit card bills, and Isabella had complained that Bennett wanted her to end her maternity leave and return to work.
Another court document claimed Isabella had told a friend she had no idea how much money Bennett had or how he earned it.
Yet he possessed £163,000 to transfer between international accounts between 2014 and 2017.
Prosecutors said the couple bickered over their finances, little Emelia’s upbringing and even what continent they should live on. Bennett wanted to move back to Australia while she was determined to stay in the U.S. They said Bennett, who slept in a separate bedroom to Isabella and their baby, told her the baby had come at the ‘wrong time’.
He would disappear for long periods without explanation — three months after the baby was born he flew off to Thailand to enrol at a boxing academy.
His ‘controlling’ nature resulted in arguments with Isabella over the slightest issue. He once became ‘ super angry’ after she simply spelt Emelia as ‘Emilia’, said court papers.
According to prosecutor Benjamin Greenberg: ‘ Ms Hellmann’s murder would remove the marital strife from the defendant’s life . . . and would enable him to inherit money from [her] estate.’
Bennett attempted to have her declared dead just a day after the Coast Guard called off a four-day search for her. He would have inherited their home and the contents of her bank account.
Mr Greenberg also proposed another intriguing theory to explain why she had to disappear — that Isabella had discovered Bennett’s haul of stolen coins. The prosecution’s portrait of the couple’s unhappy relationship tallied with what Ms Hellmann’s friends said about how becoming parents fuelled the couple’s differences — as they bickered over how to bring her up.
Bennett would argue with his wife over everything from whether to give the girl an English or Latino name to the sort of nappies she should wear, said Sarah Cortes, a close friend of Isabella.
Bennett — who studied at Bangor University in Wales and then the Camborne School of Mines, part of Exeter University — had previously lived in Australia where he worked for several years in mining before setting up a solar power business.
He met Isabella — who was living in Florida — on the internet five years ago. Her friends said the relationship soon became serious, with Ms Hellmann flying to the UK to meet his parents at their home near Southampton.
However, Isabella seemed to do most of the work to keep the relationship going. Friends said Bennett hardly ever visited her in the U.S., instead having her fly out to meet him in places such as Tahiti and Singapore, when he put into port on the yachts on which he was then working.
According to Isabella’s friend Sarah Cortes, Bennett had claimed he had come into some ‘family money’, pouring most of it into his catamaran which he would skipper for clients. And Isabella’s baby, said Ms Cortes, was her ‘last shot at being a mother’.
Members of Ms Hellmann’s family were so suspicious of Bennett’s behaviour when she disappeared that they bugged the couple’s apartment, court papers revealed. Some of them have said they were perturbed by his lack of emotion over her disappearance.
‘He was calm, he wasn’t crying or anything,’ said another of her sisters, Dayana Rodriguez.
‘When I saw him, I ran to him and I hugged him and I said, “Where is Isabella?” And he said, “I don’t know”.’
‘I asked him: “Do you think she’s alive? Do you think she’s dead?” And he said, “I think she’s asleep.” That was his answer.’
The family’s lawyer, Mitchell Kitroser, read their statement on Monday after Bennett’s plea.
‘Although they already knew, they now have confirmation their beloved daughter and sister, Isabella, is never coming back.’
HER child is still a bone of contention for them. Two weeks after his wife vanished, Bennett took Emelia, now two, to Britain.
And within days, he began asking about obtaining citizenship for her. She remains in the UK with his parents, Sheila and Tom, at their home in Hythe, Hampshire.
The child’s other grandmother Mrs Alvarez said she had not just lost her daughter but also her granddaughter ‘because she is in England and I have no proper access to her.
‘I have got a right to be part of her life and I want to be part of her life. I have only seen her twice since she was taken to England, and that was over the internet. I’m heartbroken.’
Mr Kitroser urged Bennett to take pity on her. ‘Mr Bennett can allow Emelia to come home. He can share her with Isabella’s family,’ he said.
‘It’s the decent thing to do. It’s the remorseful thing to do.
‘And it’s the only good thing that can come from such a terrible tragedy.’