By Antonia Hoyle
Some 12 hours after reporting Sarm Heslop missing from his catamaran in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Ryan Bane called her best friend Kate owen, a former flight attendant who was islandhopping around the Caribbean.
Bane said he had been woken by his boat’s anchor alarm at 2am on march 8, 2021, and found that Sarm, his British girlfriend, had vanished without a trace.
Kate counted the charismatic American yacht captain, Sarm’s partner of eight months, as a friend — but as he spoke about his missing girlfriend, her affection for Bane quickly turned to suspicion.
At first, she recalls, ‘he sounded upset, but almost drained from it all. It might be his American accent — he’s a very slow speaker — but I would have been absolutely frantic. It was almost as if he was shrugging his shoulders, like he didn’t know what to do’.
Then, she recalls, ‘he said he missed her. I remember thinking, “That’s strange, because how do you know she’s definitely gone?” ’
Bane’s behaviour soon started to baffle others, too. He hadn’t called the coastguard to search for Sarm, 41, until she’d been missing for more than nine hours, and both Virgin Islands Police Department officers and the coastguard claim he then refused them permission to fully search the Siren Song, his luxury 47ft boat, moored off the coast of the tiny island of St John.
Within days of Sarm’s disappearance Bane had hired David Cattie, a lawyer who has represented Ghislaine maxwell — at which point, his friendship with Kate, to whom he had assured he would cooperate with police, came to an abrupt end: ‘He said, “Kate, I don’t want this to sound weird, but I’ve got myself a lawyer”. And that’s when communication stopped.’
Shortly afterwards, it emerged that Bane, 47, had been imprisoned for assaulting his ex-wife Cori Stevenson, leaving her with a broken tooth and finger marks around her neck. Yet police still didn’t formally question him about Sarm’s disappearance and, days later, he sailed away from St John.
Despite being described as a ‘person of interest’ by police, Bane’s boat has never been forensically examined and, last week, photographs emerged of him in a gym in his hometown of Lake orion, michigan, seemingly without a care in the world. ‘It’s gut wrenching,’ says a tearful Kate, of her reaction to those smiling pictures. ‘He’s never come forward to help the investigation.’
Three years on from Sarm’s disappearance, her family and friends hold little hope of seeing her again, and are calling for the case to be reclassified from a missing persons inquiry to a murder investigation.
‘I cry when I speak about her, so I try not to,’ says Kate, 44, from Southsea in Hampshire. She met Sarm in 2008 when they both worked as air hostesses for Fly Be. ‘She was funny, one of those people who couldn’t sit still for five minutes, always wanting adventure.’
UnTIL now, Kate, who works in a picture framing gallery, has only discussed Bane guardedly, for fear of jeopardising an already shambolic police investigation.
But Sarm’s family claim officers have stopped replying to their requests for information (nor did they reply to our request for comment). The case appears to have ground to a halt, so Kate now feels she has nothing to lose: ‘All barriers are down. We can speak our minds. I think, from Ryan’s actions afterwards, foul play happened. If you hadn’t got anything to hide, why would you not be open?’
Last week, Sarm’s distraught mother Brenda Street, 67, from ongar, essex, said she believed her daughter had been murdered.
David Johnston, former Commander of Homicide and Serious Crime at the metropolitan Police, who is working pro bono as the family’s advocate in his role as patron of the charity murdered Abroad, is even less circumspect.
‘my belief is that Bane had an argument with her. She was assaulted and died from her injuries,’ says Johnston. Had police searched the boat, he says, ‘I believe they would have found either Sarm’s body or signs of a struggle.’ Thirty years of policing have taught him to ‘try to avoid making assumptions’, he stresses, but Bane has done nothing to disprove the hypothesis.
Cattie, Bane’s lawyer, says in response that ‘it is wildly irresponsible for a former head of law enforcement to be making such baseless accusations. That fact that mr Johnston would further traumatise Sarm’s family with baseless conjecture is repulsive’.
The one thing both seem to agree on is that, as Johnston, 66, puts it, ‘the gloves have to come off’.
Sarm was a free spirit, with a ‘lust for life,’ Kate says. When Sarm asked if she could sail to the Caribbean with Kate and her boyfriend, martin, on their planned trip in December 2019, ‘it made sense. She didn’t have any ties. For me it was ideal, being with my partner and best friend, sailing to paradise’.
The three arrived in Grenada in the summer of 2020, where Sarm met Bane on the dating site Tinder. Bane, a former account manager for a technology firm, had moved to the Caribbean in 2015 and built a business chartering yachts. Kate describes the attraction between them as ‘instant. I think she loved him. He was very charming’.
The four became close friends, and Bane showed no sign of a temper in front of Kate — ‘I don’t think I ever saw him angry,’ she says.
By February 2021, Sarm and Bane had moved to St John and, on the night of march 7, dined at a restaurant on the island. meanwhile, Kate was with martin on the island of St martin. At 7pm, Sarm, apparently in good spirits, sent her a text.
Bane says they returned to his yacht, moored 120ft off Frank Bay, and watched a film until he fell asleep, before being woken by the sound of the anchor alarm which signalled his boat had moved.
There were two other catamarans moored close by, the owners of which confirmed to American TV channel nBC’s Dateline investigation that they heard no commotion to indicate someone had fallen overboard or gone missing.
Kate Vernalls, 42, another of Sarm’s friends — who were roommates for eight years until Sarm left for the Caribbean — believes that, ‘If someone you loved fell off a boat or wasn’t there when you woke up, you’d be shouting their name, on a dinghy looking for them’.
AFTeR Bane reported Sarm missing, he met police on land — a strange decision, says Johnston, who adds that, when dealing with someone who is a suspect in a missing person’s case, ‘ you go to the crime scene and investigate’.
Cattie says that Bane asked for police assistance in locating Sarm, but clearly, opportunities were missed. Under U.S. law, the police needed ‘probable cause’ that Bane was implicated in Sarm’s disappearance in order to search the boat, which they claim they didn’t have.
However, Johnston believes ‘they could have obtained a warrant from a judge, detained the boat and searched it. I have asked, “Did you speak to a lawyer to see what was needed to meet the threshold for probable cause, or make an assumption and not bother?”’ He insists that it’s likely ‘it’s the latter’.
The 24 hours after a possible crime has been committed ‘ are what we call the golden hours’, he adds, when, in his view, the GPS from the