Missing wife Facebook post deleted
Lewis Bennett, whose wife, Isabella Hellmann, was reported lost at sea appears to have taken down a long Facebook posting he made just last week, after it sparked a long line of comments that alternate between messages of support from friends and relatives and searing questions from people who question his role in the disappearance of the suburban Delray Beach real estate broker.
Bennett has told the Coast Guard he was awakened early on May 15 after his 37-foot catamaran Surf into Summer struck something about 30 miles west of Cay Sal in the Bahamas. He said he came topside to find the vessel was taking on water and Hellmann, his wife of three months, was gone. He was rescued, but a four-day search failed to find Hellmann, 41.
The Coast Guard and the FBI confirmed May 26, eight days after the search was called off, that each was conducting a “missing person investigation.”
Neither agency has said whether Bennett is a target of their investigation or even if they suspect foul play.
But on June 16, several FBI investigators pushed through yellow evidence tape that the agency had used weeks earlier to seal the front door of the couple’s unit at Pine Ridge at Delray and spent the entire day in the condo, leaving with numerous boxes. An FBI spokesman would say only that the agency “initiated a court-authorized search” as “part of the investigation into the disappearance of Isabella Hellmann.”
“Understandably, I have now returned to the UK with my daughter to seek the comfort of my friends and family,” Bennett wrote in the June 28 posting, and “must take a step back from the world of social media.”
Within hours, several people posted comments saying they shared his grief and encouraging him.
But soon others posted comments asking Bennett why he was in such a hurry to leave Florida, denying Hellmann’s family access to the couple’s daughter, born in July 2016. Then several others began posting unsubstantiated allegations and saying “justice will be served.”
Bennett’s post still was up Monday evening. But by 5 a.m. Tuesday, it was gone. Bennett’s most current posting now is the one that, for a long time, had been his last one: an April 4 post showing him with Isabella and the couple’s daughter.
In last week’s posting, Bennett thanked people who he said have “supported me through this most testing of times” and criticized what he called “negative and derisory comments that have been said and insinuated by people that, surprisingly, are brought by people that I thought would be there to support myself and Emelia.”
A police report said one of Hellman’s sisters screamed accusations at Bennett during a May 28 confrontation at the Boca Raton home of Hellmann’s relatives.
Family members, friends and neighbors have said Hellmann told them she and her husband argued regularly over Bennett’s desire to return with her and the baby to Australia, where Bennett has dual British-Australian citizenship.
All efforts by The Palm Beach Post to contact Bennett have failed.
The Hellmann family also has not responded to numerous inquiries from The Post. On June 15, the family used the one-month anniversary of the disappearance to ramp up activity on the “find Isabella” page it created on Facebook.