Hellmann mystery broadens amid silence
DELRAY BEACH — On Monday, a British journalist knocked on the door of a home in Hythe, a coastal Hampshire town about 85 miles southwest of London.
“We have been told not to say anything,” the resident told the reporter, sent by The Palm Beach Post. “He lives here some of the time, because we are his parents, but not all the time.”
“He” is Lewis Bennett, whereabouts unknown. The 40-year-old man has a mysterious back story, no permanent home or confirmed means of income, and a little girl who turns 1 this month and whose mother vanished at sea.
His story — and that of 41-yearold suburban Delray Beach real
estate broker Isabella Hellmann — takes place in an array of locales that would fill the board game Risk, with push pins in no fewer than nine countries and possessions spanning three continents.
Bennett has insisted that as he and Hellmann, his wife of three months, sailed for home at the end of a weekslong Caribbean honeymoon, he was jolted awake early May 15 by his 37-foot catamaran smacking into something about 90 miles southeast of Key West. He says he came up from below and saw only twinkling stars. His wife was gone.
The Coast Guard spent four days scouring an area nearly the size of Connecticut, but on May 18, it called off the search. Either the next day, or perhaps even before that — Coast Guard correspondence isn’t clear — Bennett wrote to ask for a document the Coast Guard isn’t in the business of issuing: a “presumption of death.”
Isabella Hellmann’s vanishing, which has been reported across the globe, is notable also because virtually everyone involved won’t talk about it.
■ The Coast Guard and the FBI will say only that they are conducting a “missing persons investigation.” They never have said they suspect foul play. Both have said they will provide any documents only after they are done. Neighbors did say they saw men in latex gloves in the parking lot of the couple’s condo, going over Bennett’s car and questioning him as he stood nearby. And this past month, several FBI investigators spent a day inside the condo, leaving with several boxes, as part of a court-ordered search.
■ The Post’s efforts to reach out to the family have failed, even as relatives created Facebook pages titled “Find Isabella” and “Bring Emelia Back.” Emelia is the couple’s daughter, whom the family has said it despairs of ever seeing again. One of Hellman’s sisters angrily accused Bennett of foul play during a May 28 confrontation at the Boca Raton home of Hellmann’s relatives, but family members have offered no evidence.
■ The Post has made numerous unsuccessful efforts to reach Bennett through phone, email, social media and his Boca Raton lawyer, and even via Monday’s in-person visit by Southampton-based Solent News and Photo Agency. The Post directed the agency to the home after Palm Beach County court documents gave the address in England where Bennett was served with court papers.
In that brief interview Monday, Bennett’s father, who did not give his name, said Lewis has had bad experiences with the media.
“The trouble with that is that when he has done it before, it does not end up the way he tells it,” the man said. “They change it around.”
Several questions remain. Among them:
Where is Bennett? His lawyer won’t comment. Hellmann’s family has said she and Bennett quarreled over Bennett’s desire to move his family to Australia. Bennett posted on his Facebook page in late June that he’d gone to England with his daughter, but there’s no way to confirm he or Emelia is there.
What actually happened? The Coast Guard has not said if Bennett reported hearing his wife go overboard or heard her scream or splash. The agency hasn’t said if he reported seeing the object the catamaran reportedly struck but has said it never found anything. It’s possible the yacht ran onto the Cay Sal Bank, about 30 miles to the east, then drifted back west to where the Coast Guard found both it and Bennett.
Where is the catamaran now? The Coast Guard confirmed it lost track of it and the family has said it was told the vessel sank. A catamaran is far less likely to sink than a boat, since it essentially is a cabin between two giant “hulls,” or pontoons, and the Coast Guard says it found no obvious holes in either one. Bennett initially reported he came up to the deck to find the boat was taking on water. That means it still was upright and would have turned upside down some time after Bennett retrieved his lifeboat, satellite phone and “EPIRB” tracking device and abandoned ship, and before the Coast Guard found and rescued him some three hours after his initial call.
Where does Bennett spend most of his time? Bennett is a dual citizen of England and Australia, and the Post has been unable to determine when he moved from England to Australia, except that he registered his solar panel firm in Queensland, Australia, in 2011. Cameron Stewart, Washington correspondent for the national newspaper The Australian, who’s been reporting the story in cooperation with The Palm Beach Post, had said government sources told him Bennett left Australia in February 2016, writing in his departure form that he planned to visit his native England and to stay there no more than 12 months. Instead, he appears to have been in the Caribbean and Florida.
Hellmann’s friend Sara Cortes said Bennett rarely came to Florida. She said Bennett would fly Hellmann to meet him and his catamaran at various ports, including Tahiti and Singapore. Cortes also said the couple visited Bennett’s parents in England. Bennett registered solar panel corporations in Australia and in Delray Beach. But Cortes has said Bennett told her he was a plumber, and Hellmann told her Bennett had come into some family money, had poured most of it into the catamaran, and that he made a living transporting people. The Australian Maritime Registry says Bennett submitted that Surf into Summer was built in 1986, and a yacht broker has told The Post a catamaran that old would be worth about $60,000. But the company that builds the yacht says on its webpage that the model was first built in 2008. Online ads show that model built in 2008 selling for between $275,000 and $400,000.