No bond for man facing murder charge
Dual citizen of England, Australia thought a flight risk.
MIAMI — As Lewis Bennett waited Tuesday for a judge to come into the courtroom and sentence him on a coin-theft charge, his lawyer leaned in and gave him the bad news: He now had been charged with murder.
“No one told him beforehand, and I had to tell him,” Marc Shiner said Wednesday, confirming the conversation he was seen having with Bennett at the defense table just after court bailiffs had brought the prisoner into the courtroom.
Moments earlier, Shiner had learned the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office had filed a complaint charging Bennett had killed Isabella Hellmann in May in international waters west of the Bahamas and south of Key West, then deliberately sank his catamaran in an attempt to stage an accident.
On Wednesday afternoon, Bennett for the first time faced a judge as an alleged murderer.
At an afternoon hearing before Miami U.S. Magistrate Judge Edwin G. Torres, which lasted fewer than five minutes, Bennett acknowledged the second-degree murder charge. He will make a formal plea at a later hearing.
The judge consented to prosecutors’ request that Bennett be held without bond, saying the dual citizen of England and Australia was a flight risk. Bennett faces deportation in the cointheft case.
A bond hearing is set for 10 a.m. Monday, again in Miami, and an arraignment for March 7, likely also in Miami.
Bennett said he could afford a lawyer and he’d be represented by Shiner, whose firm represented him in the coins case. But Shiner said Wednesday from Palm Beach County that the firm no longer represents Bennett.
Bennett left court under the escort of bailiffs without further comment. Hellman’s family did not attend Wednesday’s hearing, but was at the Tuesday sentencing, having just learned of the murder charge.
Tuesday’s federal complaint never says how investigators believe Bennett, 40, killed Hellmann, a 41-yearold suburban Delray Beach real estate broker, his bride of three months and the mother of their child, and doesn’t specifically detail that he did. But it lays out a series of steps the FBI alleges he took to cover up his crime at sea.
Bennett had called the Coast Guard early on May 15, saying he’d been below when MAP ONLINE
Follow an interactive map of Isabella Hellmann’s story at myPalmBeachPost.com.
his catamaran struck something. He said he came topside to find the vessel taking on water and his wife gone. The Coast Guard called off its ocean search after four days. Within a day of that, Bennett wrote the agency and requested, without success, a “letter of presumed death.”
On May 20, the complaint said, Bennett bought oneway plane tickets for himself and his daughter Emilia to the United Kingdom, and he flew there on May 28, not telling Hellmann’s family of his departure. The girl is believed to still be in England.
Bennett separately has been trying in Palm Beach County Court to have Hellmann declared dead so he can settle her estate. But a judge has refused to rule until she knows more.
In November, Bennett pleaded guilty to transporting the stolen coins knowingly. On Tuesday morning, U.S. District Judge James Lawrence King handed down a seven-month sentence, which would be followed by three years of probation. The judge waived a fine of up to $250,000; Bennett’s lawyers said he had no money to pay it.