PROSECUTORS: NEED DELAY TO GET GOODS ON LEWIS BENNETT
Feds seek to track down leads around the world in woman’s loss at sea.
Lewis Bennett’s alleged motive for murdering his wife, suburban Delray Beach real estate broker Isabella Hellmann, might lie in a bank account half a world away, and federal prosecutors want nearly a year to track down that lead and others, they say in a court motion.
In fact, while its Feb. 20 complaint charging Bennett with second-degree murder was just eight pages, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami said last week it already had given defense attorneys “thousands of pages” of documents on 56 CDs and two hard drives.
And that by this week, they’d be adding to that documents totaling a staggering 6 terabytes. That’s 6,000 gigabytes. By comparison, the entire print holdings of the Library of Congress total 10 terabytes, although much of the Bennett prosecution materials could be images, audio and video, which use vastly more bytes than text.
In the motion filed Friday, prosecutors asked that Bennett’s trial be delayed from early April to February 2019.
The prosecutors said it could be the end of 2018 before they are able to get the evidence they’ve requested from a United Nations of agencies, as well as interview witnesses positioned at key points along the global journey that climaxed with Bennett calling authorities May 15 from the middle of the Atlantic to say his catamaran had struck something and his 41-year-old bride had vanished on their honeymoon sail.
And they said they might not be done finding things out about the case and want more time to do so.
In Friday’s court motion, prosecutors said either Bennett or his solar panel company, Next Generation Solar, might have a bank account in Australia, and that he was receiving wire transfers through OzForex Limited, an Aus-
tralia-based global money transfer company.
“The financial holdings, or lack thereof, of the defendant could be evidence of a monetary incentive for the defendant to murder Ms. Hellmann,” the motion said.
Last month’s murder complaint had said getting Hellmann declared dead would immediately gain for Bennett things that were in his wife’s name but not his: her bank accounts as well as the title to the couple’s condo west of Delray Beach, which was in the names of Hellmann and a corporation created by herself and Bennett.
In fact, a letter to Bennett from the Coast Guard indicates that within 48 hours of that agency calling off the search for Hellmann, he asked if the Coast Guard had the authority to declare her dead. The agency said it did not. Bennett later asked the Palm Beach County courts to make that declaration. That prompted Circuit Judge Kathleen Kroll to tell Bennett’s probate lawyers in October, “This is really quick. Normally, it’s after a year or two. What’s the rush?”
The murder complaint revealed Bennett had flown to Florida from England in August to try to settle his insurance policy on the catamaran when he was arrested on a related charge of knowingly transporting stolen coins. They’d disappeared in 2016 from a ship in the Caribbean on which he’d been sailing; he was the one who called in the theft. He was minutes away from being sentenced to seven months in prison in the coins case when he was slapped with the murder charge.
At a Feb. 26 arraignment, Bennett was assigned a federal public defender after he said he’d earned no income for the six months he’d been in jail since his August arrest, and was out of money except for $2,000 in an Australian bank account. Police said they had found, and seized, $20,000 on him when he was arrested in the coins case.
Friday’s federal motion says prosecutors are seeking “physical evidence presently in Australia, French St. Martin, and potentially the United Kingdom that the United States intends to offer at trial.” It lists:
■ Records with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia for accounts in the name of Bennett, an unspecified business partner or Next Generation Solar.
■ Records with OzForex Limited in the name of any of the three.
■ Records from the Australia Maritime Safety Authority, which registered the catamaran, as well as the Insurance Fraud Bureau of Australia and the Insurance Council of Australia. The prosecutors said among the items they seek are any records about investigations into any wrecks or damage regarding either the catamaran or Hellmann, as well as the details of insurance coverage on both.
■ Health records about the couple’s daughter Emelia, now 20 months old,who is believed to be living with Bennett’s parents in southwest England.
The motion said prosecutors also seek the testimony of witnesses in Australia, France, Saint Martin and the Caribbean island of Bonaire. They include a surveyor Bennett hired in St. Martin to inspect his catamaran; a business associate and a social contact, both of them in Australia; the boat’s former owners, believed to be in France; and the Dutch St. Maartin police officer who took Bennett’s report of the coin theft.
What’s in the prosecutors’ trove might never be known. Both the Coast Guard and the FBI have declined — as recently as Tuesday — numerous requests by The Palm Beach Post, both informally and via the federal Freedom of Information Act, for the results of their respective “missing person” investigations. And unlike Florida’s courts, federal courts are not required to make discovery public unless it comes out in open court. That means that if Bennett changes his plea to guilty, as he did in the stolen coins case, it most likely would remain sealed forever.
Prosecutors’ global searches in the murder case are consistent with the air of mystery surrounding Bennett, a 40-year-old dual citizen of Australia and England who has no permanent home and no confirmed means of income.
The Post has been unable to determine when he moved to Australia from England, except that he registered his solar panel firm in Australian’s Queensland state, in 2011. Cameron Stewart, Washington correspondent for the national newspaper The Australian, 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.