How an 11-Year-Old Survived a Family Massacre and 4 Days Alone at Sea

Terry Jo Duperrault was 11 years old when she was spotted drifting alone at sea on a tiny white raft on November 16, 1961. An officer on a Greek freighter ship called Captain Theo managed to spot her amidst the white wave caps, and she was brought on board, immediately collapsing into her rescuer's arms. While they could guess that she had been through quite an ordeal based on her severe sunburn and dehydration, they could not have imagined the story she was about to tell. 

Three days earlier, a man named Julian Harvey had been rescued from a small dinghy with a deceased child in his arms. He told the tale of Bluebelle, a boat chartered by the Duperrault family for a cruise to the Bahamas, with the 44-year-old Harvey as skipper. He said he had narrowly escaped the sinking ship after a storm and that he was the only survivor. He reported that his new wife, 34-year-old Mary Harvey, his charter guests, Arthur, 40, and Jean Duperrault, 38, and the three Duperrault children—Brian, 14, Terry Jo, 11 and René, 7—had all perished. 

When he learned Terry Jo was alive, Harvey died by suicide, and the truth began to come out. 

Arthur Duperrault was a relatively wealthy optometrist from Green Bay, Wisc., who planned to take his wife and three kids on a late-November cruise around the Bahamas. He chartered a small sailing boat, Bluebelle, and hired Harvey, an experienced skipper, to captain the boat, while Mary would be the onboard cook. 

They set off from Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. on November 8, 1961, and spent several days lazing on various beaches around the Bahamas. On the last day of the cruise, on the island of Great Abaco, Arthur visited with a British District commissioner (the Bahamas was a British colony at the time) and told him it had been a "once-in-a-lifetime vacation." 

On the night of November 12, the boat headed back to Florida, but never made it. Harvey was picked up the next day in a dinghy, with René’s body in his arms. 

According to the yachtsman and military veteran, the wind picked up around 11 p.m. on November 12 in what he called a "sudden tropical squall." The mainmast snapped and hit the deck, injuring Mary and Arthur and trapping Harvey away from his passengers. A fire then broke out in the fuel storage tank, and the sails went up in flames. Harvey ordered everyone to abandon ship, and he released the dinghy and a raft before diving into the water. He was only able to find René and said everyone else vanished.

Harvey told his rescuers that the other boat passengers had died, and he even wrote down all their names, but when he was questioned by the Miami Coast Guard, he mentioned no deaths at all. On November 17, toward the end of Harvey’s testimony, a Coast Guard official announced that Terry Jo had been rescued. 

"Oh my God," Harvey said. "Why, that's wonderful." 

He then left the interrogation room and headed straight to the Sandman Hotel, where he was later found deceased. He had slashed his wrists, ankles, thighs and throat with a double-edged razor, but not before writing a brief suicide note. 

"I'm going out now," he wrote. "I guess I either don't like life or I don't know what to do with it." 

He wrote a few words about his son and how all insurance policies should go to him and asked to be "buried at sea." In a postscript, he said, "I'm a nervous wreck and just can't continue." 

Mary was not the first wife Harvey lost under tragic circumstances. Years earlier, he survived an accident where the car he was driving went over a bridge. He escaped, but the crash killed his then-wife and her mother. Harvey then fought in World War II and had to retire from the military due to injury, and he had even been in two previous incidents that sank his yacht and powerboat. Some postulate that he committed the murders on Bluebelle for Mary's life insurance money.

He was buried at sea, right around the time Terry Jo recovered enough to talk. She described a very different series of events, beginning with when she and her sister had gone to their cabins around 9 p.m. 

"Later, I heard screaming and stamping, and I woke up and it went away," she said. "I went upstairs to see what it was, and I saw my mother and my brother laying on the floor, and there was blood all over. I went up to the captain and he shoved me down." 

She went back down to her bunk, and Harvey later came to her cabin with what looked like a rifle in his hands. He left her alone, and she stayed in her bunk until water started flowing in. When she went back up, she saw no signs of the rest of her family, but Harvey was there. 

“I asked him if the boat was sinking and he said, ‘Yes,’ and he went up forward to do something," she said. "He came back, and he said, ‘Is the dinghy loose?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know,’ and he jumped in after it, and I couldn’t see him, and I couldn’t see the dinghy, so I got the little raft and got in it and went away and I couldn’t see anything.” 

According to Terry Jo, there was no fire, the mast didn't break and the sea was totally calm. It is unknown why Harvey spared her life.

In 2010, a memoir called Alone: Orphaned On the Ocean, written by Tere Dupperault Fassbender (Terry Jo had by then changed her name) and Richard Logan, was released. In it, she provides more details about her time on the water, including how she couldn't sit up on the raft because it wouldn't support her weight and how she "felt like she was in some kind of strange, cosmic dream" as she drifted across the water.

On the first day, temperatures reached 85 degrees Fahrenheit, and Fassbender felt dehydrated but, at the same time, "felt no great hunger or thirst." On the second day, she saw a plane fly overhead, and she "waved her arms trying to get attention" to no avail due to her white raft, blonde clothing and light clothing. The girl went in and out of consciousness, her kidneys stopped working and fluids were going to her heart and lungs more than her brain, according to the book. As a result, she was in a coma at Mercy Hospital in Miami after finally being after four days and brought in by sailors aboard the Greek freighter Captain Theo.

Terry Jo moved in with her aunt and uncle, and while she had trouble sleeping alone, she had many cousins and friends with which to distract herself. More than a decade before, in 1999, Logan suggested Fassbender be interviewed about her experience after taking sodium amytal, or "truth serum."

"He felt this experience would give me the confidence to believe in myself about what I saw and heard," Fassbender said in in a 2010 interview with CBS. "I had seen my mother and brother floating in water and blood, but I never saw my father or sister's bodies."

She went on to explain that the ordeal inspired her to work in water resources as well as water regulation and zoning.

"Julian Harvey abandoned me thinking the ocean would swallow me, but instead it created a bond between me and water," she said.

Fassbender's rescue also influenced policy change. Because her raft blended into the white caps of the ocean, causing it to be hard to spot, the U.S. Coast Guard recommended raft colors be changed to the current bright orange.