183. Honeymoon Cruise Disappearance: George Smith
episode
Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings and Mysteries
40 min
1 speaker
3 chapters
transcribed 2 months ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What initial mystery set the scene for George Smith’s disappearance on the Brilliance of the Seas?
Welcome back to another installment of Dark Summer here at Heart Starts Pounding. As always, I'm your host, Kaylin Moore. We're only halfway through the year, and so far, cruises have dominated the headlines. In April of this year, as I'm sure you remember, 13 people traveling on a Dutch cruise ship came down with hantavirus, resulting in three deaths. The news went viral, and the world followed along with this story. which made me realize how rare that is because usually the ocean keeps its secrets and the tragedies that happen aboard these cruise ships tend to get swept away. When you push off of the dock, you're floating in a jurisdiction that belongs to no one, hundreds of miles of open water, and every so often a passenger will step onto a ship
and simply vanishes. And nobody vanished quite like George Smith. It was the summer of 2005. He was 26 years old on his honeymoon aboard Royal Caribbean's Brilliance of the Seas somewhere in the Aegean Sea. And by the time the sun came up, the only evidence that he had been on the ship was a smear of blood on a metal canopy several decks below his cabin. And there's a list of questions that still don't have a satisfying answer. We're going to get into all of that today, but before we do, I just wanted to let you know our dark summer merch is live. You can head over to shop.heartsidespounding.com and check out our dark summer shirt and our light summer shirt. We also have bandanas and our evergreen merch that's always in the store.
And as always, snap a picture and tag me when you try it on. I love seeing you all out there repping our merch. And this week in our newsletter, you can meet the artist behind the merch, Katie. I think she did a great job. That is part of our free tier on Patreon, so sign up there if you want to join our newsletter. All right, let's get into it. It was just after 7.30 in the morning on July 5th, 2005, and the Royal Caribbean Cruise Line ship, the Brilliance of the Seas, was easing into port in Kusadasi, Turkey. A 16-year-old passenger named Emily Rausch stepped onto her balcony to photograph the coastline coming into view. She lifted her camera, and that's when something a few decks below her caught her eye.
One of the ship's lifeboat canopies, the white metal awning that keeps the boats covered, it wasn't white anymore. Stretched across it was a dark red stain. Now, parts of it had already dried in the morning sun and smeared into it near the edge was what looked like a handprint. Emily took a photo and then she called security. It turns out she wasn't the only one doing that. Other passengers had seen this horrible stain too and the calls were stacking up. It looked like someone had bled out on top of the canopy, they said. But the source of the blood, that is the person the blood belonged to, was nowhere to be found. This stain was directly below a row of cabin balconies, 12 of them stacked up the side of the ship.
So on the captain's orders, security started working out who was staying in each of those rooms. That part was easy. Every passenger on this ship carried a CPAS card. That's Royal Caribbean's all-in-one room key that also tracks when you scan on and off the ship. And by 7.30 in the morning, the crew could already tell that almost everyone in those 12 cabins had already scanned their card to go ashore for the day. Almost everyone. The couple staying in cabin 9062 hadn't scanned off. They were a newlywed couple six days into their honeymoon, George and Jennifer Smith. Security knocked on their door, but there was no answer. So they just let themselves in. The room, as they saw it, was a mess. The bed was unmade.
There was clothes everywhere. I mean, it was the room of two people on vacation, but George and Jennifer were nowhere to be found. So the crew started a quiet ship-wide search. They searched up and down the halls of the ship, and they also looked through the ship's electronic key card system for the couple. This way they could do it without freaking out the other passengers.
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Chapters
3 chapters
1
What initial mystery set the scene for George Smith’s disappearance on the Brilliance of the Seas?
0:00–10:06
2
How was the blood-stained lifeboat canopy discovered and who first reported it?
10:06–18:29
3
What did the ship’s early onboard search reveal about George and Jennifer’s cabin?
18:29–40:21
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings and Mysteries
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