Two Wealthy Yachters Are Cleared In Murder That Roiled Caribbean

KINGSTOWN, St. Vincent - Jurors found a wealthy West Virginia couple not guilty today in the shooting death of a West Indian boatman, saving them from the threat of execution by hanging.

Penny Fletcher, 35, cried with relief in the arms of her 50-year-old husband, James, after the judge ordered them to leave the dock.

Fletcher family members gathered around, sobbing and hugging in the courtroom.

"The question remains: Who shot Jolly Joseph?" said Judge Dunbar Cenac of the East Caribbean High Court. "There is no evidence before me, direct or indirect, that the accused committed this act."

The Huntington, W.Va., couple were charged with shooting and killing Jerome "Jolly" Joseph while they vacationed off the Grenadine island of Bequia in October.

Joseph, 30, was a popular boat-taxi driver who was last seen ferrying the Fletchers to their yacht, the Carefree, on Oct. 6. His body was found Oct. 9 floating off Bequia. He had been killed by a .22-caliber bullet.

The Fletchers brought a single .22-caliber handgun with them when they arrived in St. Vincent and the Grenadines in August. The gun has never been found.

After the prosecution rested its case Wednesday, defense lawyer Ralph Gonsalves argued that there was no blood, ballistics or circumstantial evidence tying the couple to the killing.

The case had become a cause celebre, with the Fletchers alleging they were victims of corrupt officials seeking to extort money from

wealthy Americans. One of their lawyers said he was approached earlier this year by an important islander wanting $250,000 in return for the Fletchers' freedom.

Local musicians wrote calypso songs about the case, and one lawyer called it "O.J. in Paradise."

"It has a murder, corruption, politics, rich white people and a dead black man," said Gonsalves. "Of course people are interested."

`Ugly Americans'

There's little doubt that Jim and Penny Fletcher did not act like model tourists when they arrived in this exquisitely beautiful Caribbean island aboard their $250,000 yacht.

They drank too often and too much, mostly a 92-proof local brew, Sunset Very Strong Rum. They fought in public. She threw drunken tantrums, once biting a man. She boasted she had a pistol.

St. Vincent Prime Minister Sir James Mitchell described the couple as "typical ugly Americans."

Detractors said the rich white Fletchers tried to escape the gallows by using the power of the U.S. media to browbeat this small and predominantly black nation.

The couple, both on their third marriage and getting over a near-divorce, hoped for clear sailing when they left Key Largo early last year aboard the Carefree, a 47-foot yacht they had bought from Jim's father.

Penny, a vivacious former cheerleader, wanted a round-the-world trip. Jim, a lanky 6-foot-1 sailor, had taken early retirement from the family business.

In early August of last year, they joined 100 other yachts in Admiralty Bay, the fishhook-shaped harbor of Bequia (pronounced BEK-WAY), one of the Grenadines.

Penny gave money to the local school, told family lawyers to establish a $25,000 trust and promised 10 percent of the profits from the yacht-chartering business she and Jim planned to start.

Rum, rage and rumors

But they both drank heavily. Jim would grow quiet, but Penny turned feisty, fighting with bartenders, waitresses, even market women.

"They be well-known real fast," said taxi driver Bill Adams.

On Friday evening, Oct. 4, Penny flew into a drunken rage at Buddy's Bar, a tiny hangout next to the open-air fish and vegetable market. She threw bottles at three male patrons and bit one on the chest, the men told a court hearing in March.

Penny also claimed she had been raped by a black man in Antigua and vowed to shoot a black in revenge, the men added. And she boasted that she had a pistol.

That Sunday, Oct. 6, the couple used the Carefree's VHF radio to summon a water taxi at 10 p.m. for a short ride to the beachside Gingerbread House restaurant. "Jolly" Joseph, 30, went to pick them up.

Jim and Penny say they found the restaurant closed for the night and Joseph returned them to the yacht. On the way back, they add, Joseph got another radio call.

No one has reported seeing Joseph alive again.

Joseph's 15-foot motorboat was found ashore at 6 a.m. the next day, downwind from the Fletchers' yacht. His body would not be found until two days later. Yet within three hours after the boat was found, a dozen Bequians had lined up on shore near the Carefree, shouting "You killed him!" Police began searching the yacht and sent divers into the shallow, gin-clear water around it. They found nothing.

"Everyone just jumped on Dad and Penny because of the way they had behaved, nothing else," said Jim's eldest daughter Kathy, 27.

A fired former deckhand on the Carefree testified that he saw Penny embracing Joseph, who was known for his ways with female tourists. Penny denies any affair.

Joseph was shot once in the chest with a 22-caliber gun, the same caliber as the Smith & Wesson pistol and 200 bullets that Jim and Penny had declared to Bequia customs when they arrived here.

But the slug dug out of Joseph's body, plus two live rounds found aboard his water taxi, were much longer than the slugs of the 120 bullets found by police aboard the Carefree.

The Fletchers say they had noticed the pistol missing in August and assumed it was stolen by the deckhand, but never reported it to police.

In March, when a young Bequia magistrate found "probable cause" to charge the Fletchers with premeditated murder, the case erupted into headlines that made Bequians furious at U.S. news media.

A Fletcher family lawyer, Arturo Diaz of Puerto Rico, charged on ABC's "Nightline" that a St. Vincent man known to be a friend of a top police official had offered to spring the couple "by the payment of a certain amount of money."

Robert Fletcher, 81, Jim's father, said Diaz flew to Key Largo in December to ask if the family would pay the bribe. They agreed to pay up to $100,000 - then learned that the deal was off.

A U.S. diplomat also outraged St. Vincentians when he remarked that the local magistrate had "taken lint and created a rope with which to hang the Fletchers."

But what really angered people here was the "Nightline" program, which portrayed the well-liked water-taxi driver as a drug dealer and failed to identify the correspondent, John McWethy, as a classmate of Jim Fletcher at DePauw University in Indiana.