[BITList] The Perfect Crime ?

[michael J Feltham]

No police, no body: why cruise ships suit the perfect crime

Nearly 200 people have vanished from cruise ships this century, but arrests rarely follow
By : Catherine Howard
“Saw this and thought of you,” the email’s subject line read. In it was a link to a recent news report about Dublin resident Daniel Belling, who had been arrested over his wife’s disappearance from a cruise ship in the Mediterranean.

The story surfaced again this week with the discovery of a body at Rimini on Italy’s Adriatic coast. The body turned out not to be that of Belling’s wife, Xiang Lei Li, who was reported missing in February following a 10-day Mediterranean cruise. Belling remains under arrest in Rome, on suspicion of having killed his wife during the cruise. My first thought was that I should brace myself for more messages telling me that the plot line of my novel appeared to be unfolding in real life. My second was that I’d have dismissed this case as being too unrealistic for fiction, because the aftermath of cruise-ship crime rarely involves arrests and criminal charges. There are, effectively, no police at sea. Before I became a crime writer, I worked in hospitality. As a receptionist at a 2,000-room Disney World hotel, as a courier on a French campsite and as the voice on the other end of a tour operator’s customer service line. Sometimes holidaymakers came to me as victims of theft, reporting money or travel documents stolen. Sometimes it was something much worse than that. I could always pick up the phone and get help, from the Orlando police department, la police nationale or our own gardaí. But what happens when you find yourself the victim of a crime that has occurred in no country at all?In practice, this means that if you awake in your cabin to discover a member of your party has gone missing in the night, your help is going to come in the form of a police officer from a nation potentially thousands of miles away.

Maritime law 
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