Decades Later, Sea Tragedy Survivor Breaks Silence
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Tere Jo Duperrault became the most famous 11-year-old in the world in 1961, when she was rescued from the waters off Florida after almost four days without food or water.
Almost 50 years later, the girl dubbed the "sea waif" by Life magazine, now Tere Duperrault Fassbender, is recounting the chilling story of her family's murder and her survival in a new book, "Alone: Orphaned on the Ocean."
"Everybody was told not to speak to me about it and so I never was able to talk about it," Fassbender said on NBC's "Today" show this morning. "It was always in my mind."
Fassbender is breaking her silence about the tragedy of the Bluebelle, the sailboat her family rented in November 1961. While enjoying a family vacation with her parents, brother and sister, the ship's captain, Julian Harvey, a pilot and war hero, murdered his wife and all of Fassbender's family. She awoke to find her family dead in pools of blood and Harvey pulling the plugs on the boat, preparing it to sink.
"I think he probably thought I would go down with the ship," she told NBC's Matt Lauer.
Instead, Fassbender now says she jumped onto a two-and-a-half-by-five-foot cork float, with the captain on her trail.
"He went forward to get a knife or something to kill her, but she did not hold on to the line," Fassbender's co-author, Richard Logan, told "Today." "Tere had incredible presence of mind in that next moment and went and untied that float."
In the three and a half days that followed, Tere clung to the tiny float in shark-infested waters, bearing burning sun by day and chilling cold by night without food or water to sustain her.
"I was never frightened. I was an outdoor child and I loved the water," she told "Today." "I had strong faith. I believed in God and I prayed for him to help me and I just went with the flow I guess."
Miraculously, Nicolaos Spachidakis, second officer of the Greek freighter Captain Theo, spotted Tere's tiny float after almost four days at sea.
"The girl was reclining stiffly, leaning back on her arms, wearing pale pink pedal pushers and a white blouse, her feet dangling over the side of the float. One of the crewmen took a picture of her looking up from her tiny craft, squinting against the sun, dwarfed by the expanse of empty sea around her," Logan and Fassbender write in "Alone." "Her bleached hair was glowing brightly in the sun above her emaciated and painfully drawn sunburned face. This picture would shortly be wired around the world, and front pages everywhere would proclaim the miracle of the 'sea waif.'"
A barely alive Tere was rushed to a Miami hospital, but her ordeal was not yet over. Harvey, too, had survived, after coming to shore on a dinghy. He claimed the Bluebelle had caught fire, killing Tere's family and his wife.
After learning of Tere's survival, Harvey checked into a Florida hotel and committed suicide. Officials said the cash-strapped captain may have been motivated to murder his wife in order to collect her life insurance policy. It was later revealed that another of Harvey's six wives had died under violent circumstances.
Fassbender said she received little psychological treatment after the traumatizing ordeal, but telling her story in "Alone" has been therapeutic.
"I thought that I was spared for a reason and that the reason would be to help other people," she said. "I would just hope that I could help someone after they read the book, to give them inspiration."
