128. Rebecca Coriam: The Cruise Employee Who Vanished // DARK SUMMER VOL. 2

Head to https://www.tryfum.com/HEART and use promo code HEART to get your free gift with purchase and start the Good Habit today! In 2011, a 24 year old woman vanished from a Disney Cruise that was heading back to LA. And what at first seemed like an open and shut “man overboard” case quickly started to seem like something much darker. Leaving us with the question, does Disney know more than they’re saying?? TW: Reference to Sexual Assault Subscribe onPatreon https://www.patreon.com/heartstartspounding for bonus content and to become a member of our Rogue Detecting Society. Patrons have access to bonus content as well as other perks. And members of our High Council on Patreon have access to our after-show called Footnotes, where I share my case file with our producer, Matt. Apple subscriptions are now live! Get access to ad-free episodes and bonus episodes when you subscribe on Apple Podcasts. Follow onTik Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@heartstartspounding?lang=en andInstagram https://www.instagram.com/heartstartspounding/ for a daily dose of horror. Show Notes: https://www.heartstartspounding.com/episodes/rebeccacoriam

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:00Kaelyn Moore?

  This episode is brought to you by Bigelow Tea. By now, you should all know that I'm obviously a very curious person, and I'm also a big tea drinker. So I've always heard about this tea called Bigelow Constant Comment. It's been around forever, and people absolutely love it. I realized I had no idea what it actually tasted like. Obviously, I had to investigate, and now I'm obsessed. Constant Comment is this incredible black tea with real orange rind, cold-pressed orange oil, and sweet spices. The best way I can describe it is it's like Christmas in a cup, except you get to drink it all year long. Then I learned the story behind it, which made me love it even more. Constant Comment was created by Ruth Campbell Bigelow and her New York City kitchen in 1945.

• 1:43Kaelyn Moore?

  She shared it with her friends, and everyone kept talking about it. And all of those "constant comments" actually gave it its name. The recipe is still a Bigelow family secret over 80 years later. So this one is a mystery worth investigating for yourself. Bigelow Constant Comment. Curiously different, impossible to forget.

• 2:02Kaelyn Moore?

  9:00 AM, March 22, 2011. A large cruise ship called the Disney Wonder plowed through the ocean waves off the coast of Mexico near the Baja California Peninsula. It was supposed to be a normal sunny day at sea. Think breakfast buffets, character sightings, and families splashing around in the multiple pools onboard. But that morning, below deck in the crew corridors, something was very wrong. A 24-year-old ship employee named Rebecca Coriam hadn't shown up for work that day, and no one could get a hold of her. Now, it was typical to see Rebecca first thing in the morning with a big smile on her face, wearing her bright yellow employee polo.

• 2:45Kaelyn Moore?

  She was always on time, she was always in a good mood, she was a youth counselor on the ship after all. But that day, she was nowhere to be found, and she hadn't alerted her team that she would be absent. One employee went down to her room in the crew quarters and knocked on her door. No answer. Another radioed her, thinking that maybe she was somewhere else on the ship, but the line was completely silent. Her fellow employees started searching around the boat, and they were really careful to not make too much of a scene, because they didn't want the families that were on the boat with young children to know that they were searching for a missing person. But the more they searched, the more scared they started to get, because they were on

• 3:27Kaelyn Moore?

  a ship in the middle of the ocean with no land in sight. And people don't just go missing on boats like that unless... And that's when one of the employees looked out at the vast expanse of ocean on all sides of the boat, and they got this really bad feeling. But then they looked back at the boat, and it was full of people, it was full of families and crew members alike, and most importantly, it was covered in security cameras. If Rebecca was truly missing, someone knew what happened to her.

• 4:08Kaelyn Moore?

  Welcome back to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings, and mysteries. I'm going to be your captain on this very dark voyage today, Haylen Moore. As we dive further into dark summer here in the Rogue Detecting Society headquarters, I thought it was only fair to dig a little deeper into what I consider to be one of the most terrifying summer holidays that one can take, and that is cruises. So today, I want to tell you about one of the most unsettling disappearances to ever happen on a cruise ship, but also I want to tell you about why cruise ships are pretty much the worst place in the entire world to go missing. But before we dive in, I just wanted to give a shout out to everyone who bought merch from our new drop.

• 4:51Kaelyn Moore?

  I love seeing you guys in your sweatshirts and your t-shirts. If you're a subscriber on Apple and Patreon, you get 10% off your order. And if you're a subscriber to the High Council tier on Patreon, you will get 20% off, which basically pays for your membership. Because I sit here in the Rogue Detecting Society headquarters all day just poring through documents and research, I love reading your messages that you all send to me. And this week, I actually got a message from one of our listeners, Samantha, that included a picture of the Annabelle the Doll tattoo that she recently got with the phrase "World Tour" written underneath, which is very fitting considering the episode we just did on that very world tour. Okay, we have a big mystery today that I want to get right into, so let's get back into it.

• 5:39Kaelyn Moore?

  What started as a small-scale search with just a few crew members soon turned into this much larger operation. Entire sections of the ship were combed through, which included the crew gym, the mess hall, the Deck Five pool where off-duty workers liked to unwind. Rebecca was not any of those places, and there was really no trace of her anywhere. Her uniform wasn't in the laundry, her room key hadn't been used that day, she hadn't even touched the breakfast that had been brought to her. And the ship had just departed the day before from Los Angeles, and it was now almost at its next destination, Cabo San Lucas in Mexico. So there wasn't really any way that she could have gotten off the boat like at a port.

• 6:23Kaelyn Moore?

  Her name wasn't logged for disembarking and her passport was in her room. And she had been seen the day before. The last sighting of her was at 11:00 PM by a friend named Melissa. So she had definitely made it onto the ship. Now, it's important to note here just how big the cruise ship that Rebecca worked on is. The Disney wonder consists of 11 decks, 875 guest cabins, and it accommodates over 3,000 people. It's an 83,000 ton cruise ship, stretching nearly 1,000 feet from bow to stern. That's three football fields long. And the outside, in this kind of almost macabre way, resembles the Titanic.

• 7:09Kaelyn Moore?

  But once you go inside, you see this like complete labyrinth of theaters, dining halls, pools, spas, child play areas, crew quarters, maintenance quarters. And they're all connected by this maze of stairwells and restricted access zones. For guests, when you're in the ship, it's this place of nonstop entertainment. But if you work on the ship, if you're an employee there, like Rebecca was, the ship feels like something else entirely. The cruise world exists behind the scenes, in the liminal spaces of the boat. In tight windowless cabins, down narrow back passageways,

• 7:48Kaelyn Moore?

  and in crew-only spaces like the mess hall, the crew gym, and the crew pool tucked away on deck five. Now Rebecca would have understood the inner workings of the ship very well because she had worked on this boat in some capacity since 2010, which was the year before her disappearance. Then she was hired as a youth worker, basically a camp counselor of sorts. She was originally from Liverpool and had studied in this specific field while at Liverpool Hope University. And she had previous work experience at Camp America in the United States before she got her job with Disney. And as far as her parents could tell, Rebecca was really enjoying this job and she seemed to be in really good spirits.

• 8:32Kaelyn Moore?

  The family had a pretty close relationship with her and they would talk every day on the phone or via email. And it seems like everyone on the ship really loved Rebecca, who was sometimes called Bex or even Becky as her name tag read. A friend who refers to herself as Melissa described Rebecca as being, quote, "The most amazing little burst of energy. You were completely drawn to her. She loved life, bouncing around all the time. Bex made hundreds of people happy. The passengers loved her. They all loved her." So it makes total sense that crew members were completely devastated by the early afternoon when they still had found no trace of her.

• 9:17Kaelyn Moore?

  And eventually, they had to go and tell the ship's captain what was happening. And he made a formal announcement over the intercom. He told everyone on the ship that a young woman, one of their own, was missing. And now the ship was on full lockdown mode.

• 9:39Kaelyn Moore?

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• 10:22Kaelyn Moore?

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• 10:39Kaelyn Moore?

  The Mexican Navy and US Coast Guard were called and told that a young woman had vanished from the cruise ship. And while the rest of the crew waited for them to arrive, they decided to do another sweep of the boat for any clues. Maybe there was something they missed the first time. So they all spread out. Some went back to Rebecca's cabin, others went up to the crew gym, and a few went back down to the staff pool on deck five. And that's when one of the crew members screamed that they had found something. There, sitting by the crew pool, was one single woman's flip-flop. No one could really say how it stayed hidden during the initial search for Rebecca. If everyone was looking

• 11:21Kaelyn Moore?

  really carefully around the boat, how did they completely miss this potentially very helpful evidence? Now, this pool was a very important part of the crew's experience while on the Disney Wonder. It was the one area where crew members could relax and hang out without being in the view of the guests. It was really a place where they could all let loose. So what if Rebecca had been there the night before she went missing, and she left only a single flip-flop as kind of a small breadcrumb as to what happened to her? Because based on where this flip-flop was sitting, close to the railing, it looked like she could have gone overboard. So when a person goes over the side of a cruise ship,

• 12:03Kaelyn Moore?

  a man overboard procedure is then implemented. If you're a passenger on the ship when this happens, you might hear "Oscar, Oscar, Oscar," or code "Oscar," blasted over the boat's sound system. Another code that they sometimes use is "Mr. Mob," M-O-B, standing for "man overboard." So the entire ship will then turn around in an attempt to go back to where the person would have landed in the water. There would be lights searching in the water, and also emergency buoys that light up thrown overboard. That's only if the boat is able to turn around, though, which does depend on a few things, like the boat's size, the

• 12:45Kaelyn Moore?

  condition of the water and the waves. When someone goes overboard one of these massive ships... The chances of being found and rescued are pretty low. Some people put the survival rate after a fall off a cruise ship at just 17%. If it's in the middle of the night, I've seen estimates of around 1%. Since the year 2000, it's estimated that 420 people have gone overboard off of cruise ships, most of them Carnival crews, but none of these incidents were on a Disney cruise. And I thought it was interesting that when Rebecca went missing, no one had ever gone overboard on a Disney wonder cruise.

• 13:28Kaelyn Moore?

  And no one has ever gone over after Rebecca vanished either. So it would be strange if that's what had happened. And the crew honestly felt so too, because they looked around near the crew pool where they were. Sure, it was on the fifth deck in the front of the ship. So the open ocean was just on the other side of the pool, basically on three sides of the pool, just all around them. But maybe when you picture this in your mind's eye, you're picturing a railing, kind of like in the Titanic movie, where Rose can easily climb over it, even in a floor-length Edwardian dress. This was not that kind of railing at all. This railing was much taller. It was about chest height for an average person.

• 14:13Kaelyn Moore?

  And it was also basically a wall of steel. And it was about as wide as it was tall. So that means you would have to reach pretty far over the railing to touch the other side of the boat. It wasn't really a place where you could just slip and fall over the side. Still, though, the Coast Guard and the Navy had to check the water. But what made it especially difficult to do that was there was no clear location in the water for searchers to look for Rebecca, because no one knew the exact time she would have gone over. It had been hours since she was last seen. So that means that the ship potentially covered over 100 miles between her last sighting at 11:00 PM and 9:00 AM, when she didn't show up for her shift.

• 14:58Kaelyn Moore?

  So the US Coast Guard and the Mexican Navy searched the ocean nearest to where she had last been seen alive at 11:00 PM the night before. And they didn't find anything, not that the odds were really in their favor to begin with, but because they found her flip-flop at the crew pool on deck five, some people felt like they had a pretty good idea of what happened, even without finding her in the water. And this is where things get a little bit more confusing and honestly, a little creepier. Because a crew member was playing with the flip-flop in their hands, just kind of turning it over, maybe thinking about what could have happened to Rebecca. And they noticed that there was something on the bottom of it. There was a cabin number

• 15:42Kaelyn Moore?

  and a name scribbled next to it. For a person who was most definitely not Rebecca, this was not her flip-flop. So it was essentially back to square one in this investigation. And because crew members now didn't really have any idea what happened to Rebecca, the next step was to call the authorities. And I want to take a moment here to explain a really not so fun fact about cruise ships. When crimes happen on cruise ships, it can be very confusing who is supposed to investigate it. For instance, if a crime is committed when a ship is docked somewhere, the country where it's docked can have jurisdiction. So

• 16:25Kaelyn Moore?

  if the Disney wonder had been docked in Los Angeles when Rebecca disappeared, the FBI from America would have gotten involved. But it's not that simple when a crime happens out in international waters. When that's the case, the flag state has jurisdiction. And the flag state is where the ship is registered. Now, the big corporations that own these cruise ships like to take advantage of tax havens and countries that have less regulations so that they can build the boats however they want. And so a ton of cruise ships are registered in places like the Bahamas, Panama, and Malta. So what that meant for Rebecca's

• 17:07Kaelyn Moore?

  case, which happened in international waters, remember, was that the police from Disney Wonders' flag state, which was the Bahamas, were taking over. No one involved in the disappearance was from the Bahamas. The ship was not going to or from the Bahamas. Bahmanian police really didn't have any skin in this game. And I read an article from this time where someone described the Bahmanian police as having endemic corruption. And yet, the first officer on the scene to investigate the disappearance of Rebecca Coriam, a British citizen traveling from America to Mexico, was a Bahmanian officer named Paul Roll. When Officer Roll made it onto the ship, there was a lot of work to be done.

• 17:50Kaelyn Moore?

  There was CCTV footage that needed to be meticulously combed through. All of the guests and the crew were still on the boat and they needed to be interviewed and asked for witness statements. A detailed timeline of Rebecca's movements needed to be accounted for. Her family was about to take a flight to LA from the UK and they were going to be desperate for answers. But that is not what happened. Officer Roll arrived on the ship and spent just 36 hours on there. He spoke to exactly six of the 950 crew members and zero guests. The interviews that he did with the crew were all described as being quick and shallow. He barely even asked them about their relationships to Rebecca.

• 18:35Kaelyn Moore?

  And at the end of those 36 hours, most of which was spent literally walking in circles around the ship, Officer Roll announced that he had come to a conclusion about what happened to Rebecca. He said that through his investigation, Rebecca had been up by herself at the crew pool sometime in the middle of the night and that while she was up there, the ship was hit by a giant rogue wave and she was thrown over the railing. I'm sorry, but a rogue wave, really? Everyone who heard that conclusion on the boat basically laughed at it. The boat had not been hit by a rogue wave in the middle of the night.

• 19:16Kaelyn Moore?

  Not only did no one else feel that, but the ship had sensors on it to detect waves of certain sizes and none of them had indicated that that had occurred. Someone who worked on the boat explains to Paul that a wave to be big enough to knock Rebecca off of the fifth level near the crew pool would have had to have been around 100 feet tall. And a wave of that magnitude would have woken up nearly every passenger. And not to mention, it also would have knocked anyone who was on the decks off into the ocean. There was no way that a rogue wave hit this boat. And I want to make another little interjection here because there's a lot more that's weird about this conclusion, other than the fact

• 20:00Kaelyn Moore?

  that it certainly didn't happen. But while Officer Roll was on the ship, Disney had released some of the CCTV footage from the night Rebecca went missing. And Rebecca is in that footage. But what the camera captured of her is very confusing, but it's very important. So the CCTV footage was taken in one of the back hallways of the ship, near the ship's phone at around 5:45 in the morning, the morning that she didn't show up for her shift. And in this grainy footage, a distressed Rebecca wanders through the dimly lit empty halls. She's wearing clothes that look way too big for her. They look more like a man's clothing than something Rebecca

• 20:44Kaelyn Moore?

  herself would have worn. And she keeps pushing through the eerie hallways until she finds the ship's phone. And with this shaky hand, she picks it up and she places a call. And then she brings her hands up to the phone's receiver, almost as if she didn't want anyone around her to hear what she was saying. And suddenly, a man appears in the hallway, and Rebecca's breath kind of catches in her throat. She seems like she's really startled. But then she sees that whoever is in the hallway was not a threat. It was not someone she would be running from or scared of. And he asks her if she's okay. And Rebecca tells him, yes, she's okay. And he appears to kind of hesitate before accepting the answer and then walking

• 21:28Kaelyn Moore?

  off, leaving her totally alone. Eventually, the call goes through and Rebecca starts speaking to someone on the other end of the line, and she's still very upset. You can tell in the grainy footage. And after the call ends, she walks off. And after that, there's no more CCTV footage. The boat didn't capture Rebecca doing anything else after that moment. So that was the last time Rebecca was ever confirmed to be alive. And there's obviously a lot that can be learned from this footage. Who was the man that last saw Rebecca in the hallway? And why wasn't he interviewed by Officer Roll? And most importantly, who was Rebecca talking to on the phone? And what did she say? It was 5:45 in the morning

• 22:11Kaelyn Moore?

  when she made the call. So we can assume that she was calling someone in the UK because it would have been later in the afternoon there. Did she call a friend? Was she scared for her life? Was she in distress? Did she need help? After this footage was found, Rebecca's parents, Anne and Mike Coriam, finally touched down in LA. They were able to confirm that it wasn't them on the phone with Rebecca, but they had spoken to her the night before she went missing. And they said she seemed to be in really good spirits. They were really surprised to hear how upset she sounded on the phone. Apparently, on this phone call they had, she told them that she would call them the next day, because they remember they spoke daily. But that call never came. And instead, the call they

• 22:55Kaelyn Moore?

  got was from Disney telling them their daughter had disappeared. But besides that, they were given very little information by Disney, which made Anne and Mike all the more anxious to just get to the boat themselves and be there in person. And maybe they thought that when they touched down, they would get a little bit more clarity on the situation, from Disney, from the officers, from the crew, whoever. And when they landed at the airport, there was a black car from Disney waiting to take them directly to the ship. But once they got inside that car, they saw that the windows had been fully blacked out, like they couldn't see anything outside of the windows and no one could see anything in. They were then driven an unknown distance. And when they finally got to the ship,

• 23:38Kaelyn Moore?

  they were driven on board through this hidden side entrance. It was like Disney was trying to hide the fact that the parents were there. They were then held in the car for a few hours and it's really unclear what was happening outside of the car during this time. They couldn't see anything out of the windows. So they didn't know if someone was, say, cleaning up a crime scene or doing something else. They really had no idea. And when they finally were allowed out of the car, they were met by Detective Roll, who told them that the passengers had already disembarked. Rebecca's parents then asked what he learned from those passengers. And he told them that he hadn't actually talked to any of them.

• 24:18Kaelyn Moore?

  And I can't even imagine how badly the Coriam must have wanted to scream at this man. But that's when he told them his conclusion about the rogue wave. A conclusion that didn't make any sense to me. I'm sure it didn't make any sense to you. And it definitely did not make any sense to Rebecca's parents. But the most shocking part is that by the time that this theory was relayed to Rebecca's parents, Disney agreed with it and accepted it as the reason for Rebecca's vanishing. So they weren't relaying this theory to the parents to kind of see what they thought about it. They were telling them this as if to say, "We know what happened to your daughter and we're sorry, but there's nothing else to look into."

• 25:03Kaelyn Moore?

  And this rightfully infuriated Anne and Mike. If their daughter did go overboard, where is the CCT footage of that happening? There was no reason for Disney to not have a tape showing that happening. Nearly every square inch of the boat was covered in cameras, including Deck Five by the pool. If that's truly what happened to her, then all Disney had to do to confirm was release the tapes showing it. And Rebecca's parents weren't the only ones who didn't buy this story. In October of 2011, which was seven months after Rebecca went missing, seven long months without any real answers for her parents.

• 25:46Kaelyn Moore?

  A Welsh-American journalist named John Ronson decided to do his own investigation. Ronson was appalled when he spoke to Rebecca's parents. They told him about the blacked-out windows and how they hadn't been allowed to speak to any of the guests on the boat. They said that when they got out of the car, they could even see some of the passengers leaving, but they were not allowed to talk to any of them. And when they pleaded with the officers to let them speak to some of the guests, that was all shot down. They thought they would eventually be given the chance to speak to passengers, but that request was denied. And requests for official information from the investigation were also ignored by Disney. And unlike the Bahmanian detective or the Coriam,

• 26:28Kaelyn Moore?

  Ronson actually got to speak to some of the people who had been on the boat at the time of Rebecca's disappearance, because he was launching his own investigation. He just went out and found these people. And one of those crew members was Melissa, which is a pseudonym, who I mentioned earlier. She said she was a close friend and a coworker of Rebecca's on the Disney Wonder. Now, Melissa hadn't actually wanted to talk to Ronson at first, but the Coriam asked her to, knowing about their close relationship. So Melissa told Ronson about the secret corridors on the ship that the crew would use. She said, quote, "There's a whole different world underneath the ship deck. We have parties down there, private showings of films. It's absolutely brilliant."

• 27:10Kaelyn Moore?

  Ronson had heard rumblings of a relationship that had gone wrong. So he asked Melissa if he thought that that's what the 6:00 a.m. phone call had been about. He had apparently heard that Rebecca was maybe dating someone on the ship, and it wasn't going well. And Melissa sighed when she heard this, and she said, quote, "That ship absolutely seethes with rumors." Yes, she was in a relationship, and there were problems, and it was upsetting her. It was a very, very intense relationship. It was great, and then it was awful. They were both fiery, passionate personalities. I can't think of any other reason why she would have been upset and wandering around by herself at 6:00 a.m. From what I heard, she was on the phone with a mutual friend,

• 27:55Kaelyn Moore?

  not the girl she'd been having the relationship with. Melissa didn't think that the tumultuous relationship would have been the direct reason that Rebecca disappeared. She could have imagined her going to the crew pool alone in the early morning of March 22nd, maybe after this heated phone call. Melissa said that maybe Rebecca sat up on the ledge to clear her head. She did describe Rebecca as a risk taker after all. Rebecca maybe didn't think about how tall the wall was or that she could have fallen off. And then maybe she did, completely by accident. Even as she relayed what she thought maybe happened to Rebecca, she agreed that the story just didn't add up for her.

• 28:39Kaelyn Moore?

  She said the entire ship was secured and covered by cameras, so how was there no footage of what happened to Rebecca? Melissa whispered to him that she just wasn't buying that Disney was in the dark. She thought they knew what happened, and all of the staff agreed with her, apparently. No. Melissa thought that the company was hiding camera footage in order to protect their brand. She told Ronson, quote, "If it was 6 a.m. and they were doing their job and watching the front, someone must have seen her go over, or if they didn't, they're covering up why they didn't." And then she fell silent and said, quote, "Rebecca made hundreds of people happy. The passengers loved her. They all loved her.

• 29:23Kaelyn Moore?

  You'd think Disney would have given something back. They owe it to her to find out what happened." And this information was all very shocking to Ronson when he learned it from Melissa. He was so upset that Detective Rolle hadn't taken any of this into consideration, anything about the relationship that Rebecca might have been in. And so now Ronson basically decided it was up to him to finish the investigation. So he tracked down more of the staff that were on the ship that night, and he realized that Melissa wasn't the only person to find Disney's actions after the disappearance to be very odd and very concerning. Another crew member who did not want their name on record told Ronson, quote, Disney knows exactly what happened.

• 30:07Kaelyn Moore?

  Everything here is taped. There's CCTV everywhere. Disney has the tape. And then another crew member who also did not want to go on record, gee, I wonder why, said, quote, "I don't know anything about it. It didn't happen. You know, that's the answer I have to give." So there seemed to be a consensus that someone did know what happened, but wasn't saying. No matter how many people Ronson asked, the only explanation that he ever got from any of the crew members, and maybe this is because they felt like they had to say it, was that Rebecca went off the side of the ship from one of the crew decks. But remember, the only reason that it's believed she went off of the side of the boat from one of the crew decks was because of the flip-flop that was found by the crew

• 30:51Kaelyn Moore?

  pool, the flip-flop that wasn't even hers. And for whatever reason, that just remained the story. But Ronson really wasn't buying this, so he decided to do his own examination of the ship, just to see if that would have even been possible. He retraced what he knew of Rebecca's steps, starting at the ship's phone, where she made that distraught call. From there, he said he could picture Rebecca not going to the crew pool, but actually going to the crew running track, which was in the other direction, to blow off some steam, maybe. He noticed that the railings over there by the running track were much, much lower than they were by the crew pool. So he said he could picture Rebecca going for a run, maybe she slipped and then fell

• 31:36Kaelyn Moore?

  over the side of the ship. And he was apparently so confident in this theory that when he spotted a crew member on the ship while he was standing at the crew running track, he told that crew member what he discovered. But the crew member just shook his head and said, quote, "I was there that day. Everybody knows. Everybody knows she went off Crew Deck Five by the pool. That's where her flip-flop was found." And then the crew member told him something that honestly still gives me goosebumps when I hear about it. He told him that not long after the discovery of the flip-flop, there was a bouquet of flowers placed next to where it was believed Rebecca went over. It was like a little makeshift memorial for her. Now, maybe you're thinking that those flowers were placed by other crew members who were

• 32:21Kaelyn Moore?

  devastated over the loss of their friends. But Ronson actually got to the bottom of who left those flowers there. And they were left by Disney. Now, Ronson didn't think that Disney put those flowers there as a memorial. He thought that they put them there so everyone on the ship would assume that that was definitely the place she went over and would stop asking questions. But the theory that Ronson came up with, that she slipped off the side of the running track, doesn't feel definitive either. Like I said, no one had ever slipped off the boat before and no one has slipped off these boats since. Also, the track is part of the boat that is covered in surveillance, so there still would be tapes of her slipping and

• 33:06Kaelyn Moore?

  there just aren't. So no matter which way you look at this, things just don't add up. And one thing that kept coming up as I was researching this episode was how people go overboard. Now, people don't just randomly slip and fall off of cruise ships. Sure, sometimes they get very drunk and they fall. Sometimes people jump. Sometimes people get thrown over. But the chances of someone completely sober, running around in the early morning, slipping and falling off of the boat, just does not sit well with some people. And no matter which way you look at this case, things just don't add up entirely. There's not really an explanation that feels satisfying. And there wasn't one that felt

• 33:49Kaelyn Moore?

  satisfying to Rebecca's parents either. So, over the years, people have kind of started coming up with some of their own theories about what happened to Rebecca, and I want to go over some of those now.

• 34:04Kaelyn Moore?

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• 34:47Kaelyn Moore?

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• 35:31Kaelyn Moore?

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• 36:16Kaelyn Moore?

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• 37:00Kaelyn Moore?

  That's S I J O H O M E dot com and use code HSP for 20% off at checkout. Rebecca's family was always pretty vocal about what they thought happened to her on March 22nd, 2011. Their suspicions, they believed that Rebecca was the victim of foul play. They thought that someone else directly caused her death and that the whole thing was being covered up. The Coriums are not the only people who believe that to be the case. So I found that the former City of Chester MP Chris Matheson believes that Rebecca was the victim of a crime and was possibly sexually assaulted or murdered. And then the former commander of Specialist Operations at Scotland Yard, Roy Ram, agrees with this

• 37:45Kaelyn Moore?

  hypothesis. He thinks that Rebecca was maybe sexually assaulted on the ship and then thrown overboard by the assailant. Roy was hired as a personal investigator in this case, and he says that's what the conclusion he came to was. He told The Sun, quote, "Somebody on that vessel was unquestionably responsible for her death." He comments on the fact that she wasn't wearing her own clothing when she was seen on that footage. Potentially, she was wearing a man's clothes, and the clothes, to him at least, looked like they were ripped. And he says because of that, there's no doubt that she was sexually assaulted. And I actually think it's important to note here that he doesn't make it clear why he thought it was assault outside of how she was dressed, and that she seemed distressed

• 38:30Kaelyn Moore?

  on the CCTV footage captured of her phone call. But he says he knows why Disney botched the investigation on purpose. He says it's because they cared more about keeping the crews on schedule than they cared about getting justice for Rebecca. Another theory that I saw put forth is that Rebecca actually got off the ship alive and then disappeared herself on purpose? People that believe this theory imagine that Rebecca got off the boat one of the times the ship was docked. Like, maybe the ship was stopped at one of its planned locations where guests could get on and off and explore if they wanted to, and that's when Rebecca left the ship. However, rather than going back before the ship set sail again, she just never got back on.

• 39:12Kaelyn Moore?

  She decided to stay and also decided to not tell anyone where she went. At least that's what some people theorize. Like I said, the ship left the day before from its initial port, which was Los Angeles. So there actually weren't any places for her to get off. The ship never docked anywhere else before it was getting to its stop in Mexico. But people still say that there's some evidence that supports this idea. According to some reports, and I want to add here that these have been very hard to verify. This is just a theory and just something that I've seen people say online. They say that her credit card hadn't been found amongst her things in her cabin. And then, one day, nearly two months after Rebecca went missing, an email came through on her account and the message was from her bank,

• 39:56Kaelyn Moore?

  flagging that someone tried to use Rebecca's credit card. Or rather, that someone had tried to gain access to her bank account on April 19th, which was just under a month after Rebecca went missing on March 22nd. And that wasn't the only thing that pointed to the possibility of Rebecca being alive, they said. On top of all of that, apparently, the password to Rebecca's Facebook account had been changed some point after she went missing. Now, was it Rebecca who had been the one to use her credit card and change her Facebook password? Or could it have been that someone just got her information and it wasn't Rebecca after all? If you remember, Rebecca's passport was still in her crew cabin when they went and looked for her.

• 40:38Kaelyn Moore?

  And so if she didn't have her passport on her, it almost doesn't matter that she didn't have her credit card. It's very hard to navigate around the globe without a passport and stay hidden forever, without that kind of identification. And I just don't really believe that's what happened. But still, there was one more piece of evidence that did come in that suggested Rebecca did disappear herself.

• 41:00Kaelyn Moore?

  It is very bizarre. I don't know how I feel about it, but it took a while for this new piece of information to come forward. Exactly one day before the one year anniversary of her disappearance, her father actually got an email that really upset him. A year had already passed, and even though her parents had not given up on finding her at all, they still thought she was maybe alive at that point. They were starting to lose hope. So when Mike got this email, it was maybe like rain after a very long drought. Someone claimed in this email that Mike got to have seen Rebecca, and they said that she was definitely alive, and they were 85% sure that it was her. The woman who wrote the tip said that she had

• 41:42Kaelyn Moore?

  seen the website that Rebecca's parents had started, and it brought forward a memory of seeing someone who she thought was Rebecca. She claimed that she saw her with a dark-haired man in Venice, Italy. But this lead didn't go anywhere. There was never any follow-up. No one was ever able to spot Rebecca ever again. I think chances are she saw someone who she thought looked like Rebecca and wasn't actually her, but it does seem like Rebecca's parents took this tip to heart and did believe that maybe she was alive and out there at the time that they got the tip. Other than that, there is one more prevailing theory that I want to bring up to you guys. It's come up a few times in my research, and it's important to note here that this information hasn't been fully corroborated outside of

• 42:27Kaelyn Moore?

  this one witness that came forward to discuss what they believed happened. Everything you're about to hear in this story comes from one witness, but there is some evidence that there's notes inside of one of the detective's notebooks that basically confirms her story. So let's just get into it. There is a woman who came forward with new information about Rebecca's disappearance, and her name is Tracy Medley. Tracy came forward seven years after Rebecca went missing to tell her side of the story. And that's a very long time to wait, and Tracy knows that. But Tracy says she was getting death threats over Rebecca's disappearance, so it probably was making her hesitant to share. So Tracy says that

• 43:08Kaelyn Moore?

  she was one of the last people to be with Rebecca. She said that the two of them were in a relationship. She was the woman that Rebecca was dating. There was mention of Rebecca having a girlfriend on the ship. Remember, Melissa actually talked about that relationship, but this was the first confirmation of the person she was dating. Tracy said that the two of them ended up spending the night with a man. And this man that the two women supposedly slept with wasn't just a random coworker. Tracy said that this man was actually someone that she had been in a relationship with back when she first met Rebecca. She said that she broke things off with him to be with Rebecca and he was off the ship for a while, but he ended up coming back on board.

• 43:50Kaelyn Moore?

  And when that happened, he and Tracy kind of reignited their relationship behind Rebecca's back. But then Rebecca eventually found out about it and was incredibly upset. And yet, despite being this upset, it does seem like the night before she disappeared, she did agree to spend the night with Tracy and this man. Now Tracy said that Rebecca did not feel good about the fact that the three of them slept together the night before she disappeared. And it caused her in some ways to spiral out. Tracy said that Rebecca was very agitated after the event and she got up to leave the room and ended up asking Tracy to come with her. But Tracy said no, and she asked if Rebecca would be coming back, but Rebecca had already left without answering.

• 44:36Kaelyn Moore?

  That's maybe when Rebecca wandered through the cruise hallways until she found a phone. And that's potentially when she called to talk to her friend about how upset she was. Now, does that explain why Rebecca was maybe wearing men's clothing when she took this phone call? She was wearing the clothing potentially of the man that she had just slept with. But this doesn't necessarily answer what happened to Rebecca. So Tracy was still asked, what do you think happened to her? And she kind of wondered aloud if maybe Rebecca was so upset about what had happened and so heartbroken that it did cause her to take her own life. And now Tracy was absolutely racked with guilt as she was retelling this story. She did say that she wished she had stayed by Rebecca's side the entire night because

• 45:19Kaelyn Moore?

  she was deeply in love with Rebecca and also that they were best friends. Tracy said, quote, "I hate that she was alone and that so many questions were left unanswered. I feel horrible and I know I should have gone with her when she asked me to." But the question that I keep coming back to that I feel like is still not answered despite this new explanation, as devastating as it is, is why is there still no CCTV footage of what happened to Rebecca? How did that tape just disappear? And also, the person who Rebecca spoke to on the phone has still never come forward to confirm or deny what that call was about. Now, the Daily Mail went on to report that Detective Rolle actually did have notes

• 46:01Kaelyn Moore?

  about this reported relationship in his detective notebook. And he also had notes about a fight that maybe happened. And that those notes were eventually sent to Rebecca's family years later for them to look at. But this, again, kind of brings up more questions for me. Why didn't he consider that when he was coming up with his conclusion about the rogue wave? Was there maybe someone or a company pressuring him to come up with the rogue wave theory so that this whole thing would just go away? And if that's the case, does someone really know what happened? Has someone seen the footage of what actually happened that night and made it go away? Has that all been erased?

• 46:42Kaelyn Moore?

  After years of searching for answers, Rebecca's parents did not feel any closer to getting any real answer on what happened to their daughter. Like I said, they set up that website for anyone to submit information that could potentially help solve this mystery. But that website was eventually taken down. And that's because the Coriam signed a settlement with Disney. We don't know what the terms of that settlement were. We don't know how much money was given to the Coriam as consolation for Rebecca's disappearance. But one thing that we do know is that they're no longer allowed to talk about Rebecca's disappearance publicly. And without the parents able to continue searching for answers and without Disney cooperating

• 47:26Kaelyn Moore?

  and releasing any CCTV footage they have, we're probably never going to know exactly what happened to Rebecca. But I don't want to forget the girl that's at the center of all this. The fun, bubbly, smiley youth counselor that was universally liked by all of her colleagues and had a love of traveling the world. Something happened to her on that boat. And it's not unreasonable to think that someone or multiple people do know what happened. But I just don't know that the truth will ever come out. I think there's too much at stake and people are just never going to talk. I know that's a little bit of a sad note to end on, but that's all I have for you this week.

• 48:11Kaelyn Moore?

  If any of you have any cruise vacations lined up this summer, please let me know how many cameras you see on those boats, because I promise you, they are, every single square inch of that boat is always patrolled. They always know what's going on. So please, ask the community, if you know anything about cruises, if you're going on a cruise, let me know in the comments wherever you listen. All right, I will see you next week. And until then, stay curious.

• 48:44Kaelyn Moore?

  Heart Starts Pounding is written and produced by me, Kayla Moore. Heart Starts Pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Our associate producer is Juno Hobbs. Additional research and writing by Megan Gilbert. Sound design and mix by Pete's Tree Sound. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Ternigan, the team at WME, and Ben Jaffe. Have a heart pounding story or a case request? Check out our website at hearts start pounding.com.

• 49:07Kaelyn Moore?

  This episode is brought to you by our partner, Vistaprint. If you run a small business, you know that there's a moment where you go from just doing the thing you love to realizing you need stuff, like physical stuff. Custom merch for an event, branded apparel for your team, business cards that actually look professional. That was definitely me with Heart Starts Pounding. What started as a podcast I made in my closet, turned into something that had merch, had mugs, had stickers, had all of this stuff that I needed to get made. And Vistaprint made it so much less overwhelming. They are a true print expert. Premium quality products, fast turnaround, and design tools that actually make sense. I actually got custom Mugs made from Vistaprint and they are gorgeous and very, very good quality. The quality feels expensive without having an expensive price tag.

• 49:52Kaelyn Moore?

  There's a reason over 17 million businesses trust Vistaprint with their print needs. Vistaprint, print your possible. Right now, new customers get 20% off with code NEW20 at Vistaprint.com. That's 20% off at Vistaprint.com using code NEW20. Do you want more Darkly Curious stories in your life? Sign up for our Patreon for free and get access to a rotating shelf of bonus content, our weekly Rogue Detecting Society newsletter, and the HSP Book Club. Paid members also get monthly bonus episodes and archive access, which I think is more than 40 episodes at this point. You also get a cool jinx sticker after your first three months. And you can check it all out with a free seven day trial. Link in the bio or go to patreon.com backslash heart starts pounding. But whatever you do, stay curious.