Police, up to press time tonight, have not found a fisherman, Earl Young Crawford, 27, and his girlfriend, Myrtle Gill, age unknown, reported missing since Tuesday, July 8, from Brown’s Caye, located 9 miles southeast of Belize City. The cay is owned by Walter “Wally” Brown, 76, of a Kings Park address. Police fear the worst – double murder.
Police are viewing the disappearance seriously, because after being called to Brown’s Caye by Brown, a retired public officer, they found that the walls of the hut in which Crawford and Gill were staying were spattered with blood.
Wally Brown, the owner of Brown’s Butane Gas Service on Mopan Street in Belize City, told Amandala by phone Wednesday afternoon that on the recommendation of a fisherman who knew and spoke highly of the young man, he, Brown, hired him to watch over his property for two months beginning on July 4. He had previously worked for Brown part-time for three weeks.
Earl Young Crawford is not a stranger to police. In December 2004, he was arrested in connection with the sensational shooting murder of police officer Uwin Armstrong on the Belcan Bridge, but he was acquitted in March of 2007. He was shot on Dean Street two months later, but the shooter was never found.
Wally Brown told police that when he visited the recently-developed caye, which is northeast of Stake Bank in the Drowned Caye range, with a friend at about 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday, he could not find either Crawford or his girlfriend when he called for them. After searching around, he observed bloodstains in the two-bedroom plywood house in which the couple stayed. That house and another building on the property had been ransacked, and an outboard engine was reportedly stolen.
Police took about an hour to arrive at the caye, where they conducted a fruitless search for the couple. Personnel in the Criminal Investigation Branch office at Queen Street told Amandala yesterday afternoon, Wednesday, that a team led by Inspector Sinquest Martinez was at the island again that day, this time accompanied by Crawford’s father, a resident of Tibruce Street in Lake Independence.
As of 5:00 p.m., they had returned with a bloody 12-inch knife found in the house in which Crawford and his girlfriend had been staying, but no bodies.
Crawford is fair and of slim build. He is short and has braided hair. Police did not give a description of Gill, who, we are told, lived near the Government Complex in Lake Independence before moving in with Crawford at his family’s property on Tibruce Street. Her picture, however, shows a fair-complexioned person with dark hair.
Residents in the Tibruce Street area spoke well of Crawford when we visited the area yesterday afternoon, saying he was “not a bad boy” and that he “kept to himself.”
During Crawford’s part-time work at the caye, he would travel back and forth to Belize City to visit his girlfriend.
The latest disappearances, which have all the hallmarks of murder, bring into sharp focus the danger facing the seafaring public who have to travel the waters surrounding Belize City for pleasure and work. Just late last year, Magistrate Richard Swift and six men went out to fish in the area between Long Caye and English Caye on the weekend of November 4, and disappeared.
Six days later, Swift’s body was recovered on Glover’s Reef by a group of searchers, but to date, there has been no trace of the other six men.
In December, 1998, a family of five disappeared while on their way to English Caye, just to the south of Brown’s Caye. Charles Garbutt, a Port Authority employee, his wife and their three children, left Belize City on December 16 that year and vanished into thin air.
Several days later, three divers recovered the boat and took possession of it rather than report the discovery, and they were arrested and charged with theft.
The men, Emil Franklin, Geoffrey Zuniga and Lyndon Raymond, were out on bail when they were murdered a month later in the same area while diving. Their bodies were discovered in January of 1999 floating under a boat known as the “S. Kelly,” tied to the skiff and displaying multiple gunshot wounds.
Franklin had admitted to local media at the time that he and his crew took the boat, but denied knowing anything about the Garbutt family’s disappearance. No bodies were found in the abandoned boat, he had claimed.
Five men were arrested on suspicion of being involved in the deaths of Franklin, Zuniga and Raymond, including Belize City’s Andrew “Pawpa” Brown. But they were never charged for either the disappearance or the murders of Franklin and his crew.
Wide speculation was that cocaine was the subject of both incidents. To date, however, no one has been charged for either the Garbutt family’s disappearance, or the Franklin crew murders.
Brown, Winston “Tanga” James, Lionel Kelly, James Hyde and Francis Dawson were prosecuted for two similar kidnappings in November and December, 1998, that may have been related to the Garbutt disappearances and the murder of Emil Franklin and his crewmen, but all charges were withdrawn in August of 1999 after the complainant, Wallingford Requeña, requested no further prosecution.
Requeña had accused the five men of kidnapping him, his wife and their three children from their home in Gales Point Manatee in November, beating him up and questioning him over the whereabouts of a quantity of cocaine for three hours before releasing him and his family.
The second case involved one Charles Leslie, who alleged that one of the five men, and three other men, had kidnapped him and another man separately at gunpoint, taken them to Mile 5 on the Western Highway and tortured and interrogated them for 3 hours.
Leslie was taken first, and the other man, unnamed, later, following an initial interrogation of Leslie. Police allege that the men already had grave sites dug out for both victims, but never used them, as the men were released. There is no indication as to whether charges proceeded in this case.
At the time, police had believed that the four cases were related, although there was no concrete evidence to link them together.