Horror Tale off Cuba on board abandoned Joe Cool

by Todd Lewan, AP on 18 Oct 2007 Unlike most boats returning from the high seas, the Joe Cool had no tales to tell. Three days earlier, the 47-foot boat had departed for the island of Bimini, four crew members and two passengers aboard. A day earlier, it had been found, doing circles and dragging anchor, on a lonely stretch of the Florida Straits about 30 miles north of Cuba.

With no crew.

And no passengers.

As a Coast Guard cutter towed it slowly back into Biscayne Bay, a hush fell over its home, the Miami Beach Marina.

In the slips, men ceased buffing the pearly hulls of multimillion-dollar yachts. Dock boys stopped zipping about in EZGO carts. Even the Shih Tzu-walkers in their Gucci sunglasses and clogs paused as the white vessel glided without a murmur up the channel.

Along the docks and the palm-lined pier, 'Everyone stood there and followed the boat with their eyes,' Valerie Kevorkian, a dive shop operator and scuba instructor, recalled, 'and then there was only emptiness ... a ghostly feeling.'

Indeed, the Joe Cool had returned with no souls or story — only clues, tantalizing to be sure, to a high-seas mystery full of twists, discrepancies, revelations and contradictions.

As on an episode of 'CSI,' investigators would pluck from the vessel some valuable evidence: four 9 mm shell casings; a tiny key that might or might not unlock handcuffs; splotches of human blood, inside and outside the cabin.

They would also find, drifting in an orange life raft 12 miles north of the ghost ship, two seemingly incongruous men who had chartered the Joe Cool — a 35-year-old, suspected thief on the run from police in Arkansas, and a clean-cut, 19-year-old Cuban-American training to become a private security guard.

They would interrogate these survivors, take down a story that three pirates had hijacked the boat and coldly shot each crew member, and then, for some reason, let these two go in a life raft with their luggage and about $2,200 in cash.

Investigators didn't buy the story. On Wednesday, prosecutors charged the suspects with first-degree murder in the high-seas killing of the Joe Cool's young, four-member crew: the captain, Jake Branam, 27; his wife, Kelley, 30; Jake's half-brother, Scott Gamble, 35, and their friend and first mate, Samuel Kairy, 27.

What law enforcement would not immediately provide — may never fully provide, perhaps — are what the relatives and friends of the four most desire: Answers and, by extension, closure.

For a week after its return, the Joe Cool sat in dock at a Coast Guard station directly across the channel from the marina. No one was allowed near the vessel — except the forensics experts who combed it for clues — but the boat's graceful hull and vaulting flybridge were visible, and haunting, to all.

'This could have happened to any one of us, and whenever you looked at that boat over there, it reminded of you of that,' said Greg Love, 51, who runs Club Nautico South Beach, one of the marina's five charter businesses.

Kevorkian, whose dive shop is next door, caught herself many times that week, gazing beyond the boat lifts at the tied-up Joe Cool.

'It just looked empty. Like a shell,' she said. 'There was no feeling, no soul in it anymore.'

___

As with many sea mysteries, this one starts on land — in central Arkansas, to be precise.

It features a fellow named Kirby Logan Archer, who, by the age of 35, had been described as a loner, a romantic, a sensitive son, a vindictive husband, a loving father, a gay man.

According to a WANTED flier from the Independence County sheriff's office, Archer stands 6 feet tall and weighs 190 pounds. His mugshot reveals a no-nonsense squint and a grown-out crewcut — a throwback, maybe, to his Army days. (He had been a Military Police investigator at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, during the Cuban Rafter Crisis, which began in 1994. He went AWOL four years ago, receiving an 'other-than-honorable' discharge, court records show.)

Arkansas prosecutors have accused Archer of robbing the Wal-Mart in Batesville, where he worked for less than a year as a customer service manager.

On a Friday night this January, they allege, Archer used a cart to collect the money trays from cash registers, part of his normal duties, and wheeled it to a back room.

Next, they say, he stashed $92,620.66 in cash and checks in a microwave oven and re-sealed the box. A surveillance video showed that Archer strolled out the front doors with the box at 10:25 p.m., after paying for the microwave at the front checkout counter.

'He even used his employee discount,' Keith Bowers, sheriff of Independence County, said in a phone interview.

By the time a court had issued a warrant for his arrest the following morning, Archer had fled the state.

He left behind a wife, two children and, apparently, a troubled home life. Though his current wife, Michelle, has described him as a 'wonderful father,' his previous wife, Michelle Rowe, says Archer was quite the opposite.

Allegations leveled during the couple's divorce and child custody proceedings paint a lurid picture: that Rowe was sexually involved with another woman; that Archer had a gay lover; that Rowe suffered an 'accidental overdose' of migraine medication; that Archer once gave Rowe a black eye; and more.

At the time Archer went on the lam, he was the subject of a child molestation investigation — and still is, though no charges have been filed, says Sgt. David Huffmaster of the Sharp County, Ark., sheriff's office. (In 1993, while living in Tucson, Ariz., Archer was found guilty of a misdemeanor charge of 'contributing to the delinquency or dependency of a minor.')

Allan Kaiser, a lawyer appointed to defend Archer in Miami, says the allegations come mainly 'from an ex-wife who is pretty unbalanced.'

A little more than an hour after leaving Wal-Mart for good, Archer was stopped by police in Bono, Ark., 90 miles away, because one headlight of his 1991 Dodge Caravan was out. He was cited and sent on his way since the all-points bulletin on him hadn't yet been posted.

'It's a shame,' says Lance Suttles, Bono's police chief. 'We could have stopped this whole mess right there, if only we'd have known about him.'

___

For nearly eight months, Archer lay low. When next he surfaced, he was in the Miami area, spending time with a 19-year-old Cuban immigrant with a weight lifter's torso and a close-cropped, dark beard: Guillermo Zarabozo.

To his neighbors in Hialeah, Zarabozo was sociable, respectful, well-behaved. He lived with his mother, sister, stepfather and pet dog in a second-floor walkup.

Did he drink, smoke, use drugs? No, the neighbors say. Was he in trouble with the law? Never, they insist.

Gaby Lopez, 19, a Hialeah High School classmate, knew him as 'an easygoing' student who excelled in science and math and was in the school's Junior ROTC.

'Guillermo worked out a lot, was a sports nut,' says Nelson Palenzuela, 60, a downstairs neighbor. 'He had a Cuban girlfriend, but he never came home late.'

'He's a boy any mother would want to have,' said another neighbor, Belkis Diaz, 38.

Until recently, Zarabozo worked for private investigation and security companies and held a state permit to carry three types of handguns.

But if Zarabozo got along so well with his neighbors, why did he install a video surveillance camera in the hall outside of his family's apartment? And if, as Zarabozo's neighbors and friends attest, Archer never visited Zarabozo at home, school, or work, how and when did they meet?

Archer's attorney, Allan Kaiser, said the two were introduced in Florida six months ago by 'people they knew mutually.'

Zarabozo's mother, Francisca Alonso, said in a TV interview that her son's father had been stationed at Guantanamo in 1995, when Archer was an MP officer there. (Archer briefly mentioned 'a boy from Cuba whose family he apparently befriended while stationed in Cuba