Troubled Waters : Woman’s Death During Shipwreck Spurs Lawsuit Against Husband, Who’s Battling Family Over Estate

She had been a doctor’s wife, a mother of three who kept a comfortable house in Huntington Harbour and ran a small clothing business on the side. It wasn’t in the script for her to die on a deserted Caribbean beach in the middle of the night.

But it was in some ways a remarkably different Nancy Ann Barwick who set sail early last year on a 136-foot cargo ship for the Netherlands Antilles, leaving suburban Orange County half a world behind.

The children had grown up. The doctor had died of a heart attack. She began thinking about things, about everything they had put off for the waterfront home and the good schools.

One day, a red Corvette showed up in the driveway. She met a man 13 years younger and married him in Las Vegas. The kids would come over after work, and suddenly, they recall, mom was serving cocaine, not cookies.

The second time around, she wrote, in one of dozens of pages of letters and musings left behind at the family home, trust your feelings, and let nothing interfere. Love what you discover, and protect it from harm and gossip.

It ended on the night of Feb. 20, 1985, when the SS Vera went down in 3,000 feet of water a few miles off the island of Aruba.

Now, 3,700 miles away in Orange County Superior Court, Nancy Barwick’s three children are trying to prove that their stepfather was responsible for her death. And if they can go beyond that and prove that he murdered her, Kenneth Barwick will be denied access to the $1.2 million worth of west Orange County real estate that Nancy Barwick and her former husband accumulated during their 24 years of marriage--property that has raised the stakes on both sides in determining how she died.

In a wrongful-death suit filed earlier this year against their stepfather of two years, Mark, Tony and Paula Galyean claim that Barwick was responsible for their mother’s death and kept it from the family for several days in order to find--and conceal--her will.

Barwick, who said he fought desperately to save his wife’s life after the Vera sank, believes that they may have taken the will themselves in order to cut him out of the estate. Attributing the family’s motives to vindictiveness and greed, Barwick’s version of the shipwreck recounts a tale of a man desperate to save the life of the woman he loved.

The case, spelled out in obscure probate documents, witnesses’ testimony and Nancy Barwick’s own letters, resembles a novel of international intrigue. At its heart is the troubling question of how Nancy Barwick died.

The family’s first inkling that something was wrong was a call from Kenneth Barwick one evening at supper time. There had been an accident with the ship he and Nancy had refurbished to carry cargo through the Caribbean, he said. Nancy was in the hospital and might not recover. He sounded “businesslike . . . very casual,” recalled Nancy’s mother, Marion Painter.

Tony Galyean said he heard from Barwick that same night but the message was much different. Barwick told him that Nancy was in the hospital but everything would be fine. Galyean testified later that Barwick couldn’t remember the name of the hospital, or the telephone number.

A day later, Barwick called to say that Nancy was dead.

The story became more confusing when Mark Galyean telephoned Barwick’s hotel in Aruba and got a German sea captain who had been aboard the Vera when it sank. The captain, Hans Borgwardt, said he had begged Barwick to tell the family about his wife’s death for nearly two days.

Argued by Telephone

Barwick says it took him two days to find Painter’s phone number, then worried about breaking the tragic news to the elderly woman too suddenly. “Because I wanted to allow her to prepare herself, I told her that there had been an accident with the boat and that Nancy was in the hospital. Nancy was actually in the hospital morgue,” he said.

Family members, confused and arguing with Barwick by phone over the $5,000 he needed to ship the body home, wrote the U.S. Consulate in Curacao for information. The vice consul said an autopsy had determined that their mother died of a heart attack shortly after the shipwreck. Mark Galyean wrote again, seeking information on who had performed the autopsy.

Then the vice consul said he had been mistaken, that there had been no autopsy.

“It would appear the lady did not have heart disease,” said John Whelan, the Huntington Beach attorney who is representing the family. “Her former husband was a doctor. She had a complete physical exam once a year. There was no evidence whatsoever of heart disease. Somehow, someone, and we’re still not quite sure who, came to a determination that this lady had died of a heart attack.”

For Kenneth Barwick, a seaman and occasional construction worker, the Vera was a chance to go into business for himself, be the master of his own ship, sail the Caribbean islands and make some money.

But it wasn’t going to be easy. There was little hope of U.S. certification for the decrepit vessel, and even Panamanian officials took one look at the ship and threw up their hands. Nancy, with a comfortable income from her apartments and other property in Sunset Beach and Seal Beach, kept writing most of the checks.

She also wrote: Kenny, this ship is becoming an obsession, and draining our attitude to people over money . Only the buck seems to count, not the relationship . . . . Remember, love, if I register nothing else while being your “woman,” learn to enjoy what you have. To conquer the world and lose your soul is too big a price to pay. Finish this, and let’s get on with living.

Tony Galyean spent several months in Jacksonville, Fla., back in the fall of 1984, helping restore the ship. He and Barwick went back a long way. In fact, it was Galyean who had casually introduced his one-time co-worker to his mother.

Large Tank in Ship’s Hold

From the beginning, Galyean said, Barwick had bigger plans than hauling fertilizer through the Caribbean. He had constructed a large tank in the hold of the ship, something he said was a water tank but that Galyean insisted was really a false bulkhead designed to conceal narcotics.

“The boat was supposed to be home and everybody was supposed to be rich by Christmastime,” Tony Galyean recalled. “I’m thinking like, this is it! I’m 27, I’ve never been anywhere in my life. I’m in the Caribbean, you know, island girls, and my mom’s involved? What could be wrong?”

Then Galyean thought better of it and came home before Thanksgiving. Nancy wasn’t far behind, leaving Barwick to finish work on the boat. Sometimes she wrote him every day, letters usually full of affection and loneliness that sometimes turned angry:

Stop the merry-go-round, I want off. Listen to me, Kenny!!! We are drifting away from each other. I’ve become economic treasurer, not Nancy. You are Admiral K.B.B. MacArthur, and consumed with pursuing to everyone’s demise your dream. Well, what about the army you kill along the way, baby?? Do you care? Does it matter? Do I count in your life and plans?

It was about that time, the Galyeans believe, that their mother came home and found an anonymous, hand-written note that talked threateningly about money owed. It was also about then, they said, that an intruder entered the Huntington Harbour home, beat Nancy Barwick and took thousands of dollars worth of jewelry.

She wrote to Barwick: Our friends from Latin America are all congregating within the week in So. Calif. I was told, I won’t know the “heafie” that acts for the family . . . Got It??? They want to scare me, or payment, or both. Honest, Kenny, this is for real. I am in danger whether you want to accept the fact or not. I am worried and edgy. I believe I’ll get fingered. I am a target and so is my family . . . .

Listen to me. Send me pictures of Vera. Copies of contracts for freight, anything! So if I happen to get bagged alone, I’ve got something to buy time. PLEASE DON’T DISREGARD MY ASSESSMENT OF THE SITUATION! If you don’t, you might not have me around anymore, and I am not exaggerating. I’ve never felt so alone or scared in my whole life.

Hans Borgwardt was having breakfast by the pool at the Royal Haitian Hotel in Port-au-Prince when Kenneth and Nancy Barwick walked in. They wanted to know if he was the German sea captain they had heard so much about.

Barwick had a 365-ton freighter called the Vera moored in a small harbor nearby. He needed someone with Borgwardt’s maritime experience to help make a trip from Port-au-Prince to San Pedro in the Dominican Republic, and return. Four days, $4,600 cash. On Feb. 16, 1985, they were underway.

Dramatic details of the last hours of the Vera--and of Nancy Barwick--were provided by Borgwardt in a sworn deposition taken at the family’s request. But much of it is vigorously disputed by Barwick, who says Borgwardt’s account is seriously flawed.

According to the captain, Barwick and his wife began fighting almost from the moment the ship left the harbor.

‘He Hit Her’

“Once in the afternoon before arrival to San Pedro, I came just in my room and I always had to pass his room, and there was a lot of trouble, and then he hit her and she fell down on the floor, and then he kicked her with his feet in the body,” Borgwardt said.

Nancy started confiding in him, Borgwardt said. “She said to me, ‘Mr. Hans, that is not the first time. Since Miami, I get this nearly every day.’

“She said to me many times she was thinking about to run away, and the first time that this happened, this happened in Nassau in Bahamas because they had some Argentinians on board and Nancy left on top of the bed $3,000 and she went--she forgot it.

“She went with Barwick ashore and when they came back . . . then Nancy remember, Jesus Christ, I keep my $3,000 on top of the bed and it’s gone. And in that moment, Barwick knocked her down totally.”

That, she told Borgwardt, was when she first started thinking about leaving. “But Barwick was telling her, ‘Stay, stay, stay.’ And then OK, she said, ‘It’s all right, I stay. . . .’ She asked him twice to make divorce, but he refused it.”

The Vera docked in San Pedro, and the Barwicks and Borgwardt took a bus to Santo Domingo to discuss payment for the load of fertilizer they were to carry. When they returned a day and a half later, the ship had been loaded. They sailed at sunset.

Fuel Tanks Questioned

Borgwardt started asking questions about the unusually large fuel tanks on the Vera--big enough for six weeks’ worth of fuel--and the new bulkhead Tony Galyean had asked about.

“For me, it was clear when I saw this tanks and this bulkhead, it has something to do with smuggling. This for me was absolutely clear,” Borgwardt testified.

“I said, ‘What means that?’ And then he said, ‘Don’t ask so much. I will tell you later on.’ ”

Borgwardt pointed the ship back toward Port-au-Prince, but after about an hour Barwick told him to chart a course farther south, between the islands of Curacao and Aruba.

“I asked him straightaway, ‘What is the purpose we go there now?’ ” Borgwardt testified. “Then he said yes, he’s not sure if we go to Curacao or he go to Aruba. Maybe he go to Colombia.”

‘Colombian Friends’

Borgwardt, according to his deposition, turned to Nancy for an explanation. Barwick, she said, owed $70,000 to some “Colombian friends” and needed to sell the cargo in Aruba or Curacao to pay them off. But the ultimate plan, she said, was to transport a load of cocaine north to Vancouver. They needed Borgwardt’s help, she said.

According to the captain, Barwick said “one trip makes about $6 million and he want to pay me for my navigation for each trip 500,000 U.S. dollar.”

That night, Borgwardt went back to his cabin. Sitting there, he remembered that it was directly above the area covered by the new bulkhead in the hold below.

Borgwardt thought for a moment, then lifted up the rug.

Underneath was an 18-inch-square door, too small to crawl through but large enough for a flashlight. Squinting down into the space below, he saw three or four cardboard cartons, each about 3 feet high and 1 1/2 feet wide.

He put the rug back.

Anxiety, Nancy wrote. The situation appears normal, but underneath, deep down inside, a big question mark raises its ugly head. What pushed the button when the argument began? Why did the other person over-react? Why does it become necessary to threaten to leave constantly?

The trouble started on the fifth day. The first sign was a gentle heeling to starboard. Borgwardt said he figured that some cargo had shifted slightly in the hold. But then the ship started to heel a little more. There was a foot of water in the hold.

“So I said, ‘Switch on your bilge pumps.’ So then he said, ‘Not possible.’ I said, ‘What is not possible?’ ” They had been pumping for several days and had finally given out, Barwick said.

With the ship listing in high winds and heavy seas, Barwick ordered a course for Curacao, then decided on Aruba.

Still, something was wrong. Borgwardt said Barwick had refused to bring the Vera’s engines up to full power, even though there was little hope of reaching shore at the speed they were maintaining.

The ship was taking on a ton of water every 10 minutes. At 4 p.m., Borgwardt calculated that they were eight miles off Colorado Point, the easternmost tip of Aruba--and listing badly. With darkness closing in, Borgwardt began urging Barwick to ground the ship on the beach.

He said Barwick “refused it completely.” Half an hour later, Borgwardt said, he tried again. “I told him, ‘You have no chance. Please, ground the ship. . . .’ I told him again, and he told me . . . he is the captain on board. He said, ‘I’m the captain and you have to do what I ever tell you and that is all.’ ”

“Then I was thinking about it,” Borgwardt said. “Because for me it was absolute clear it is no chance. I went down in my cabin because I know that my cabin, the desk was a pistol . . . I had no chance because the pistol was gone. He had it already. He took it out before.”

Borgwardt went back up on deck and approached Barwick again. “He was very excited and he called me son of a bitch and all kind of very bad words, and then we was coming in trouble. Then he took out his pistol and showed the pistol on me and said, ‘Now you keep quiet or it means I shoot you down like a rabbit.’ ”

Close to Capsizing

By 7 p.m., the Vera was close to capsizing. Borgwardt began transmitting a Mayday call over the radio, while Nancy, Barwick and the four other crewmen hoisted the lifeboat over the side and began climbing in.

The boat was already gone by the time he dropped the radio. Borgwardt jumped.

“I catch the lifeboat and when I was just in the lifeboat, this ship Vera was turn around. I saw it and I said, ‘You see, your boat go now. Tell him goodby.’ I made the joke. I said, ‘Tell him goodby.’ The boat was gone. Nancy start crying.”

It seemed time for some levity. “I make a joke and said, ‘Jesus Christ, I would like a cigarette now.’ And then Nancy said, ‘Hey, you like a cigarette but I would like booze.’ . . . Nancy was the one who make joke with me together.”

They had drifted for nearly 40 minutes when the water color turned from an inky black to a muddy brown. They had to be close to shore. Then, the lifeboat capsized beneath a sudden wave.

Borgwardt, Barwick and one of the crewmen tried to right it, but another wave tumbled in. “That time, we get split so much, I didn’t know anymore what happened,” Borgwardt said. “Then I was move around, around, around, and after about two minutes I was sitting on the stone, high and dry.”

On the Beach

Straining to see through the darkness, Borgwardt spotted several other figures about 60 feet away. “And then I said very loud, ‘Nancy.’ Because if things happen like this, you always think in the first moment about a woman.

“She didn’t answer it, but Barwick--I don’t know if it was Barwick or whoever (said), ‘We are here.’ ”

He made his way over to the others and found Nancy sitting quietly on the beach. “The first thing I asked, I said, ‘Nancy, you all right?’ She said, “ ‘Yes, Hans, I’m OK.’ The only thing, she had a little bit damage. She said, ‘I have a little bit damage on my knee. . . .’ Shortly after that, she said, ‘We was lucky.’ ”

Barwick had a cut on his head. It was freezing in the stiff wind. They sent three of the crewmen ahead for an ambulance and waited about 20 minutes before they began hiking toward a nearby road.

Nancy walked, supported by Barwick and one of the crewmen. They had moved about 200 yards when she said she needed to sit down and catch her breath. Borgwardt and the crewman walked ahead another 60 yards to flag down a truck.

Borgwardt said he directed the truck to pull over while he walked back to where Barwick and Nancy were waiting.

Ambulance Arrives

When Barwick stood up to meet him, Nancy slumped down to the ground, Borgwardt said. “I said, ‘What’s wrong with her?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he said.” The ambulance arrived within minutes and they headed for Oranjestad.

At the hospital, Borgwardt said, the doctor “opened her eyes and heard something, and said straightaway, ‘She’s dead.’ Then Barwick start to pressing her breast. You understand? He did things like you would do with a fellow who fall in the water and he drink too much sea water.

“And the doctor said, ‘No, no, no, stop that.’ And he (Barwick) said some wrong words to the doctor, he make trouble to the doctor. . . . It was like, ‘I know more than the doctor,’ you know. You have some people, they think they know something, but they didn’t know nothing. After that, straightaway he took off rings and the gold and like that.

“When I saw this, I shake my head and go out.”

Borgwardt’s sworn testimony is the cornerstone of the case the Galyeans and their 75-year-old grandmother are trying to build against Barwick.

In their $1-million, wrongful-death suit, they say Barwick should pay for taking his wife to sea in a rundown vessel, then refusing to ground it in order to hide what was aboard.

But Barwick paints a markedly different picture of those last few days on the Vera and what happened on shore.

In an interview and a statement prepared by his attorneys, Barwick said Borgwardt’s testimony about the secret hold, the gun, the smuggling plan were all “figments of his imagination,” probably designed to cover up the fact that he had gotten them lost.

Barwick said Borgwardt was piloting the ship and decided against going to nearby Curacao, where they might have harbored safely. The captain insisted on pushing on for Aruba, Barwick said.

Begged Her to Leave

Moreover, he said, he had twice begged Nancy to leave the Vera, once before they left the harbor and again when they passed a nearby commercial vessel after the trouble began.

“She wasn’t accustomed to living on a ship,” he said. “It was making her seasick, she wasn’t happy, but she wanted to stay by my side. She just didn’t like to be away from me. She would rather have put up with seasickness and everything else than to go home and not be there. And she liked the adventure.”

Their arguments never turned violent, and there was never any talk of divorce, Barwick said.

Once the lifeboat capsized after the shipwreck, Barwick said he found himself standing in about three feet of water, looking everywhere for Nancy.

“I couldn’t get any response,” he said. “So I waded around and swam out a little bit.” He said he spotted the iridescence of her life jacket and grabbed it and pulled her out of the water. “My only concern was for my darling Nancy’s safety,” he said.

“As I pulled her out, I shimmied up this rock, and I had her on my chest, and as I inched up the rock to get out of the surf, by just pulling on her chest--I didn’t know she had had a heart attack, but this revived her.

“By that time, the crew was helping me pull her up, that’s when she stood up. I thought she was just exhausted. . . . She got up and said, ‘I don’t feel good.’ I said, ‘You’re going to be OK, honey, we’re almost to the road.’ ”

As they began walking, he said, Nancy whispered, “Kenny, stay with me. I love you.” But in a few moments, he said, she “collapsed like letting air out of a balloon.” Barwick said he carried her about 100 feet while Borgwardt went ahead, then put her down and began administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

He continued resuscitation efforts during the ride to the hospital, but by the time they arrived it was too late, he said. “I was so stunned that I almost passed out. Grief came over me like a cold rubber sheet,” he said. “I couldn’t believe that she had died.”

Barwick said he had taken his wife’s jewelry because he feared that it might have gotten stolen. He also said he was concerned that without money, he would have been dumped on shore that night with nothing but his Levis, unable to put up the Vera’s crew and send them home.

Furniture Removed

By the time Barwick got home, Mark and Tony Galyean had removed two truckloads of furniture from the family home in Huntington Harbour, convinced that Barwick would attempt to take what their mother and father allegedly had promised would be theirs someday.

Before they left the house, Barwick telephoned from Aruba.

“I believe I asked him what he wanted,” Mark Galyean testified in his deposition. “He said, ‘I’m taking everything. You’re not getting anything.’ I said, ‘Like hell, you are.’ He was trying to antagonize me and tell me that everything that was--that had belonged to my mother and father--was now going to be his.”

Barwick said he had to call the police to prevent the Galyeans from emptying the family home before he could return. By the time he got back, he alleges in a countersuit, much of the furniture and many of his own private papers had been taken.

The entire case, he said, is based on the Galyeans’ resentment of his marriage to their mother--and the money that’s at stake.

Under a will Nancy had drafted while her former husband was still alive, Barwick stands to inherit a third of his wife’s estate, with the rest going to the children.

But under state law, Barwick cannot inherit anything if Nancy’s children prove that he murdered his wife--an allegation that has been raised in both the wrongful-death lawsuit and in the probate proceedings over the will.

No Hard Evidence

The Galyeans acknowledge that they have little or no hard evidence. But they say their mother’s good health, Barwick’s delay in reporting her death and Borgwardt’s testimony raise questions about what happened that night on shore when Borgwardt went ahead for help, leaving Barwick alone with his wife.

“I believe she was murdered,” Mark Galyean testified in his deposition, adding that it’s possible she was suffocated during the few moments it took Borgwardt to flag down the passing truck.

Law enforcement authorities in Aruba and Curacao have said they never had any reason to suspect any wrongdoing. And though Barwick said Aruba police questioned him for three days about whether there were any drugs aboard the Vera, no charges were filed.

“When there should be only a little piece of suspicious things in this case, I should have immediately ordered an autopsy,” said Hans Hoogland, Aruba’s deputy public prosecutor. “But the doctor who saw the body didn’t give me any idea that there had been something wrong. It could be that we made a mistake, I don’t know.”

U.S. authorities have declined to investigate the case because it happened in another country’s jurisdiction. Privately, they question whether there is anything to investigate at all. They have suggested that a woman who reportedly used cocaine might well have had a heart attack after so traumatic an experience as a shipwreck. Besides, said one law enforcement official: “There’s a lot easier ways to bump somebody off. Why didn’t he just throw her overboard?”

The family has filed a petition in Los Angeles Superior Court seeking to exhume the body for an autopsy.

“I think it’s a desecration of her grave,” Barwick said. “She should be left to rest, and if they want to exhume her body, then that’s on their conscience . . . I don’t think it’s going to prove anything.”

Nancy, he said, “loved me more than anything else in this world. I cherished her because of the way she was to me. I would give everything that I have in this world today if I could bring her back.”

THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE SS VERA The steamship Vera was going to be a ticket to big money and high adventure for Kenneth and Nancy Barwick when they bought the 365-ton freighter in 1983. But the Huntington beach couple’s plans to renovate the aging vessel and restore her to service in the Caribbean went awry on the night of Feb. 20, 1985, when the Vera sank off the coast of the Netherlands Antilles. Nancy Barwick never made it back from the maiden voyage. Now the story of the Vera has made its way back to Orange County Superior Court, where her children are trying to find out how ---- and why ---- she died. 1. After completing thousands of dollars of repairs on the vessel, the Barwicks set sail from Jacksonville, Fla., early in 1985 and docked in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. There, they engaged the services of a German sea captain, Hans Borgwardt, to help them pick up cargo from the Dominican Republic and return it to Haiti. 2. The cargo was picked up in San Pedro as planned and on Feb. 16 the Vera set out for the return voyage to Haiti. 3. Later that day an unexpected storm moved in. Kenneth Barwick and Hans Borgwardt disagree on who made the order, but the Vera changed course and began heading south toward the Netherlands Antilles, a small chain of islands off the North coast of South America. The seas rose higher, and the ship began taking on water. 4. The Vera went down on the night of Feb. 20 a little more than a mile off the coast of Aruba. The crew took to the lifeboat and had been ashore less than an hour when Nancy Barwick collapsed in her husband’s arms. Taken to a hospital, she was pronounced dead.