Slaughter in Paradise: Yacht Murders Haunt Antigua : Caribbean: For many on tourism-dependent island, the frightening aspect of the slayings is financial.

This has not been a good season for a place that bills itself as a Caribbean oasis where guests pay as much as $1,700 a day for sun and tranquillity.

For their money, tourists seeking refuge from London damp and Manhattan snow instead got rain nearly every day this week, along with clouds that hid the sun.

And then there were the murders, what some here are calling “slaughter in paradise.”

“The rain will stop and the clouds will blow away,” Alan Jeyes, hotel owner and yachtsman, said of the unusual bad weather. “But the killings--I’m afraid they’re going to be a blight for a long time.”

The killings: On Jan. 29, four people, two originally from California, were found dead on a richly appointed 65-foot, two-masted yacht as it lay at anchor just off an isolated beach of the neighboring island of Barbuda.

Police announced Friday that they had arrested an unidentified 22-year-old Barbudan and that two other men were being sought in the crime.

Detective Supt. Michael Lawrence from London’s Scotland Yard said the apparent motive for the killing was robbery.

Whether solved or not, the murders--the victims were bound, gagged and shot execution-style--are the first multiple killings in Antigua’s history.

They have stunned and frightened this tiny Caribbean nation, which lives almost totally on the money spent by the 500,000 upscale tourists who come every year--most of them at this time of year.

There is much to be frightened about. As with nearly all of the minuscule island nations left behind by European colonial masters, Antigua is nearly totally dependent on the whims of tourists, mostly from the United States and Europe.

At least 70% of Antigua’s gross domestic product, the measure of the country’s economic wealth, comes directly from tourism and provides the population with one of the highest standards of living in the Caribbean.

Since most of the islands offer the same thing--warm weather in the winter months of North America and Europe, blue water and fine sand beaches--Antiguans seek a competitive edge in other, intangible ways.

Rather than go for offering high-volume cheap tours or low prices as do some, or easy sex and gambling as do others, Antigua lures guests with some of the best harbors in the world and assurances of exclusivity.

While some other Caribbean islands contend with racial tensions between local dark-skinned have-nots and visiting white haves, Antigua boasts of friendly citizens who always smile when they say “hello” and “thank you.”

To make sure that there is little to offend, there are few long-haired backpackers; facilities are fancy and prices too high.

Few working-class people or couples with large packs of little children come to vacation where tourist guides list hotels in the $300-per-person per-day range as “moderate.”

“Above all, what we offer is a beach for every day” says Tourism Minister Rodney Williams, referring to Antigua’s 365 beaches, “sun and tranquillity--and that includes safety.”

So the brutal deaths of two wealthy tourists and what initially seemed to be slow and clumsy police work have put everyone on edge.

Until Friday’s announcement, the investigation had been confusing, full of contradictory and often erroneous police statements.

“It’s the kind of thing that could send them (the tourists) all off to Anguilla,” says Alberto Ravenello, owner of an expensive Italian restaurant, referring to a rival resort island that also caters to the very wealthy.

Commented one New Jersey executive who was spending $800 a night for a month’s stay at the Curtain Bluff resort, where the clientele is mainly elderly and white and where the men wear coats and ties each night for dinner:

“I come here every year because it is safe and I don’t have to worry about feeling guilty or being threatened because I want to live well. If I can’t have peace of mind and the lifestyle I want, if I can’t go sailing or out to dinner at night without worrying about it, then there are many other places to go.

“Antigua is nice, but I don’t owe it anything.”

Still, he added: “I think these killings were a one-time thing; at least, I expect so, and I’m planning on coming back.”

The executive might not be so casual if he knew that Antigua is in the middle of what appears to be a crime wave, at least in local terms.

It’s not Los Angeles or Miami--or even Grand Island, Neb.

Last year there were five murders in this nation of 60,000.

But in the last two months, the head of Antiguan Customs was killed in circumstances so mysterious that the detectives from Scotland Yard were called in to help the investigation. A prominent shopkeeper was murdered. Then came the four on the yacht. And on Feb. 14, an unidentified man was killed, some say by the police in shady circumstances.

This is not to mention at least two robberies of visitors golfing on one of Antigua’s most exclusive courses.

Most of these crimes have been kept from the public. The radio and television stations are owned or controlled by the government, as are the large-circulation newspapers.

“They (the government and the resort owners) don’t want people to know,” said Tim Hector, Antigua’s most prominent political dissident and publisher of the independent weekly newspaper, the Outlet. “So they suppress all the bad news.”

Or else they blame it on immigrants from nearby islands.

“All them killings, them golf robberies,” claimed tourist guide Denley Henley, were done by Jamaican Rastafarians, “or Dominicans.”

But the yacht murders have been too big to keep under wraps, particularly because the victims were from very sensitive groups: rich tourists and the sailing community.

The victims were William Clever, 58, his wife, Kathleen, 50, the yacht’s 33-year-old captain, Ian Cridland, and crewman Tom Williams, 22.

The Clevers, Americans from the Sacramento area, had lived abroad for a quarter of a century, sailing the world and operating a yacht-chartering service in France before moving to Britain. Clever’s last job was as an executive in a company developing an estate on one of the Channel Islands in the English Channel.

Both Cridland and Williams were British, although they spent much of the time in this southern Antiguan port village, one of the premier sailing centers in the Caribbean.

The million-dollar-plus yacht they were sailing, the Computacenter Challenger, is owned by Peter Ogden, Clever’s boss in the estate development company and owner of one of Britain’s largest computer dealerships, Computacenter.

The Clevers were taking a sailing vacation on the yacht as a gift from Ogden, friends here said.

They and the two crewmen were well known in the bars and wealthy resorts and restaurants that dot the pink sandy beaches of Antigua and Barbuda.

In spite of Friday’s arrest, little is known or being admitted about what happened.

Theories, speculation and rumors--lots of rumors--are still making the rounds: The crew was running drugs. The boat was being used to carry drugs without anyone on board knowing. The four victims were silenced because they saw an airplane drop drugs that were picked up by another boat. And--the theory possibly borne out by Friday’s arrest--just plain robbery.

This much is known: According to police and residents, the Computacenter Challenger left Nelson’s Dockyard, a national park used as a marina by some of the world’s largest and fanciest boats, on Jan. 29. They were to be gone six days.

Mysteriously, at least in the minds of several dockyard regulars, one or perhaps two other scheduled guests failed to make the sailing.

Five days later, a passing sailor noticed the Computacenter Challenger sitting at anchor in 20 feet of water at Low Bay, one of the many lonely and unoccupied beaches of Barbuda. Low Bay is about 15 miles from Antigua but close to a resort that boasts a $1,700-a-day suite.

His curiosity piqued by the location--a boat as large as the Computacenter Challenger should have been in deeper water--and by the yacht’s open hatches, the passer-by clambered on board.

What he found was horrible. Four badly decomposed bodies, the men in undershorts, Kathleen Clever in a night shirt, were lying on the floor of the main cabin. Their hands had been tied behind their backs, their mouths gagged with duct tape. Police theorize that they had been sitting at a table when they were killed.

That is about as definite as the police have been. Even in announcing the arrest, Lawrence, one of seven Scotland Yard detectives working on the case, provided no more details about the actual murders.

And the investigation itself appeared sketchy, at best.

The first report from police said the four people had been stabbed and mutilated. That prompted talk that the four had been tortured before being killed, one by one.

A later autopsy showed they had all been shot, Clever in the back and side, his wife once in the back, Cridland in the chest and Williams in the head and back. There were no stab wounds, no mutilations.

Determining exactly what happened was hampered when Antiguan police sailed the yacht to the capital, St. John’s, without securing the scene of the killings. When the boat arrived after plowing through rough seas, the bodies and other evidence had been tossed about.

Most of the island speculation centers on a connection to the drug trade in the eastern Caribbean, where both British and American narcotics experts say Colombian cocaine dealers have been increasingly active.

These experts say there is no evidence that the boat had been used in running drugs or that the Clevers and the crewmen had any involvement in the drug trade.

Hector, the dissident and newspaper publisher who has good sources in the government and with the police, said one likely scenario was that the four witnessed a drug transaction and were killed to keep them silent.

The drug experts say the most prevalent narcotic transaction involves airplanes dropping bales of cocaine into the seas near Antigua, where black-painted speedboats known as stealth boats recover them, passing them over to larger mother ships or smuggling them into nearby poorly policed ports.

“That could happen to any of us,” said Judy Harrison, an American bartender who has lived here for 15 years. “We all see things that are strange. It really makes me nervous.”

Judy Ravenello, the wife of restaurant owner Alberto, feels the same way.

“Today we saw a strange ship sail into a harbor where no one ever goes,” she said. “I got out of there in a hurry.”

In announcing the arrest, Antigua’s police commissioner, Edric Potter, and Detective Supt. Michael Williamson, another of the Scotland Yard officers, said they had always discounted the drug connection as well as speculation about a sex crime or a business deal gone bad.

“We worked from the start on the theory that it was robbery,” Potter said in a telephone interview.

Williamson said investigators found some travelers checks and cigars that were traced back to the yacht, as well as some other items that he declined to identify, which were buried on the beach near the yacht’s anchorage.

However, questions remain. Williamson would not comment, but other sources said large amounts of valuable jewelry were left on board and wallets were found containing money.

“I don’t know,” said Jeyes, the hotelier, when contacted after the arrest announcement. “If it were a robbery, why was so much stuff left on the boat? It is still very, very unsettling.”