A Parent’s Hell in a Bit of Paradise

For more than a month now, Fred and Mary Ann Kirschhoch insist, they have scoured every memory of their daughter’s 29 years of life. They have sifted the sparse, last-known details of it here in this mecca of hedonism and playful sin.

And the New Jersey couple have stopped at nothing in their search for any clue that would explain how, from her conservative roots in suburban New Jersey to this Jamaican beach resort, Claudia Kirschhoch could have simply vanished from the face of the Earth.

But the narrowing possibilities after six weeks without a word from the young woman have begun to bode ill for the Kirschhochs--and for Jamaica. For any nation, in fact, that survives on pleasure-seeking adventure tourism. And for any parents whose daughters or sons might seek more of it than they ever could have imagined.

After all, Claudia Kirschhoch wasn’t just any tourist. The New Jersey native was the tourism industry--a travel-book writer and editor on assignment here when she was last reliably seen walking near the sea May 27 at the exclusive Beaches resort--her host on a promotional tour after a planned trip to Cuba was canceled.

And her background was the model of convention: one of a class of 25 at a private all-girls academy in her native Morristown, N.J., and a political science graduate of Virginia’s conservative Washington and Lee University.

She had lived at home with her parents until December, when she moved into an apartment in Astoria, N.Y., that her father had found for her--just to be closer to her new employer, Manhattan-based Frommer’s Travel Guides.

And in May, when Frommer’s sent her to Cuba as a guest of Jamaica’s Sandals chain, which owns the Beaches resort, Kirschhoch’s first call when she arrived en route at Montego Bay in Jamaica was, as always, to her parents.

Mary Ann Kirschhoch recalls, with bitter irony, her relief that evening when her daughter told her that Sandals had canceled the trip to Communist Cuba, citing potential fallout concerning the ongoing Elian Gonzalez affair. Instead, Sandals was offering a complimentary week at one of its better-known resorts in Montego Bay or Negril.

“Claudia was disappointed,” her father recalled. “But her mother was overjoyed. We worry about places she goes that are unknown to us. A week in Negril sounded like a good idea.”

Little did the Kirschhochs know that just three days later, their daughter would disappear, leaving behind her passport, credit cards, cellular phone, plane ticket, camera, cash and clothes--everything she’d brought, save for a blue-striped bikini, sunglasses and perhaps a small portable radio.

Nor, the Kirschhochs now say, could they possibly have imagined that the majority of Jamaicans, including senior management at Sandals and the island’s media, ultimately would cast their daughter as an adventure-seeker and party-goer whose attraction to the local reggae and Rasta culture could have caused her to throw all caution to the West Indian winds.

“I know her,” an angry Fred Kirschhoch snapped at a news conference in the Jamaican capital, Kingston, during the couple’s second trip to the island in late June. “And this is not like her.”

Resolving Claudia Kirschhoch’s disappearance has become a parental crusade so determined that the couple allowed the ABC program “20/20” to turn them into “reality actors” during a stage-managed trip here last month. But the search has also has become a singular national security concern for Jamaica.

If, as the Kirschhochs suspect, their daughter is being held against her will--or worse--it would suggest that not even the resort town of Negril, billed as an oasis of peace, is free from the dangers that have made the Jamaican capital one of the world’s most violent. That could deliver a devastating blow to Jamaica’s tourist industry, the nation’s largest source of foreign exchange, at a time when its economy already is teetering.

In a massive mobilization, the Jamaican police have searched land and sea, deployed scores of detectives, saturated the island with posters of Kirschhoch offering a $50,000 reward and followed up on nearly 400 telephone tips--none of them productive.

Jamaica’s police recently conceded that they have no leads, and the island’s nationalist government, for the first time anyone here can recall, acceded to the Kirschhochs’ request and last month officially called in the FBI for help.

Police Emphatic That She Is Alive

In a nation of 2.5 million that routinely records more than 800 murders a year--the overwhelming majority of them Jamaicans in and around far-off, drug-infested Kingston--police officials are emphatic in their belief that Kirschhoch is alive.

“There’s no evidence that suggests she is not alive,” Jamaica’s police-tourism liaison, Supt. Ione Ramsay-Nelson, concluded in a news conference June 27.

So, then, where is Claudia Kirschhoch?

Most Jamaicans share a theory. And it was during that Kingston news conference that Leo Lambert, head of Sandals’ corporate public relations and Kirschhoch’s host, sought to frame it.

In an account that infuriated Fred Kirschhoch, Lambert recited a shopping list of rumors and secondhand reports--most of them bordering on libel--suggesting that Kirschhoch’s daughter had been on a partying binge that could help explain her disappearance.

As one Jamaican newspaper recently put it: Kirschhoch has simply “broken loose,” walking away from the Manhattan fast track and her conservative New Jersey roots for the solace, simplicity and soulfulness of life in the Jamaican hills.

Lambert cited several “sightings” of Kirschhoch in the days after a Sandals security guard spotted her on the beach May 27: at a local reggae beach club in the company of six Jamaican men; at another nightclub several miles away; and in far-off villages.

Police investigators said none of those reports have been confirmed. But they added that there are precedents here for foreigners “breaking loose”: An Australian recently walked out of the hills after several months in a Rastafarian enclave, and a German woman was found with a newborn child after months with a Jamaican partner in the mountains, although neither woman had been reported missing during their long absences.

Yet there are scant clues to suggest that Claudia Kirschhoch was the type to behave in such a fashion.

Beyond Lambert’s published reports of Kirschhoch partying on the beach, dating a bartender and attending local reggae beach bashes here--all attributed to another American travel writer who had joined Kirschhoch briefly in Negril but since has denied having made many of the reports--much has been made of Kirschhoch’s favorite writer, Paul Bowles.

So enamored was Kirschhoch of the late author that she had a framed letter signed by him on a wall in her Astoria apartment. Bowles wrote “The Sheltering Sky,” a haunting tale of an American woman who disappears with nomads in the African desert while in a state of shock over her husband’s death.

“That’s not the way she looked at that story,” Fred Kirschhoch said. “She just loved the way he wrote.”

Besides, the Kirschhochs added, that simply wasn’t their daughter’s style. She had lived in Paris for seven months in the mid-1990s and called home once a week. Just a few weeks before the Negril trip, she had been working in Washington state, driving 1,100 miles of coastline, flying over Mt. Rainier and Mt. St. Helens and calling home the instant she spotted a flock of bald eagles.

At 5 feet 2 and a compact 105 pounds, Claudia, they said, has always been adventurous but cautious, an avid bird-watcher and aficionado of cultural tourism who carefully weighed risks, paid attention to detail and took no chances.

And her father says that, before leaving John F. Kennedy International Airport, his daughter had read her own employer’s travel guide concerning Jamaica, which warns: “Jamaica can be a tranquil and intriguing island, but there’s no denying that it’s plagued by crime and drugs.

“But many visitors are unaffected; they’re escorted from the airport grounds and to their hotel grounds and venture out only on expensive organized tours. These vacationers are largely sheltered from the more unpredictable and sometimes dangerous side of island life.

“Those who want to see ‘the real Jamaica,’ or at least see the island in greater depth, should be prepared for some hassle. . . . Should you go? By all means, yes. Be prudent and cautious, just as if you were visiting New York, Miami or Los Angeles.”

Resorts Keep Track of Guests’ Whereabouts

The Beaches resort where Kirschhoch was last seen is typical of Negril’s hermetically sealed all-inclusives--sprawling luxury compounds that are so careful about guests’ safety that their comings and goings from the grounds are recorded in logs even when they jog down the beach.

But the seven-mile stretch of Negril beach also is home to the Hedonism resorts, which advertise: “Be wicked for a week. . . . Have Appleton rum for breakfast. Go skinny-dipping. Don’t call your mother. . . . Anything goes.”

As he and his wife sat solemnly on another Sandals beach surrounded by honeymooning couples and swilling vacationers a mile from where Kirschhoch was last seen, Fred Kirschhoch said he has no doubt that his daughter would have left the Beaches grounds in search of Jamaican reality. But, he adds: “She would have weighed the risks carefully.”

What, he was asked, about the Jamaican mainstay of ganja, its illegal though plentiful marijuana crop, which has drawn millions of American tourists here since the hippie wave of the ‘60s.

“It’s not something Claudia did before,” Kirschhoch insisted.

“But kids don’t tell you everything,” Mary Ann Kirschhoch added.

“Listen, Claudia told us more than most kids,” Fred Kirschhoch concluded flatly, “more than we wanted to know. Nobody knows her better than we do.”

So, then, what happened to Claudia Kirschhoch?

“We have no other choice but to feel she’s alive,” Kirschhoch finally said, when pressed by an animated Jamaican press corps at the Kingston news conference.

But through all the local media blitz that has kept Claudia Kirschhoch’s picture on the front pages here--especially in the Jamaican newspaper owned by the same entrepreneur who is chairman of the Sandals resorts--Kirschhoch has had little success in convincing most Jamaicans that his daughter may well have met a darker fate.

Just a few hundred yards down the beach where Sandals was hosting the Kirschhochs, Cosmo Brown is a singular authority concerning local matters.

Cosmo’s Beach Bar and Restaurant is a quarter-century-old institution in Negril. And its proprietor became a fast friend of the Kirschhochs, as he has thousands of American visitors, even though he can’t recall ever having seen their daughter.

For Cosmo, as he’s universally known, Negril is “very safe--as safe for you as it is for me.”

“Always remember,” the wiry, white-haired restaurateur continued, “incidents will always happen--one in a million. But I still think she’s alive.

“There are so many young people who come here to Negril--both local and foreigner alike--and they wander away,” Cosmo continued. “They find a friend, and they say, ‘Let me explore a different kind of life.’ And that might be what happened here.”

Fred and Mary Ann Kirschhoch say they’ve found themselves praying that Cosmo is right. But they quickly add that such a view may well be wishful thinking by a people whose livelihoods would be hurt if their daughter’s story has an unhappier ending.

“The mystery of it all is that this is such a closely knit society, there should be someone out there who saw her,” Fred Kirschhoch said. “They say, ‘Don’t worry, she’s OK.’ But tourism is so important here, and 7 million people read Frommer’s tourist guides, so maybe they think she’s OK because they want her to be.

“We’re keeping every idea open, including the idea that she’s fine and doing what she wants, that she likes it here and wants to stay,” Kirschhoch added. “She likes the lifestyle? That’s OK. We just want to know she’s healthy and under her own control.

“Believe me, at this point, we’d be overjoyed with that outcome.”

But for now, the question remains: Where is Claudia Kirschhoch?