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The media frenzy surrounding the ongoing Smith investigation has dredged up other unsettling cases. One concerns Merrian Carver, a sometime investment banker from the Boston area who disappeared in 2004 during a weeklong Celebrity cruise to Alaska. Her cabin attendant has testified that when he reported his suspicion that she was no longer aboard three days into the voyage, he was told to keep putting fresh chocolates on her pillow. At the end of the trip, his supervisor placed Carver's belongings in storage without notifying her family or the authorities.
The supervisor was fired for what a company spokesman insists was a rare breakdown of a solid reporting system. But Shays isn't sold on that. He is trying to determine whether cruise lines are keeping some crimes off the books. "There's a huge incentive to downplay any incident, to sail on," says the centrist Republican. "Is going on a cruise the perfect way to commit the perfect crime?"
The few statistics available aren't too comforting. No one tracks the total number of incidents cruise ships report to U.S. law-enforcement agencies. The FBI opened just 305 cruise-crime investigations from 2000 to September 2005, suggesting that either those floating hotel-casinos are some of the safest places on earth or this caseload is just the tip of the iceberg. Evidence supporting the latter: the FBI generally won't look into an onboard theft unless the items stolen are worth more than $10,000.
Other countries appear to put even fewer resources into investigating cruise-ship crime. For instance, Reginald Ferguson, assistant crime commissioner for the Bahamas, in which many ships are registered, says his office has examined "maybe one or two incidents involving U.S. citizens over the last three or four years."
That means the only authorities most cruise-crime victims can turn to are the ship's security personnel, who have a strong incentive to protect the industry's fun-in-the-sun image. "The cruise line controls the scene of the crime, controls the witnesses, controls the evidence," says Miami attorney James Walker, who represented Kelly. "It's all being filtered through the company's risk-management department." Court documents seen by TIME back up that contention. In one case, a passenger who was examined on board for evidence of gang rape sued the cruise line after ship security, by allowing housekeeping to repeatedly steam-clean the carpet, failed to preserve the alleged crime scene. In another case, a passenger accused of sexual assault testified that a ship security officer coached him to state that "no sex was performed by anyone." Cruise lines, says maritime lawyer Charles Lipcon, "are silently working against the victim. They're busy trying to make sure criminal cases don't see the light of day."
Perhaps that's the reason only 7% of the 135 federal investigations into sexual assault over the past five years were prosecuted. Why were 93% of the cases dropped? Says Bill Carter of the FBI: "By the time we can get to [the victim and witnesses], a period of time has passed, people's memories change, they were intoxicated, or there is a lack of evidence because it was cleaned."