CRIME: End of the Romance

Aboard the Dutch freighter Utrecht, carrying sugar, general cargo and eleven passengers from Singapore to New York, perhaps no man was more envied by his fellow crewmen than Willem Marie Louis Van Rie, the ship’s radio officer. He was a newcomer to the 62-man crew, son of the headmaster of a Roman Catholic school in Holland, married (18 months ago to the daughter of a leather manufacturer), a prospective father. Moreover, handsome Willem Van Rie had something that most sailors can only dream about as they toss in their lonely bunks on the heaving seas: a pretty girl with whom he was involved in a shipboard romance.

The girl, Lynn Kauffman, 23, was a divorcee; she was vivacious, smart, well educated. The affair blossomed in the 44-day voyage from Singapore to Boston. On the 45th day, when Utrecht left Boston for New York, the shipboard romance was dead—and so was Lynn Kauffman, whose half-nude body, brutally beaten, was found awash on Spectacle Island in Boston Bay. Last week police arrested Radio Officer Van Rie on a charge of murder.

Scholar. The case was by no means a neat package. Lynn Kauffman was a close friend to Stanley Spector, 35, a professor of Far Eastern Affairs at St. Louis’ Washington University, and to his family. She was Professor Specter’s secretary and a dedicated scholar in Oriental studies (she could speak Mandarin); she had lived with Spector and his wife Juanita and three children since 1956, accompanied the Spector family to Singapore last year. Spector himself had flown home to St. Louis from Singapore, and his family, with Lynn, followed aboard Utrecht.

Lynn was good company at sea. She cheerfully pressed the uniforms for some of the ship’s officers, and Van Rie’s coat was later found in her cabin. Some passengers thought that Juanita Spector had seemed annoyed at Lynn’s behavior, heard rumors that Juanita no longer welcomed her in the Spector household.

Utrecht sailed on to Boston, thence toward New York. At 6:55 on the last night out, Nita Spector knocked on the door of Cabin 7, called Lynn for dinner. The secretary replied that she was not feeling well. A steward knocked again at 7:05; he heard only quiet sobbing and left. At 9 o’clock Mrs. Spector returned to Lynn’s cabin with the Utrecht purser. The cabin was empty, and Lynn Kauffman was not again seen alive.

Suspect. For 20 hours, New York and Boston police grilled Radio Officer Van Rie. He admitted—later repudiating his statement—that he had gone to Lynn’s cabin at 7 p.m. She was crying. Van Rie is reported to have said jokingly: “What’s the matter? Are you pregnant?” Then, “She got excited and came at me.” Police said Van Rie admitted, then denied, that “I beat her unmercifully. I beat her with my left. I beat her with my right. She fell to the floor. I picked her up and shook her. I threw her into the bunk. I heard a knock on the door and asked her to reply. She said she was too sick and wasn’t going to dinner.” Then, said Van Rie, he left her, still alive. At all times he denied that he had picked her up and thrown her into the sea.

With the case awaiting grand jury action in Boston, police tightened the lid on their evidence, except to hint about a batch of love letters (presumably from someone other than Van Rie) and Lynn’s diary. On that basis the murder trial—if it comes to that—should be one of the most sensational in a long while.