Lewis Bennett & Isabella Hellman

About a year ago, we posted about the strange disappearance of Isabella Hellman while sailing with her husband, Lewis Bennett, on a catamaran from Cuba to Florida in 2017. Bennet has now been charged with second-degree murder in the death of his wife. 

Bennett was rescued from a life raft by the US Coast Guard on May 15, 2017. He told his rescuers that he had been below asleep, with Hellman on watch on deck. He said that he was awoken when the catamaran hit something and began taking on water rapidly. When Bennet came on deck, he said that his wife was nowhere to be found. The Coast Guard searched for three days for Isabella Hellman without finding any trace of the missing woman. When Bennet was rescued, he was found to be carrying silver coins, believed to be stolen, worth approximately $4,200. The FBI found additional stolen coins worth about $26,100 in the couple’s house in Florida.

Lewis Bennett, a British engineer with Australian citizenship, plead guilty to transporting the stolen coins in November 2017 and is now serving a seven-month jail term. Based on further investigation, he was later charged with second-degree murder.

Bennett’s trial is scheduled to begin on December 10. Last week, Federal prosecutors released documents to support their assertion that Bennett murdered his wife and deliberately sank their catamaran to inherit her estate. The prosecutors also claim that ‘marital strife’ was a motive for the alleged murder.  The Palm Beach Post reports that will show Bennett wanted out of the marriage so badly that he plotted her death and arranged to move to Australia with their daughter. The documents also detail the financial distress the couple was facing at the time of their sailing trip to the Caribbean.