And the Sea Will Tell

And the Sea Will Tell

First edition published by W. W. Norton & Co. (1991)
Author	Vincent Bugliosi
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	True crime
Publisher	W. W. Norton & Company
Publication date	1991
Media type	Print

And the Sea Will Tell is a true crime book by Vincent Bugliosi and Bruce Henderson. The nonfiction book recounts a double murder on Palmyra Atoll; the subsequent arrest, trial and conviction of Duane ("Buck") Walker; and the acquittal of his girlfriend, Stephanie Stearns, whom Bugliosi and Leonard Weinglass defended. The book went to No. 1 on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list in March 1991 and is still in print as a trade paperback

In 1974, a yachting couple from San Diego, California, Malcolm "Mac" Graham III, 43, and Eleanor LaVerne "Muff" Graham, 40, sailed a 38-foot ketch to Palmyra Atoll — 1,200 miles south of Honolulu — hoping to find it deserted and to pass an idyllic year or more there. The wealthy Grahams overcame their disappointment at finding other sailors already on Palmyra, including two male Canadian scientists. The couple found the two men amiable and intelligent, and stayed.

Also on Palmyra were Buck Walker (a.k.a. Wesley G. Walker) and Stephanie Stearns (referred to as "Jennifer Jenkins" in the book), who had sailed there together from Hawaii on Stearns' sailing vessel Iola, a deteriorating, patched-together wooden sloop that lacked a reliable auxiliary engine. In contrast, the Grahams' ketch, the Sea Wind, was beautifully finished and impeccably outfitted, with an onboard machine shop equipped with a lathe and acetylene welding torch.

Walker was an ex-convict fleeing a drug possession charge and had come up with the idea of growing cannabis on Palmyra to support himself. The Grahams were a happily married couple touring the world, and Mr. Graham ran his business remotely. The Grahams had brought more than a year's supply of food for their voyage, but Walker and Stearns quickly consumed their own meager supplies and resorted to harvesting the island's few coconuts, often by chopping down entire trees, leaving scars on the island habitat. As Walker's method of farming became unsustainable, he and Stearns were forced to plan a voyage in the rickety Iola, against prevailing winds and currents, to Fanning (Tabuaeran), a nearby atoll in Kiribati, to restock — a voyage that was somewhere between difficult and impossible without a working auxiliary engine.