The boat was gone. Tom and Eileen Lonergan broke the surface of the Coral Sea after their third scuba dive of the day, and all they saw was open water. The Outer Edge, the 26-passenger dive boat they had boarded that morning out of Port Douglas, Australia, had simply left without them. It was January 25, 1998.
Tom was 33, Eileen was 28. They were American tourists from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who had spent years traveling the world together. They met at Louisiana State University, where Eileen had gotten into scuba diving and convinced Tom to join her. They worked as teachers for the Peace Corps in Tuvalu, then spent a year in Fiji.
Now they were on their way home, and they had stopped in Queensland to dive the Great Barrier Reef. It should have been a dream. The Outer Edge was supposed to take them on three dives along the Ribbon Reefs, about 40 miles offshore. The couple headed off together for that third dive around 3:00 p.
m. , swimming calmly 12 meters below the surface. When they surfaced less than an hour later, the boat was gone. There was nothing but water in every direction.
Being left behind on a dive isn’t automatically fatal. In January 2000, an English tourist named Paul Lucas survived 40 hours in stormy seas after his dive boat left him behind in northern New South Wales. But the Lonergans were floating in the blazing heat of the tropical Coral Sea with no fresh water. Under that sun, a person can dehydrate rapidly.
And for Tom and Eileen, no help was coming. The day after the incident, the Outer Edge brought another tour party to the same area. One of the guest divers found six dive weights resting on the seafloor. A crew member described the find as a bonus, completely unaware of what had happened the day before.
Tom and Eileen might still have been alive, only a few miles away, using the empty dive belt to bind themselves together. There is evidence they survived the night. Several months later, a fisherman 100 miles north of the site found a dive slate with the Lonergans’ thoughts written in an unsteady scrawl, faded by months lost at sea. Tom had written: “Monday, Jan 26, 1998.
0800. To anyone who can help us, we have been abandoned on Agincourt Reef by MV Outer Edge, 25 Jan ’98, 3:00 p. m. Please help us.
Come to rescue us before we die. Help. ”
Other clues washed up later. A wetsuit in Eileen’s size appeared on a beach in North Queensland in early February.
Scientists measured the speed of barnacle growth on its zipper and estimated it was lost on January 26th. There were tears in the material around the buttocks and armpit, apparently caused by coral. Inflatable dive jackets marked with their names washed ashore north of Port Douglas, along with their tanks and one of Eileen’s fins. None of the gear showed signs of a violent end.
There was no evidence of a shark attack, like the one depicted in the film that would later be made about them. But what actually happened to the couple? It took two full days before anyone realized they were missing. Outer Edge skipper Geoffrey Nairn found a bag aboard containing their personal belongings, wallets, and passports.
A massive search was organized, involving both air and sea rescue teams. For three days, naval and civilian boats and aircraft looked for the missing couple. Their bodies were never found. Experts speculated that the two drifted helplessly back and forth on the tides in the boiling heat of the tropical sun, eventually becoming delirious from dehydration.
They believed it was this delirium that caused the couple to struggle out of their uncomfortable swim gear. Without the buoyancy of their dive jackets and wetsuits, and in their weakened condition, they couldn’t tread water for long. The publicity surrounding the Lonergans’ disappearance had major repercussions for the entire Queensland dive industry, one of the pillars of the province’s economy. The Barrier Reef tourist trade employed nearly 50,000 people, hosted nearly 4 million day trips every year, and brought in more than 4 billion Australian dollars.
The horrifying fate of the Lonergans threatened permanent damage to this important industry. But perhaps that was as it should be. What happened to Tom and Eileen wasn’t just an unavoidable accident. There were specific protocols for dive boat operators that were not followed that day, and those failures led directly to the couple’s disappearance.
Dive boat crews are required to count every diver into and out of the water, and then conduct a further count once the boat leaves the dive site. These simple, common-sense safety measures weren’t followed properly that day. When asked about the count, skipper Nairn said he had ordered a crew member to carry it out as usual, but the numbers had become confused because two passengers jumped into the water halfway through the count. Still, no one on board seemed to notice that two sets of diving gear were missing as the boat made its return to Port Douglas.
Instead of owning up to their negligence, the Queensland diving industry went into damage control. Speculation began to spill into the media that somehow the Lonergans themselves were to blame for their own deaths. These conspiracy theories ranged from the couple faking their deaths to a murder-suicide, or even that they had some kind of suicide pact. Many of these outlandish ideas were encouraged by the Outer Edge’s owner, Tom Colrain, who did have some basis for the claim.
Both Lonergans had kept personal journals, which were discovered among their belongings at their hostel. Both contained content that was at odds with the family and friends’ assertion that the couple was happy and looking forward to a future together. Some of the passages were deeply melancholy and even suicidal. In one of Tom’s diary entries, dated six months before the fateful dive, he wrote that he felt like a student who had just finished an exam and now believed his life was complete and that he was ready to die.
He wrote that as far as he could tell, from here on his life could only get worse. He said his life had peaked and it would be all downhill from there until his funeral. An entry in Eileen’s diary from January 9th, 1998, just weeks before the dive, was even more disturbing. She wrote that Tom hoped to die a quick death and that he hoped it happened soon.
She then wrote, paradoxically, that Tom wasn’t suicidal, but that he did have a death wish. Finally, she admitted that Tom’s death could very well lead him to what he desired, but that she feared she could get caught up in that, too. Both Lonergans also spoke of not enjoying their jobs. Eileen wrote that their lives were so intertwined now that they were hardly two individuals anymore, and that where they were now goes beyond dependence and beyond love.
Media reports of these diary entries not only fed rumors of the couple engineering or faking their own demise, but also led to supposed sightings of the Lonergans being reported from all over Australia. None of these were taken very seriously. Skipper Nairn was charged and tried on manslaughter charges. During the trial, his defense attorney used the Lonergans’ diaries to create doubt about how the couple had actually died.
Eileen’s father, John Haines, who traveled to Queensland for the trial, disputed this suspicion and said the diary entries were taken out of context. Ultimately, skipper Nairn was found not guilty. The coroner in the case, Noel Noonan, then recommended that Nairn be charged with unlawful killing, stating that a skipper should be vigilant for the safety of passengers and ensure that safety measures are carried out. The coroner said he was sure a reasonable jury would find Nairn guilty of manslaughter on criminal evidence.
But while Nairn was found not guilty, the company he worked for was fined after pleading guilty to negligence and later went out of business. The Lonergans’ case also prompted stricter government safety regulations for dive boat operators, including head count confirmations and new identification measures. Only six years after the Lonergans were lost at sea, the film Open Water used their predicament as a jumping-off point for a survivalist horror film about what their last hours alive might have been like. It was a surprise hit, winning Best Thriller at the Golden Trailer Awards, and Blanchard Ryan won Best Actress at the Saturn Awards for her performance as Eileen.
The filmmakers were happy to have a hit on their hands, as well as the start of a small franchise with two sequels that were unrelated to the Lonergan case. The diving industry in Queensland was far less enthused. But any negative impact from the film on tourism seemed well earned when you look at the dive industry’s continued struggle to rebuild its reputation on safety issues in the wake of the Lonergans’ deaths. In a check of 59 dive shops by Queensland health and safety inspectors in 2002, a total of 76 notices were issued for failure to do proper head counts, dive logs, or lookouts—the main issues highlighted three years earlier in the Lonergan inquest.
Eileen’s father, John Haines, is understandably no fan of the film and said he had no desire to ever watch Open Water. But perhaps surprisingly, he and Eileen’s mother, Kathy Haines, say they hold no grudges against the crew or passengers of the Outer Edge, the dive boat that left their children behind. In 2018, on the 20th anniversary of the Lonergans’ disappearance, Kathy Haines told the Courier Mail that she held no ill will towards Australia and that the family feel nothing but sympathy for skipper Nairn, who passed away in 2015, and believed it was the right decision that he wasn’t further prosecuted over the deaths. John Haines said he simply wished they could have found his daughter and son-in-law’s bodies, because that would give them some sort of closure.
Then again, he added, he supposed that Tom and Eileen would always be a part of the Great Barrier Reef.
