Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings, and Mysteries - 183. Honeymoon Cruise Disappearance: George Smith

Episode Date: July 9, 2026

Go to https://kachava.com and use code HSP for 15% off your first order! A newlywed couple boarded a Mediterranean cruise for their honeymoon. Five days later, a teenager photographed blood splattered across a lifeboat canopy, and the groom was gone. His bride says she blacked out. Four men were the last to see him alive. What happened to George Smith puzzled his family for years until they finally started pulling at the threads. Dark Summer Merch Is Here! Get your Tour Tee or Bandana at https://shop.heartstartspounding.com/ Subscribe on⁠ Patreon⁠ to become a member of our Rogue Detecting Society and enjoy ad-free listening, monthly bonus content, merch discounts and more. Members of our High Council on Patreon also have access to our weekly after-show, Footnotes, where I share my case file with our producer, Matt. You can also enjoy many of these same perks, including ad-free listening and bonus content when you subscribe on Apple Podcasts. Follow on⁠ Tik Tok⁠ and⁠ Instagram⁠ for a daily dose of horror. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Here we go. Someone's already claiming this is our year. Someone else said that last year too. A round of Jameson, ginger, and lime arrives at a table. Smooth enough for kickoff, smooth enough for extra time. New friends pulling up a stool. Debates about whether that was a handball. Cheers rising like a roar around the room.

Because match days are about the shared moments. How did Jameson to your match day lineup? Jameson, it's what you bring. Please enjoy our products responsibly. Welcome back to another installment of Dark Summer here at Heart Starts Pounding. As always, I'm your host, Kaelin Moore. We're only halfway through the year, and so far, cruises have dominated the headlines. In April of this year, as I'm sure you remember, 13 people traveling on a Dutch cruise ship

came down with hauntavirus, resulting in three deaths. The news went viral, and the world followed along with this story, which made me realize how rare that is, because usually the ocean keeps its secrets, and the tragedies that happen aboard these cruise ships tend to get swept away. When you push off of the dock, you're floating in a jurisdiction that belongs to no one, hundreds of miles of open water, and every so often, a passenger will step onto a ship and simply vanishes. And nobody vanished quite like George Smith. It was the summer of 2005. He was 26 years old on his honeymoon aboard Royal Caribbean's brilliance of the seas somewhere in the Aegean Sea.

And by the time the sun came up, the only evidence that he had been on the ship was a smear of blood on a metal canopy several decks below his cabin. And there's a list of questions that still don't have a satisfying answer. We're going to get into all of that today. But before we do, I just wanted to let you know our dark summer merch is live. You can head over to shop.hartsidespounding.com and check out our dark summer shirt and our light summer shirt. We also have bandanas and our evergreen merch that's.

always in the store. And as always, snap a picture and tag me when you try it on. I love seeing you all out there rubbing our merch. And this week in our newsletter, you can meet the artist behind the merch, Katie. I think she did a great job. That is part of our free tier on Patreon, so sign up there if you want to join our newsletter. All right, let's get into it. It was just after 730 in the morning on July 5, 2005, and the Royal Caribbean Cruise Line ship, The Brilliance of the Seas, was easing into court in Kusatase, Turkey. A 16-year-old passenger named Emily Rauch stepped onto her balcony to photograph the coastline

coming into view. She lifted her camera, and that's when something a few decks below her caught her eye. One of the ship's lifeboat canopies, the white metal awning that keeps the boats covered, it wasn't white anymore. Stretched across it was a dark red stain. Now, parts of it had already dried in the morning sun

and smeared into it near the edge was what looked like a handprint. Emily took a photo and then she called security. It turns out she wasn't the only one doing that. Other passengers had seen this horrible stain too and the calls were stacking up. It looked like someone had bled out on top of the canopy, they said. But the source of the blood, that is the person the blood belonged to, was nowhere to be found. This stain was directly below a row of cabin balconies, 12 of them stacked up the side of the ship. So on the captain's orders, security started working out who was staying in each of those rooms.

That part was easy. Every passenger on this ship carried a C-pass card. That's Royal Caribbean's all-in-one room key that also tracks when you scan on and off the ship. And by 7.30 in the morning, the crew could already tell that almost everyone in those 12 cabins had already scanned their card to go ashore for the day. Almost everyone. The couple, staying in cabin 9062, hadn't scanned off. They were a newlywed couple six days into their honeymoon, George and Jennifer Smith. Security knocked on their door, but there was no answer. So they just let themselves in. The room, as they saw it, was a mess. The bed was unmade. There was clothes

everywhere. I mean, it was the room of two people on vacation. But George and Jennifer were nowhere to be found. So the crew started a quiet, ship-wide search. They searched up and down the halls of the ship, and they also looked through the ship's electronic key card system for the couple. This way they could do it without freaking out the other passengers. And the crew got a hit almost immediately, because Jennifer had made an 8.30 appointment for that morning, a couple's massage. When three security officers walked into the ship's spa area and found Jennifer, she was face down on the table mid-massage, completely relaxed. She had no idea that anyone had been looking for her. And when they asked her where her husband, George was, she seemed totally confused. She hadn't seen him

since the night before, and although he didn't arrive for their couple's massage, she didn't seem worried at all. The security officers escorted her off the table and brought her to the ship's nurse where the head guest services broke the news to her as gently as he could, George was missing, and they thought from the looks of it that he may have gone overboard. On top of that, it just wasn't looking good in general. Even if they knew exactly where the ship had been in the ocean when he went into the water, and let's be clear, they didn't, the currents could have already carried him miles away. The odds of finding George alive were basically zero at this point.

Jennifer had only been married to this man for 10 days, and now she was being told that he was most likely dead. The couple had met a few summers earlier in Newport, Rhode Island, where George was renting a beach house with his friends. One of the other renters had a sister, Jennifer, and the second that George met her, that was it. His own sister later described him as a serial monogamous, but said that Jennifer was totally different.

He got very serious with her fast. She moved in not long after they started. dating, and the couple was really cute. All of their friends said they had this adorable Monday night routine because George had Mondays off of work, and so he'd grilled Chilean sea bass for her out on the grill, sometimes in the snow if he had to. Eventually, George gave up a tech job to move home to Greenwich, Connecticut, and help run his dad's liquor store. Jennifer, of course, came with him, and soon he proposed to her, and the two of them planned the kind of big, cliffside fairy tale wedding that you dream about. That wedding happened on June 25th. And 10 days later, George was gone

and Jennifer was standing in the nurse's office in a swimsuit cover-up trying to understand what she was being told. Now, the crew needed to know more about how George could have possibly gone over the side of the ship. So they asked her, what happened last night? Well, Jennifer said she didn't remember. She knew that the couple had gone to the casino. but after that it got really hazy, and then her memories just stopped. She knew that she'd gotten back to her room a little before 5 a.m. and had passed out on the bed, but she couldn't remember how she got there. She did know, though, that George wasn't in bed with her.

But she said that that wasn't necessarily alarming because they had had a fight the night before, and she figured that he crashed in a new friend's cabin and would maybe turn up at the spa the next morning. the authorities could not believe what they were hearing. Your husband of 10 days is missing. There's blood all over the side of the ship. And your story is, we were fighting. I don't remember anything. And so I went to my massage.

Now, Jennifer sat in the nurse's station waiting for someone to come get her when all of a sudden the captain came in. And he sat down next to her and he told her that he thought he knew what had happened to George. He said that he took a good look. at the balcony himself and he thought that he could make out a mark in the morning due on the railing. It almost looked like a butt print, like George had been sitting up on that railing. He guessed that George probably climbed up there, maybe to smoke, and then a wave rocked the ship, and he went over. So the captain, right then and there, made a call. This was just a tragic accident

and the ship needed to keep moving. There were thousands of people who wanted to keep their vacation plan scheduled, so they would be off without investigating that much more. I mean, why would they have to? It seemed obvious that he had just fallen. But the captain didn't know that back in the room, investigators were taking a closer look at George and Jennifer's things, and that's when they saw something that the crew had missed earlier. On the bed sheets, so small that you might miss them, were these two streaks of blood. They were each about two centimeters long sitting right next to each other. They almost looked like the number 11.

This wasn't a lot. I mean, it was nowhere near the amount of blood that was on the canopy below, but it was blood in the newlyweds bed that no one could explain. It was a little late for this discovery, though. The captain had already decided that they needed to keep to schedule,

so Turkish police took Jennifer ashore for questioning while the ship got ready to depart. And then she was taken to a hospital for a physical exam, and she describes it as being in a rough for part of town where a male officer looked her over while no female officer was present. By the time she got back to the dock, her and George's luggage was already sitting there waiting for her, hastily packed by the crew, and George's tennis shoes were poking out of the bag.

That meant that someone had gone into their room and cleaned it already. The brilliance of the seas sailed off that evening without Jennifer, and she was left in a port city where she didn't speak the language, waiting on her dad to come help her book a flight home. And then when she arrived back home, Jennifer did something no one was expecting. She went completely quiet. George's family expected her to reach out to them and talk about what happened, maybe grieve with them, but no, nothing. She never called them. And this was really confusing and upsetting for George's family, but it also made them incredibly suspicious. of Jennifer. Was there something that she was trying to cover up? Is that why she wasn't talking to

them? So what was it? Was what the captain said true that George had gone out for a smoke and fallen off the railing? Or did his new bride have something to do with it? Well, they had no idea that the investigation on the ship turned up a lot more than the family was told about. specifically, it turned up some information about where Jennifer was that night and how what happened to George was likely not an accident. The pages of Royal Caribbean's report painted a much clearer image of the trip that George and Jennifer had taken leading up to his disappearance, starting at the beginning of their journey. On June 29, 2005 in Barcelona, George and Jennifer walked up the gateway of the brilliance of the

for the first time. And let me describe this ship to you a little bit more because I think it's important. It's basically a floating city. There's 13 decks, nearly 850 crew. There's restaurants and pools, a spa, a whole casino, and then there's also a nightclub up top. And for the first few days, this 12-day Mediterranean cruise was the honeymoon of their dreams. And they fell into a rhythm on the ship fast. They would spend days off of the ship exploring port towns. Then they'd be back on the the ship at night with a rotating cast of other passengers that they kept bumping into and befriending. If you look at pictures of them at this time, they're tan and they're happy and they're toasting their good luck. By every account, this honeymoon was going perfectly.

But two things stuck out to the other passengers on this cruise. The first was that George couldn't really hold his liquor, as evidenced by their second night at sea, when their own next door neighbor filed a noise complaint about the honeymooners. George was in quote. incredibly drunk at the time. And the second thing was this group of young men that were on board. They were Russian and they were also traveling on the ship with their families. And they were quietly becoming the crew's problem child. There was Greg Rosenberg, who was 18 years old, his cousin, Zach, and their friend, Rusty Kaufman. A few days in, they had gotten written up for cursing out room service over the phone. And on July 3rd, two days before George's disappearance,

they were caught drinking and smoking by the pool. And when officers asked them to knock it off, one of them shouted back, nobody can stop me. And it got bad enough that the ship pulled their parents aside and laid down an ultimatum for them. One more incident and the whole group was getting forced off the boat at the next port. And all of this leads us to the day before George disappeared, July 4th. That day, the ship docked at the Greek island of Mekanos and George and Jennifer had a beautiful day together. They wandered the white and blue streets. They sight saw, They even grabbed a photo with the actress Tara Reid who happened to be traveling there as well. And that afternoon, they headed back to the ship to have a romantic dinner and toast their marriage,

while somewhere below the captain was charting a course overnight for Turkey. At around midnight that night, the couple drifted into the casino, as most of the adults on the ship did. Jennifer settled into playing blackjack. George preferred crap, so for a couple of hours, the two gambled apart. They were having a really fun time, though, and they weren't ready to call it at night, by the time the casino closed at around 2.30 a.m. So George and Jennifer headed up to the Dec 13 Disco, which was basically this big revolving bar.

But at that point, there was a group of guys with them who also didn't want the party to end. That group included Josh Askin, who was a 20-year-old from Orange County that they had met days earlier on a shore excursion, and also the three young Russian troublemakers, Greg, Zach, and Rusty. And it's right around then that that group of boys

makes another room service call. And this time, at least according to the staff, they threatened to throw the operator overboard if their food didn't come fast enough. At that point, security got involved and the kitchen was explicitly told to stop taking this group of boys' orders entirely. So after that, that group of boys goes back up to the disco,

and the bartender remembered that entire group being up there at around three in the morning. And the bartender also remembered Greg buying around vodka shots, two of them being for George and Jennifer. Josh had a bottle of absent that he had smuggled aboard, so everyone in the group was taking shots of that too. But then, just after three in the morning, something happens. George looked over and saw Jennifer leaning on another man,

the manager of the casino named Lloyd Botha. Now, George was pretty drunk at this point, and he called his new wife a hussy. Even in the early 2000s, that was kind of a weird and unsurious thing to call someone. So there is a chance that George was just joking. when he said this, but Jennifer absolutely did not take it as a joke. She was also very drunk, she did not take it well.

She went ahead and need him hard and told him that she was done and then she walked off. And according to Josh Askin, she left with the casino manager, Lloyd Botha. George stayed behind though and he kept drinking and then at about 3.45 in the morning, he could barely stand up. So those four guys, Josh, Greg, Zach, and Rusty walked him out of the dinner. go and back towards his cabin, basically holding him upright the entire time. His C-pass registered opening the door of his room, 9062, at 352 a.m. And as far as anyone has ever been able to prove, those four were the last people to see

George Smith alive. This episode is brought to you by Cachava. If you've been listening to the show for a while, you know, I love my Cachava. It's one of those non-negotiable parts of my routine that I don't want to give up just because I'm not home, which is why I'm so excited to tell you today about Kachava's new travel packs. I love Kachava. My favorite flavor right now, the one that I have on Auto Buy is vanilla, but I've also been loving their coffee flavor. And what's nice about the travel packs is I can throw one in my bag and never worry about being left without a snack. All the nutrition your body craves

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We're going to give you actionable guidance to make your financial life clearer, less stressful. We're going to answer your financial questions and take the mystery out of your financial life. Follow and listen to Money Moves with Jill Schlesinger, wherever you get your podcast. This episode is brought to you by Merit Beauty. One thing that I love about Merit is they don't launch products just for the sake of it. When they drop something new, you pay attention. And they've done it again with their clean volume mascara, which is absolutely going to be a staple.

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Meritbeautcom. Now, by their own account, George had expected to find Jennifer in the room still furious with him, but instead it was empty. She hadn't returned. So now he was drunk and worried about his wife, so he asked the guys to help him find her. They said that they checked the solarium, the hot tub area up top, but they didn't see her and they gave up their search pretty quickly. But here is also where we get the one witness who changes everything we know about that night. See, the man in the cabin next door was a deputy chief of police from Redlands, California, named

Cleet Hyman. He was a guy who knew professionally that what he was hearing that night next door to him was not good. This is Cleet's account of what happened after the men entered George's room. So just after 4 a.m., a commotion in room 9062 wakes Cleet up. Through the wall, he could hear yelling, guys like egging each other on. It sounded like a party, according to him. But then it went quiet for a few minutes. And just when he thought that maybe all of the men had gone to sleep,

he started to hear arguing out on the balcony, though, this time. It was loud and it was not in English. He said it sounded sort of like Spanish, but he wasn't entirely sure. And then he heard someone say, good night in English, and the door opened. Cleet looked out into the hallway, and he watched as a group of men walked towards the elevators. He counted them.

One, two, three. And then he checked his watch. It was 4.18 a.m. Now, that's three men. A group of four men had admittedly gone into the room with George. So that maybe meant that someone was still in there with him when the other three walked out. But because the men were facing away from Cleet, he couldn't see who they were. But then the cabin next to him didn't stay quiet.

Cleek could hear someone moving around in there, and then he heard a man's voice. He also heard what sounded like furniture being dragged across the balcony area, and then, at 4.25 a.m., he heard one heavy thud. And after that, nothing. Silence. Now, a few hours after that, a teenage girl would step onto her balcony, lift up her camera, and see the stain spreading across the lifeboat canopy. At around noon on July 5th, almost eight hours after the thud was heard,

Turkish authorities boarded the ship and questioned those four men about what had happened that night. But the answers they gave really drove suspicion away from them. They said that George was drunk and passed out on the bed when they all entered the room, so they took off his shoes for him and they all left the cabin together. And then they went back to one of their own rooms and ordered a ton of room service. They said that they had a photo of the food that was time stamped and would prove this. They also told them the story of the night before, how George's wife had left with another man. So maybe the authorities felt like they just had their answer.

George, who was known to not be able to hold his liquor, was drunk in his room after watching his wife leave with the casino manager. Maybe he was sad and he threw himself off the balcony. Or maybe he just went out for a cigarette and really did just fall. But what about what CLEET had heard? And what about those two bloodstains on the bed sheets? Well, the investigation was over for now, it seemed. The men were released and those questions were unanswered. And George's family just had to live with the not knowing of what really happened to him.

That is, until years later, when someone finally started to pull on those loose threads. Here's how the threats got pulled. So after George disappeared, Jennifer, who was his wife and also his next of kin, settled a wrong death claim with Royal Caribbean in 2006 for a little over a million dollars. George's family was super furious with this. They were his heirs too,

and they had no say in that settlement. They thought that she had sold their son short and done it really fast to avoid being deposed, so they decided to hire their own attorney, a man named Mike Jones, and they went after the cruise line themselves. Now, Royal Caribbean and the FBI wouldn't hand Mike anything at first. So for years, Mike had to build the case against the cruise line the hard way. He subpoenaed his own witnesses.

He worked off of public reporting. He had to chase the last four men to see George through their own lawyers. And when he was finally able to interview them, it was horrible. It went basically nowhere. When he got to Josh, he basically pled the fifth and wouldn't say anything to him. Mike. The Russians weren't much better. But Mike kept pulling at these threads. And the more he learned about that night, the less it looked like a man falling off of a balcony by accident. And the more it looked like something had intentionally been done to George. The family's case

finally settled in 2010 for $1.3 million. And sure, the money was part of it. But there was something else that they got in that settlement, that they wanted more than the money. Royal Caribbean had to hand over all of the case files to the family. Key card logs, phone records, room service tickets, security reports, crime scene photos, their own interviews with the passengers and the crews. This was massive because it let Mike reconstruct that night minute by minute. And that's when he learned some key pieces of information that changed everything he knew about that night. Let's start with Josh, the 20-year-old from Orange.

County. Remember, Josh had helped investigators piece together Jennifer's night, the parts that she couldn't remember. He insisted that she had left the disco with a casino manager, a South African man named Lloyd Botha. Except, that had been a lie. Mike looked at the key card logs from that night and realized that was impossible. Lloyd Batha had swiped into his girlfriend's cabin at around 3.25 a.m. before Jennifer had even left the disco. He was in for the night with someone else. Jennifer had left the disco alone at around 3.30 in the morning. A member of the cleaning crew actually watched her go and confirmed the time. He watched her stumble out so drunk that she clipped her head on the wall,

and he was worried enough to ride the elevator down with her just to make sure that she got back all right. And what this crew member saw actually helps us fill in some of the gaps that Jennifer didn't remember herself. See, he watched Jennifer turn and walk down a hallway, and he assumed that she was going back to her room. But what he didn't know was she was headed in the wrong direction. She never made it back to her cabin.

She actually just wandered lost around the halls until eventually she dropped down and fell asleep in the middle of the hallway. Another crew member would later find her and help her back to her room just before 5 a.m. And that's where she was when she had that flash of a memory of being in bed without George. But Jennifer had left the disco by herself. George did not go away.

her. The most she was guilty of that night was getting blackout drunk and meeing her husband for calling her a hussy. So Mike wondered why Josh had invented that story if he knew it wasn't true. So he decided to look deeper into those four men's alibi. Remember, it was that room service feast. Mike went looking for that order and the cruise record, the call logs, the kitchen's handwritten ticket book. The phone logs did show that there was a short call placed from one of the men's rooms at 4.13 in the morning. But the kitchen records show

nothing was delivered. And actually, remember, the kitchen had been told specifically to not deliver to these men. Earlier that night, they had called and threatened to throw one of the employees overboard. And at another point in the trip, they had cussed out the staff that was taking their room service order. So the

men had called about 10 minutes before the thud was heard, but they hadn't received a room service order. One questioned, the men insisted they had received that order. They could even tell investigators what they had, tuna sandwiches, cheeseburgers, the works. They said maybe the staff had forgotten to write the order down. But here's another problem. The key card logs show Zach and Rusty swiped into their cabins at

405 in the morning, and Greg swiped into his at 407. But C-pass doesn't record when a door opens from the inside or when someone leaves a room. So those swipes don't prove that they stayed put and didn't go to George's room afterwards. Which could have lined up with what Cleet heard, the arguing between 4 and 418, three men leaving, the dragging sound, and then the lone male voice and the thud at 425. Then there was Josh's own behavior after George disappeared,

which was documented in this file that Mike had. It turns out that at one point, Josh asked a crew member whether there were cameras in the hallways. And when the crew member said yes, Josh asked to be shown exactly where they were. This was very strange to the crew member who refused to show him. A few days later, a cleaner overheard Josh in an elevator talking to his girlfriend saying things like, assholes almost got me arrested in Turkey,

and I know more than they think I know. And the way the cleaner told this story, the girlfriend saw that the cleaner was listening to them and kissed Josh, mid-sentence like she was trying to shut him up. So now, some of the suspicion that had been placed on general, Jennifer in the past had swung even harder onto the four men. But suspicious behavior isn't necessarily a motive and it's not a confession. But the case file was about to offer something that looked a lot like both. This episode is brought to you by Alma. I'm a big believer in therapy,

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Shopify.com slash HSP pod. This episode is brought to you by Salas Health. Salas pairs you with a personal health advocate. And the best part is it's covered by insurance. Healthcare frustration is such a real thing. I mean, think about the time that you lose being on hold with doctors' offices or insurance. Bills that come in that are very confusing. Even personally, just navigating the insurance system as a new mom is so overwhelming.

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Go to solacehealth.com to see if you qualify. It takes about two minutes and it's covered by insurance. That's S-O-L-A-C-E health.com must be 18 or older. Advocates do not provide medical or legal advice. Two days after George disappeared, while the ship was still at sea, an 18-year-old passenger went to the ship's nurse for a morning after pill. She disclosed that the night before she had been sexually assaulted. When asked who the assailants were, she was able to name them immediately.

and it was that same group. Greg, his younger brother, Zach, and Rusty. And this woman also said that Josh had been in the room but hadn't taken part. She said that she was very drunk and the men offered to take her back to her cabin but instead brought her to theirs. And she also mentioned that the assault had been filmed.

The ship's lawyer called the FBI, the captain summoned the families of everyone involved to a meeting and the men were confined to their cabins under guard and removed from the ship at the ship. the next port in Naples. Their families marched off as the other passengers watched them from their decks. And here is the part that really makes me want to scream, but Italian authorities apparently reviewed this tape and declined to bring charges. The tape was then sent to the FBI, and no charges were ever filed in the U.S. either. But even though the tape wasn't used to persecute that crime,

it did have something else on it, something that the men had filmed before the assault. So earlier that same day, hours after George had vanished, the men had filmed themselves having lunch. They were all laughing with each other, and they were joking about George. On the recording, one of them says that George had gone parachute riding off of the balcony. And at the end, Greg looks straight into the camera,

throws up a hand sign and says, told you I was gangster. To Mike, this was proof of what he felt like he already knew to be true. The men knew exactly what happened to George and they had partaken in it. I mean, it sounds like Greg is admitting to throwing him off of the balcony. And then, years later, Greg himself handed investigators a motive almost by accident. By the time Mike Jones deposed the four men in 2010, three of them gave him almost nothing. Two of them took the fifth and one said over and over and over that he didn't remember anything. But Greg, Greg talked. Greg talked. Greg

talked a lot. He actually wouldn't shut up. He was by then sitting in a Florida prison on a drug trafficking charge, and he was happy to talk smack about all of his former friends. I mean, at one point, he even called Josh a spoiled crybaby type dude, and he insisted that no, he hadn't hurt George, but somebody had. Dude did not kill himself, he said. Someone hurt the dude. Greg's own polygraph test had come back inconclusive, but he said that that was because of his ADHD. And yes, I'm sure I have a bunch of listeners with ADHD. ADHD gang rise up. But please don't go committing crimes and then say that Kaelin told you that you could beat a polygraph test because that's not really how it works.

But Greg denied the sexual assault to Mike's face. And Mike knew that that was a lie. I mean, he knew that the FBI had the tape and he knew that it had changed hands multiple times and multiple agencies had watched the assault. And Mike knew that ADHD does not make you a lying asshole. So there was something else going. on. But then, Greg had this rare moment where he said something that was actually true, and it was something that made Mike's blood run cold. When Mike asked Greg how he had ended up in prison, Greg said, I'm a fanatic with clothes, jewelry, watches, and that's why I'm in here, man.

Watches. The night George went overboard. He was wearing a brightling watch. It's a brand that can run a few thousand dollars or many times that. And here's the strange thing that. thing about Greg's read on George. In that same deposition, Greg kept calling George a millionaire. Now, George was not a millionaire. His dad owned a liquor store, but you can see how the illusion got built. I mean, the guy's name was literally George Smith the fourth. That's the most millionaire name I've ever heard. He had a big Newport wedding, the same place where the Kennedys got married. He was wearing a brightling watch, and he and Jennifer had been heard talking all week about the wedding gift cash that they were carrying to go play in the casino. Jennifer was wearing her engagement

ring and her wedding rings to a stranger. George looked like money. Now, none of the jewelry that the couple owned was ever reported stolen for what it's worth, but you don't have to successfully rob someone for a robbery to go wrong, which brings Mike Jones back to those two little streaks of blood on the sheets. His theory is that the blood didn't come from a fight. It It actually came from someone working a watch off of George's wrist while he was passed out. The metal bands clasp maybe nicking the skin. And so according to Mike, the night probably went something like this. Three men left the room like Cleet saw, but one stayed behind to rob a drunk unconscious man.

George woke up at some point. There was a struggle. And a man too drunk to even stand went over the railing. Now, I want to be clear that this is just a theory. Nobody was ever charged with this crime. There's no confession. George's body was never found. And the watch was never recovered.

But it's the version that fits the blood on the bed, the missing fourth man and the alibi that falls apart the second you check it. And also, it fits a guy who was obsessed with watches. But this is where the story stalls out, pretty much forever. In the days right after George vanished, there was at least a search for his body. The ship was in the Aegean Sea at the time, so the Greek coast guards sent divers and helicopters out over the water to look for him.

After about four days, they called it off. They never found anything. No George alive or otherwise. The FBI investigated for nearly a decade and spent millions of dollars by the family's count. The file ran to something like 97,000 pages. And in January of 2015, they just closed the case. There were no charges filed, not enough evidence to bring to anyone. George's sister B spoke to the family and her question was one that a lot of people have.

How do you put together 97,000 pages over almost 10 years only to land on the idea that maybe this was just an accident? 97,000 pages is like 65 Bibles. It's a ton of pages. But the accident theory is still the cruise lines official version. The captain believed from the first morning that George had stepped out onto the balcony for a cigar, lost his footing, and as far as we know, the captain has never changed his mind on that. George's family has never believed that story for a single second. They think that their son was murdered, and that at least one person who knows exactly what happened chose not to say.

Jennifer, for her part, eventually moved on. She remarried a few years later, became a parent, and she stayed out of the spotlight. She declined to take part when a true crime show revisited the case, and after everything, she just wanted out of the story. and I don't really blame her for that. She thought she was going to be spending her life with George, and he was taken from her just a few days later.

The whole story is devastating. George's family went in the other direction, though. They've kept his case alive online for years, still pointing at both the Russian passengers, and, you know, sometimes they also do point at Jennifer. And the one man who always seemed willing to talk, unfortunately, cannot anymore. On December 23rd, 2019, 14 years after George,

George disappeared, Greg Rosenberg was shot and killed in the driveway of his home in DeVee, Florida. Police released surveillance footage of a vehicle fleeing the scene and called it a targeted hit, and his murder in an almost ironic twist of fate is also unsolved. No one has ever been charged with the death of George Smith, and there's a lot of unanswered questions. Who was in the room with him that night? And was there someone in there when he fell overboard? Is there a chance that this was just an unfortunate? accident? Well, I'm going to leave you with this because there's one detail that I keep coming back to. And that is the bloodstain on the canopy. It was the thing that might have shown investigators

what actually happened to George. It got hosed off the side of the ship at around 6th that evening, per the captain's orders, before the FBI ever stepped foot aboard. The stain was scaring passengers, and the ship had an image to uphold. Then George's room got cleaned, and the ship set sail right on schedule. And once you understand how a cruise actually makes money, it starts to look less like incompetence and more like incentive. Cruise lines run on really thin margins on the tickets themselves. The real money is everything that you buy once you're on board. So a ship held in port for a death investigation is a ship full of thousands of paying passengers whose vacations are ruined who want refunds, who will miss their flights home. A murder is a catastrophe. An accident is just

paperwork. And out in international waters with the FBI and a foreign government, both technically in charge, it's way easier if a problem just drifts away. But it is a little bit hard for cruise lines to ignore the deaths of passengers now, and that is in part thanks to George's case. The outcry was loud enough that by the end of 2005, cruise executives were getting hauled in front of Congress to answer for how passengers' disappearances were handled. Jennifer herself submitted a written statement about how she felt Royal Caribbean had treated her, and that pressure helped push Congress to pass the Cruise Vessel Security and Safety Act in 2010,

which finally required cruise lines to report disappearances and serious crimes to the FBI and Coast Guard. The industry also signed onto a voluntary cruise passenger bill of rights, none of which brings George back, but it means that the next family gets answers instead of a hosed off deck. And now, I turn it over to you guys. Was this just an unfortunate act?

accident or was someone responsible for George's death? Was the investigation that was done handled well? You guys can leave a comment wherever you listen. As always, I will be here next week with another episode for you all. If you want more, we have bonus episodes that are available on Patreon and also to Apple podcast subscribers. And we also have a weekly show available on the High Council tier on Patreon where you can listen to more information on the episodes that we cover each week.

Sometimes it's stories that didn't make it in. Other times, it's extra context. or whatever true crime story we're thinking about that week. You can join us over there. I will see you next time. And until then, stay curious. Heart Starts Pounding is written and produced by me, Kayla Moore. Our associate producer is Juno Hobbs.

HeartSars Pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Additional research and writing by Greg Castro. Sound design and mix by Red Room Creative. Video editing by Creative Step. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson, Jernigan, the team at WME. Have a heart pounding story or a case request. check out heartswardspounding.com.