| Rebecca Coriam | |
| Birth Date: | 11 March 1987 |
| Disappeared Place: | Disney Wonder |
| Occupation: | Cruise ship crew |
| Birth Place: | Chester, England |
On 22 March 2011, English Disney Wonder crew member Rebecca Coriam (born 11 March 1987) disappeared from the ship while it was at port off the Pacific coast of Mexico. She was captured by CCTV in the crew lounge earlier that morning, having a phone conversation with a woman that appeared to be causing her emotional stress. Several hours later, she missed her shift and could not be found anywhere on the ship. Her disappearance was the first such incident in the history of Disney Cruise Line.
Coriam's disappearance remains under investigation, and her whereabouts since the phone conversation have not been established. Her parents have been critical of Disney's handling of the investigation, believing the company knows more than it claims to and has been more interested in avoiding unfavourable publicity than cooperating with investigators. Her family settled a lawsuit against Disney out of court in 2016.
The Coriam family have been supported by British government officials instituting policies allowing for more comprehensive investigations of such incidents in the future, and advocates for the relatives of many other crew and passengers who have been reported missing from cruise ships over the last decade.
Coriam was born at the Countess of Chester Hospital in Chester on 11 March 1987. She grew up in Chester with her parents Annmaria and Mike, sister Rachael, and two foster brothers.[1] She graduated from Chester Catholic High School. In her youth, she also worked at Chester Zoo, where other relatives had worked; a memorial bench to her grandparents, Kevin and Dolores, is on the zoo grounds.[2] She joined the British Army cadets in her teens and attended Plymouth University, where she studied sports science. She later got a Staff Volunteer position within the cadets and participated in some outdoor events.
Coriam undertook youth studies at Liverpool Hope University, then moved to the U.S. for four months to teach sports at Camp America in Maine. In June 2010, she went to London for a Disney Cruise job interview, then received training at the company's theme parks in Florida after being hired. After four months on cruises to the Bahamas, where the ships are registered, she went back to England for two months off. When she returned to work, it was on the Disney Wonder, based in the Port of Los Angeles. She visited all its ports of call on the Mexican Riviera and went through the Panama Canal. She returned to Chester for two weeks during this period when her grandfather died, which was the last time her family saw her in person.
Coriam returned to the Wonder and her duties as a youth worker, maintaining contact with her family via Facebook and Skype. On the day the ship left Los Angeles six weeks later, 21 March 2011, she sent what would be her last message to her parents via Facebook to tell them she would call them the next day.[3] Her mother became concerned when, following her reply, 12 hours went by without a response.
At 9 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time that morning on the Wonder, off the coast of Mexico bound for Puerto Vallarta and Cabo San Lucas, Coriam had missed the start of her shift. She was not in her room or anywhere else on the ship, and did not respond to being paged over the ship's PA system. A review of CCTV footage found one appearance of her at 5:45 a.m.[4] An early but unverified account, purportedly from another crew member, claimed she had gone overboard at 3 a.m.[5] In the video, Coriam is talking on one of the ship's internal phones in a crew area and appears distraught. A young man walks up to her and appears to ask if everything is all right, and her mouth can clearly be read saying, "Yeah, fine." She then hangs up the phone and walks away, pushing her hair back and putting her hands in her back pockets, mannerisms her parents say were common for her. There has been no record of her presence anywhere since then.
The crew searched the Wonder for Coriam while ships from both the U.S. Coast Guard and Mexican Navy[6] unsuccessfully searched the international waters through which the Wonder had been sailing during the hours when she could have potentially gone overboard.
Since the Wonder is registered in the Bahamas, a detective from the Royal Bahamas Police Force (RBPF) flew to the ship to investigate once it had returned to Los Angeles three days after the disappearance. He was reported to have undertaken "several days of onboard investigations". Coriam's parents were flown out from England to meet the ship when it returned. They met the Bahamian detective and said he told them he had spent only one day on board investigating before flying back home. The detective also told them that he had interviewed only a few crew members and none of the passengers. They claimed Disney kept them in a car with blacked-out windows and brought them on board via a rarely-used side entrance after all the passengers had disembarked. The Wonder captain gave his condolences and expressed his theory that Coriam had been washed overboard by a wave while at the crew pool, a theory her parents doubted due to the high walls around it.[7] After that, they were taken to a meeting with Disney executives and the woman Coriam had been speaking to on the phone.
On the day before the first anniversary of her disappearance, Coriam's father received an email from a woman who claimed she had seen Coriam with a dark-haired man on the street in Venice the previous August. The woman said she was "85% sure" it was Coriam and that seeing the family's website had jogged her memory. Coriam's uncle said, "It was just an email but it seemed legitimate. It was very upsetting for everyone to think she could be out there somewhere after all this time." He wondered how she could have gotten there without her passport, which had been among the belongings her parents recovered from her quarters.[8] [9]
In October 2011, Welsh-American journalist and author Jon Ronson took the Wonder along the same route and made discreet inquiries while aboard. With the Coriams' permission, he wrote about his experience in The Guardian. Several crew members who had been on the ship at the time of Coriam's disappearance, none of whom wanted their names used, spoke to him and suggested that more was known about her fate than Disney or the Bahamanian police were publicly admitting. Many were circumspect, with one bartender telling Ronson, "It didn't happen. You know that's the answer I have to give." After touring the areas of the ship open to passengers, Ronson decided that Coriam had probably slipped and fallen while jogging on the Deck 4 jogging track. The railings there were low enough for such an accident to happen, and she regularly kept herself in shape by jogging. However, the track was well covered by disguised security cameras. Ronson shared this theory with a deck worker, who told him he was mistaken and that Coriam had actually gone overboard from the crew pool on Deck 5. The worker told him, "I was on the ship that day. Everyone knows." He cited a flip-flop found in the area as proof. Ronson returned home to find that a woman the Coriams had told to contact him had done so using the false name "Melissa" and told him that flowers were placed on the wall near the pool, apparently by the company, the day after Coriam's disappearance. The woman said, "It really stirred things up. Why were they putting them there? Nothing was clear."