The Grave That Shouldn't Exist

In September 1988, a marine biologist named John Naughton stepped onto a narrow strip of sand on Taongi Atoll — an uninhabited speck in the northern Marshall Islands, roughly 2,300 miles from Hawaii. He was there to survey wildlife. What he found instead was a small blue boat, beached and battered, with the letters "HA" still visible on its hull.

Naughton knew what those letters meant. He had searched for this boat nine years earlier.

About sixty yards from the wreck, he found a pile of coral rocks topped with a crude cross made from driftwood. A human jawbone protruded from the stones. He recorded everything and left the site undisturbed.

The boat was the Sarah Joe. And the story of how it came to rest on that atoll — beside a grave that should not have been there — has never been fully explained.

✦The morning they left

On the morning of February 11, 1979, five men left Hana Bay on the eastern coast of Maui aboard a 17-foot Boston whaler with an 85-horsepower outboard engine. The crew were Scott Moorman, 27; Peter Hanchett, 31; Benjamin Kalama, 38; Ralph Malaiakini, 27; and Patrick Woessner, 26. They were co-workers and friends — experienced local men who knew the water well. Ralph had borrowed the boat from his twin brother, Robert, who had named it the Sarah Joe after their parents.

They were heading into the Alenuihaha Channel, between Maui and the Big Island, for a day of fishing. The morning was calm. The sea, one family member later recalled, looked like a lake.

Hana had no television stations in 1979, and radio weather reports focused on the western side of the island. The men left without checking a forecast. By early afternoon, a low-pressure system swept in fast. The wind became a gale. The seas turned violent. Four boats had gone out that morning. Three came back.

By evening, family members were standing on Hana pier, searching the horizon. The Coast Guard was notified. Over the following five days, search crews covered tens of thousands of square miles by air and sea. The community launched its own effort, raising over $50,000 for private boats and planes. They combed the coastlines of Maui and the Big Island. Nothing was found — no wreckage, no debris, no flares, no bodies.

The Sarah Joe and its five crew simply vanished.

✦Nine years later

Then, nearly a decade later, Naughton made his discovery on Taongi.

It was a striking coincidence: the same man who had joined the volunteer search off Maui in 1979 was now standing beside the missing boat on an atoll most people have never heard of. He was there on an unrelated wildlife expedition for the National Marine Fisheries Service. The connection was pure chance.

The Coast Guard confirmed the boat's identity from its registration numbers. When the grave was excavated, a partial human skeleton was recovered and sent to the U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii. Dental records confirmed the remains as Scott Moorman's. Additional bones, also identified as his, were found at a separate location along the coast. No trace of the other four men was found on the atoll or anywhere else.

But there was something else in the grave.

✦The detail that does not fit

Buried deliberately alongside Moorman's remains was an unbound stack of small papers — roughly three inches square, about three-quarters of an inch thick. Between each sheet was a small square of tin foil. They were not ship's documents. They were not personal effects. They had been placed there with evident intention by whoever built the grave.

The Coast Guard investigated the papers and could not determine who placed them, what they signified, or where they came from.

One widely cited theory points to Joss paper — sometimes called ghost money — a traditional Chinese and Taiwanese burial practice in which small papers interleaved with gold or silver foil are interred with the dead to ensure good fortune in the afterlife. Private investigator Steve Goodenow, who travelled to Taongi in 1990, theorised that illegal fishermen — possibly of Chinese descent — had found Moorman's remains and buried him according to their customs, choosing not to report the discovery to avoid legal consequences for fishing in restricted waters.

The theory accounts for the papers. It does not account for the cross.

A driftwood cross is not part of Chinese burial tradition. Someone marked this grave with symbols from more than one tradition — and then said nothing.

✦The gap in the timeline

Oceanographers have estimated the Sarah Joe could have drifted from Hawaii to the Marshall Islands in roughly two to three months. But Taongi's reef has only one narrow channel through which a boat could enter the lagoon, making random drift entry unlikely without human guidance.

There is a further discrepancy. A U.S. government survey of Taongi conducted in 1985 reportedly found no trace of either the boat or any grave. If that record is accurate, then the Sarah Joe and Moorman's burial appeared on the atoll sometime between 1985 and 1988.

Where the boat was during those six years — and who brought it there — remains unknown. Some researchers have questioned the thoroughness of the 1985 survey. No independent verification has resolved the discrepancy.

✦What remains

In 1990, Robert Malaiakini travelled to Taongi with Goodenow and former television host Hari Kojima. They recovered the boat's outboard motor from the coral nearby but found no additional remains or evidence. The Sarah Joe itself eventually made it back to Hana. It sits today in Robert Malaiakini's yard, near the bay from which it departed more than forty-five years ago.

No trace of Benjamin Kalama, Peter Hanchett, Ralph Malaiakini, or Patrick Woessner has ever been found. The case remains open. No government agency has issued a determination of who buried Scott Moorman, who placed the papers, or what happened to the other four men.

Someone found him on that empty atoll. Someone gathered coral, built a cairn, fashioned a cross. Someone placed a small stack of paper and foil beside his bones — and left without a word.

The silence around that grave has held for nearly four decades. Whoever was there has never come forward.