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Preface to Into the Lion's Mouth

 

 

When I put the papers down I knew I'd stumbled upon something more than just a simple accident report. Risk's narrative was both compelling and horrifying. Reading between the lines, I sensed there was a kind of immortal human-interest story here that went far beyond the boundaries of an industrial accident. In retrospect, I think my reading of this document was a defining moment for me because I realized I couldn't walk away from knowing what had happened—my nightmares would have only intensified—and so I made a conscious decision to find out what went wrong and why.

Over the next eight years, as I searched for every available record and hunted down witnesses to the accident, the picture that Risk had described began to flesh out and change shape. Some of the assumptions I started with dissolved under the weight of evidence. Some remained fixed. Rumors that couldn't be ignored were investigated and discarded if they couldn't be confirmed, while others proved to be true. Gradually as a clearer understanding of the accident emerged, I began to feel as though I had entered into a cave. The further away from the entrance I got, the darker the story; and occasionally I found myself thinking, This can't be true. And yet the evidence kept stacking up to say that it was.

Eventually, after years of investigation, I managed to uncover all the failures that had contributed to the dual fatality, except one. I still couldn't understand why Richard and Skip had not been saved. I'd made dozens of seabed recoveries myself and knew what was involved. How could a fairly straightforward 1-2 hour recovery operation turn into a 17-hour-long disaster? That was the one unanswered question that remained illusive. As a result, the latter part of my investigation became a detective's quest to unravel a mystery long hidden from public view.

Along the way, the vast majority of those I approached were extremely helpful, and to my surprise I found that many of them, even those with no emotional attachment to Richard and Skip, had saved letters, personal diaries, photographs, and documents relating to the accident. Considering the passage of time and the nature of the tragedy, that seemed odd to me, but no less so than the way in which this story had burrowed into my skin. There were, however, a few exceptions to the outpouring of aid I was receiving. One of the men responsible for the accident told me in an angry voice to leave the story alone, to "let it die."

But there are some stories that never die and must be told. This is one of them.