Alumni Magazine - Fall 2008 - (Page 25) you think they’ll never come back, or then by some bizarre way you think they will.” sleepy county and his office has been criticized for releasing almost no information. “There’s so much left in the investigation,” he says. “There are challenges in this investigation. If this would have been a double homicide, there would be forensic evidence on the bodies. What we don’t have is any body of evidence. “The only thing we do have is Dennis Gerwing, but he’s deceased. That’s a huge hurdle. If in fact he’s the only one involved, that closed a lot of doors.” The search for the Calverts has been extensive, covering Hilton Head Island, the water surrounding it and several locations on the mainland and in Georgia. Missing persons fliers have been posted in nearly 200 countries, as John and Liz were known to travel abroad. Their private jet, however, remained unmoved at the Hilton Head airport. Tanner says his investigators work on the case daily, poring over financial records and interviewing associates of Gerwing and the Calverts. The FBI assisted the sheriff’s office in auditing the Harbour Town finances and tracking down the missing money, though Tanner wouldn’t say if Gerwing alone had taken the missing funds. The Club Group conducted its own audit and released a statement holding Gerwing solely responsible for financial discrepancies, though Club Group president Mark King later tried to redact the statement. “You’ve got questions and I’ve got answers, but I can’t give them to you,” Tanner says. “In due time we’ll release the information. But it’s still being worked as a disappearance.” The Rumors very morning, John Calvert would step off the Yellow Jacket and walk around the marina, greeting any other boaters who’d risen early. Somewhere along the circle he’d find a cup of coffee, and then he’d come to the far edge, where the harbormaster’s office sits in the shadow of a lighthouse. E Leslie Whitener, the assistant harbormaster, sits at her usual post in the cluttered office watching over the marina. John would sit in the other chair as they talked about the business, current events and boating. As with most days now, John’s chair remains empty. “I miss them terribly,” says Whitener, a loud and outgoing woman who’s worked at Harbour Town for 25 years. “I wish they’d walk around the corner right now.” When the couple first became regulars at the resort, Whitener and the other locals immediately took to the Calverts, though they say the couple worked too hard. “The joke in Hilton Head is we taught them how to play,” she says. “When they first bought the boat, they knew how to use it and safety and all that. But we took them out to the beaches and sand bars to have fun.” The Calverts also kept up their tireless work ethic at Harbour Town, partnering with golf tournaments, hosting Georgia Conservancy meetings and putting on Humane Society events to help causes and bring in visitors. Whitener points to an employee putting special environment-friendly garbage bags into trash cans and says, “Liz was the greenest person I know.” For employees who had worked for Harbour Town when it was owned by a management company in New York City, the Calverts’ hands-on operation was refreshing. “We were happy as larks,” Whitener says. “I’ve worked through three bankruptcies. The Calverts taking over was the greatest thing to happen to Harbour Town in 25 years.” Now that John and Liz are gone, the business continues, overseen by David White. But it’s far from the same without them, and even staff members as jubilant as Whitener are prone to moments of melancholy. They also can’t avoid the rumors, which hint that the disappearance is even more complex and troubling than it seems. Whitener worked with Gerwing for nearly 20 At the Beaufort County sheriff’s office, a missing persons poster lists the few details investigators made public about the Calvert case. The couple’s yacht, left, was named Yellow Jacket, but a black shroud now obscures the name. Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine • Fall 2008 25
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