More than four years have passed since Kate Owen’s friend Sarm Heslop disappeared in the Caribbean.
Sarm’s boyfriend Ryan Bane claimed he’d woken at 2am to discover her missing from his catamaran having left her passport, phone and wallet behind.
It was nine hours before Bane contacted the Coast Guard and asked them to start looking for Sarm, 41, after which he refused to allow police to carry out a forensic search of his 47ft vessel, the Siren Song, docked off the tiny island of St John in the US Virgin Islands.
It then emerged that Bane had a conviction for assaulting his ex-wife, Cori Stevenson, who describes him as an abusive bully. Shortly afterwards he left St John with a trail of unanswered questions in his wake.
Bane, 49, still hasn’t been formally interviewed by police, nor disclosed the whereabouts of his boat, which may still contain vital clues as to Sarm’s whereabouts.
And he refused to take part in a new BBC documentary series broadcast last month called Missing In Paradise: Searching For Sarm.
Then, 12 days ago, came an astonishing development – a 1,469-word broadside from Bane, uploaded online to defend his ‘reputation’ and the first time he’d broken his silence.
In it, the American criticised ‘major omissions and misrepresentations’ in the documentary but made no outright denial he had harmed Sarm. In fact, concern for his girlfriend appeared conspicuous only by its absence.
Sarm Heslop (pictured) disappeared from her boyfriend’s yacht in the Caribbean four years ago
Left to right, Kate Owen, her missing friend Sarm and Sarm’s boyfriend Ryan Bane in the Caribbean
CCTV shows the last sighting of Sarm, recorded six hours before she was reported missing. It shows her and Bane walking down a wooden dock before boarding a dinghy to head back to their luxury yacht anchored in the next bay
Kate, 46, who was in the Caribbean with Sarm when she disappeared, read it in shock. ‘Why talk to pick holes in a documentary when actually what we want him to do is talk to the police?
‘If you’ve got nothing to hide, why are you not speaking to them?’ she asks. ‘He knows more than he’s telling us.’
Alongside his letter, Bane made public text messages between himself and Kate, sent after Sarm’s disappearance, in which the pair make plans to meet. The messages, he says, show ‘familiarity and trust’ between the pair and ‘transparency’ in his behaviour.
‘I think he feels by showing the text messages he’s got one up on us – that he’s going to rattle us,’ says Kate.
She says keeping in touch with Bane in the aftermath of Sarm’s disappearance was a ploy to try to uncover the truth.
She kept her meeting with Bane quiet from Sarm’s other friends out of a sense of failure for not getting more out of it, but talks about it for the first time today.
‘I tried to keep friendly with him because he was the last person to have contact with Sarm.’
Kate, an interior designer who lives in Switzerland with her partner Martin, a teacher, cries as she describes the hell of not knowing what happened to her friend.
She has told herself Sarm is unlikely to be alive ‘and that has helped a bit – I’m not expecting my phone to ring and it be her’. But, she says: ‘We can’t grieve. Time hasn’t dulled the pain.’
She and other friends of Sarm are calling for what is still a missing person’s case to be reclassified as a murder investigation.
Ryan Bane, pictured walking his dog on the US Virgin Islands in 2021 after his girlfriend’s disappearance. He has never been formally questioned by police
Sarm Heslop, from Southampton, went missing from the Siren Song, a catamaran owned and operated by her American boyfriend, Ryan Bane
‘Ryan is the only person who can tell us the full story,’ says Kate. ‘We have to keep asking questions.’
Adventure-loving Sarm sailed across the Atlantic with Kate and Martin, arriving in Grenada in summer 2020, where she went on her first date with Bane after meeting him on Tinder.
A former account manager from Michigan, Bane had moved to the Caribbean in 2015 and built a business chartering yachts.
‘He was charismatic and funny,’ says Kate. She and Martin made friends with him. ‘We had no concerns about him.’
Sarm’s only slight worry, says Kate, was that after meeting Bane he had hired her to work as a chef on his catamaran.
‘He would essentially be her boyfriend and boss, on a boat. It would be a lot, quickly.’
By February 2021, Sarm and Bane had moved to St John. On March 7 they went to a bar before taking Bane’s dinghy back to the Siren Song in Frank Bay, around ten minutes away.
Last month the US Virgin Islands Police Department finally released CCTV footage of the couple boarding the dinghy, because the islands’ chief of police, Steven Phillip, admitted: ‘We’re at a dead end.’
Kate describes seeing the images of her friend ‘horrible and wonderful’ believing the footage shows Sarm was, at that stage, content. ‘There are no raised voices. The one thing that did come to light is the time stamp.’
Indeed. Bane claims he and Sarm returned to the Siren Song at 10pm, where he watched TV. But the time on the CCTV footage at the jetty is 8.45pm. ‘So that’s an extra hour, either from when he says he got back to the boat, or an extra hour on the dinghy boat.’
Bane’s lawyer David Cattie told the documentary’s presenter, Tir Dhondy, the discrepancy was an innocent error.
All the same, could it be that Sarm did not go missing from the Siren Song at all, but from the dinghy?
The owner of the boats docked within shouting distance of the Siren Song heard any commotion overnight, according to the BBC documentary.
Nor did Bane alert them to the fact Sarm was missing – a ‘man overboard’ cry for help, you might think, would be a sensible first response in this situation.
Cattie told the BBC that after reporting Sarm missing, Bane was under the impression the police would contact the Coast Guard.
Yet Commander Jan League, from the island’s Coast Guard, told the BBC it’s ‘always the captain’s responsibility’ and ‘waiting nine hours is decreasing the possibility of finding a person in the water’.
Cattie added that Bane was in a ‘panic’ overnight and suggested contacting the Coast Guard was difficult as it would take ‘hours’ to arrive. Commander League, however, said it was positioned nearby in neighbouring island St Thomas.
The afternoon after Sarm went missing, Bane told Kate, who was on the nearby island of St Martin, that he was going to talk to police.
But when they spoke later that day, he told her: ‘I don’t want this to sound weird, but I’ve got myself a lawyer.’
Kate says: ‘My first thought wouldn’t be to get a lawyer. It would be to put all my efforts into finding where Sarm was.’
Bane complained his decision to appoint a lawyer was ‘framed as suspicious rather than prudent’ by the BBC and that he simply wanted to ‘protect’ himself.
Cattie, meanwhile, told the documentary he instructed Bane not to talk to the police when they arrived to search his boat because innocent people can end up in jail.
Sarm’s mother Brenda tells the documentary that she won’t stop fighting until her daughter’s case is solved
‘He was cooperating with everybody,’ Cattie added, insisting Bane’s refusal to let the police or Coast Guard into the boat to do a thorough search is irrelevant given the Coast Guard had already done a safety sweep.
‘Their vision doesn’t change if it’s a criminal investigation or a safety sweep. They can see everything that’s on the boat.’
But why not do anything you can to help, asks Kate. ‘If you have nothing to hide, why were you not allowing the boat to be searched?’
Just days after Sarm’s disappearance, Bane’s former wife Cori told how, in 2011, Bane smashed her head to the floor of their Ohio home, leaving her with a chipped tooth, bloody ear and marks around her neck. Bane pleaded guilty to domestic violence and was jailed for 21 days.
Kate knew Bane had been married – he had told her Cori had changed and gone ‘mental’ on him – but, Kate says: ‘I believed what she said straight away. I felt sick to the pit of my stomach.’
Shortly afterwards, Bane texted Kate to say he was coming to St Martin to see her, which he presents in his open letter as proof he had nothing to hide.
‘I set sail directly to Saint Martin and spent days with them,’ he wrote.
In truth, Kate said, his announcement came as a shock. ‘I missed a call from him and then he said he was on his way. If I hadn’t agreed I think he would have come regardless.’
Bane had no reason to believe they were not still on good terms and, amid mounting suspicion, she says, ‘he probably felt we were the last friends he had’.
For her part, she says: ‘We thought maybe he would tell us something. It was incredibly difficult. But I felt I had to do it. He was the last person to have contact with Sarm. There would have been no point cutting him off.’
She told barely anyone for fear of being talked out of it – indeed, this is the first time she has talked about it publicly.
‘I didn’t want to look naive – there was talk among Sarm’s friends about leaving investigations to the police,’ she says. ‘But the police weren’t finding anything.’
They met in a bar, for several hours – not, Kate says, the ‘days’ Bane claimed in his letter.
‘He came across as he had on the phone – devastated,’ says Kate.
A photo of Sarm Heslop, 41, is seen in downtown Cruz Bay in St John, close to where she was last seen
Bane gave no new insights. He had seemed so upset, says Kate, ‘that myself and my partner walked away not knowing what to make of Ryan. Then we realised he can be devastated. He can be missing her. He could have really loved her – but he could still have harmed her.’
Bane claimed in his letter that he used Kate’s yacht broker to make ‘arrangements’ – the suggestion being, Kate says, that she had introduced him to the broker in the knowledge he was intending to sell his boat: ‘We didn’t. We used the same broker but had no idea he was going to sell the boat.’
In the end, the BBC reported, the Siren Song was taken off the market when the broker discovered its association with Sarm. Records show Bane changed its name to Orion’s Belt. Its whereabouts are unknown. Cattie says Bane is no longer its owner.
‘We don’t think he has sold the boat,’ says Kate. Bane complained the BBC left out the fact Sarm had a scar above her left eye from a fall while drinking, which ‘provided context about her past’, an omission which ‘left room for speculation where clarity could have been provided’.
This is, says Kate, Bane’s attempt to imply Sarm had ‘a drunken accident’. Yet the CCTV footage suggests she was not drunk, says Kate.
His lawyer told the BBC Bane’s theory is that Sarm either hit her head and fell overboard or had gone swimming and ‘lost her way’.
Sarm, a knowledgeable sailor, would never have taken the risk of swimming alone at night, says Kate. ‘I don’t even think that theory has come from Ryan. He’s never said that to me. It seems to be coming from someone who hasn’t actually lived and worked on a boat.’
Even if Sarm did knock her head and fall in the water, Kate adds, ‘why did Ryan not go looking for her?’
Bane insisted in his letter he did search for Sarm and the BBC should have made this clear.
He also claims he hired a private investigator to conduct an ‘independent review of the facts’, which found ‘several people were on the boat that morning [who] observed no signs of a fight, no evidence of an argument and nothing on my person – such as scratches or marks – that would suggest a struggle.’
By excluding this ‘independent investigative work’, the BBC ‘denied viewers important context,’ he wrote.
When I ask him, Cattie tells me the investigator was hired as part of his law firm’s ‘normal practice’ and the results ‘are not shared with any third parties’.
He adds: ‘Mr Bane met with members of the Virgin Islands Police Department, the US Coast Guard and numerous other persons following Sarm’s disappearance. Not a single person reported seeing any signs of an altercation/argument or any signs of a struggle.’
Sarm Heslop is seen with her father Peter Heslop and his partner Lynn
Bane takes exception to media coverage of his relationship with Cori, to whom he was married between 2008 and 2014, stressing she had failed to secure personal protection orders against him due to domestic violence.
Given he has a conviction for assault, his protestations feel, as Kate puts it, like ‘clutching at straws’.
I ask Cattie why Bane’s protracted divorce proceedings are relevant.
He said: ‘The BBC and other outlets, having failed to find any evidence that Ryan Bane ever abused Sarm, decided to focus on his ex-wife’ and that Bane wanted ‘to give context to Ms Stevenson’s accusations so that readers could understand her motives, biases and credibility.’
Bane, who is believed to be back in Michigan, blocked Kate on Facebook the summer Sarm disappeared. ‘I was annoyed but not surprised,’ she says. ‘I guessed he’d got wind that I was suspicious.’
When she texted him a final time in November, he didn’t reply. He addressed his open letter to investigative journalists, asking those ‘who value accuracy over spectacle’ to contact him.
He didn’t respond to my email, however, and Cattie told me his client ‘will not be making any additional statements at this time’.
When I put it to Cattie that Bane doesn’t deny he harmed Sarm in his letter, Cattie says I am ‘mistaken; Ryan has always emphatically denied any suggestion that he ever harmed Sarm in any way… Ryan had nothing to do with Sarm’s disappearance and remains heartbroken.’
A BBC spokesperson said the ‘documentary was rigorously researched and made in line with the highest editorial standards and legal guidance.
‘We ensured that all relevant parties were given the opportunity to respond and all rights of reply have been included.’
So what compelled Bane to speak out now? And will his rambling letter salvage or further sabotage his reputation?
‘Most of what he said was rebuttable or wrong,’ says David Johnston, former Commander of Homicide and Serious Crime at the Metropolitan Police, who is working pro bono for the Find Sarm campaign in his role as patron of the charity Murdered Abroad.
Mr Johnston puts the letter’s appearance down to Bane’s ego: ‘He can’t stand people continuing to point the finger at him.’
In addition to defending his reputation, Bane claimed he was motivated to ensure ‘reporting on Sarm’s disappearance is accurate, transparent and fact-based’.
Something, at least, he and Kate can agree on.
‘All we want is the truth,’ says Kate. ‘And he’s the only person who knows it.’
– findsarm.com
