By Seamus McGraw

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WASHINGTON, D.C. (Crime Library) - It is a compelling and tragic story, laid out in excruciating detail in the congressional record, how, on a beautiful day last July, on a honeymoon cruise through the sparkling blue waters between the coasts of Greece and Turkey, Jennifer Hagel Smith became a widow.

She had been married just 10 days. She and her husband, George Allen Smith IV had wed on June 25, in Newport, R.I, "overlooking the waters where we first met," she wrote in a statement to Congress delivered earlier this week. They had decided to spend their first few weeks of marriage on a cruise aboard a Royal Caribbean liner in the eastern Mediterranean. On July 5, George Allen Smith vanished.

"Three Royal Caribbean Cruise line men told me my husband had gone overboard in Greek waters," she wrote. Though Royal Caribbean officials have denied that they treated the 26-year-old widow unprofessionally, Hagel Smith maintains that for the next several hours, she endured what she has described as an utter lack of "compassion, sympathy or sensitivity," on the part of cruise line officials. And it only got worse, she wrote, when officials on the ship turned her over to Turkish authorities who were investigating the incident.

"I was drivento Turkish police station where I was mocked and taunted as I sat crying and bewildered," Hagel Smith wrote. "I was then taken, against my will further from the cruise ship, to a hospital. A man, who I could not understand, lifted up my shirt and looked down without taking me to a private examination room."

By the time she arrived back at the port, the ship had left. Her suitcases and belongings were stacked there, waiting for her return.  Whatever couldn't be crammed into suitcases was stuffed carelessly into plastic bags, she wrote. A pair of her husband's running shoes taunted her from a plastic bag. She had been abandoned, she said.

It has been more than five months since Jennifer Hagel Smith became a widow, and her husband's disappearance remains an open case. The FBI is handling the investigation along with Turkish authorities and investigators have said that there is ample cause for suspicion. Among other evidence, bloodstains were found running along a ship's railing from the balcony of the newlyweds' cabin to the lifeboats and a bloody handprint was found on the side of the ship.

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Contact Seamus McGraw at seamusm@ptd.net