Scuba diver accused of murdering wife by allowing her to drown during Great Barrier Reef honeymoon

Daily Mail ^ | 28 Nov 2008 | Richard Shears

[driftdiver]

“I don’t get why she sank!? In salt water no less.. “

my friend has done it to me on numerous training dives. So its not hard to do it without noticing. You don’t even have to hug someone.

I also don’t think it unlikely that they didn’t notice her air tank was turned off. Rescues can be very very hectic and the dive master we see swimming after her was probably more interested in getting her to the surface.

Its easy to sink in salt water if you have enough weight on.

[piytar]

I was wondering about what happened here, what the rest of the story was. The link helps.

As far as taking “his good ol’ time getting to the surface for help,” there is something that happens to a scuba diver if they don’t take their “good ol’ time getting to the surface.” It’s called the bends: http://scuba-diving.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_bends_in_scuba_diving

I’m not defending this guy, esp. with the info. on him cutting the flowers off her grave. However, it is clear to me that many here don’t know beans about scuba diving. (On the other hand, some do, for example the poster above who mentioned that if you aren’t looking, WWIII could be going off behind you and you wouldn’t notice — well, unless there were shock waves etc.)

[piytar]

“An ‘experienced’ diver would have stayed with the victum and signalled for help. Banging a metal object (like his diver’s knife) can be heard from great distances. I notice that he was wearing an octopus regulator. This means he had a spare mouthpiece to share with her if she had run out of air. Also, he had to know she would be fully drowned in the time it would take him to surface and get ‘help.’”

Good points. However, even banging a metal object to call for help won’t do much good if you don’t know other people are around.

The point about the octopus is definitely on the mark.

[piytar]

“I don’t get why she sank!? In salt water no less...”

If you run out of air and try to breath water (drowning), your lungs fill with water, and you will sink. On top of that, if he squeezed out the air in her BC, her diving weights would help sink her, too.

[Wolfie]

The bends didn’t seem to be a problem for the divers who brought her body to the surface. They did it in a minute and a half. His dive computer indicates it took him over twice that to reach the surface.

[piytar]

Depends on how long they were down, what other dives they’d done, etc. If they just got in, they could swim down, get her, and pop back up. If they had been down for a while and/or had been diving earlier, they could have been VERY sick and in utter agony from doing that. (You used to have to work dive tables to figure all of this out, now the dive computers handle it — although I prefer to work the tables, too, just to be safe.) Same applies to the husband. If he’d just started diving, there was no need for a safety stop. If he’d been down for a while or diving earlier, a safety stop may have been legit and in fact necessary.

PS From what I’ve read on this, I don’t think a safety stop was necessary, but can’t be sure.