A jury found Sisby Barnett not guilty of murdering Henry Eden Ebanks, which was the main front-page story in the 29 May 1975 edition of The Caymanian Compass. Sixteen witnesses testified over the course of the trial, during which Barnett was described as “calm and apparently unperturbed” throughout the proceedings. It took the jury 45 minutes to acquit Barnett, after which he was hugged, kissed and cheered by several people from his home district of West Bay. He had been arrested on 27 March 1975 for the January murder of Ebanks, and news about his detainment and trial had been on the front page several times since then.
On a lighter note, there was an article on a recent Sunday edition of The New York Times which featured a positive review of Peter Matthiessen’s ‘Far Tortuga’, a book about a schooner leaving Cayman on a turtling journey to the western Caribbean. The review included a photo of the author with a map of the Cayman Islands in the background. At the same time, Cayman officials had attended the Caribbean Heads of Government Ball at The Plaza hotel in New York. Among those at the ball were Governor Thomas Russell; Warren Conolly, ExCo member for tourism; and Eric Bergstrom, the director of tourism.
A photo at the bottom of page 1 showed the R/V Hollis Hedberg, described as “the newest, finest, best-equipped research vessel in the world today”. The ship was measured for tonnage through a set of blueprints by Captain Rayal B. Bodden. Adding to the Cayman connection, the shop was manned by 16 people from the Sister Islands, out of a total of 60 personnel, including 10 scientists.
A follow-up to the previous week’s article on the emergency care of a Honduran diver transported to Grand Cayman after being paralysed by the bends, said that Carvell Bush “may in time walk again” after days of treatment in the hyperbaric chamber operated by the Cayman Diving Club.
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