In the early morning hours of November 13, 1981, a motorist traveling along California’s State Highway 1 was flagged down by a man near Stinson Beach, ten miles north of San Francisco. The soaking wet man said his yacht had sank in the Pacific Ocean. The motorist took the drenched and discombobulated man, thirty-four-year-old Bob Dozier, to the nearby Coast Guard station for assistance.

Dozier told the Coast Guard the yacht’s captain, forty-four-year-old John Russell, lay stranded on the beach with a broken ankle. Rescuers found a bruised and shaken Russell there.

Very little of the rest of the subsequent story told by the men could be confirmed.

                              Bob Dozier                                  John Russell 

Russell and Dozier told the Coast Guard that on the evening of November 12, they, along with two women, had set sail from Sausalito, fifteen miles southeast of Stinson Beach, aboard the fifty-one-foot yacht Freedom II. They said their destination was Tahiti, over 4,200 miles away in the south-central Pacific Ocean.

The men told the Coast Guard that shortly after departing, the ketch’s generator began malfunctioning. To make matters worse, the Freedom II was hit by a large freighter. The impact, they said, broke the boat’s rudder, destroying its power and steering.

Dozier claimed he had sent out radio messages and distress flares at approximately 6:30 p.m. but received no response. Approximately three hours later, he said the anchor line snapped and the Freedom II was struck by a large wave. The boat soon began breaking apart, forcing the crew to abandon ship. They inflated the boat’s eight-foot rubber raft, tossed it into the water and climbed into it, but it gave way after hitting large rocks.

The Freedom II

Dozier and Russell said they were able to swim to shore, but that the two female passengers, Russell’s thirty-year-old wife Suzanne, and twenty-year-old Kristin Tomlin, were lost at sea.

                        Suzanne Russell                     Kristin Tomlin

The Coast Guard was certain they would have found the Freedom II if it had sunk in the area where Dozier and Russell claimed. Helicopters and vessels, both equipped with infrared photography, however, failed to locate the ship.

Small pieces of debris from the yacht, including the nameplate and torn life raft, washed ashore later that day. Hammer marks were found on several of the pieces that were not from the main hull.  All of the fragments, however, were from non-vital parts of the boat and did not appear to have been torn off by a force of nature.

The debris found was insufficient to conclude the vessel had sunk, and the veracity of the men’s account was called into question after no record was found of the distress call Dozier claimed he had sent. The flares were certain to have been seen by a Coast Guard monitoring boat positioned only one-to-three miles away throughout the evening, and officials at a nearby Observation Center would have responded to the radio calls.  In addition, there was also no record of a large freighter in the area and no indication vessels entered or departed the Golden Gate during the time the men said the yacht was hit.

Further casting doubt on the men’s story was their contention that the Freedom II did not have radar; several people who had earlier been aboard the vessel said it was equipped with the technology.

Only Small Parts of the Freedom II Are Found

Bob Dozier and John Russell were taken to San Francisco’s Letterman General Hospital for treatment. Hospital workers said neither man exhibited signs of hypothermia, the low body temperature expected after being exposed to the 55 degree ocean water for a prolonged period.

Russell was kept at the hospital overnight for treatment on his ankle. The following day, with the Coast Guard search still in progress, he checked himself out. He and Dozier promptly left the area. This act further aroused authorities’ suspicions because the men seemed disinterested in the fate of the women.

The Coast Guard believed the Freedom II had not wrecked but was unclear about what exactly had happened to it. The police were called for assistance. Their investigation came to the same conclusion: some sort of sea scam was transpiring.

Dozier and Russell’s Story Is Shady

The following day, November 15, Russell called the Coast Guard from Las Vegas with a surprising twist to the already strange story. He claimed a third woman had been aboard the Freedom II. He identified her as his daughter and Bob Dozier’s wife, Cherie Ann Dozier. Russell said she had hit her head on rocks after falling from the damaged raft.

Russell claimed he and Dozier had not told the Coast Guard about the third woman due to their disorientation at the time of the rescue. This new claim, however, was also contradicted by a non-disoriented marina worker where the Freedom II was docked; he only saw two women on the yacht shortly before it departed.

Did I Say Two Women?

I Meant Three

Pieces of a fiberglass hull and other debris consistent with that of the Freedom II were found by divers several weeks after the alleged sinking, but the remnants were still not enough to prove the vessel was destroyed.

As police continued their investigation into the strange sea saga, they found that the crew of the Freedom II had partaken in plenty of fishy activity before hitting the waters that evening.

Bob Dozier had recently married Cherie Ann Dozier, said to be the missing third woman aboard the Freedom II. Her true identity was determined to be Suzanne Russell, the wife of, not the daughter, of John Russell. In the early 1970s, Suzanne had worked as John Russell’s secretary at Pleasure World, a Las Vegas boat and camper outlet. They wed there in 1971. One week later, Pleasure World claims the new groom stole $85,000 from the company.

Over the following three years, Russell owned a Ford dealership in Hawaii and was a partner in a Los Angeles auto sales firm before returning to Las Vegas, where he again encountered trouble after the couple’s business, Leisure World, went bankrupt, leaving them owing several hundred thousand dollars to former employees and creditors.

 

 

John Russell and His Wife Suzanne

Three years later, in September 1977, Suzanne was charged with fraud and failure to pay rent on Oxnard property where she planned to open Global Yacht Sales, a yacht dealership. Bob Dozier worked at a warehouse on the premises where the boats were to be stored.

Suzanne, using her maiden name of Wright, had used financing to obtain Chrysler boats for the purchase price, but she was alleged to have not forwarded payment to the company. I could not find the results of these lawsuits.

She and Dozier left Las Vegas after the lawsuits were filed against her.

Bob Dozier and His Wife Suzanne (Alias Cherie Ann) 

In January 1980, two years later, John Russell and Bob Dozier opened the Stage Stop Saloon in Virginia City, Nevada, twenty-five miles southeast of Reno and four-hundred twenty miles northwest of Las Vegas. The liquor license was obtained under Dozier’s name because Russell’s 1968 conviction of marijuana possession while serving in the Air Force prevented him from obtaining the license.

In order to maintain his business interest, John Russell had his wife Suzanne marry Bob Dozier under the name of Cherie Ann Dozier. On the marriage license, her father was listed as ”John Farrell.”

Stage Stop Saloon patrons knew John Russell as John Farrell, the father of Cherie Ann Dozier, the wife of Bob Dozier. They say Cherie (in actuality Suzanne Russell) ran the saloon while her (original) husband, not father, John Russell, alias John Farrell, and her second husband and bar owner, Bob Dozier, appeared to have had very little part in the day-to-day operations.

Dozier had sold the saloon in July 1981, four months before the supposed sinking of the Freedom II. The trio told friends they were sailing to Tahiti to write an article for National Geographic magazine, but magazine editors said no one by any of the names they used was working for them.

John Russell, Suzanne Russell, and Bob Dozier, now had a new round of questions they would be asked by both the Coast Guard and the police. Suzanne could not be questioned as she was still presumed lost and sea, as was Kristin Tomlin.

The men who had survived being in the cold water now knew they were in hot water. They again promptly vanished.

One Woman;

Two Identities; Two Husbands

Investigators found the Freedom II was registered in Scottsdale, Arizona, to Bob Dozier. A false hull identification number was used in the boat’s registration papers, probably done to obscure the boat’s manufacturer.

The papers showed the boat was purchased with cash from a Florida man named Michael Hays, found to be an alias used by Bob Dozier. All of the ship’s transactions with various boatyards in the San Rafael, California, area were also conducted with cash.

Dozier Leaves a False Paper Trail

The evidence was suggesting fraud, but Coast Guard officials and police investigators believe Russell and Dozier may have been engaging in much more nefarious activity than that and to being married to the same woman.

Throughout November 1981, four to six paper packages and vials, items commonly used in transporting cocaine, as well as plastic bags and drug paraphernalia surfaced near where Russell and Dozier had come ashore after their alleged shipwreck. In addition, the area where the boat was said to have sunk had earlier been the scene of two large drug busts.

Russell and Dozier may have been transporting drugs abroad. In so doing, officials believe they also concocted a scam to fake an accident on the water, throw debris overboard in an effort to make the drug owner think the cargo sank, and abscond with the $250,000 yacht and approximately $5-$6 million in drugs.

The week before the incident, a gun shop owner said he had sold John and Suzanne Russell a .308 assault rifle, a twelve-gauge shotgun, and twelve-hundred rounds of ammunition. The couple said they wanted the guns and ammo to protect themselves if they encountered pirates while on the seas.

Partnering Scammers

 

Drug Runners Too?

After the Unsolved Mysteries segment of the case aired in 1988, Bill and Betty Rochert of Ontario, Canada, contacted authorities, saying three people had stolen their boat in 1982, one year after the alleged sinking of the Freedom II.

Betty and Bill Rochert

The couple were certain the trio who had fleeced their vessel were Bob Dozier, John Russell, and the said-to-be lost at sea Suzanne Russell, known to them as Bob Johnson, John Smith, and Ann Christine Smith.

The Rochert’s told investigators the thieves paid only ten percent of the boat’s purchase price before absconding with it.

Did the Scammers Strike Again?

Six months later, the Rocherts tracked their boat to Fort Pierce, Florida.

A court ordered the boat returned to them and declared a $47,800 judgment against the Smiths and Johnson.

The Rocherts’ Boat

By this time however, John Smith, Bob Johnson, and Ann Christine Smith, believed to be John Russell, Bob Dozier, and Suzanne Russell, had again vanished.

The Trio Again Disappear

In April 1991, nine years later, Bob Dozier was located in Paauhau, Hawaii; he was still using the name “Bob Johnson.” John Russell was captured in Monroe, Oregon, in June 1993. Both were convicted in California of insurance fraud, and each served six months in jail. Russell was also charged in Florida with possession of a fraudulent vessel title and a boat with an altered identification number. I could not find if he was convicted or if the boat was determined to be the Rocherts’.

Neither man was charged in connection with the disappearances of Suzanne Russell and Kristin Tomlin; both still contended the women were lost at sea. As far as I could find, it was not proven that John Russell, Suzanne Russell, and Bob Dozier were the culprits who stole the Rocherts’ boat in Canada.

Bob Dozier died in 2017 at age seventy.

 

The Men are Apprehended . . .

Suspected of aiding her two husbands in the scams, Suzanne Russell, alias Cherie Ann Dozier, has never been found. Because she was said to be an excellent sailor, authorities believe she could have steered the Freedom II to another port where she later rendezvoused with her husband(s). She was reportedly seen back near Stinson Beach in California in 1982, the year after the vessel’s disappearance, but the sighting could not be confirmed.

Suzanne Russell could still be living in parts unknown, but there have been no confirmed sightings of her in the forty-two years since the Freedom II’s disappearance, leading many to now believe she is deceased. Whether she died on the water, while in hiding, or was murdered is still the subject of conjecture.

Suzanne Russell would today be seventy-two-years-old.

. . . But Suzanne Russell Is Still Missing

Is She An Accomplice or A Victim?

Perhaps the most confusing part of this convoluted sea saga is the role of Kristin Tomlin. The twenty-year-old was said to be a family friend of Bob Dozier. She had worked part time at his Stage Stop Saloon for only a few months prior to the ill-fated boat ride.

Kristin had never been in trouble with the law and was described as the All-American girl. She had no sailing experience and it seems unlikely she would partake in an insurance scam, but it also seems odd that she would have been asked to accompany the others if she were not involved.

What is Kristin’s Role?

Like Suzanne Russell, there have been no confirmed sightings of Kristin Tomlin since 1981. She would today be sixty-two-years-old.

Some sources spell her first name as “Kristen.”

Kristin Is Also Still Missing

Officials believe the supposed sinking of the Freedom II may be connected to the reporting of the phony theft of another yacht. In November 1982, forty-six-year-old Doug Reinertson was convicted of insurance fraud for collecting $110,000 after falsely reporting that his yacht, Inspiration, had been stolen from a Los Angeles harbor in June 1981, five months before the alleged sinking of the Freedom II.

Reinertson, an investigator with the Las Vegas Public Defender’s office, had previously worked for John Russell.  In February 1981, Bob Dozier was found to have lived on and worked on the Inspiration, and a man resembling Russell was frequently seen aboard the ship. Authorities believe Dozier and Russell were involved in an insurance scam with Reinertson.

Russell had reportedly been trying to negotiate a sale of the Inspiration shortly before it was reported stolen. After failing to strike a deal, investigators believe that he and Dozier took the yacht to Richmond, California, repainted it, and used phony documents in registering it as the Freedom II.

In June 1983, Doug Reinertson was charged in another insurance fraud case involving another boat he owned, the Shalom. He claimed that it had sunk after it was struck by a whale, but investigators found the ketch intact in San Diego. He pled no-contest, was sentenced to six months in jail, and was also ordered to pay restitution to two insurance companies. I could not find a picture of him.

More Scams

Several sightings of a boat resembling the Freedom II were reported near Hawaii and Acapulco for several years after its disappearance, but none could be confirmed as being the vessel at the center of the Tall Tale of the North Pacific.

Subsequent Sightings of the Freedom II?

 

SOURCES:

• Los Angeles Times
• New York Times
• Reno-Gazette Journal
• San Bernardino County Sun
• Sacramento Bee
• San Francisco Examiner
• United Press International
• Unsolved Mysteries