The Resort Murders

St. Croix, largest of the American Virgin Islands, is a serenely beautiful patch of lush jungle mountains, golden valleys and tropical beaches. It is dotted with condominiums as well as the remains of stone sugar mills that were built by the Danes more than a century ago. By tradition, the islanders have made mainland Americans feel at home. As a Virgin Islands travel brochure puts it: "They show you their love in small, spontaneous ways."

One balmy afternoon last week, four tourists from Miami finished a round of golf at the Fountain Valley course, a lavish facility on the northwest coast owned by Laurance and David Rockefeller. As the tourists stood at the outdoor bar, they were startled to see half a dozen men--all wearing military fatigues and masks--burst from a nearby hedge. Suddenly the masked men opened fire with automatic rifles, spraying bullets crazily at everyone in sight. In moments the four Miami tourists were dead and so were three club employees. A fourth, Groundskeeper John Gulliver, 23, moaned again and again, "I'm going to die," and was dead after reaching the hospital.

The gunmen methodically scooped up about $700 from the club's cash registers and casually collected the wallets and purses of the dead and dying. Then they walked away toward the hills, according to a man who watched, "with their guns slung over their shoulders as if they were bird hunters."

Islanders have grown used to grumbling about a rise in the crime rate and the bands of youths that sometimes wander round nearby Christiansted at night. But they were stunned by what Governor Melvin Evans called "the most heinous crime I can recall." Some tourists wondered whether the real motive for the murders might have been political or racial; all the gunmen were black, apparently, and seven of the eight victims were white. But police believed that the crime was merely a particularly vicious case of armed robbery. At week's end, the police arrested two men in the case and charged them each with eight counts of murder.

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