Best friend of Brit Sarm Heslop who mysteriously vanished in the Carribean reveals the final thing she said to her

EARLIER this year, British woman Sarm Heslop mysteriously vanished in the Caribbean from the catamaran she shared with her boyfriend. Fabulous speaks to her best friend about the desperate quest to find out what really happened that night

Kate Owen listened to the voice on the other end of the phone and felt panic rise inside her.

She couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

Her best friend Sarm Heslop had been missing for 12 hours from the boat she lived on with her American boyfriend Ryan Bane.  

“It just didn’t add up that she would disappear like that,” Kate, 41, from Hampshire, tells Fabulous. 

“Sarm has such a lust for life. She’s open, funny, loving, adventurous and the best friend that I could have wished for.

“I never thought that I’d be searching for her in a missing persons case.”

Sarm’s disappearance on March 8, 2021, from a catamaran moored just off the beautiful Caribbean island of St John, has prompted a frantic search from desperate family and friends.

The circumstances are so confused that the FBI, as well as UK police forces, have been called in to help.

The last contact Kate had with Sarm, who’s originally from Hertfordshire, was on the evening of her disappearance. 

“We spoke over text, around 7pm,” Kate says.

“We were just joking around and she was her normal, upbeat self.”

The pair first met when they worked as cabin crew together in 2008.

“We hit it off immediately,” Kate remembers.

“She was the best at making up silly games, and when we had time off, her drunken dancing was legendary.

“We soon became best friends, met each other’s families and would even spend Christmas and New Year’s Eve together. We are like sisters.”

It was Sarm, 41, who introduced Kate to her fiancé Martin, and when the couple planned to cross the Atlantic by boat in December 2019, Sarm asked if she could come along, too.

Once they arrived in the Caribbean, they decided to island hop, sailing to Grenada in June 2020, which is where Sarm met 44-year-old Ryan Bane on Tinder.

Originally from Michigan, he was living on his boat Siren Song with his dog, a labrador named Hunter.

“Ryan and Sarm had several dates before becoming a couple,” recalls Kate.

“Ryan seemed sweet, quietly spoken and a bit reserved, but lots of fun.

“He often mimicked Sarm’s English accent and they were always laughing and looked happy. I had absolutely no concerns.

“We spent many nights just the four of us, including one on Siren Song.”

If she had fallen in she would have been able to get out - she's a strong swimmer

After seeing out most of the pandemic locked down in Grenada, in October Sarm travelled to Malta, where she had friends, to work in a call centre and save some money.

Then in January 2021, Ryan sailed Siren Song 400 miles north from Grenada to St John and Sarm flew back to reunite with him. They chartered the boat out to tourists, with Ryan captaining the yacht while Sarm did the cooking.

The last time Sarm was seen, she was drinking with Ryan at the island’s popular 420 to Center bar in Cruz Bay on Sunday March 7, where witnesses have said they saw them drinking and looking happy.

After spending almost two hours at the bar, the couple returned to Siren Song in time for the 10pm Covid curfew.

But at 2.30am, Virgin Islands police received a call from Ryan, telling them he’d been woken up by the sound of his boat’s  anchor alarm, which is triggered when the vessel drifts.

He told them that Sarm wasn’t anywhere on board, but that her passport, wallet and mobile phone were still there.

He was instructed by the police to alert the US Coast Guard immediately, while they initiated a missing persons search – but he didn’t call them until 11.46am.

Once they had been notified nine hours later, the US Coast Guard searched the water around and out to sea from Siren Song, as well as the nearby islands.

A Coast Guard helicopter joined the search, with a police spokesperson confirming that conditions were near perfect as far as visibility and sea state, but there were no signs of anyone in the water.

Police and local volunteers conducted a land search using dogs and drones, which continued throughout the day until police confirmed that they had checked everywhere on the 20-square-mile island. 

Meanwhile, that afternoon, the police and Coast Guard arrived to search the vessel, but Ryan prevented them from conducting a full forensic search and wouldn’t answer any questions, on the advice of his lawyer.

Local police were powerless to force a search of the boat, because they needed reasonable grounds to request a warrant and question Ryan further, and the case was still classed as a missing persons investigation. 

Divers performed an analysis of sea currents to try to determine where they could have dragged Sarm if she had gone into the water, while other boats in Frank Bay were canvassed to see if they had any information, but none of the skippers reported anything unusual or any sightings of Sarm. 

Kate was with her fiancé on the island of St Martin when she was called by a close friend of Ryan, 12 hours after Sarm had gone missing, to let her know the terrible news.

She then called Sarm’s friend in the UK, so that he could deliver the news to her parents.

Devastated at their daughter’s disappearance and frustrated by their inability to travel due to Covid restrictions, Sarm’s father Peter Heslop and mother Brenda Street released a statement saying: “If we could travel we would. We want to be helping with the search and we dream of being able to wrap our arms round our darling daughter.”

Friends, including Kate, set up a Find Sarm Heslop Facebook page, where a witness posted that they had been walking their dog along Frank’s Bay at 1am on the night that Sarm went missing and had “heard a scream”. 

“There are always noises in this place and it could be from any one of the vessels nearby in the harbour,” a spokesperson for the Virgin Islands Police Commissioner said.

Kate questions what Ryan was doing in the nine hours that Sarm was missing, before he called the Coast Guard.

“I know he was annoyed by the police and felt they weren’t doing as much as they should have to find her.

“He told me over email the day after she went missing that he’d got himself a lawyer as he was feeling threatened by the Coast Guard and had followed the lawyer’s advice not to speak to anyone.

“While he was waiting for the lawyer to arrive, I specifically asked him to speak to the police and he replied that absolutely he would, but we’re still waiting for him to do so.

“I’ve kept in contact, hoping he would open up to me, but he hasn’t.

“He isn’t in the Virgin Islands now and hasn’t been since April.

“The police don’t see him as a person of interest, so he didn’t have to stay.” 

Sarm is never far from Kate’s thoughts. The first thing she does when she wakes up is to scour the internet for new leads.

“It’s a natural reaction when grieving to want to blame someone and that’s the hardest part,” she says.

“Should we be grieving when we don’t know where she is? I don’t know whether to talk about Sarm in the past or present tense.”

Siren Song was only anchored in 11 feet of water, but there are rip currents in Frank Bay that could have quickly taken Sarm out into much deeper and more treacherous waters if she had fallen in – and the fact that Ryan told police he’d been woken up by the anchor alarm could potentially be relevant to the state of the currents at that time.

But Kate doesn’t believe Sarm fell into the water or decided to go for a swim in the dark.

“Sarm’s a really strong swimmer,” she says.

“If she’d fallen in she would have been able to get herself back out quickly and she wouldn’t have gone in alone, especially not in the dark and after drinking.

“The sea life in the bay is quite active and she would have been hesitant over sharks. Also, when you’ve spent as long as she has on a boat in the Caribbean, jumping in the sea from the deck loses its novelty.”

In the days after Sarm went missing, there were some reported sightings of her, but police weren’t able to confirm any of them. Plus, as St John only has a population of around 4,000, Kate believes that if her friend had still been on the island, someone would have seen her.

Meanwhile, Ryan has remained silent, presumably on the advice of his legal advisors.

It emerged in late March that he has a past conviction for domestic violence against his ex-wife Cori Stevenson, and that he served a three-week jail sentence for domestic violence in 2011, after he had become violent towards her.

As the days turned into weeks and months, Sarm’s friends and family have proactively pursued more information.

#FindSarm has been used on social media and they have launched a US Virgin Islands Crime Stoppers appeal with a reward of $10,000 for information leading to an arrest.

A Go Fund Me page has been set up to cover the cost, as well as travel expenses for Sarm’s parents to fly out to St John as soon as they’re allowed.

“Unfortunately, with each day that passes, the chance of a missing person being found becomes increasingly unlikely,” explains Dr Bryanna Fox, a criminology professor at the University of South Florida and a former FBI agent, who specialises in missing persons cases.

“That’s something that’s incredibly hard to accept for the friends and family.”

Sarm’s friends have issued an emotional video of messages, in which they pay tribute to her. 

But they feel helpless that they’re not able to do more and must simply wait for news. “I don’t know what’s happened to my beautiful friend,” says Kate. “I only know I want to hear her laugh again. All I can do is hope that we get answers. We all miss her so much.”