George Smith IV and Jennifer Hagel had everything to look forward to after their stylish Rhode Island wedding and 12-day honeymoon cruise of the Mediterranean last July.

She was an elementary school teacher excited about taking over the third grade come September in Westchester, the affluent Connecticut neighbourhood near where the couple intended to settle. He was looking forward to running the family's liquor business.

To passengers on Royal Caribbean's Brilliance of the Seas liner, they seemed like any other newlywed couple. But within days the Smiths had become a staple of cable news and tabloid TV in the US, and Hagel was facing her new life alone.

Shortly into their cruise, Smith emailed his parents. "We are having such a great time, " he told them. "Don't call me unless somebody dies or it's the end of the world."

Within two days he was dead and the centre of a major investigation.

Aside from a distraught new bride, his devastated family and a trail of blood, George Smith, left behind a barrage of unanswered questions, and a PR headache for Royal Caribbean cruise lines.

No one is really sure what happened, whether he fell overboard by accident or was helped on his way.

All that is clear is that George Smith disappeared somewhere between the hours of 4am and 5am on 5 July, the seventh day of his cruise and just a few hours out of the Turkish port of Kusadasi.

As the ship docked in Turkey at 6.15am that morning, a 16-year-old girl, on holiday with her parents, noticed a drying pool of blood on the metal overhang above her cabin. There were also splatters on a lifeboat below. The family alerted authorities and ship personnel searched Smith and Hagel's cabin, two floors above. Finding neither George nor Jennifer, they issued several pages on the ship's intercom. There was no response. Then they went physically searching for the couple.

What investigators have pieced together from witnesses and the ship logs is this. Both Smiths were drinking heavily in the liner's casino on the evening of 4 July. According to witnesses, the couple were with four young men, one of whom was 20-year-old Rusty Kofman, a recent Russian emigre to New York.

Kofman's lawyer, Albert Dayan, told US news programme Primetime last week that his client met the already heavily intoxicated couple on the night before . . . US Independence Day . . . and sat down for drinks with them. Hagel, he says, was being openly flirtatious in the casino in the presence of her husband. Kofman says this led to a confrontation with her new husband, during which she kicked him in the groin and walked away with what he described as "attitude".

Witnesses say that after his wife staggered out of the casino, Smith remained with his new friends, drinking shots of absinthe.

Kofman claims that when the bar closed, Smith was so intoxicated he could not make it back to his cabin alone, so the three men assisted him. He says Smith was adamant about finding Hagel, who was not in their cabin; the men helped him try to locate her.

When they failed, they brought Smith back a second time.

At 4.05am, Royal Caribbean says a guest in an adjoining cabin to the Smiths named Clete Hyman, a deputy police chief from California, had called Guest Relations to complain about loud voices and the sounds of drinking games coming from the Smiths' cabin.

Hyman recalls being woken by cheering from several people next door. "It sounded like they were encouraging somebody to do shooters or, you know, chug a beer, " he told Primetime. After calling security, Hyman banged on the wall in the hope of getting the noise to stop.

By the time security came to the room, the noise had stopped, and no one responded to their knocks on the door.

Hyman says he then heard an argument start between three or possibly four people on the Smiths' cabin balcony. After a few minutes he heard male voices say goodnight and opened his door to see three young men in the hall. Back in his own cabin he says he heard noises in the room next door and a male voice talking. This was followed by what seemed like furniture being moved around on the balcony. By now it was 4.30am.

"Then we heard what I would have to describe as an horrific thud, " Hyman has since told reporters. "The sound was so loud it reverberated through our cabin."

Kofman's lawyer says that his client denies he or the others were drinking in the Smiths' cabin.

Until recently, another mystery surrounded where Jennifer Hagel was when her husband disappeared.

Hagel, who refused to speak publicly until January, citing the FBI investigation, has since said she recalls little of that night.

On the Oprah Winfrey show on 18 January, she told the host, "I remember being at the casino, I remember being around George.

I remember very vaguely leaving the casino area to go to this revolving bar and then I remember nothing. We must have been drinking heavily. I don't remember anything."

According to Royal Caribbean's statement, Hagel was found passed out on the floor of a corridor far away from her cabin on the other side of the ship in the early hours of 5 July. While crew members stayed with her, two others went to her cabin and knocked on the door. It was now 4.48am.

When they failed to get a response, they opened the cabin, looked inside, and seeing no one and nothing amiss, went back out onto the corridor. At that point, Clete Hyman from the adjoining cabin opened his door and urged the crew members to check the Smiths' room due to the noises he'd heard earlier. However, as the crew members had already done so, they left without looking a second time.

Hagel was shortly afterwards taken back to the cabin in a wheelchair by security guards and a female supervisor, who placed her on top of her bed and asked if she was all right. When Hagel answered that she was, the crew members left.

It was now almost 5am, with the ship just an hour and 15 minutes from port.

When the missing-persons alert was raised the next morning, Hagel had already left her cabin for a massage in the ship's spa, an act that would later circulate suspicion around her. Witnesses say she was wearing the same clothes from the night before. It was at the spa that she was alerted by the staff captain shortly before 10am that her husband may have gone overboard. Hagel . . . whom the FBI has since made clear it is not investigating . . .

has passed a lie-detector test and taken issue with how she was then treated by Royal Caribbean.

She says she was instructed to take a shower to get ready for an interview with Turkish police and given only Royal Caribbean logoed clothes to wear, as her own were all in her cabin. "I was taken away from the ship to a Turkish police station. I was just falling deeper into this feeling of shock, " she told reporters on US news programme Dateline.

She says she was then taken to a hospital in a seedy part of town and essentially stripped searched.

As evening fell, Hagel was brought back to the dock to find her luggage waiting.

"I see my suitcases and I see 10 Royal Carribean logoed plastic souvenir bags on the dock and I just froze. As I am looking at all of our suitcases, just one thing stuck outf George's sneakers were appearing out of one of the bags that was just haphazardly thrown together, in an attempt to, I am sure, get me and anything having to do with Georgef just off the ship."

Royal Caribbean denies that Hagel was mistreated. It says that a female officer was with her at all times from when she was discovered in the spa. Smith's family has also taken issue with the company, claiming it was part of a cover-up.

They say Turkish authorities were at the ship for three hours, took only six statements and accuse Royal Caribbean of not preserving a crime scene.

It's a claim the company has vehemently denied, saying Turkish police carried out a full forensic investigation, and even after they'd declared the ship's personnel could clean the cabin, they did not do so for another six days, remaining constantly in contact with Turkish authorities and the FBI.

The findings of the Turkish authorities were later handed over to the FBI, as is normal.

Smith's family say Kofman and the other men were only interviewed for 10 minutes.

Clete Hyman was not interviewed at all.

Hagel has also criticised the company for allowing the authorities quickly declare the incident an accident and allowing Brilliance of the Seas to set sail for Italy.

Last week, Hagel's family hired their own investigator, a medical examiner, Henry Lee, who became famous from the OJ Simpson trial. Hagel is also offering a $100,000 reward for any information that leads to an arrest in her husband's disappearance.

It is hardly surprising that criminal deaths on board their ships is the subject that cruise lines like to discuss the least. For the cruise business, not all publicity is good publicity. But the days when a cruise company can brush over the subject of a possible homicide on board its ship may be running short.

Last December, members of the US Congress held a joint hearing for the first time into cases of passengers vanishing at sea, and their aim was clear: to force cruise lines to admit they have a problem and to encourage better cooperation with the FBI and other lawenforcement agencies when passenger counts fall short. Because in the last two years, 15 passengers have gone missing at sea from cruise ships.

Gregory Purdy, Royal Caribbean's director of safety and security, giving evidence at last December's hearing, said that his company had handled the Smith case "correctly and responsibly". He did, however, offer a belated expression of sympathy.

His words of sorrow were unlikely to have appeased the Smith family.

A Connecticut legal representative of the Smiths said, "The bottom line is we are suspicious, candidly, that there's some huge problem in the cruise industry."

LOST AT SEA

George Smith is among 15 persons to go missing off cruise ships in the past two years. Some of the others include:

Jill Begora

The 59-year-old from Canada disappeared from a Royal Caribbean liner in December and may have thrown herself overboard after a bout of severe depression.

Annette Mizener

The 37-year-old from Wisconsin, USA, disappeared from her Carnival cruise on 4 December last year when the ship neared the Mexican coast. She was on holiday with her parents and 17-year-old daughter and was last seen around 9.15pm. An hour after she failed to show up for a 10pm dinner, two Carnival workers found her purse near a railing. One of the men noticed a nearby security camera was covered with paper.

Glenn Sheridan Sheridan

(54) vanished on 24 November 2004 from the Carnival cruise liner Celebration. The American had been on a five-day trip around the Bahamas but there was no sign of him when the tour ended in Jacksonville, Florida.

Merrian Lynn Carver Carver

(40) was last seen alive on the Celebrity cruise ship Mercury on 28 August last year, while touring around Alaska. She later vanished, but the ship's crew did not see fit to report her disappearance and were unable to confirm whether she got off the vessel at the end of the cruise in Vancouver. Carver did not board a return flight to her home state of Massachusetts.

James Scavone The 22-year-old American vanished from a Carnival cruise ship disco in the Caribbean on 5 July 1999.

Amy Lynn Bradley Bradley

(23) went missing from the Royal Caribbean ship Rhapsody of the Seas in March 1998. She was last seen leaving her cabin early one morning for a cigarette.

Police investigating her disappearance said it was unlikely she fell overboard and drowned, as she was a trained lifeguard.

Lynsey O'Brien

Fifteen-year-old Dublin schoolgirl Lynsey O'Brien went missing from the cruise ship Costa Magica off the coast of Mexico in the early hours of 5 January this year. She was on a holiday with her family at the time.