Disappeared: Malcolm “Mac” Graham, missing 39 years, and the “Palmyra Curse.”
Thirty-nine years ago today, on August 30, 1974, at least one and probably two grisly murders occurred in one of the most faraway locales on planet Earth–a small Pacific atoll called Palmyra, a thousand miles south of Hawaii, which has no permanent human population. The one victim that we know of was Eleanor Graham, called Muff, but her husband, Malcolm “Mac” Graham III, age 43, vanished. The married couple were yachting around the Pacific on their impressive sailboat called the Sea Wind, and they had unfortunately chosen the wrong island to camp on.
The killer was Buck Duane Walker, also known as Wesley G. Walker, a tough ex-convict and noted con artist, who had also sailed to Palmyra that summer with his girlfriend, Stephanie Stearns. The Grahams were upper-crust people, pretty conservative and reserved. Walker and Stearns were thought of by the Grahams as “hippies,” free-spirited, but Walker certainly had a dark side. Their boats were anchored in a lagoon near each other, and the couples inevitably came into conflict. Stearns was pretty easy to get along with so most of the conflict came from Walker.
On August 30, according to Stephanie Stearns, Buck Walker told her that the Grahams had invited the two of them over for dinner aboard the Sea Wind. They showed up at 6:30 PM but the Grahams weren’t there. Walker told his girlfriend that they had told them they were to “make themselves at home” if they (the Grahams) weren’t back yet from fishing. Dark came, no sign of them. In the morning they began searching and found an overturned boat on the shore of the lagoon. Walker and Stearns concluded that the Grahams had a fishing accident.