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Honeymoon Overboard: The Lie That Drowned Her · Creepy Horror Stories

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Valentine's Day, 1988. A Coast Guard crew, scanning the Pacific,
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: spots something floating in the water, miles off the California coast.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: They move closer. It is a young woman. She has
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: been in the ocean for ten hours. She is already dead.
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: Her name was Karen Waltz. She was 26 years old.
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: She was on her honeymoon. And here is the detail
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: that still doesn't sit right with me. When I read
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: this case, Karen Waltz was an exceptional swimmer. She grew
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: up loving the ocean. She ran 10 miles a day.
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: She trained in taekwondo. She was the last person who
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: should have drowned. Except she didn't drown, and the autopsy
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: would prove that. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: The night before her body was found, Karen was aboard
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: a cruise ship called the Star Dancer. on the final
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: leg of a honeymoon voyage from California down to Mexico.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: And back, her husband, Scott Roston, was with her. He
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: is the one who raised the alarm. He ran to
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: find the captain, shouting four words that the crew would
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: not forget. My wife's been blown overboard. That was the story.
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: A gust of wind. A terrible accident. A husband desperate
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: to save her. Every single part of that story was wrong.
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: There is no version of this case where everything makes sense.
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: Not Scott's explanation. Not the evidence. Not the timeline. But
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: the truth that eventually emerged is far darker than a
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: storm at sea. Scott Rosten told investigators he had tried
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: to catch her, that he had lunged forward and slammed
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: his face against a metal box on the deck, trying
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: to grab her arm before she went over. There was
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: a cut on his face. To prove it, he said,
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: a mark that matched the force of impact. What no
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: one knew yet, what the investigators would not confirm until later,
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: was the shape of that mark and what had actually
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: made it. But before the Star Dancer, before the ocean,
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: before any of this, there was a massage table in
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: Palm Beach, Florida, and that is where Karen Waltz's story
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: with Scott Rosten began. Karen was 26 and worked as
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: a massage therapist at a resort. She was covering for
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: a colleague one afternoon. When a regular client came in,
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: his name was Scott Rosten. He was around 36, well-dressed, confident.
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: He told her he was a chiropractor. He told her
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: he had a practice in California. He told her a
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: lot of things. Karen had recently ended a relationship with
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: a man named Troy, a carpenter with blue eyes who
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: specialized in building boats. By every account, Troy was steady
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: and kind and genuinely in love with her. Karen left
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: him for Scott. The relationship moved fast. Scott relocated to
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: Santa Monica, and the two of them maintained long-distance contact
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: while he got settled. When he proposed, he presented Karen
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: with a ring that appeared to carry a large, brilliant stone.
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: Karen said yes. The ring was later appraised. The stone
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: was cubic, zircomia, synthetic, a convincing imitation of a diamond.
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: designed to look like something. It was not, which, as
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: it turned out, described the man who gave it to
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: her almost perfectly. Scott Rosten was not a licensed chiropractor
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: in California. He had no active practice. He was not
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: the successful professional he claimed to be. He was living
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: with his parents before moving to Santa Monica, and his
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: primary income came from an insurance settlement, the result of
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: slipping on a banana peel at a shopping mall. He
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: had also written a book. In it, he described being
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: tortured by the Israeli mafia and persecuted by corrupt government officials.
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: His own mother had previously reported an attempted kidnapping by
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: two Israeli men who allegedly shouted, Israel wants you. An
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: incident the sheriff's office could not corroborate with a single witness.
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: None of this reached Karen before the wedding. The ceremony
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: was held in Las Vegas, a civil office. Plastic flowers.
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: A paid witness. No guests. No photographs. No one who
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: knew either of them. Karen was 20. Six. Scott was
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: somewhere around 36. They signed the paperwork. And that was that.
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: The honeymoon cruise was the star dancer. A ship running
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: a route from Los Angeles down through Puerto Vallarta and
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: Cabo San Lucas, then back up the California coast. It
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: should have been the beginning of something. Instead, it was
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: the final week of Karen Waltz's life. Passengers who observed
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: the couple during the voyage later described the dynamic at dinner.
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: Scott corrected Karen on which utensils to use. He reprimanded
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: her if she reached for something sweet. Small corrections delivered quietly,
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: the kind that are easy to dismiss in the moment
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: and harder to forget afterward. On the night of February 13th, 1988,
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: the star dancer was making its return to Los Angeles.
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: It was the last night of the cruise. Karen and
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: Scott were somewhere on the upper deck, in the dark,
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: above the Pacific. By morning, she was gone. Scott ran
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: to the captain's deck at approximately two in the morning.
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: His voice carried through the corridors of the Star Dancer
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: before anyone could make sense of the words. Somebody help me, Captain.
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: My wife's been blown overboard. The crew moved fast. The
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: ship's officers were trained for emergencies at sea, and a
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: passenger overboard was exactly the kind of crisis that triggered
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: every protocol at once. The star dancer slowed, lights swept
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: the water, the Coast Guard station in San Diego was
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: contacted within minutes, and a search operation began that would
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: cover hundreds of square miles of the Pacific before sunrise.
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: Scott stood on deck while all of this happened around him.
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: He had a cut on his face. He explained it
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: to the officers who approached him He had tried to
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: grab Karen when the wind took her, lunged for her
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: over the railing, and struck his cheek against a metal
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: box mounted near the deck. He had felt the impact.
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: He had tried to hold on. She slipped through his hands.
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: The officers listened. Then they walked to the railing. The
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: railing on the Stardancer's upper deck came up past Karen's waist.
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: That detail was not approximate. The crew knew the exact
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: height because they knew the ship For a woman of
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: Karen's build to go over that railing, accidentally, something would
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: have had to lift her. A wave, a sudden lurch
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: of the ship, or a wind strong enough to physically
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: carry a person over a fixed barrier. The officers checked
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: the ship's log for that stretch of the voyage. The
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: night of February 13th into the 14th had been calm.
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: No significant wind. No wave event. No mechanical incident recorded.
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: They went back to the metal box Scott had described.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: No blood, no smear, no trace. A man who had
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: struck his face hard enough to cut himself on a
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: metal edge would have left something. There was nothing on
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: that surface. The rational explanation was already coming apart at
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: its edges. The Coast Guard search continued through the night
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: and into the morning of Valentine's Day, 1988. Ten hours
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: after Scott's cry for help, A Coast Guard crew spotted
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: something in the water. They brought the vessel alongside. Karen
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: Waltz Rosten, 26 years old, excellent swimmer, was dead. She
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: had been in the Pacific for hours. She was face up.
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: When the medical examiner examined her body, the first finding
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: was the one that changed the structure of the entire investigation.
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: Karen was alive when she entered the water. She had
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: a contusion on her forehead. and there was fluid in
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: her lungs. She had inhaled seawater. She had not been
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: dead before she went over. The second finding was the
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: one that closed every other possibility. There were marks on
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: both sides of Karen's neck, not bruising from impact, not
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: abrasions from contact with the railing or the water. The
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: marks were consistent with pressure applied by two hands, one
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: on each side, pressing inward. The medical examiner's conclusion was
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: bilateral strangulation. Someone had put both hands around Karen Waltz's
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: throat before she went into the Pacific Ocean. This was
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: not a fall. It was not an accident. It was
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: not the wind. When investigators confronted Scott with the physical evidence,
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: the railing height, the calm seas, the absence of blood
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: on the metal box, he did not say he had
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: been mistaken. He said he had lied, but not for
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: the reason they might think The wind story, he explained,
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: was a fabrication. He had invented it to protect his parents.
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: The truth, Scott said, was something far larger and far
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: more dangerous than a marital accident. The truth was that
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: Israeli commandos had murdered Karen on the deck of the
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: Star Dancer. He had witnessed it. He had been unable
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: to stop them. He had invented the wind story. Because
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: going to the authorities with the real account would put
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: his family at risk from the same forces that had
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: already targeted him. This was not a spontaneous claim. Scott
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: had a book. He had written it himself, a document
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: detailing what he described as systematic torture inflicted on him
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: by the Israeli mafia and corrupt government officials. The book existed.
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: It had been written before the cruise, and there was
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: one detail aboard the Star Dancer that seemed, for a moment...
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: To give the story a foothold, the passenger manifest listed
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: two Israeli citizens aboard the ship that night. Two people,
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: real passengers, documented. Their names were on the record. The
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: FBI did not find evidence connecting either of them to
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: any intelligence operation. No weapons, no communication, intercepts, no observed
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: contact with Scott or Karen during the voyage. Two people
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: on a cruise who happened to hold Israeli passports. Nothing more.
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: The foothold dissolved the moment. Investigators looked at it directly.
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: Scott's mother had her own account to add. She reported
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: that prior to the cruise, two men had approached her
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: in Palm Beach. They had shouted at her. She said,
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: Israel wants you. A kidnapping attempt, she believed. The Palm
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: Beach Sheriff's Office found no witnesses to the incident. No
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: corroboration of any kind. Scott's parents believed their son completely.
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: the FBI did not. Scott Rustin was taken into custody
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: without bail. The Bureau identified him as the primary suspect
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: in the death of Karen Waltz Rustin. The investigation that
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: had begun with a cry for help on a cruise
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: ship's deck was now a federal homicide case. There was
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: one physical detail the investigators kept returning to. Scott had
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: a wound on his face. He said he got it
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: from the metal box. The metal box showed nothing. The
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: wound itself was specific in shape. Not a gash from
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: a sharp corner, not a scrape from a flat surface.
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: It had a particular contour. The shape of it was
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: unusual enough that forensic examiners noted it in their documentation.
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: What matched that shape would not become clear until the
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: evidence from the Star Dancer was cataloged in full. Every
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: layer of Scott Rosten's life, when examined closely, turned out
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: to be a constructed version of something real, He called
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: himself a chiropractor. He was not licensed to practice in California.
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: He had no active office, no patient files, no professional
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: standing that could be verified. The income that supported him
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: came from a personal injury settlement. He had slipped on
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: a banana peel in a shopping mall and filed a
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: successful claim. That was the financial foundation of the man
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: who had proposed marriage with what appeared to be a diamond.
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: The ring had been appraised. The stone was cubic zirconia,
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: a synthetic, a copy, a thing designed to look like something.
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: It was not. Scott's book described a world in which
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: powerful institutions had targeted him specifically. Israeli operatives, corrupt officials,
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: organized persecution. His mother's story about the men in Palm
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: Beach fit neatly into that framework. His second account of
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: Karen's death fit into it, too. In Scott's telling, he
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: was always the target. The forces arrayed against him were
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: always vast and shadowed. The evidence against him was always planted.
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: There is a version of that worldview that is a
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: genuine disorder. There is another version that is a calculated defense.
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: The distinction matters enormously in a courtroom, and investigators had
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: to sit with the question of which they were looking at.
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: What they had physically was this, a dead woman with
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: strangulation marks. on both sides of her neck, who was
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: alive when she entered the ocean. A husband whose first
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: story was impossible by the ship's own records. A husband
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: whose second story named a conspiracy that the FBI could
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: not find a single thread of. A wound on the
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: husband's face that didn't match the object he said caused it.
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: And the ring, the stone that looked like a diamond
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: and wasn't. Approximately One year after Karen's body was recovered
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: from the Pacific, Scott Rosten stood trial for her murder.
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: The charge was second-degree homicide committed on the high seas.
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: The jury considered everything, the railing, the calm night, the
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: autopsy findings, the collapsed stories, the FBI's investigation into the
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: Israeli conspiracy claim. They returned a verdict of guilty. The
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: judge did not treat it as a second-degree matter in spirit.
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: The sentence imposed was life in prison, the maximum applicable
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: to a first-degree conviction. It was a statement from the bench,
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: a formal expression of what the evidence had already made plain.
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: On appeal, the sentence was reduced to 33 years. Scott
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: Roston went to prison. He continued writing. In a letter
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: sent to the production team that eventually documented this case,
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: he maintained that he had been framed, that governmental forces
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: were still pursuing him, That the truth had not been told.
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: The wound on his face had long since healed into
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: a scar. The shape of that scar. When finally compared
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: to the ring that Karen Waltz had worn on her
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: left hand, matched the contour of the cubic zirconia stone.
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: The stone that was not a diamond. The false thing
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: he had given her. Karen fought back. The only real
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: mark Scott left on her neck. The only real mark
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: she left on him. was the shape of his own
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: lie pressed into his skin. The motive for why Scott
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: Rosten put his hands around his wife's throat on the
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: last night of their honeymoon has never been officially established.
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: The jury found him guilty. The reason he did it remains,
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: by the court's own record, unknown. The trial began approximately
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: one year after Karen's body was recovered from the Pacific.
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: Scott Rosten sat before a jury and offered no confession,
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: no apology, and no explanation that held together under examination.
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: Every version of events he had given, the gust of wind,
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: the metal box, the Israeli commandos had already collapsed against
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: the physical record. The jury convicted him of homicide in
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: the second degree, committed on the high seas. The judge
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: did not sentence him as a second degree conviction. The
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: sentence imposed was life in prison. The penalty reserved for
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: first-degree murder. It was a deliberate signal, written into the
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: punishment itself, that the court found the crime to be
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: something beyond what the charge required. An appeal. That sentence
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: was reduced to 33 years. Scott Roston did not disappear
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: quietly into those years. He wrote a letter to a
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: production team, revisiting the case. And in it, he maintained
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: precisely what he had maintained from the beginning. that he
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: was framed, that governmental forces continued to pursue him, that
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: the truth had not been told. The letter arrived, typed, composed,
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: and detailed. He had written a book, once about being
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: tortured by the Israeli mafia. He was still writing his
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: own story, still the protagonist of a persecution that no
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: investigation had ever been able to locate. There is something
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: particular about that letter that has stayed with me since
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: I first encountered this case, not its content its confidence.
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: He had watched the evidence accumulate, the railing too high.
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: The night too, still, the metal box clean of blood,
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: the autopsy's findings, the shape of the scar on his
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: own face, and he wrote as though none of it existed.
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: Karen's mother had called Scott before the honeymoon. She asked him, directly,
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: to take care of her daughter. He told her that
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: he would. Karen's sister was pregnant when the ship docked.
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: Karen had been excited about becoming an aunt. She never
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: got to hold the baby. When the child was born,
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: her sister named her Karen. That girl carries the name
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: of a woman she never met, a woman who ran
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: 10 miles a day and loved the ocean and believed
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: at 26 that she had finally found what she was
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: looking for. The motive was never established in court. No
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: one argued convincingly for a reason. The insurance question was examined.
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: Nothing definitive emerged. What the jury was asked to accept,
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: and did accept, was the physical evidence alone. The hands.
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: The neck. The marks left by two palms pressing from
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: both sides at once. The why remains open. Only the
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: what was ever proven. Scott Rosten gave Karen a ring
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: with a stone that was not a diamond. A cubic zirconia,
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: sized to look like something it wasn't. When the medical
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: examiner looked at the scar on Scott's face after the arrest,
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: the shape matched the setting of that stone exactly. Karen
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: had fought back. The one thing he had lied to
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: her about had left a mark on him that the
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: investigation could measure and document and enter into the record.
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: She fought back with a fake diamond, and it was
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: real enough to matter. Somewhere in Florida, a girl named
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: Karen has grown up without knowing her aunt's laugh or
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: the way she moved when she danced, or what it
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: looked like when she ran along the coast in the
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: early morning. She carries the name. That is what remained.
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: This show is made by Oba Media.