When Brenda Street finally visited the beach where her daughter went missing in the US Virgin Islands last year, she lay down by the shore and wept.
Street, 66, is the mother of Sarm Heslop, a British former flight attendant who disappeared without a trace on March 8, 2021. She was last thought to be on her American boyfriend’s luxury catamaran, which was docked off the shore of St. John.
“I felt she was with me,” said Street in an interview with the Daily Mail. Street made the trip to the Virgin Islands with Heslop’s father in March to meet with authorities over the disappearance of their daughter. “I made a wreath of knitted flowers — she loved that I could knit — and we threw it in the water.”
Street, along with a coterie of Heslop’s friends, recently broke their 18-month silence, frustrated by what they said was a lack of information concerning the investigation into what happened to the 42-year-old brunette, who was passionate about sailing and her new American boyfriend.
“It just feels like [VI police] have their heads buried in the sand hoping this will go away,” Heslop’s friend Andrew Baldwin told The Post. “Or they have something to hide.”
He, along with Street and others, want the police to turn over video footage of Heslop leaving a local restaurant with boyfriend Ryan Bane, 46, a sailor who runs a high-end Caribbean charter service on his yacht. Heslop met Bane on Tinder in 2020, and had been working as a cook on his boat when she went missing.
Baldwin said that Heslop’s parents were shown CCTV footage by members of the Virgin Islands Police Department when they visited the island in March. The footage showed what appears to be Bane, a self-described entrepreneur who grew up in the Detroit suburbs, and Heslop heading to a dinghy on the night she disappeared.
The video shows Heslop in shorts and a T-shirt — not the black dress with flowers that Bane told Street Heslop was wearing the night she went missing — according to an Oct. 31 press statement from Heslop’s supporters. But the video was stopped short by police “before seeing Sarm and Bane board his dinghy,” the BBC reported.
In an Oct. 31 letter to the USVIPD, Street said: “I would like all of it, not a shortened version shown on the day I was there on the island. This crucial bit of footage displays surroundings, people, actions and behaviors and information that may have been missed.”
“If this is an active investigation then we would ask the police to tell Sarm’s family what they are doing,” Baldwin, 44, added.
In a press release, Heslop’s friends noted that police told her family last year that the CCTV cameras “were not working in the area in which she was last seen with Ryan Bane on the night she went missing.”
According to Baldwin, 43, the police still have Heslop’s phone and iPad. “We urge them to return them to Sarm’s family,” he said.
Calls to the USVIPD were not returned.
Family and friends have set up a Facebook page to share information about the disappearance and are offering a reward for up to $10,000 for clues leading to Heslop’s whereabouts.
Bane was the last person to see Heslop alive.
The couple had gone ashore to a local bar on March 7, 2021. According to Bane, they returned together to his catamaran — Siren Song — that evening. Although he reported Heslop missing to police at 2:30 a.m., Bane waited nine hours before calling the Coast Guard to conduct a search. Heslop left her passport, wallet and phone on board the catamaran before she vanished, according to reports.
Street said that Bane messaged her at 6 a.m. on March 8 to let her know that her daughter had disappeared. She claimed that he has refused to speak to her, and blocked her number last year, according to a report. Bane left St. John and is reportedly living on his catamaran in Grenada.
Heslop’s family and friends said they knew little about Bane, who was arrested in Michigan on suspicion of domestic violence in 2011, while married to Corie Stevenson, according to public records. He served 21 days behind bars after he threw his wife to the floor and slammed her head against it, causing her tooth to break, according to a report in Britain’s The Sun newspaper..
“Ryan’s personality changed once we got married. It was a beautiful wedding in 2008 but it was like he flipped a switch,” Stevenson told the newspaper. She was wed to Bane between 2008 and 2014.
Bane’s attorney David Cattie did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.
It’s unclear whether Heslop knew about the incident with Bane’s ex-wife. If she did, she did not share it with friends and family who said she seemed head over heels in love with him.
“She described [Bane] as charming and good fun, with a sense of humor and adventure,” Baldwin told The Post, recalling the last time he spoke to his friend. “When I spoke with her she was asking what I thought of her going out to be with him and I told her to go for it and follow her heart.”
Before deciding to settle in the Virgin Islands with Bane, Heslop had used up most of her savings to sail around the world with friends, and returned to Europe to make extra cash, working as a waitress, according to reports.
“She was a flight attendant for quite a few years in the UK,” Baldwin told The Post. “She then worked in a number of roles as she saved up to travel. She loves to travel and spent time working in both Gibraltar and Malta.”
Nearly a month after she went missing in April 2021, police said they were unable to confirm if Heslop had returned to the catamaran, as Bane reported. A full, forensic search of the boat has never been carried out, according to USVIPD.
Baldwin said he met Heslop in 1996 while they were both studying travel and tourism at college in England. Heslop grew up in Southampton, a port city in the southern part of the country.
“She was the … bestest friend you could want,” Baldwin said. “Always supportive, giving good advice. Sarm lights up a room. She is engaging, loyal, passionate and loved by everyone who met her. We are all devastated: Her family are missing a daughter and we are missing our friend.”
Heslop’s supporters said they are demanding that the FBI get involved in the search for Heslop, and have asked British diplomats for help in pressuring US authorities to continue the search. Heslop’s parents were accompanied by officials from the British Consulate in Miami when they visited St. John earlier this year, according to reports.
“Sarm would not just go missing,” her friends and family wrote in a press release last week.
“Someone, somewhere, knows what has happened and if the FBI can support the US
Virgin Island Police search, it may help find the answers we need and deserve.”