On a breezy summer’s day in 1965, a pale green 40-foot yacht washed up on the Guatemalan coast. Aboard, three distraught young Mexican women who had no idea how to sail, and the decomposing body of an American movie star.

He played gangsters, womanizers, carnies and psychopaths. The handsome, brooding cowboy-turned-actor starred alongside James Cagney in “White Heat” and helped 1946’s “The Best Years of Our Lives” bring home seven Oscars. A critic once described him as “the new king of the Hollywood heavies,” but Steve Cochran’s most intriguing storyline may have been his mystifying, and gruesome, real-life death. 

After Cochran was born in Eureka, California, in 1917, his father’s work as a logger took the family to Laramie, Wyoming, where he spent most of his youth playing basketball and working as a cowherd. At the age of 20, Cochran decided to give movie stardom a shot and bought a one-way ticket to Los Angeles. After a stint in summer stock theater and some time on Broadway, Cochran’s good looks and roguish qualities soon made it onto the big screen, peaking in the ’40s with turns in Oscar-winning pictures and acting alongside Hollywood greats like Doris Day, Gary Cooper and Groucho Marx.

Outside of his successful on-screen career though, Cochran quickly gained the reputation of a lech. Twice divorced and married three times, the actor was a mainstay in the tabloids of the 1940s for alleged affairs with Mae West, Jayne Mansfield, Joan Crawford and other starlets.

Cochran was aware of his notoriety and even reveled in it. The keen sailor named his schooner “Rogue” and enjoyed regaling reporters about his public troubles. On one occasion, after a brawl at a party ended with him knocking out professional boxer Lenwood “Buddy” Wright with a bat, Cochran told the press “I knew Buddy Wright was an ex-fighter, so I hit him with a baseball bat.” 

By the 1960s, the actor’s box office appeal was meeting diminishing returns, and so he returned to the theater while taking on some supporting roles in the new medium of television. 

In 1965, though, at the age of 48, Cochran wanted one last shot at the silver screen. 

To be made under the banner of his new film company, Robert Alexander Productions (named after the actor’s birth name), Cochran got his hands on a script for “Captain O’Flynn.” The story revolved around a goofy sea captain and his high jinks on a yacht surrounded by six beautiful women. Cochran had hoped to cast Alec Guinness in the lead role, but he needed to scout a locale to shoot the picture. So in January of that year, Cochran left his home in the Hollywood Hills and sailed south to Acapulco. 

The actor was an avid sailor, but not necessarily a good one. In 1947, he had to be rescued by the Coast Guard off the coast of Catalina after his ketch sprung a leak. In 1960, he mistakenly sailed a boat into the breakwater in the Los Angeles Harbor, sinking it. A newspaper article mentioning that incident curiously reports Cochran, a chimpanzee, two dogs and two young women scrambled to safety. 

The actor wasn’t much less of a liability off the water. In 1953, a police officer fired a warning shot over Cochran’s speeding car to force him off the road after a 2-mile chase through Culver City. Three years later, he became the first person in Beverly Hills to get a traffic ticket in the air for flying his airplane erratically low over the city. 

Cochran’s litany of troubles included far more sinister incidents of violence too. 

A month before he set sail on his fateful voyage to Acapulco, he was accused by singer Ronie Rae of beating her after she spilled a drink in his home. Next to a photo of a bruised Rae in the newspaper, Cochran claimed he was protecting her from herself. The police told reporters they would question Cochran. Another paper dismissed the incident as a “rhubarb” and reported that the district attorney decided against pressing charges. Cochran left the country a few weeks after that brush with the law.

Over the coming months, Cochran’s yacht slowly made its way 2,000 miles down the Pacific coast to Acapulco, ostensibly to get into preproduction on “Captain O’Flynn.” There, the actor placed an advertisement in the local paper that requested “young ladies” to join him on the trip. It is unclear what the tasks of these desired employees actually were, maybe as Cochran intended. 

The advertisement is no longer in the archives, but one report stated Cochran was looking for “maids and helpers” for a voyage to Costa Rica on the Hollywood star’s yacht. Another report described the hired staff as “servants.” Cochran’s friend Bruce Pennington, who wrote the “Captain O’Flynn” script, later said the actor was actually seeking women and girls in Acapulco to play bit parts in the movie, after finding talent too expensive in LA.

Of the more than 100 applicants, 10 were chosen by Cochran to join him on the adventure, though, significantly, only three made it to sea. 

Two Mexican women and a girl were chosen — Eva Monteros Castellanos, 25, Eugenia Bautista Zacarias, 19, and Lorenza Infante De La Rosa, 14. In an interview with them after the tragedy, Guatemalan newspaper Prensa Libre described them all as “of a low social level” and “gravely poor.” (A photo taken later of the trio can be found here, from that newspaper report.)

On June 3, 1965, with his newly assembled “crew” aboard, Cochran set his compass south once more and left Acapulco for Costa Rica. The women and girl said Cochran paid them 70 pesos a day (about $30 in today’s money) and offered them food, candy and access to his mini bar. They said they never touched the liquor. The trio told reporters that the actor was friendly and joked with them over dinner, and he promised to pay their way for a return journey if they chose to leave.

Then things started to go wrong. 

Castellanos, Zacarias and De La Rosa told the Associated Press that Cochran would drink several whiskies every night and sleep under the stars on the deck, before making his way down to the cabin in the early hours. On either June 12 or 13, the Rogue lost one of its two masts in a storm. The crew said that while attempting to fix the mast, the actor complained of pain in his legs, which soon spread to his chest, arms and head. 

With his fever rising, Cochran became bedridden, stowed away in his cabin. Broken jars were strewn around his bed from the storm. The trio later recalled some of his utterances in his fever dream, including “Please don’t leave me alone” and “God, what will happen to you should I die?”

Cochran reportedly asked his helpers to massage him to ease the pain. He also started giving them advice on how to sail the boat if he died, which included guidance to head due east and tie a red flag to the mast. 

Then, on June 15, with only 14-year-old De La Rosa at his side, Cochran took his last breath. As Castellanos recalled, “Mr. Cochran died almost in the arms of Lorenza who had been bathing his fevered face with a wet towel.”

Teenaged De La Rosa described the moment as one of relief. “Mr. Cochran finally stopped complaining. He let out a deep sigh, he opened his eyes, and then he no longer complained.”

With no ability to sail a 40-foot yacht with a broken mast on rough seas, the women and girl described a horrific scene wherein they tried to stay on deck away from the stench, but heavy rains forced them to shelter in the cabin near the actor’s quickly decomposing body. As they told the Guatemalan newspaper after the ordeal, the handsome actor they had seen on celluloid gave way to “a swollen monstrous thing” as a “fetid odor enveloped the yacht.”

The only food left on the vessel was potatoes. The inexperienced crew members tied a red flag to the remaining mast, as they were instructed, and prayed the boat would drift ashore or help would find them. 

The nightmarish scene turned to a desperate one when after nine days adrift with a corpse, eating only potatoes, they ran out of drinking water. A rainstorm that night provided some small hydration. On the 10th day aboard with the famous corpse, the helpless crew scanned the horizon and saw the silhouette of a ship. They violently waved their arms. Their savior came in the form of an American-owned fishing vessel named Bella de Portugal. 

Their 10 torrid days on the Pacific had come to an end. 

The Rogue was found drifting off the coast of the Guatemalan port town of Champerico on June 25 and was towed ashore. There, locals discovered the unsavory scene aboard. 

Moving the actor’s body was an unenviable task. “The huge blackish mass he had become disintegrated when the funeral home employees touched it,” reported Prensa Libre. “The stench of death washed over the small town.”

Castellanos, Zacarias and De La Rosa were held for questioning before being turned over to the Mexican Embassy and flown home to Acapulco without charge. As the newspaper put it, they were still “affected by the stench of the decomposing body of the famous American film actor.”

Cochran’s body was put in a zinc coffin and flown to Guatemala City along with the boat by the country’s Air Force for further investigation. 

There, medical authorities deduced Cochran died of a mysterious lung infection that also caused paralysis. One report said the medical examiner in Guatemala City who did the autopsy knew the actor. The description of paralysis of some kind was backed by the women and girl, who said the actor was only able to move his head while bedridden in the cabin.

Rumors soon swirled of poisoning at sea. The LA Times phoned the police in Guatemala, only to be told that the authorities had no idea what caused the lungs to swell. The paper characterized the diagnosis of a lung infection followed by paralysis as a “mysterious ailment.”

Much of the mystery came from a lack of coverage in the press. While Hollywood’s studio system was already falling apart, so-called fixers in the industry were still hard at work burying unwanted scandals. This may be why Cochran’s sensational death found few inches in the press at the time and isn’t well remembered to this day, while Natalie Wood’s mysterious death at sea in 1981, for example, made global front pages and headline news.

At the time of his death, Cochran was technically still married to a woman named Jonna Jensen Cochran, who lived in San Francisco. Jensen was a Danish immigrant who had met the 44-year-old Cochran at the age of 19. By 1965, their marriage was over for all intents and purposes, possibly due to Cochran’s fondness for sailing the seas with underage girls. Jensen had filed for divorce from Cochran the previous year, but the case was never finalized, meaning that despite the protests of Cochran’s mother, Jensen inherited his entire estate. 

Cochran’s body was flown to San Francisco and buried next to his father, near the ocean in Monterey. His reputation was so tarnished that an old friend saw the need to defend his standing in a curious article in the Van Nuys News. Published two weeks after his death, actress and columnist Jeanne Markham Keating characterized Cochran as a kind and extremely good-looking man who was sadly a target for “numerous kooks who seemed to spot an easy mark.” Keating’s glowing ode to her friend, though, did end in referring to him as “an unusual and a different sort.”

It is not clear what became of Castellanos, Zacarias and De La Rosa after their ghoulish brush with American celebrity and return to Acapulco.

There is no evidence to suggest that Cochran was met with foul play on the yacht, and we will never know the actual responsibilities required of the girl and young women aboard. It is probably safe to deduce that it wasn’t all plain sailing aboard the Rogue, even before the actor’s demise. 

The three Mexicans told Prensa Libre that after Cochran chose his 10 crew members from the 100 applicants in Acapulco, seven resigned after meeting the actor and learning more about their duties. Shortly after his death, the LA Times spoke with an actress named Sandra Danielson, who had also once been invited onto Cochran’s boat to star in a movie. “You are supposed to speak well of the dead,” Danielson said, “but he put me in a very compromising situation. I told him I didn’t need a job that bad.”