Loewenstein Found

Channel swimmers take off from Cap Gris Nez, France. Last week the Breton fishing trawler Sainte Therese de L'Enfant Jesus was wallowing past Cape Gray Nose when Captain Jean Marie Bougrad espied a body that did not swim.

Boathooks jabbed at a semi-skeleton from which half the flesh had sloughed away. Seeing a glint of gold at the wrist, Captain Bougrad warned his men not to let it slip off. When peered at it proved to be an identification bracelet engraved: Captain Loewenstein, 315 Rue de la Science, Brussels.

"We fisherfolk don't read the papers," said sturdy Breton Bougrad some days later, "All we knew was that it must be a Belgian. . . . We wrapped it in a tarpaulin, lashed it across our stern, and put straight in to Boulogne."

Persons who read papers knew that the $55,000,000 estate of Belgium's richest jew could now be distributed to his heirs, since his death was certain at last. A few days before the body was found the Court of Appeals at Brussels had refused to issue a death certificate, holding that Captain Loewenstein was simply "missing," after his disappearance from an airplane in flight over the English Channel (TIME, July 16). This ruling, if persisted in, would have made it impossible to distribute the estate until 100 years after Captain Loewenstein's birth, or in 1977.

Identification was made absolute, last week, when certain unfinished dental work in the skeleton's upper jaw was positively identified by Captain Loewenstein's dentist. Mme. Loewenstein sent a -brother and brother-in-law to view the appalling sight. Not present was son & heir Robert Loewenstein, 18, racially only half a Jew and, like his father, a Roman Catholic by conviction.

Said Brother-in-law Convert, husband of Captain Loewenstein's late sister: "I want this affair cleared up. If my brother-in-law was drugged we must know about it, if possible. Suicide is out of the question. On the day before his death Captain Loewenstein telephoned one of his closest friends that he was on his way to see his son ride in the horse show at Geneva. He was a man too happy to commit suicide." Autopsy findings. ". . . many multiple fracture wounds, proving that the fall was from a great height ... no trace of drugs or poisons . . . muscular derangement . . . evidence that he was alive when he struck the water."