A True-Life Message in a Bottle

When a Frenchwoman’s son died at the age of 13, she fell into despair. So one day, in the spring of 2002, she sent a teardrop-shaped bottle out to sea with a letter to the boy. “Forgive me for being so angry at your disappearance,” the woman wrote in the letter. “I still think there’s been some mistake, and I keep waiting for God to fix it.” Eventually, a woman found the note on the shores of Kent, in England, and gave it to her friend Karen Liebreich, a London-based author. Fascinated, Liebreich spent several years consulting newspapers and meeting with private detectives, psychologists, forensic scientists, secret servicemen, and others to find the letter writer—all of which proved fruitless. The result, though, was a book, The Letter in the Bottle. Three years later, in 2009, the mysterious Frenchwoman came forward and said she felt violated and the two had a bitter meeting. But eventually, Liebreich says, the two started to become acquainted. “We email each other,” she says. “I think there’s a friendship evolving that’s not linked totally to this book and the death of the child.” And as for the bottle? “We don't know what to do with it,” Liebreich says.