THE POLICE IN Puerto Madero keep Long's case in a homicide folder, on a messy front desk littered with other homicide folders. Public-ministry lawyer Teofilo Esteban Perez Sala takes me over, then hands me the police report. I'm so shocked, I can't speak. I finally manage a "Gracias."

Perez says Long's injuries were so extreme that his entire skull was basically "pushed over" to the side. I ask whether I can photocopy the file, and to my amazement he says yes. It turns out there's absolutely nothing useful except the full autopsy—but I'm in the right place, finally.

The only problem is that there was never an investigation. We should know, for instance, whether there were any traces of blood on the boat. The injuries happened somewhere, and there must have been evidence before looters literally sawed it off the boat and carted it away. But even Perez, with his homicide folder, caves in to the official line and says he thinks it was an accidental death.

When I leave Puerto Madero after a week, I have little more than the facts I arrived with. But here's what I believe happened to John Long. He was sailing sometime before midnight, only a few miles from shore. Despite what his son Aaron says, I don't think he was planning to go into Puerto Madero for repairs. If that had been his plan, he would have been wearing clothing, and he would have furled his sails.

But Long was flying full sail, including main, mizzen, and his largest jib, in light air and small waves, making probably four or five knots. It was hot, so he may have been naked as he rested or tried to sleep below, and he had his pilothouse door all the way open for breeze. Close to Puerto Madero, he heard a panga roaring up, heard its outboard over the sound of water against the hull. And he most likely had already experienced this a dozen times, day and night, pangas coming up asking him for things all along the coast. So he turned on his deck lights and climbed out his side door to tell them to scram. The pirates could have come aboard quickly, easy to do from the bow of a panga.

According to Jason Long, his father was no longer very physically able; even climbing bleachers at ballgames had become difficult. And his guns, which were illegal in Mexico, were too far away, stored not in the pilothouse but in the lower section of the boat.

Long was hit hard on the left side of his head by a blunt object, perhaps a club used for killing fish. He had cerebral hemorrhaging, a broken neck, broken ribs, a bloody nose, and large bruises on his right thigh and stomach, one of them a foot and a half long. His skin wasn't cut, however, so it's possible he was stripped before being thrown overboard.

I think it's fair to say there's no chance that Long's was an accidental death. The boom swinging over on an accidental jibe could fracture a skull and break a neck, but all of Long's controls were below: During a tack or jibe, he would have been in his pilothouse. He also can't have fallen from a mast, because he had no mast steps. He can't have been deploying his dinghy, because all his sails were up. It's hard to imagine he simply fell, because he moved slowly and his injuries were so extreme.

The Cúlin's EPIRB went off briefly at 12:49 A.M. and again at 12:59 A.M., then went silent. Its position was where the boat lies now, on the beach. But the navy recovered Long's body two miles out to sea. I think it's most likely that looters set off the EPIRB while fiddling with the buttons.

Long's body would have drifted at about half a knot per hour south, so my guess is that he was killed around 10 P.M., within a few miles of Puerto Madero. After an hour or so, his boat must have turned toward land. Even if the malfunctioning autopilot had been turned on, the boat could have slipped off course, toward the beach. At that point, the Cúlin became a true ghost ship, sailing itself into La Cigüeña, its captain lost at sea.