It was 25 years ago, in the warm, cerulean blue waters off the Mexican paradise island of Cozumel, that legendary British singer Kirsty MacColl lost her life in the most horrifying of circumstances.
And for one man, in particular, the events of that day are as clear as they were a quarter of a century ago.
Jose Cen Yam, the former deckhand who became notorious as the reckless driver of the motorboat that struck the Fairytale Of New York star in open water, has never spoken publicly about the final moments of the singer’s life – nor his role in her senseless killing.
But today, for the first time, Cen Yam has been tracked down by The Mail on Sunday amid sensational new claims by Ms MacColl’s former husband, record producer Steve Lillywhite, of an extraordinary conspiracy to conceal the involvement of one of the richest men in the world.
The claims have reignited questions about the circumstances of Ms MacColl’s death and, crucially, about the true identity of the man driving the 31 ft motorboat, which struck her with one of its twin propellers as she was scuba diving with her sons in December 2000.
According to Lillywhite, ‘no one believes’ that Cen Yam was driving the boat. Rather, he was the ‘fall guy’ for the true culprit – his powerful boss, the late Mexican billionaire Guillermo Gonzalez Nova.
So did power, money and influence subjugate the truth – and justice – for a quarter of a century?
Well, not according to Cen Yam.
Former deckhand Jose Cen Yam today insists he was driving the speedboat that killed Fairytale of New York icon Kirsty MacColl in an interview after her family claimed it was a cover up
British singer Kirsty had her life tragically cut short at the age of 41 25 years ago when she was struck by a speedboat while on holiday in Mexico with her two sons
Kirsty and her boys Louis and Jamie had just finished a diving trip when she was struck by a powerful boat called The Percalito belonging to a Mexican billionaire
Speaking to the MoS from his workplace on Cozumel, he is as insistent as he was when he gave his statement to police all those years ago.
‘No, it was me,’ he says. ‘That’s the truth. The family [of Gonzalez Nova] never put pressure on me to admit to anything I didn’t do. I have always told the truth about this.’
And as for whether Gonzalez Nova was really at the helm, Cen Yam again shakes his head. ‘Absolutely not,’ he says.
If he was paid to lie – and is continuing to – it is fair to say that Cen Yam, now a handyman, lives an apparently simple life in paradise. With his grubby T-shirt and chipped teeth, this is a man who does not bear any of the outward trappings of wealth or comfort. Certainly, he does not relish the spotlight being forced upon him once again.
It is no doubt uncomfortable for him that Ms MacColl’s death, and the many questions surrounding it, have never gone away. The bravery of her final moments captured the heart of a nation, after all. In the seconds between surfacing from a dive and being struck by the allegedly speeding boat’s propeller, the singer just had time to scream a warning and push her eldest son, Jamie, to safety – the last thing, it is said, she ever did.
But Cen Yam, who swears he saw no one in the water that day and had no time to react, has a rather different perspective.
‘I was going at about five miles an hour,’ he insists. ‘I didn’t see anyone in the water, no one. But then I heard a propeller make a very strange noise.
‘It was really weird, a whirring like something hit it. There was no bang in the boat, just the noise of a propeller doing this weird stuff.
‘I thought, ‘I’ve gone over something’. So I slowed and went to the back of the boat and I saw her there.’
Ms MacColl’s horrific injuries made it obvious that she was beyond rescue. ‘She was definitely dead. There was nothing I could do to save her life,’ he says.
To his credit, Cen Yam – who is now married and a grandfather – did not leave the scene nor abandon Ms MacColl in the water. Another deckhand called the authorities, while he took hold of the breathing tube on the singer’s scuba gear to stop the current dragging her away, holding on for half an hour until the authorities arrived. ‘She was just floating in the water all that time. I didn’t pull her body out of the water, we just had to let her be there until help came.’
Occasionally pausing to wipe his eyes, he nevertheless adds, defiantly: ‘I don’t feel shame over this. It was an accident. I don’t feel it was my fault.’
It is not, perhaps, the re-opening of a cold case that Ms MacColl’s loved ones might have hoped for.
For years, her mother, Jean Newlove, led a Justice For Kirsty campaign to uncover the truth and seek a proper judicial review, arguing that the Mexican legal system was corrupt. And what they will make of Cen Yam’s latest revelations remains to be seen.
There were claims at the time that deckhand Jose Cen Yam, who was 26 back then, wasn’t driving the boat and that he had just taken the rap for the crash for his wealthy boss
Mexican billionaire Guillermo Gonzalez Nova, who died in 2009, was initially arrested after the accident and was heard telling police he had been driving – but hours later Jose Cen Yam said he had been at the helm. Yam was eventually found guilty of culpable homicide in 2003
Kirsty’s body is carried from the sea to the beach after the tragic accdent that killed her
The boat was owned by supermarket tycoon Guillermo Gonzalez Nova whose deckhand gave an account of what happened that fateful day – and how Kirsty was killed in the accident
Kirsty – a mother-of-two – with Irish musician Shane MacGowan. She became a household name after recording their iconic Christmas song Fairytale Of New York remains a hit today
Whatever the case, in their eyes neither he nor anyone else has faced any onerous repercussions for a tragedy that shocked the world and left two young boys without their mother.
Cen Yam was not even jailed – under Mexican law at the time, although he was found guilty of culpable homicide in 2003 and sentenced to two years and ten months in prison, he instead paid the equivalent of just $90 [approximately £60 in 2000] in fines to avoid his sentence. That he does not, as he says today, continue to even feel ‘shame’ over his role in her death is unlikely to persuade Ms MacColl’s family that justice has been served.
None of this could have been imagined when she arrived in Mexico in December 2000 for a much-needed holiday after 18 months of non-stop work. She was with her 26-year-old boyfriend James Knight and sons Jamie, 15, and Louis, 13, from her marriage to Lillywhite.
By this point, the 41-year-old singer was riding high, having released her fifth studio album, Tropical Brainstorm, just a few months before. She had already won over television audiences with appearances on French And Saunders and, of course, her unforgettable duet with Shane MacGowan on The Pogues’ 1988 hit Fairytale Of New York. Her future was looking bright.
The family was on the island of Cozumel, 12 miles off the mainland and famous for the breathtaking Chankanaab coral reef.
Ms MacColl, a diving enthusiast, had been twice before but this would be her first time diving there with her boys.
The trio went out on Monday December 18, two days before they were to return home for a family Christmas, alongside instructor Ivan Diaz. They were within a 67,000-acre protected area, open only to divers and their support vessels. Other boats were prohibited and, to ensure swimmers’ safety, the speed limit was restricted to four knots.
Louis and Ms MacColl were first to surface, shortly followed by Jamie and Mr Diaz. ‘Then she suddenly screamed, ‘Look out!’ and tried to push us out of the way,’ Louis would later recall. ‘The boat was already over us – I could see the propellers.’
A speedboat spluttered 300 ft in the distance, the propeller bent by the force of the collision. Ms MacColl’s body floated face down in water that had turned crimson red.
‘I was swimming in Mummy’s blood,’ Louis said. ‘I screamed that she’d been hit, and to swim the other way and not look back.’ An autopsy, carried out by forensic pathologist Dr Richard Shepherd at St George’s Hospital Medical School in London, confirmed she had died instantly.
These are the simple facts. But it is what happened next, as authorities attempted to execute swift justice, that continues to leave Ms MacColl’s family cold.
Police discovered that the boat responsible for the collision was a mighty 31 ft, £127,000 motorboat called the Percalito, registered in Guernsey. The boat’s captain and owner was then 67-year-old Guillermo Gonzalez Nova, a billionaire businessman and the owner of one of Mexico’s largest supermarket chains. He was on-board with his family, including his ten-month-old granddaughter.
In the aftermath, a local newspaper reported Gonzalez Nova had been at the helm of the vessel at the time of the crash.
This made sense. He was the only passenger with the necessary licence to operate a beast boasting a top-speed of 33 knots. It should have been a relatively clear-cut case. But the story took a twist.
Steve Lillywhite (left) father of Kirsty’s two sons, claims that ‘no one believes’ that Jose Cen Yam was driving the boat and that billionaire Guillermo Gonzalez Novahe orchestrated a cover-up to prevent himself facing an expensive lawsuit from Kirsty’s bereaved family
Steve with Kirsty and their two sons. They had separated by the time of the accident. Steve said this week that he believed the Mexican billionaire was driving the boat that hilled her
Kirsty is pictured here with her mother Jean Newlove. Jean, who died in 2017, campaigned passionately to get the bottom of what happened to her daughter
Steve is pictured here recently with his son Louis. Louis, then 14, watched in horror as his beloved mother was killed just off the paradise island of Cozumel on December 18, 2000
Kirsty’s younger son Jamie, pictured recently, was 14 when his mother was killed after a dive sessions. Jamie has spoken of the devastation the crash had on him and his family
Despite initially admitting to police he had been steering the boat, his then 26-year-old deckhand, Cen Yam, walked into the police station to claim it was, in fact, he who had been at the helm. Cen Yam was prosecuted while Gonzalez Nova lived blame-free before dying in 2009.
But this contradiction would haunt Ms MacColl’s family, leaving three unanswered questions: Who was really driving the boat? What speed was it going? And where did the accident happen?
No witnesses could definitively say who was at the helm. However, one boatman claimed to police that he watched the Percalito leave shore roughly an hour before the accident with a dark-haired man on the controls who, the witness said, appeared to be part of the family. Gonzalez Nova is the one who had the necessary licence; Cen Yam has been unable to provide documentation to support his claims he was a qualified seaman.
Furthermore, under investigation he was unable to give the technical definition of a ‘knot’, had little knowledge of boat technology or instrumentation and even said he struggled to distinguish between his left and right.
Would Gonzalez Nova have entrusted the safety of his children and grandchild to such a man? According to Cen Yam, that’s what he did. But Ms MacColl’s family have long argued it is far more likely the billionaire convinced his deckhand to take the rap for him.
‘They said that it was a young kid driving, but no one believes that,’ ex-husband Lillywhite said last week. ‘I think they just didn’t want to have an enormous lawsuit because he [Gonzalez Nova] was one of the richest guys in Mexico.’
And then there’s the question of speed. Cen Yam claimed the boat was moving at just one knot. This is implausibly slow.
In an exclusive interview with the Mail on Sunday today, Jose Cen rubbishes any theories of a cover up insisting that it was he who was driving the boat
He said: ‘That’s the truth. The family of Gonzalez Nova never put pressure on me to admit to anything I didn’t do. I have always told the truth about this’
‘One knot equals one nautical mile per hour, and is approximately 1.7ft per second,’ deduced crime writer Alix Kirsta who has investigated the accident.
‘Therefore, the 31ft Percalito would have taken more than 18 seconds to pass through Kirsty’s group, merely nudging them aside, allowing the divers – and the skipper – ample time to avoid impact.’
When the MoS spoke to Cen Yam last week, he claimed the boat was moving at 5 mph (a little over four knots) which is still slow enough that the singer could have avoided serious injury.
Dive captain Mr Diaz claimed he saw the Percalito closing in on them at great speed from a quarter of a mile away after he surfaced. ‘It was coming straight towards us,’ he said. ‘I thought, ‘Oh my God, these guys can’t see us, they’re going to hit us.’ I was very scared, waving and yelling, trying to get their attention.’
This brings us to the final question of where the divers were swimming. Were they inside the national park diving zone, or outside of it where speedboats are entitled to race across the waves?
Cen Yam told police at the time that he was driving the boat in the correct area – and repeated those claims to the MoS last week.
He insists it was the divers who were not where they should have been. ‘I was in the correct zone for what I was doing. I believe it was more a case of the divers were in the wrong area, not me.’
Gonzalez Nova also claimed in his original police statement that the accident was about 400 metres beyond the Chankanaab Reef. But Mr Diaz, then 49, was one of the most highly respected professional instructors on Cozumel and had spent over 10,000 hours in the water. It seems implausible he would take Ms MacColl and her inexperienced sons outside the safe diving zone – despite what Cen Yam and Gonzalez Nova claimed.
Nor was there a reason to take that risk as the best of the reef was in the park. The driver of the MacColl family’s support boat, anchored 165 ft away, also swore they were within the park limits.
Given these inconsistencies, it’s little wonder Ms MacColl’s family set up a campaign for the truth, frustrated at what they saw to be a lack of transparency and accountability in the judicial process.
‘All I ever wanted was the truth and an apology,’ Ms MacColl’s mother said. ‘I never got the truth. I’ve never had an apology. And it’s too late for that now.’ The campaign disbanded in 2009 and Ms Newlove died, aged 94, in 2017.
The family might have hoped Cen Yam could, one day, offer a fresh perspective on Ms MacColl’s death. But this may remain one mystery that is never fully solved.
