Grim anniversary for Hawks family

Relatives recall Tom and Jackie Hawks, who disappeared a year ago; authorities believe they were killed at sea.* Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part series marking the first anniversary of the disappearance of a Newport Beach couple.

Jack O’Neill talks fondly of the last time he saw his daughter, Jackie Hawks.

She came out to visit the family at their Ohio home in the hot, humid summer of 2002. They took a family trip, traveling some 200 miles from their home to spend a few days at a lakeside cabin loaned to them by a friend.

“It was a great visit,” O’Neill said by phone of the time Jackie Hawks spent with her brother and sisters at the house, going out to eat and seeing family.

It was a great visit that was also a last visit.

One year ago today, Jackie and her husband, Tom Hawks, left Newport Harbor aboard their boat, Well Deserved, for what would turn out to be their final cruise.

They had advertised the sale of their 55-foot cabin cruiser in boating publications and were ready to start a new chapter in life. The couple was looking into purchasing property in Mexico and downsizing to a smaller boat.

A young Long Beach couple -- Skylar and Jennifer Deleon -- had expressed interest in buying the boat. Skylar Deleon had visited the Hawkses aboard Well Deserved several times before embarking on the Nov. 15 sea trial.

But police say Well Deserved returned to Newport Harbor without Tom and Jackie Hawks aboard.

Police believe the Hawkses were killed -- tied to one another, handcuffed to the boat’s 66-pound anchor and thrown overboard alive.

Their bodies have not been found.

It has been one year since Tom and Jackie Hawks saw their new grandson, one year since they went for a weekend trip with friends to Catalina.

Ryan Hawks of San Diego last spoke with his parents as he was leaving for a business trip to Seattle. He remembers rushing to get off the phone, telling them he would call when he returned.

The year’s events -- which began as a missing persons investigation and resulted in the arrest of Jennifer and Skylar Deleon and three other men in connection with the Hawkses’ alleged murder -- have blurred a year in the life of family and friends.

“It’s amazing, something like this affects your life, physically and mentally,” said Ryan Hawks, 29.

Jackie Hawks’ parents, Jack and Gayle O’Neill, try not to think too much about what happened to their daughter, Jack O’Neill said. But nearly every day they receive a phone call and someone brings it up; they are once again reminded that they’ll never get another visit from their daughter, O’Neill said.

“I can’t believe it’s been a year. It’s still so fresh in our memories, in our minds,” Gayle O’Neill said.

When neither Tom nor Jackie Hawks returned any phone calls that week in November, family and friends wondered what had happened to the couple, who always kept in touch. The Hawkses were retired. They kept a home in Prescott, Ariz., and lived aboard their boat in the Newport Harbor when they weren’t on sailing expeditions to Catalina and Mexico.

“They had such an enthusiasm for life,” said Newport Beach resident Carter Ford, a fellow cruiser and friend of the Hawkses.

Ford met Tom and Jackie Hawks several years ago; he had a mooring in Newport Harbor, and the Hawkses needed a place to tie up when they weren’t traveling.

Ford was the last person to hear from the Hawkses the day they disappeared.

Jackie Hawks placed a call to Ford’s cell phone that afternoon. The call went to voicemail, and Hawks said they “were out to sea” and would try again later that night after they returned.

Of course, the promised phone call never came, Ford said.

“I wished it [the call] had come to me personally instead of my cell phone,” Ford said.

In a year of their absence from the close-knit cruising community, Ford said there are many times when he is reminded of Tom and Jackie Hawks.

A recent trip to the Sea of Cortez, spent kayaking and swimming, served for Ford as a bittersweet memory of the Hawkses’ life in Mexico.

Every once in a while he comes across a saved e-mail, one of the many sent by Jackie Hawks -- “eloquently written descriptions of the joyous life they were having,” Ford said.

The killings of Tom and Jackie Hawks received national attention, but today a small group of family and friends are planning to celebrate their lives in private.