Cruise death singer Jackie Kastrinelis’s body to be exhumed

The parents of an US singer who died a mysterious death on a cruise ship off Darwin will ­exhume her body to search for clues.

Kathy Kastrinelis yesterday at the Groveland, Massachusetts, gravesite of her daughter, Jackie.

The parents of an American singer who died a mysterious death on a cruise ship off Darwin will ­exhume her body to search for clues about her death, saying Northern Territory authorities have failed to investigate properly.

In an agonising decision, Kathy and Mike Kastrinelis will exhume the body of their 24-year-old daughter Jackie from a Massachusetts graveyard this month, more than five years after she died without warning on the cruise ship Seven Seas Voyager.

The Kastrinelis family says it has no choice after the Territory coroner recently denied its ­request to hold an inquest into Jackie’s unexplained death in February 2013.

“This is really difficult for our family but we have to make sure justice is done for Jackie,” Ms Kastrinelis told The Australian.

“The investigation into her death was flawed from the start and we are at a loss as to why they did not open an inquest.”

Jackie Kastrinelis.

The Territory coroner decided last year to consider an inquest after The Weekend Australian Magazine revealed a series of ­apparent errors and cover-ups by police and forensic experts in relation to Jackie’s death.

Mrs and Mr Kastrinelis had called for an inquest into her death amid fears that she was murdered, despite the official finding that their apparently healthy daughter died of the extremely rare “sudden unexplained death syndrome” while asleep. Jackie Kastrinelis, who was the main singer aboard the ship, went to the crew bar on the night before her death and was observed laughing and enjoying herself before she went back to her cabin at 1.40am.

She was found dead the next morning as the cruise ship was ­arriving in Darwin but police could not find any obvious signs of violence or physical abuse and an autopsy could not determine a medical cause of death.

The last person to see the singer alive was an ex-boyfriend who initially failed to disclose to police that he had been in a previous ­relationship with her, admitting he was “a little jealous” to see her in the company of another man on the night she died.

The Seven Seas Voyager.

A police report into her death admitted that police did not collect as many DNA samples aboard the ship as they should have, making it impossible to know more about the unknown male DNA found on Kastrinelis’s underpants. After re-examining the evidence, Territory coroner Greg Kavanaugh wrote to the family declining to open an inquest, ­saying there were no “new facts” to examine.

However, the coroner acknowledged that some of Kastrinelis’s blood samples had been inadvertently destroyed by ­authorities and the only remaining vial of her blood had somehow gone missing when it was mailed to the US at the request of the family.

The missing blood has denied the Kastrinelis family the chance to conduct further forensic tests in the US that might explain their daughter’s death.

As a result, the family says the only solution is to exhume Kastrinelis’s body and have medical experts test her remains to see if they provide clues to her death.

“I am obviously uneasy with this (exhuming),” Mr Kastrinelis said. “It is not the thing that I wanted to have to do but I don’t think there is anything else we can do at this point.

“It involves taking sections of her organs that in their opinion could retain key markers of drug interactions or proteins and ­enzymes that might indicate a cause of death.”

Mrs Kastrinelis said she was furious that her family have been forced to exhume their daughter.

“We have suspected for a long time that the investigation was not unbiased,” she said.

“Northern Territory authorities took a point of view that this was a party girl on a ship and ­nobody did anything to her. She is just dead.”

Mrs Kastrinelis said exhuming her daughter’s body was the last option.

Cameron Stewart is also US contributor for Sky News Australia