The rags to unbelievable riches love story behind the yacht tragedy

Sitting in the front row of the public gallery of a San Francisco federal courthouse in June, Angela Bacares was a constant presence throughout the fraud trial which could have seen her husband spend the rest of his life behind bars. 

A split second after the jury found Mike Lynch not guilty on all counts, 57-year-old Angela was on her feet, rushing to hug her husband.

At the end of a gruelling 13 year campaign to prove his innocence, including 13 months spent under house arrest in the US, the couple cried tears of joy as they embraced in the wood-panelled courtroom. With chances of acquittal said to have been 0.5 per cent, it was an astonishing turn of events.

It was the beginning of what Mike called ‘a second life’ – a chance to start over which was cruelly cut short last weekend when the couple’s luxury yacht Bayesian sank off the Sicilian coast in the midst of a freak Mediterranean storm.

While Angela, five guests and nine crew escaped the sinking yacht, Mike, 59, and the couple’s youngest daughter Hannah, 18, along with four others, did not.

Yesterday as Hannah’s body completed the grim tally to be recovered from the sunken 184ft yacht, only those closest to the wealthy couple, Hannah and their other daughter Esme, 21, understood the extent of a tragedy that is almost Shakespearian in its magnitude.

The brilliant family life the couple had built together, the symmetry of their origins as the children of hardworking immigrants from different continents, is nothing less than a modern fairytale, a testament to the power of hard work and aspiration. But it is one torn apart in a matter of 60 seconds when disaster struck in the early hours of Monday morning.

‘It’s really painful for her, really sad for her,’ one of Angela’s relatives said as her American family struggled to come to terms with this week’s heart-breaking events and news that Angela has lost not only her husband but her youngest daughter who, just last week, received A-level results securing a much-coveted place to read English at Trinity College, Oxford.

A contemporary of their daughters said that the tragedy was ‘hard to take in’.

‘They are such lovely people, not just brilliant but down-to-earth, so normal. It’s impossible to comprehend that the family has been torn in half.’

Turn back the clock 23 years and the Bacares family, originally from Colombia, were celebrating Angela’s 2001 marriage to Mike at St Mary’s Cadogan Street, one of the oldest Roman Catholic parishes in London.

Esme, who was not on the Bayesian last weekend, was born in 2003, followed by Hannah in 2006.

The Lynches, who last year were said to be worth £852million, divided their time between a Grade II-listed Georgian town house just off the King’s Road in Chelsea and a 16th century farm and estate in Suffolk, with holidays often spent with their girls on their much-loved £30million yacht.

Such a life was a world away from the pair’s modest childhoods; his as the son of working class immigrants, who moved to Essex from Ireland in the 1960s; hers as the daughter of Colombians who emigrated to New York in the same decade.

Much has been written about the rags-to-riches ascent of the man dubbed ‘the British Bill Gates’. Mike’s late father, also Michael, was a firefighter from County Cork. His late mother Dolores was a nurse from County Tipperary.

Growing up as an Irish Catholic in 1970s London against the backdrop of the Troubles, he once said: ‘You had to learn to run fast.’

One of his first jobs was as a cleaner, mopping floors at the hospital where his mother worked, but his brilliant mind was evident from a young age. At 11 he won a scholarship to Bancroft’s school in Woodford Green, north-east London. From there he went to Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he gained a degree in Natural Sciences and a PhD in artificial neural networks at the beginning of a career which would make him a multi-millionaire and earn him an OBE in 2006 for services to enterprise.

Angela’s early life was equally remarkable. Her mother Marina and father Rafael, an engineer, married in the Colombian capital Bogota in 1963 before moving to New York City in the mid-1960s and settling in Elmhurst, a neighbourhood in the borough of Queens where they raised Angela and her brother Rafael.

Despite being born in the US, Angela could not speak English when she began attending Public School 89 and followed a bilingual programme until entering the sixth grade at Newtown high school at 11. There, like her future husband, she excelled at science.

Aged 17, she was one of just 300 students who made it though to the semi-final of the US’s most prestigious school science competition, the Westinghouse Talent Science Search, described in 1991 by President George Bush as the ‘Super Bowl of science’.

Her project, a study of the tobacco hornworm, which won her a place at the finals in Washington, was funded with a $300 scholarship from the New York Academy of Sciences.

Teenage Angela told the New York Daily News that she worked on the project after school and full-time during the holidays.

‘It was a great experience that I would recommend to anyone who has the opportunity,’ she said.

Her mother Marina told the paper that the honour would ‘open many doors for her. It’s great to be recognised, especially since she is a first generation American’.

Angela, who is believed to have spent time studying at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire – one of the US’s most prestigious, Ivy League, universities – went on to forge a career as an equity trader in New York.

She married an investment portfolio manager in Florida in January 2000 but they were divorced by the following December.

Her engagement to Mike was announced in The Times five months later in May 2001.

They married the following September, fewer than three weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center. With the arrival of their daughters, it soon became clear how passionately Mike and Angela felt about education.

Both Esme and Hannah were educated privately at two highly academic schools, St Paul’s Girls’ School and Latymer Upper, both in Hammersmith, west London.

Esme went on to study physics at Imperial College in London, a subject her father, a former government science adviser under David Cameron, once said more girls needed to take to encourage future female entrepreneurship.

Hannah, who sat her A-levels while her father was on trial in the US, had attended her school prom in London last week and received her exam results two days later. She was due to start at Oxford this autumn.

Much of the girls’ lives has been overshadowed by the fraud case which engulfed their father following the 2011 sale of his software firm Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard (HP) for £7.4billion when Esme and Hannah were nine and six.

The deal turned Mike into one of the richest men in Britain but within a year, HP had accused him of artificially inflating the price of Autonomy and overcharging them to the tune of £5billion.

The family was plunged into a 12-year trans-Atlantic legal fight and innumerable court appearances which ultimately saw Mike extradited and flown in handcuffs to the US in May 2023 and placed under house arrest.

If convicted, he faced up to 25 years in a US prison and given his age and the serious lung condition from which he was suffering, Mike believed that if locked up, he was unlikely to live long enough to see freedom again.

Just a month after his extradition, another cataclysmic episode rocked the family in June last year when Mike learnt that his younger brother, 56-year-old Richard, had died after an overdose.

While Mike was confined to an address in San Francisco, Angela bought her dog-loving husband a Shetland sheepdog called Faucet to keep him company while she divided her time between London and the US.

Faucet was his constant companion throughout the 13 months leading up to his trial – although he was dependent on security guards to take his pet for a walk.

After being acquitted and returning to London, Faucet remained by his side, along with the family’s five other dogs.

Throughout the stressful years leading up his trial in June, Mike and Angela sought to keep life as normal as possible for their girls.

At least before he was extradited in 2023, their 16-year-old luxury award-winning superyacht was somewhere to which the family could retreat and get away from the pressures of Mike’s seemingly endless legal battle.

The family were united in their love of sailing. Esme is a keen member of her university’s sailing society and Hannah documented her passion for the sea via her ‘stars and sea’ photography Instagram account which features dozens of stunning nautical images.

In 2019, she won a runner-up prize in a school film competition featuring one-minute ‘shorts’ with a clip entitled ‘To Swim Like a Sea Lion’.

This week close family friend Lord Deben, the former Cabinet Minister John Gummer, reflected on the girls’ relationship with their father. ‘The daughters did so much for him and yet, at the same time, achieved so much in their own work,’ he said.

‘The younger one getting into Oxford, the older one completing studies with very considerable aplomb. All that going on while still being there for him and supporting him and understanding that they could give to him what no one else could.

‘So for that family to be torn apart in this way is really terribly sad.’ The loss of Mike and Hannah was also met with shock and disbelief by locals in the village of Pettistree, near Woodbridge in Suffolk, many of whom attended a garden party at the family’s 400-year-old country home to celebrate Mike’s acquittal.

‘It is utterly tragic that he came out from under that cloud and then this happens,’ said Sue Jones, chairwoman of Pettistree parish council, who attended the party in June at the country home Loudham Hall, where Mike and Angela kept Red Poll cattle, Suffolk sheep, a flock of rhea birds and Gloucestershire Old Spots pigs.

This summer’s voyage on Bayesian was meant to celebrate the end of the legal battle with family as well as colleagues and business associates who had supported him throughout.

The stunning voyage around the Gulf of Naples to Cefalu in Sicily and then on towards the fishing port of Porticello was one they had made before.

The ill-fated yacht was named after the 18th century mathematician Thomas Bayes whose work on probability and risk informed much of Mike’s thinking.

Much has been made of how improbable it was not only that he should have lost his life so soon after winning his court case, but how a yacht described as ‘bullet-proof’ should have sunk so quickly with such devastating consequences. Angela, who is said to have been woken on Monday morning when the yacht ‘tilted’ and got out of bed to investigate, suffered severe cuts to her feet when glass shattered around her as the Bayesian began to sink.

She is said to be confined to a wheelchair at a luxury hotel complex in Porticello.

A strange twist to this tragedy is the death last weekend of Mike’s co-defendant Stephen Chamberlain, Autonomy’s former vice president, who died after being hit by a car while out jogging near his home in Cambridgeshire.

One of Mike’s closest friends and Cambridge colleagues was quoted this week as saying: ‘It’s truly unimaginable.

‘The probability of all these events – Mike’s acquittal only three months ago, the storm capsizing the Bayesian and the death of Stephen Chamberlain while out for his morning run on a sleepy road in Cambridgeshire is simply beyond the realms of probability.’

Police are not treating Mr Chamberlain’s death as suspicious. The woman driver of a Corsa was helping police with their inquiries.

In an interview fewer than two months ago, Mike told Radio 4 how grateful he was for being given a ‘second life’.

It was one that was to be agonisingly short-lived, leaving Angela and Esme facing a lifetime of grief over the loss of a husband and father and a daughter and sister and, for those who have followed every unfolding moment of this agonising tragedy, a savage reminder of the fragility of life.