August 1983: At the one year anniversary of working the Investor case, troopers had fielded close to a thousand calls, investigated hundreds of leads and taped nearly as many interviews. All of that and they still failed to find their man. As the anniversary of these heinous killings approached, troopers realized they needed to try something different.
That opportunity came in the late summer of 1983, when Sgt. Miller and Sgt. Stogsdill switched jobs, Miller going to statewide narcotics, Stogsdill moving into homicide. In handing over the reins, Miller couldn’t help but believe that they’d missed something. Maybe they had taken a wrong turn somewhere. More than anything, though, they had lost focus. They needed, as Miller put it, “to look at this case again real hard.”
Sergeant Stogsdill immediately took up Miller’s challenge. He gathered every case interview and report he could find. After imposing a rough order on the records, he read — and re-read — as much as he could. And then, as August drifted toward September, Stogsdill held a meeting.
They came to Ketchikan, at the heartland of this murder case. They came from all over Alaska and, in one case, from the Seattle office. And, in what became known as the anniversary meeting, they did precisely what Miller suggested.
It was Sgt. Glenn Flothe, from the Anchorage office, who suggested they create a matrix that identified the key characteristics of their killer. “Experienced fisherman,” was in one column. “Knew the Coulthurst’s and the Investor crew,” was in another. “Was in Craig” at the time of the killings was a third.
The rows of that anniversary matrix listed their suspects. There were five names in total. One of the first ones on it was Dean Moon. His body had still not been identified from the bones found in the burned out wreckage. Chris Heyman was another name on that list — for the same reason.
The troopers added three more names. John Glenn Charles, an Alaska Native who had committed suicide in the weeks following the murders. Eric Opperman, a Coulthurst relative-by-marriage whom several eyewitnesses identified from photographs as someone who looked like the skiffman.
And John Kenneth Peel, the former Coulthurst crewman who’d been identified as a possible person of interest on the day after the Investor fire.
Excerpts from the unpublished original manuscript, “Sailor Take Warning,” by Leland E. Hale. That manuscript, started in 1992 and based on court records from the Alaska State Archive, served as the basis for “What Happened in Craig.”
Copyright Leland E. Hale (2019). All rights reserved.
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