As 1982 came to an end, the troopers found that little had changed. They were still conducting interviews. Still consulting with other police departments. Still traveling. In early November, Sergeant Miller went south to San Rafael, California. He met with Chris Heyman’s father and stepmother. What Miller learned moved him further from the idea that Chris Heyman was a suspect. Heyman was a greenhorn.
A recent high school graduate, Heyman planned to enter college in the fall. He was, from every description, a quiet kid. He was into hot rod magazines. Had a steady girlfriend. And from every indication, he was having a good time onboard the Investor, though he had only been there a few months.
Perhaps most revealing, however, was news that Chris had only recently moved to California. He had spent most of his life in New York City, where he lived with his mother. Miller thought Chris Heyman was street wise. Not boat wise. A greenhorn at best.
That was, according to his father, Don Heyman, why Chris was crewing on the Investor at the time of his death. In a September 26, 1982, Bellingham Herald article by Eric Thomas, the senior Heyman said his son’s greatest interest was to someday help him manage their Stowaway Marina in San Rafael. “To give him some experience,” Thomas wrote, “he and his father arranged with their friends, the Coulthursts, to let [Chris] work aboard the purse seine boat Investor this past summer in Alaska.”
“He learned more in the last 10 weeks than he had learned in the past 12 months,” Don Heyman said of his son’s experience on the Investor. “I saw a picture of him and the Investor crew. It was dripping rain, but he still had a grin on his face — that never-say-die attitude. The whole crew was like that, and that’s why I wanted him on the boat. I knew them all and nobody thought they were hot stuff, they were a super team.”
There is was. The bundle of contradictions that would forever haunt this case. Was there trouble on board the Investor, trouble of the sort that would lead to mass murder? Or was it just the normal ebb and flow of emotions onboard a hard-working fishing boat? The one, nearly unassailable point — attested to by two former crewmen — was that the crew appeared to have reached a breaking point. A breaking point that coincided with the arrival of Irene Coulthust and the kids. Even with Chris Heyman dwindling as a suspect, Miller returned to the thought that someone had snapped onboard the Investor. The greenhorn? Maybe.
Copyright Leland E. Hale (2019). All rights reserved.
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