With new leads in seemingly every direction, Stogsdill next followed up on the Canadian murders by consulting with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. At one point, the Mounties came to Anchorage for a week, so they could exchange information. The truth was, they were searching for a connection where perhaps there was none. In important ways, each investigation was at a fork in the road.
The only common denominators seemed to be .22 caliber gunshots to the head and the fact of fire. Perhaps that would have been enough, except that Canadian witnesses had seen two men driving a camper truck similar to that stolen from the Kamloops victims. In mid-September, witnesses spotted them in North Battleford, Saskatchewan — 740 miles to the east of the murder scene. Canadian authorities soon took a creative fork in their investigation, hoping for a break.
In April, the crime was re-enacted on-site for TV cameras and aired across Canada in hopes that some significant clue would be triggered. In May, police drove a replica of the Bentleys’ 1981 Ford camper truck to Ontario and Quebec, as over 300 people had claimed they had seen such a vehicle heading east during the fall and winter. The reward for finding the truck was raised to $7,500 and 10,000 posters were sent out to police detachments and post offices across North America.
Wikipedia, “Wells Gray Provincial Park Family Murders”
Unfortunately for both investigations, neither of the composites from the Mounties looked particularly like the Investor composites.
Wells Gray Composite #1 (courtesy BDHQ, Aug 15, 2016)
One of the Canadian suspects had shoulder-length blonde hair and a shaggy mustache; he was about five foot nine and weighed approximately 150 pounds. The other suspect was a six-footer who weighed about two-hundred-twenty pounds. This man had black, shaggy hair hanging below his shoulders, a bushy black beard and mustache.
Wells Gray Composite #2 (courtesy BDHQ, Aug 15, 2016)
Significantly, both suspects were thought to be French-speaking. As far as anyone knew, the Investor suspect spoke only English.
And then, in early February of 1983, Sergeant Miller got a call from Bellingham police Detective Dave McNeill. Somebody, McNeill told him, had spotted Investor crewman Dean Moon. Alive. In San Francisco. When? Miller asked. Only days ago, McNeill told him. According to court records, Miller immediately got on the horn to talk to the man, a Bellingham fisherman. This was a fork worth pursuing.
And that was the jist of it: all the suspects were now apparently on the run. One fork in the road became two forks, branching in wildly different directions.
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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