Excerpts from the unpublished original manuscript, “Sailor Take Warning,” by Leland E. Hale.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.” In this installment, enhanced by a recent interview, Jerry Mackie encounters someone he believes is their suspect.
The Hill Bar (copyright Leland E. Hale)
Jerry Mackie slid through the front door of the Hill Bar and poked his head in far enough to see everyone inside. He saw ten, maybe fifteen people, tops. He scanned the room, trying to make eye contact with each one of them. For the most part, the patrons looked up from their beers, noticed him in his blue trooper coveralls and went back to what they’d been doing.
But one guy was different. This guy turned and, when he saw Mackie walk in, fixed his eyes on him. He looked away, then looked back, then looked away, then looked back again. His nervousness caught Mackie’s attention — he thought the guy seemed really shifty and “kind of hinky.”
Mackie wasn’t sure what was going on, but one thing was certain. This guy had “that look in his eye.” The effect was chilling, so chilling that Mackie could hardly describe it. But something told him this man was someone the troopers should talk to. “This is the guy,” he told himself. “And he fits the description.”
Thirty six years later, Jerry Mackie gets the same shivers through his body as he remembers that day in September 1982, when he slid into the Hill Bar not really expecting anything. Just the thought of it brings back the same to-the-bone shake in his marrow. Suddenly Jerry Mackie is once more face to face with someone who overwhelms him with suspicion. “I just knew it,” he says. “It gave me the chills. Still gives me the chills. The minute I saw him, I knew he was our guy.”
He remembers racing into the streets of Craig to find Capt. Kolivosky and Lt. McCoy. Remembers insisting that they immediately go to the Hill Bar and talk to this young man whom Mackie now considered a “person of interest.” His feelings were stronger than that coldly technical term. Mackie was convinced this was their suspect.
“Downtown” Craig in the 1980’s
The description Mackie was going on was, admittedly, not based on an artist’s composite drawing, the kind that’s made with the direct participation of witnesses. It instead depended on the words of witnesses. The recent words of witnesses. Their description of the suspect was a close fit to Jerry Mackie himself. Same age, similar build, almost identical height and weight. And now there was someone in his mom’s bar who fit that description to a “T.”
Copyright Leland E. Hale (2018). All rights reserved.
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