The decision from Anchorage came down on Sunday. The Criminal Investigation Bureau would handle the Investor murders. The reason seemed simple. This was an involved case that required the full-time contributions of experienced investigators. The scene investigation already proved the truth of that assertion.
And, from Anchorage at least, it looked like Captain Kolivosky badly wanted off this case. Within months, the Captain had another job. Well connected politically, when Alaska elected a new governor Kolivosky was appointed Commander of the State Troopers. He became the highest ranking trooper in the state.
The change in jurisdiction, meanwhile, meant that Sergeant Miller was now the chief investigator. And Sergeant Stogsdill was his assistant. Each had his area of specialization. Sort of.
CIB Investigator Chuck Miller
Miller was fifteen years a trooper and, like most officers, he’d been all over Alaska. In Fairbanks, he worked the road as a uniformed officer. In Nome, he worked the bush and was responsible for whatever came along: traffic, aircraft patrol, misdemeanors, felonies. He started with the CIB in January 1973. His specialty was homicide.
A robust-looking man with jet-black hair and a bushy mustache, Miller was known for his not always subtle sense of humor. At the office, he wore a baseball cap emblazoned with the emblem, “Death Feeds My Family.” Yet for all his apparent brashness, Miller was a family man, even if the way he expressed it was slightly unorthodox. And he’d seen it all. He’d investigated murders by professional hitmen. Investigated the contract killing of a psychopath by a motorcycle gang in Anchorage. Investigated numerous family beefs that turned bloody.
Sgt. Jim Stogsdill, AST
Sergeant Jim Stogsdill was, like Miller, a family man. He seemed easy-going, had a great sense of humor, but underneath the surface he was a driven, type-A personality. Like many people in law enforcement, he started out in the military. He came almost straight out of the Air Force, where he was in the armed forces police. His career with the troopers was already a decade long. In ten more years, he was eligible for retirement. But unlike Miller, his career had only recently focused on criminal investigations.
For most of his time as a trooper, Stogsdill — or “Stogs” as he was known to other troopers — was assigned to either patrol or administrative positions, including one stint as Corporal in charge of the unit that served arrest warrants. But in the fall of 1981, Stogsdill made sergeant and was promoted into the Criminal Investigation Bureau.
The troopers decided to make Jim Stogsdill an arson investigator. They sent him to a one-week arson investigation school in Chicago. He followed that up with two weeks of on-the-job training on the King County-Metro arson task force in Washington state.
The Investor fire was the first major arson for which he had primary responsibility. It was, literally, a baptism by 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.
Order “What Happened In Craig,” HERE and HERE. True crime from Epicenter Press about Alaska’s Worst Unsolved Mass Murder.