McCoy and Kolivosky kept looking for witnesses. Eventually, they reasoned, they’d succeed. They found one of their new witnesses above the Craig gas station, and he told them he had seen a white male adult come in to request gas on the Monday before the fire. He said the man was carrying a red jerry jug, was possibly wearing a halibut jacket and had something on his head — probably a baseball cap.
They found another witness who claimed to have seen the Investor skiff on Tuesday at two o’clock, more than two hours before the fire. The skiff operator, he said, “was a middle-aged native man with medium height and stocky build.” The witness didn’t pay attention to which direction the skiffman went, didn’t see what color of clothes he had on, and didn’t know what his facial expressions were.
Trying to change their luck, Kolivosky and McCoy traveled to Hollis on Saturday, September 11th, the fourth day of the investigation. They had a photo line-up of the Investor crew that they’d scrambled to put together and they wanted to show it to Sue Domenowske and Paul Page. Already, they considered Jerome Keown a likely suspect, if only because he had been on the boat for only two weeks. Maybe commercial fishing had gotten to him. Maybe he had snapped under the pressure.
Jerome Keown, in fishing gear
From Ketchikan, William Keown — Jerome’s father — addressed the newsmedia. He told reporters his son was an honor student at Seattle University. That Jerome took LeRoy Flammang’s place and planned to return before school started on September 23rd. Keown noted that his son called home on the Sunday before the fire.
“He was happy to be up there,” his father said, adding that there was no indication of trouble. “The whole thing is bizarre,” he continued. “I can’t make any sense out of it.”
When Sue Domenowske saw the line-up, she pointed to photos one and four. Jerome Keown was photo number three. “Domenowske was unable to identify the suspect,” McCoy wrote in his report. Five minutes later, Paul Page was shown the same photo line-up. He pointed to photos one and three. “Paul Page stated that photograph number 1 and number 3 were similar to the person that he recalls,” McCoy wrote, “but was not positive.”
Curve balls. Nothing but curve balls. How did they square the Alaska Native seen in the skiff with the surfer dude description from other witnesses? And was the Jerome Keown tack anything more than a blind alley? After all, their two best witnesses couldn’t ID him. And his family thought it ridiculous. The trouble was, he was still missing. That damn boat fire. That goddamned boat fire.
Jerome Keown, high school yearbook (1981)
By mid-September of 1982, Jerome Keown was finally identified. His body was found on the stairs leading up to the galley of the Investor. He’d been shot at least once, in the arm. Troopers considered that a defensive injury, one he had suffered while holding his arm up to protect himself from the killer’s weapon.
Got it. Innocent. Totally innocent.
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 (2018). All rights reserved.
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