Finished with their first week of investigations, Kolivosky and McCoy headed to Klawock. They had a Saturday meeting to attend at Trooper Anderson’s house. Everyone would be there.
The trooper’s Saturday evening meeting brought everything together. All the previous meetings — too short because everyone was too busy — were forgotten. All the troopers working this case exchanged what they knew. Every single tidbit was dumped into the common pot and stirred. At the end of the day, a strategy for finding and arresting the perpetrator would emerge.
The troopers were there in force. Captain Kolivosky. Lieutenant McCoy. Sergeants Stogsdill, Miller and Meek. Trooper Anderson. They were joined by Ketchikan prosecuting attorney Mary Anne Henry. They had plenty to learn.
That first Saturday they already knew three bodies were positively identified: Mark Coulthurst, his wife Irene and their daughter Kimberly. From Kolivosky and McCoy, they now learned that 144 fishing boats were anchored in and around Craig during the weekend of the murders. The also learned that the Investor was rafted up next to two other boats on the northernmost finger float at North Cove. She docked on Sunday, September 5th. She left her moorage at North Cove in the early morning hours of Monday, September 6th.
Mark and Irene Coulthurst
The troopers also knew that when the Investor pulled away from North Cove, she left her tie lines behind. Equally revealing was this: all attempts to contact the Investor that Monday, and inform her skipper about the tie lines, were failures. By mid-morning Monday, moreover, the weather turned into a full-blown pea-souper. The Investor was invisible as she bobbed in Ben’s Cove.
By Tuesday the weather had cleared. But nobody saw any activity on board the vessel from the time it left the dock until the time it caught on fire.
Based on the autopsy results, meanwhile, the troopers knew the Coulthursts were dead before the fire started. None of the victims had carbon monoxide in their lungs, which would have been present had they been alive beforehand. And, judging from the blood alcohol tests they’d conducted, both of the adult victims were drunk when they were killed. The pathologist estimated, moreover, that they had only seven bodies. The conclusion was obvious. At least one of the Investor’s eight crewmembers was unaccounted for — and quite possibly a murderer.
Johnny and Kimberly Coulthurst
As for motives, robbery seemed unlikely, if only because the Investor was the third boat out and a robber would have to climb over two other boats just to get there and back. Nor did it seem like an execution — and not just because the victims hadn’t been lined up and shot in the back of the head.
Anyone who felt like he had to kill the kids along with the crew probably feared being identified by people he knew. No, these people were not murdered by a stranger.
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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