Miller and Stogsdill knew that nearly everyone they wanted to talk to had left Craig. The salmon season had come to an end. Nobody had a reason to stick around. They were starting over. Their first trip took them to Petersburg, Alaska, about 90 miles northeast of Craig.
Petersburg, Alaska (Sons of Norway Hall)
In Petersburg, the two investigators talked to three fishermen whose boats were rafted up next to the Investor in Craig. One of them handed over the Investor tie-lines, which had been left behind on his boat. Those tie-lines would ultimately be sent to the FBI to be fingerprinted.
The two fishermen tied up closest to the Investor told similar stories. Because it was the end of the season, they were intoxicated on the night of the murders. Each of them had awakened early the next morning, at about 6:00 a.m., sick or hungover or both. They had seen a solitary figure on the Investor as it drifted away from the dock, then take off under its own power.
At about 6 a.m., crewman Dale Rose of the Decade “weaves out on deck to throw up,” Miller says. “From the haze of his illness, he looks up and sees the Investor drifting out.
“He sees a guy in the wheelhouse. He waves. The guy waves back. Rose does his business and goes back inside.”
A few minutes before or after Rose, the Decade skipper, Clyde Curry, also comes up on deck. He sees a man on the deck of the Investor. Curry and Rose aren’t feeling too well. They don’t recognize the man they see but assume he is one of the Investor crew.
A little while later, Rose has to make a second trip to the railing. His sighting is the last anyone sees of the Investor for 36 hours. She is underway, headed north. […]
At 9 a.m., “Decade skipper Clyde Curry and his crew come to life and find the lines from the Investor still tied to their boat,” Miller says. The three lines are worth about $20 each. The Decade crew finds the abandoned lines very unusual, not at all Mark Coulthurst’s style.
“I wondered if we made too much noise last night and they moved just to get away,” Curry tells police.
Sheila Toomey, Alaska Fisherman’s Journal, October 1983
None of the Petersburg fishermen could physically describe who they’d seen. Of the three, only one had additional details.
Petersburg, AK (fish dock)
On the Sunday night before the murders, Mark Coulthurst asked one of the men to give him $100 in exchange for a check. The man generously complied because, he said, he trusted Mark Coulthurst. And on Monday afternoon at 1:30 p.m., this same man spotted the Investor skiff tied up at the cold storage dock.
Miller and Stogsdill felt like they had just visited the Twilight Zone. They were starting over, but had learned more than seemed obvious. For all his success, Mark Coulthurst didn’t have a lousy hundred bucks for his own birthday dinner.
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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