What Happened in Craig

Author’s Note

This is a work of nonfiction. While most of the dialogue in it is taken directly from court and police transcripts, there are multiple instances in which it has been reconstructed on the basis of the author’s interviews with relevant individuals. In addition, certain scenes have been dramatically recreated to more effectively portray the personalities involved in this story and the atmosphere surrounding the events upon which this book is based.

It should be emphasized that a police investigation and criminal trial produce conflicting versions of events. Where such conflict exists, the author has sought to provide the version which, in his view, is most credible.

Part One

The Investor in May 1982, with Mark Coulthurst at the bow. The Casino is behind and to the right of the Investor. (Courtesy of Doug McNair.)

Mark Coulthurst in May, 1982. (Courtesy of Doug McNair.)

Ruth Ann’s restaurant in Craig, Alaska, where the Coulthurst family ate their last supper. (Courtesy of Leland Hale.)

Alaska State Trooper composite sketches of the skiffman seen leaving the Investor in the days after the murders. (Courtesy of the Alaska State Troopers.)

John Peel in August, 1991. (Courtesy of the Bellingham Herald.)

Hill Bar in downtown Criag, Alaska. This bar was frequented by John Peel and the Libby 8 crew. (Courtesy of Leland Hale.)

1

Craig, Alaska

Tuesday, September 7, 1982

The CF/V Investor had lain at anchor for a day, enshrouded in the fog off Fish Egg Island. The weather lifted by mid-morning but still she lay there, bobbing gently in the shallow waters of Ben’s Cove. By late afternoon, she was on fire.

The smoke rising from her hull—thin and gray at first, becoming a thick black plume as the fire caught hold—was visible for miles. When the first mayday went out folks started scrambling: on shore, they rushed for anything that floated and had a motor; at sea, boats began to converge from all directions, closing in on a spot one-quarter mile south of Cole Island.

By the time the first boats arrived, the living quarters of the Investor were fully engulfed by the blaze; bright orange flames filled her wheelhouse, tongues of fire ripped out of her stateroom, out of her cabin, out of her head. A dense cloud swirled around the vessel, fed by the inferno that roared beneath it.

There’s no way we can get on the boat and accomplish anything, reasoned the skipper of the troller Casino, the first boat on the scene. The fire was so intense and so hot that he feared to take his boat closer than fifty feet. He had three full propane tanks on the stern of his boat and he didn’t want them to explode. With the tide starting to turn, he was also afraid of running aground. When a small skiff arrived a few minutes later, Casino skipper Bruce Anderson asked its operator to do what he couldn’t.

Circle the boat and look for survivors, he told him. The skiff made several loops around the purse seiner, but saw nothing except a few, unidentifiable objects floating in the water.¹

The fire, meanwhile, continued to spread. The flames in the wheelhouse began to melt the roof, the fire in the cabin blossomed toward the stem of the boat, creeping past the hatch and along the deck to the seine net. Within fifteen minutes, the entire back deck was ablaze. Lacking any way to fight the fire the boats stood by helpless.

While everyone else hesitated, Alaska State Trooper Bob Anderson rushed to the scene. At 4:20 p.m. that day, Ketchikan dispatch had relayed a call from the Coast Guard, telling him a boat was on fire outside Craig, seven miles from his office in Klawock. Beyond that, information was sketchy. As Anderson sped south on the gravel-paved Craig-Klawock highway, however, he gained firsthand information: what he saw was a large vessel, close by the northeastern tip of Fish Egg Island and totally consumed by flames. The newness of the boat, and the fact that it was the end of the season, told Anderson everything he needed to know. The boat’s owner probably hadn’t done well that season. The seiner was likely being torched for the insurance money.

In Craig, Anderson searched desperately for firefighting equipment. His first stop was the police station, but the Craig Police Department was newly formed and lacked a firefighting vessel. From the police station, Anderson rushed to the fire department and then to the Forest Service—but again he was out of luck: some of the pumps didn’t work, and the pumps that did work couldn’t be connected to the hoses he found. By themselves, neither the pumps nor the hoses were capable of putting out a book of matches, much less a fully involved vessel fire.

Rather than continuing to waste time in Craig, Anderson commandeered a 26-foot boat owned by the Alaska Fish and Wildlife Protection Service. He was headlong on his way to the fire scene, but didn’t get far. The boat’s batteries were dead; it wouldn’t start. Anderson sprinted to his personal boat, which, luckily, was moored nearby.

When Anderson arrived at the fire, a small flotilla was standing by. The day was overcast; winds were from the south at ten miles per hour; the seas were calm. The fire was raging out of control; flames had now overtaken the entire cabin, bridge, wheelhouse, and galley, as well as the seine net on the stern. Anderson quickly learned that firefighting efforts up to that time had been limited to the valiant efforts of one man, who had managed to unhook the boat’s anchor and tow it closer to shore. Anderson tried to convince a large fish-packing vessel to move alongside the boat and douse the flames with its wash-down pumps. The skipper refused. He was afraid to get too close.

Anderson was in an unenviable position: the situation was growing worse with each minute, but he couldn’t do anything. The fire was so relentless that the boat began to fall in on itself. The roof of the wheelhouse finally collapsed and the fiberglass walls of the cabin began to melt; the mast started to fold away from its base and, eventually, was torn from the deck by its own weight and fell into the water.

When the tug Andy Head steamed to the scene at quarter to six that evening, Trooper Anderson again asked for help. Although the tug had only one pump, it was better than nothing. Trooper Anderson talked her skipper into backing in as close to the Investor as they felt safe. In no time, she’d managed to put out the fire on the seine net. That accomplished, she turned her hose to the boat’s cabin—which proved considerably more difficult to extinguish. So difficult that the tug’s skipper called the Coast Guard and requested that firefighting pumps be airlifted to the scene.

In the meantime, several creative attempts were made to put out the fire. None were more creative than the attempt made by a tugboat named The Spruce, which tried to push the Investor on its side, roll it into the salt water and kill the flames. But her efforts only succeeded in pushing the Investor closer to shore, where she finally hit bottom. Nudged by the outgoing tide, the still burning vessel started to list on her starboard side.

Trooper Anderson had seen enough. He returned to Craig. Once there he called his boss, Sergeant John Glass, in Ketchikan. The Investor fire, he told him, was no accident. From witness descriptions, he knew the fire had spread quickly, had exploded with reckless fury, and a fire like that bore all the earmarks of arson. Sergeant Glass immediately agreed to send a trooper arson investigator to the scene. He couldn’t promise whether anyone would arrive before the next day.

On shore, Anderson also tried to learn what he could about the burning boat. The owner/operator of the Investor, he discovered, was Mark Coulthurst of Blaine, Washington; Coulthurst had been fishing out of Petersburg, Alaska, with his pregnant wife and two children, Johnny and Kimberly. Word was that Irene Coulthurst and the children had returned to Washington State so their daughter, Kimberly, could start school. The Coast Guard and the Craig police were both trying to confirm the whereabouts of the family. Anderson was also told that Craig police had located a power skiff parked at the cold storage dock and that it had been seen coming from the direction of the fire.

At 7:30 that evening, a Temsco Airlines helicopter arrived at the fire scene, bearing several firefighting pumps from the Coast Guard base in Ketchikan. As the pumps were offloaded onto the Andy Head, there was new hope of putting out the fire. Not long afterwards, Trooper Anderson received a radio call in Craig. The Andy Head had managed to subdue the fire. As they had brought it under control, however, they had found something suspicious. Something that might have been used to set the fire. Trooper Anderson agreed to return to the scene.

Back at Ben’s Cove, Anderson found the Investor reduced to a smoldering hull. The cabin and wheelhouse had completely collapsed and, because the boat was made of fiberglass, were layered on top of each other like a burnt sandwich. On top of that hulk, one of the firefighters had found a metal pail that looked like it could have been used to carry an accelerant. Anderson soon determined that the pail had other origins. On seine boats, a pail is often kept in the wheelhouse, where it stores the sponges and mops used to scrub down the decks. As the walls of the Investor’s upper deck caved in, Anderson reasoned, the pail had innocently found its way to the lower deck.

Trooper Anderson’s cursory inspection of the pail brought him to another conclusion: the fire, he decided, had cooled sufficiently to allow inspection. The trooper put on the heavy gloves and boots he had borrowed from a nearby seiner and clambered aboard the sagging vessel. Behind him were three volunteers. His watch read eight o’clock in the evening; fully four hours had passed since the fire began. This late in the year, the days had grown shorter in southeast Alaska, although a lingering dusk hung in the sky.

On board the Investor, the trooper and his helpers found themselves walking on a slippery, dangerous mess. The burned areas—now an ugly black mixture of charcoal and melted fiberglass—were slick from the water that had been used to fight the fire and spongy from the effects of the blaze. The boat itself was listing twenty degrees toward starboard, which made it difficult to move without falling. Each time they lifted a layer of fiberglass to investigate, the sudden blast of oxygen caused a flare-up. The trooper eventually burned a hole through his rubber boots. In the back of his mind was another worry: the risk of exploding fuel tanks; still, he thought, the fuel tanks surely would have gone by now if they were going to blow.

Anderson’s intent was to conduct a preliminary probe, to see what he could uncover before night overtook them. He knew a full investigation would have to wait until daylight and, besides, he wanted to leave the bulk of the investigation to the arson experts. One of the volunteers, however, had gone into an area where the galley door would have been. As he did so, something oozed up between a space in the fiberglass matting and other debris on the deck. The volunteer thought it looked like some warm gel-like substance like you would see the gelatin from like a cherry pie filling that you would get out of a can. The man quickly called his discovery to the trooper’s attention. Anderson knelt to take a closer look and decided it was a dog or deer carcass of some sort.

It isn’t very big, he thought. It looks like a deer laying on its side with the legs sticking straight out and totally unrecognizable, with just burnt tissue and some gut material hanging out. On closer examination, Anderson reached a different conclusion. He realized that he was looking at a human body—a human body that had been burned almost beyond recognition. Only seconds later, a second volunteer lifted another layer of fiberglass, just past the spot where the fishing boat’s stack had been. He discovered yet another body. Now everything had changed.

By law, Trooper Anderson could not remove either of the bodies without permission of the coroner, but he was loath to broadcast his macabre discovery over the airwaves. He radioed the Ketchikan coroner and communicated his request in the tersest language he could find. Found two, maybe more, he said. Permission to remove. Twenty minutes later, he got a call from the Coast Guard. Permission to proceed.

Anderson and two of the volunteers returned to the place where the second body was found. Immediately upon lifting that body they found another, directly beneath it; the two victims had been thrust against each other in a gruesome post-mortem dance that put the head of one at the feet of the other. Unlike the first body they had found, however, these two were not burned as badly and were recognizably human. The one on top was an adult male, large framed with short hair. A perforation in his cranium suggested a gunshot wound. The bottom body was also that of an adult, but with longer hair and a more rounded body. The form suggested it was a woman.

Anderson now turned his attention to the port side of the Investor, where the cabin wall had caved in. He thought he’d seen something while they were digging out the two bodies that were stacked together. Locked beneath a morass of twisted and bubbled fiberglass—in what was once the skipper’s stateroom—were the remains of what was either a baby or a very small child, very unrecognizable. Only with great difficulty did they manage to remove the remains. Not only had the wall fallen over, it had been pushed up, so that it formed a wedge around the young victim. With night fast approaching, Anderson called off the search for additional victims; the body count was now at four.

With some difficulty—the smaller bodies were fragile and pieces of tissue fell off when they were handled—Anderson and his associates placed the four bodies in body bags. From there, they were taken to the cannery dock at Columbia Ward Fisheries in Craig. A small crowd gathered to watch the proceedings.

The removal process was tedious. Because the tide was at its lowest ebb, the only way to take the bodies off the boat was to place them on pallet boards and lift them out with a crane. From there, the remains were lowered onto a cart, rolled into a warehouse and placed under lock and key. Dead tired, Trooper Anderson was ready to return home. The hour was close to midnight.

Before he could leave, however, Anderson was intercepted by a Craig policeman. The officer told him he had a witness, someone who had seen an individual coming from the fire scene in a power skiff, just after the fire was spotted. The witness also had seen the skiff operator tie up the skiff at the cold storage dock.

Can we set up an appointment in the morning? Trooper Anderson asked wearily.

He’s going back to college, the officer replied. He’s leaving on the first flight tomorrow.

Trooper Anderson made his way to the bunkhouse of the E.C. Phillips cold storage facility. The young man he met there said he’d been on his way to the fire when his boat ran out of gas. What he had witnessed still seemed strange to him. The fire had just been announced and it seemed like everyone else was headed out toward the fire, the cold storage employee told the trooper. Except this skiff. This skiff was headed in the opposite direction, toward the dock, and the guy in it seemed like he could care less about the fire.

Asked to describe the man, the witness said he had brown or blonde hair and was wearing a baseball hat. He thought the hat had an emblem on front, like an Alaska pipeline or California Fish and Game hat. He thought the guy was wearing glasses and guessed the skiffman’s age to be near his own, twenty or 21. He estimated his weight at 150 pounds, but couldn’t be sure because the skiffman was sitting down when he saw him. Still, he’d gotten a pretty good look, their boats having passed within ten yards of each other.

After the interview, Trooper Anderson went to the dock and looked at the skiff. He examined it briefly and determined that the rain—which had returned with a vengeance—made it impossible to fingerprint. He decided to leave it where it was; the hour was late and besides, even if he did seize it, he had no place to keep it. After his long day at Ben’s Cove, Anderson didn’t realize that he was staring at the Investor’s power skiff.² As far as he knew, the skiff was significant only because it had been seen coming from the fire. Anderson left the cold storage dock, called Sergeant Glass in Ketchikan, and briefed him on the day’s activities. After making sure that someone from the Craig police department was available to secure the crime scene, he went home.

On the drive back to Klawock, Anderson tried to pull everything together. He had expected a crime scene, but not this, not what he had found. All he could think was how bizarre it was: the sights, the smells, the devastation. How could he describe what it was like to find a baby’s body? The experience gnawed at him. Anderson had two kids of his own; he wanted to get home and hug them; he wanted to sleep next to his wife and disassociate himself from the Investor. This night—and many nights into the future—he would have nightmares about what he had seen.

2

Craig, Alaska

Two days earlier, Investor skipper Mark Coulthurst was at Ruth Ann’s, Craig’s finest restaurant, with his wife and children. After an intense month of near nonstop fishing, it was finally time to let loose a little. They had plenty of reasons to celebrate: it was Mark’s 28th birthday; the next day Irene and the kids were heading back to Washington State for the start of the new school year; the salmon fishing season was near at its end.

Though Mark enforced a no drinking rule on the fishing grounds, that night at Ruth Ann’s was different: they would have a round of drinks, a great meal, and maybe another round of drinks, or two. No matter that Mark had to borrow a $100 from another fisherman to pay their bill. He was good for it. They’d caught over 100,000 salmon that season; even at depressed prices, that was a lot of dough.

By most measures, though, Mark was an unlikely fisherman. He looked more like a high school shop teacher, with his thick thatch of dark hair and horn-rimmed glasses. In contrast to the Scandinavians and Alaska Natives who made up a big part of the Alaskan fishery, he did not come from a long line of professional fisher folk. His dad, Big John Coulthurst—while a larger than life personality—was a maintenance supervisor at the Whatcom County Water District in Washington State. Mark had come up the hard way, with hard work and pluck.

Even before he left high school, he restored a sunken eighteen-foot gillnetter and fished out of Bellingham Bay. After a while, he managed to save enough money to buy a $10,000 diesel engine; he wanted the engine because he wanted a bigger boat. He managed to get a loan and built a 36-foot gillnetter he called the St. Mark. Other boats followed, including The Kit, his first seine boat, in 1976. So did success.

One year, fishing for herring out of San Francisco, he caught $105,000 worth of fish in one week. After expenses, he cleared $95,000 and forged an immutable philosophy. Once, when his sister Laurie fished with him, she had the nerve to complain about the conditions.

Those fish stink, she told her brother.

That’s the smell of money, he replied.

Ever the entrepreneur, as Mark outgrew one boat, he looked for