Alaska has attracted a specific brand of risk-taker since gold was discovered here in 1871. Daredevil fortune seekers arrived, drawn by the area’s allegedly limitless riches – miners, traders, trappers, and crab fisherman all responded to Alaska’s siren song.
Throughout history, Alaska has attracted a certain type of risk-taker. Serial killers have left their mark on the landscape, drawn in by its vastness, Wild West lawlessness, interminable winter nights, or all of the above.
I set my debut mystery/thriller Cold To The Touch in this location because of its distinct, stark beauty and propensity to house the darkest and most deadly of creatures.
Edward Krause, Alaska’s first documented serial killer, is accused of murdering at least ten men between 1912 and 1915, allegedly for their real estate holdings and bank accounts. His real name was Edward Klompke, a U.S. Army deserter. He was sentenced to death, but escaped two days before the execution. He was shot and killed by a homesteader in exchange for a $1,000 prize.
Klutuk, dubbed “The Mad Trapper of Bristol Bay,” was a Yupi’k trapper named after a minor tributary of the Nushagak River in western Alaska. From 1919 until 1931, he pursued trappers and prospectors in the wilderness between Cook Inlet and the Kuskokwim River. Fiercely territorial, he allegedly slaughtered twenty or more individuals who he saw as trespassing on his area. After a massive manhunt spanning several thousand square miles, a US Marshal discovered Klutuk’s remains in a cabin near the Mulchatna River.
In 1949, while stationed in Anchorage for the United States Army, Harvey Carignan assassinated 58-year-old Laura Showalter in Alaska Territory. Although Showalter was his sole Alaska victim, Carignan also killed two young women in Washington, one of whom responded to a “help wanted” ad he placed for his gas station, and two women in Minnesota. He died in prison in Minnesota.
Between 1979 and 1981, Thomas Richard Bunday was stationed at Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks. He murdered five girls and young women. Bunday was permitted to transfer to Sheppard Air Force Base in Texas due to the lack of tangible evidence against him in Alaska. He finally confessed in 1988, but committed suicide before Alaskan investigators could catch him.
Joshua Alan Wade claimed to have murdered his first victim on an Anchorage bike route when he was fourteen. He killed four more people, including his neighbor, a nurse practitioner. After forcing her to hand him her ATM and PIN, he shot her in the head and incinerated her body. He is currently serving a life term at a federal prison in Indiana.
James Dale Ritchie began killing in 2016, shooting a homeless woman and a male acquaintance. Twenty-six days later, he shot a young man, apparently for his bicycle, and rode away from the scene. A month later, he killed a homeless guy and a young environmental activist while out on a late-night bike ride. Ritchie was slain after a gunfight with Anchorage police.
Robert Christian Hansen was the most notorious of the Alaskan serial murders, nicknamed the “Butcher Baker” because he owned a bakery near Merrill Field, where he stored his jet. Between 1971 and 1983, he kidnapped, raped, and murdered at least seventeen Alaskan girls and women, many of them were exotic dancers or sex workers. Some he flew to a secluded place in his Piper Super Cub and hunted in the forest with a semi-automatic weapon.
When Hansen was captured, authorities discovered an aeronautical map with thirty-seven “x” marks on it, prompting officials to assume he was responsible for considerably more deaths than he admitted. Hansen was only legally charged with the murders of four people; only “Eklutna Annie” has yet to be recognized. He died from natural causes in 2014, while receiving a life sentence.
Long-haul truck driver John Joseph Fautenberry admitted to killing six individuals in five states, including Jefferson Diffee, a miner at the Greens Creek silver mine near Juneau. He was extradited to Ohio after pleading guilty to the murder of Diffee and was sentenced to 99 years in prison in Alaska. He was condemned to death for previously murdering and robbing Joseph Daron, Jr., a Good Samaritan who stopped to provide him a lift. Fautenberry was executed by lethal injection in 2009.
Although Israel Keyes is suspected of committing several murders between 2001 and 2012, he has only named three victims by name: William and Lorraine Currier of Essex, Vermont, and Samantha Koenig, an Anchorage barista. After six years on the Makah Reservation, Keyes relocated to Alaska in 2007 and launched a contracting firm there. During one of his many journeys to the Lower 48, he painstakingly followed William and Lorraine Currier.
Two years before the Curriers were killed, Keyes hid a five-gallon barrel with firearms, ammo, a silencer, zip ties, and duct tape near their home. He tortured and murdered the Curriers, a middle-aged couple he had never seen before, using the items of this “murder kit” and left them to fester in an abandoned farmhouse. The Curriers’ remains were never discovered.
Samantha Koenig, 18, was a barista at Common Grounds Coffee Stand when Keyes kidnapped her at gunpoint on February 1, 2012. He escorted her to a shed just a few feet from his house, where he sexually raped and killed her. Then he embarked on a two-week voyage in the Gulf of Mexico. When he returned, he added cosmetics to Koenig’s face, stitched her eyes open with fishing thread, and shot her holding a four-day-old issue of the Anchorage Daily News to make her appear alive. He placed a ransom note demanding $30,000 in a local park before dismembering and disposing of Koenig’s body in Matanuska Lake, north of Anchorage. Officials monitored Keyes’ use of the dead woman’s ATM card as he traveled across the southwestern US. He was eventually apprehended in Texas and extradited to Alaska. He died by suicide on December 2, 2012.
Keyes was born in Utah to Mormon parents. Fautenberry hailed from Connecticut, Bunday from Tennessee, and Hansen from Iowa. Alaska was the farthest these killers could go, both literally and metaphorically. Alaska has 365 million acres, only 160,000 of which have been populated by humans. Only 1580 sworn law enforcement officials monitor this landmass, which is twice the size of Texas (2024 World Population Review). Perhaps these killers thought their heinous deeds would go unnoticed or unpunished in this lightly policed wilderness.
Victims are also lost here, never to be found, as were many of Hansen and Keyes’ casualties. Bodies disintegrate undisturbed in pristine waters or are spread by animals amidst the darkness of Alaska’s long evenings.
