John Dease Coulthurst was 4 when he was killed on the family’s new 58-foot salmon seiner, the Investor, during Labor Day weekend 1982 in Craig, Alaska. The boat’s skipper, Mark Coulthurst, his pregnant wife Irene, their daughter Kimberly, 5, John, and four teenage deckhands were found after an intense fire; autopsies later indicated gunshot wounds, likely from a .22-caliber weapon, as the cause of death rather than smoke.

Witnesses described the Investor slipping away at first light with a lone figure at the wheel and a young man in the skiff moving through the fog, then burning off Fish Egg Island until the hull later sank while under tow, destroying more physical evidence. Authorities focused on a former deckhand; John Kenneth Peel was arrested in 1984, tried twice, and in 1988 was acquitted on eight counts of murder and arson.

Who remembers that foggy dawn or saw the Investor moving in the harbor that morning?