Mark Dease Coulthurst was 28 when he and seven others were murdered and their vessel burned off Craig, Alaska. Coulthurst, the skipper of the 58-foot seiner Investor, had brought his crew and family into Craig at the end of the 1982 salmon season. The Investor tied up on September 5; by the morning of September 7 it lay at anchor near Fish Egg Island while other boats worked, and later was found ablaze. In the charred hull investigators recovered the bodies of Coulthurst; his pregnant wife, Irene, 28; their children Kimberly, 5, and John, 4; and four teenage deckhands, each shot before the fire.

Witnesses reported a young slight man seen in the Investor’s skiff moving away from the burning boat and noted suspicious gasoline purchases the morning the fire was observed. A former deckhand, John Kenneth Peel, was arrested in September 1984, tried twice (a 1986 deadlocked jury and a 1988 acquittal) and later received a civil settlement from the state; no other arrests have been announced and the killings remain officially unsolved. Does anyone have memories or information about the Investor’s arrival in Craig that Labor Day weekend in 1982?