The 1980s mystery of how a killer vanished into thin air after murdering an entire family

Bystanders could only watch in horror as a fishing boat called the Investor was engulfed in flames on Tuesday, September 7, 1982 in Craig, Alaska. 

As the fire danced high into the sky, it became impossible for rescue crews to reach the 58-foot vessel.

When the inferno finally ran its course and Alaska State Troopers wereable to board the Investor, the team were met with a scene of devastation. 

The charred bodies of Mark Coulthurst, 28, his pregnant wife Irene, also 28, and their daughter Kimberly, five, were discovered. The couple’s young son John, four-years-old, was missing, presumed dead. The bodies of crew members Chris Heyman, 18, and 19-year-olds Mike Stewart, Jerome Keown and Dean Moon were also found by investigators.

However, the victims hadn’t burned to death, they’d been shot. The fire was an attempt to distract from the man-made massacre which had taken place on board the Investor. 

To date, no-one has ever been held responsible for the murders.

‘This was a fraught time in Alaska,’ writer Leland Hale tells Metro from his home in Seattle, Washington.

Describing Craig as ‘Alaska’s wild west’ during the fishing season, he adds: ‘There were murders happening up and down the state. The cops were busy. And of course, Alaska has always had a reputation for being this wild, “Last Frontier” type place.

‘With the Investor killings, there was a huge huge sense of claustrophobia. Imagine being on that boat. You’re trapped, you hear gunshots, you hear screaming, it’s dark. There’s chaos inside of an enclosed space and no means of escape. And Craig itself is claustrophobic, it’s a small village completely isolated from the mainland.’

Leland spent much of the 1990s researching the Investor massacre for his book ‘What Happened in Craig’. He travelled to the fishing village and spoke with eye-witnesses and locals. He also visited Mark Coulthurst’s parents in Washington and briefly worked as a cook on a boat in Valdez, to get a true sense of Alaskan life during the fishing season.

This latter journey echoed a decision made by Mark Coulthurst nearly a decade earlier. The 28-year-old had sailed to Craig a handful of days before the commercial fishing season began in 1982. The isolated village would double in size when fishermen came to town each summer and pub fights and violence weren’t uncommon during this period.

On September 6, the evening of the Investor massacre, Mark and his family had celebrated his birthday at a restaurant in Craig. They returned to the Investor, secured at North Cove docks, around 9.30pm. It is unclear when the gunman boarded the fishing vessel, but police said the shootings were carried out with  either a .22-caliber pistol or a rifle. 

The next morning, on September 7, the killer hastily moved the Investor from the docks to the waters off nearby Fish Egg Island. He planned to sink the boat and destroy all evidence. But the mighty boat refused to sink so the murderer returned to the scene once more, setting the vessel on fire before fleeing the scene.

With a killer on the loose and police stretched thin on the ground, Craig’s rumour mill started to churn.

‘The big speculation was that the killings had been carried out by some sort of drug-related gang who had an issue with someone on board,’ explains Leland. It wasn’t uncommon at the time for fishing boats to secretly carry illicit goods. 

But a killing spurred by drug gangs ‘never made sense’ to the author, who doubts Mark would have been caught up in such activity.

He continues: ‘We’ve all seen photos of mob killings, or murders carried out by the mafia, bodies would be displayed. They want to leave a warning. Gangs even hang bodies from bridges as a visible symbol to say “this could happen to you.”

‘But the Investor was taken out half-a-mile from Craig, to a bay by an island that was barely visible from town. The idea of a drug-related killing never made sense to me, it didn’t make sense to the cops, it didn’t make sense to the prosecutors.’

The Investor was worth $850,000 and seen as the ‘Cadillac’ of the fishing vessel world. But suggestions of a robbery gone wrong have also been disputed.

Mark and his family had been expected to leave Craig just a few days after the killings, as Kimberly was due to start pre-school. So no-one would question if the Investor sailed away. The killer could have escaped with the expensive boat, but chose not to.

A key detail for investigators came via multiple reports of a man with ‘stringy-brown hair’ near the scene of the murders. He wore a baseball cap, a red jacket and jeans as he sped towards the Phillips Cold Storage dock on a small assist vessel [known as a skiff] which had previously been attached to the Investor.

It was only possible to reach Craig by plane or boat, meaning a game of cat and mouse had began for police. They assumed this stringy-haired suspect was near; hiding and waiting for an opportune moment to flee the village. But the trail ran dry, and police received no further reports of the mysterious skiff operator.

‘The crime scene was complicated,’ Leland explains. ‘The fire on the Investor had destroyed a lot of potential evidence. A year after the murders took place and there were still eight, maybe even 10, people considered suspects. So, police created a matrix with three questions.

‘First; they were looking for someone who had been in town when the murders occurred.

‘Second; the person would have had to know Mark Coulthust or one of the deckhands as, more often than not, victims are known to their killers.

‘Finally, the man they were looking for had to be able to handle a skiff. These small boats aren’t huge, but they are powerful. The person operating the skiff on the day of the murders was highly experienced and knew what he was doing.

‘Police went through their matrix and ticked off the boxes for each suspect they had. They were left with one name, John Peel.’

Fisherman John Peel, who hailed from Bellingham, Washington, had worked for Mark on the Investor in the 1980 and 1981 fishing seasons. He was in Craig at the time of the murders, on a different boat for a different boss. 

In 1984, two years after the Investor massacre, police charged John Peel with the murder of Mark, his family and his crew. Four people claimed to have seen the 24-year-old driving the skiff from the Investor as she burned behind him. A further witness told police he spotted the deckhand buying two 2.5-gallon jugs of gasoline on the day of the fire.

Prosecutors claimed he held grievances over a past falling out with Mark, which could have caused him to seek revenge. 

John Peel – who wore a ski mask during initial court proceedings – maintained his innocence during the trial and said he wasn’t even awake when the murders took place, insisting he’d been in bed by 8pm because he was ‘stoned’. 

His first trial ended in a hung jury and a retrial, in 1988, ended in his acquittal. John Peel was awarded $900,000 (£708,500) after his lawyer filed a wrongful prosecution suit against the state.

In 2017, after years of silence, the former deckhand spoke to PEOPLE Magazine. ‘Somebody out there knows what happened. Somebody was responsible for this,’ he told the publication. ‘Somebody out there knows what happened, but I’m not going to waste any more of my life on it.’

Meanwhile, feeling justice hadn’t been served, the district attorney in John Peel’s case ensured everything from the trials – each shred of police evidence, each medical detail, each scrap of paper – was bundled together and preserved at the Alaska State Archive in Juneau. It was there where Leland compiled much of his research into the Investor massacre.

To this day, no-one has been found guilty for the Investor killings. In 2017, Tim DeSpain, spokesman for the Alaska State Troopers stated that ‘the case is closed’.

So, does Leland think the mystery will ever truly be solved?

The writer sighs, and pauses, before responding: ‘It was seen as unsolved in the eighties and nineties and has kept that moniker. 

‘Sometimes I confess that everything you need to know really is in What Happened in Craig. There are a lot of suspects mentioned in the book, a lot of potential “what-ifs.” The clues lead to certain places.

‘In my mind, I don’t know if it really is “unsolved.” But there will forever be a sense of “can anybody really be sure?”

Buy ‘What Happened in Craig’ by Leland Hale here or visit his blog here

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing Kirsten.Robertson@metro.co.uk 

Share your views in the comments below.