On September 7, 1982, the fishing boat “Investor” was found burning off the coast of Craig, Alaska. Both the boat’s passengers and crew were found to have been killed. This was a sad day for the small town in Alaska and it would bring the town to national news…
I know the starting sentence was a little vague, so let’s understand more about the event.
City of Craig shocked by the murders
The “Investor” was the name of the boat where the massacre happened. The 58-foot fishing boat was anchored in a cove off the coast of Craig, when smoke started to rise from the hull. The smoke was so bad that there were no way people could get out of the boat. Not a single person survived the fire.
It took the fire department over 4 hours to get the fire under control so they could get in the scene and analyze the damage. But by then… everyone on board was already dead. The plot twist of this story happens when after analyzing the bodies, it came to the authorities’ attention that all the bodies found were already dead before the fire started. The body count is still a mystery because the damaged parts of the bodies found after the fire were tough to recognize. It could’ve been much more than 8… According to the investigation, the fire was intentional.
After this horrible event, the police started talking to witnesses and the answers were pretty confusing but would lead the investigation to a certain direction. Some said they saw an unknown man in his early 20s steering the skiff away from the boat. Some said that he looked a lot like someone Coulthurst had hired in the past — John Peel, 23. Peel had been with Coulthurst since 1980, the first years he was working on fishing boats.
John Peel was a prime suspect
But in 1982, he was crew on a different ship. Peel had also dated Coulthurst’s sister in the past, but no physical evidence tied him to the crime. The police, however, kept pushing towards him because he was acting suspiciously. Things got worse for Peel when he failed a polygraph test, and acquaintances said that Coulthurst had fired him for alleged drinking and drug abuse. Now remember this information as we go through how this story unfolds.
Mark Coulthurst, his pregnant wife, two small children, and four teenage crew members aboard were the known/identified victims of this murder. John Peel became the only suspect. A year and a half after the murders, Peel was formally interviewed by the troopers. Lacking hard evidence, they were hoping for a confession — which they did not get. Several months later, still lacking a “smoking gun,” Peel was finally arrested.
This case was never considered as solved because even though John Peel was the primary and only suspect, the lack of hard evidence made it harder for the police to literally close the case. It is common knowledge that there was enough evidence to connect the dots, but it lacked evidence to close the case.
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