6 killed in Alaska in shooting spree

The End of the Road

By Kevin Coughlin

Influx.uoregon.edu

On March 1, 1983, Louis Hastings attempted to murder McCarthy, Alaska. By 2 P.M. that day, six of McCarthy’s dozen or so year-round residents lied dead while two more were wounded--one cowered outside a greenhouse, tightly clutching her upper right arm to stem the flow of blood, while stifling the sound of her panicked breathing; the other had been flown by a neighbor to Glennallen, a town one hundred miles northwest and home of the nearest hospital, to receive treatment for gunshot wounds to his face and head.

The land surrounding McCarthy and Kennicott is severe and unforgiving. Temperatures can fluctuate from 50 degrees below zero in winter to 90 degrees in the summer. Annual snowfall averages 52 inches. Almost 230 miles east of Anchorage, McCarthy and Kennicott are located in the middle of the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve. Established in December of 1980, Wrangell-St. Elias encompasses an area roughly the size of West Virginia and six times the size of Yellowstone. Four major mountain ranges converge in the park and nine of the sixteen tallest peaks in the U.S. rising from within the park’s boundaries. Unlike most national parks, the land along the McCarthy Road and along the road from McCarthy to Kennicott is a checkerboard of private and public lands. More than a million acres within the park’s boundaries are still privately owned.

Hastings had worked as a computer programmer at Stanford University in the late 1970s. He and his wife left California for Alaska in 1980, initially moving into a duplex in east Anchorage, where he operated a computer services company out of their home. In the summer of 1982, about eight months before the murders, Hastings and his wife bought a vacation home in Kennicott. By the winter of 1982, both Hastings’s business and his marriage were failing. He began to spend more and more time alone at the Kennicott cabin, while his wife remained in Anchorage. In Kennicott, Hastings began refining an attack he had been planning for nearly a year.

Hastings had fled the overdevelopment of California for the wilderness of Alaska. Instead he found the state in the throes of development, largely due to the opening of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline, which winds from Prudhoe Bay south to the port of Valdez on Prince William Sound. The eight hundred mile pipeline cost $8 billion to build, renewed the natural resource economy in Alaska, and now is responsible for transporting 25 percent of the total U.S. oil production.

When he lived in California, Hastings had once volunteered to clean oil-soaked birds following an offshore oil spill. Shortly after he arrived in Alaska, he began to target the pipeline. According to one psychiatric report, Hastings "was disturbed by the population growth and influx of money into the state and determined that the best way to interrupt this was to destroy the pipeline and thus cut off Alaska’s wealth and consequent growth." Destruction of the pipeline would be the end to his McCarthy rampage.

It would begin when the weekly mail plane arrived. Hastings would kill anyone who showed up at the Heglands’ place--and most of McCarthy’s residents usually did. With most of the residents eliminated, Hastings would hijack the mail plane and kill the pilot. He then planned to land the plane near the pipeline at a pump station about eighty miles west of McCarthy and rig the plane to take off again with no one at the controls. At that point, Hastings would commandeer a fuel truck and ram the pipeline while shooting at it. He theorized that the cold winter weather would congeal the oil in the broken pipeline, thus minimizing environmentally damaging spillage while disrupting the oil flow. The fuel truck would burst into flames, charring his body beyond recognition.

Hastings thought that because the entire town would be dead and his body would be unrecognizable, he could destroy the pipeline and commit suicide without revealing to his family that he had been a murderer and a suicide. Officials would believe he had died, along with the rest of Kennicott and McCarthy, at the hands of an unknown killer.

In a 1997 interview, the prosecutor in the Hastings case described Hastings as "a very bright guy, a nerdy academic whose wig is on probably a little too tight...There are a lot of parallels to this guy [admitted Unabomber Theodore] Kaczynski."

"If you really distill it down...Mr. Hastings thought he was going to be the savior of the Alaska wilderness," Hastings’s public defender said at Hastings’s psychiatric hearings.

Although Kennicott’s 1983 population was in single figures, about two dozen people lived year-round within a 50-mile radius of neighboring McCarthy. Maxine Edwards, fifty-two, and her husband Jim, also fifty-two, homesteaded in a house they built on the west side of the Kennicott River in 1953. Called "Maxine the Diligent" by a friend, Edwards was described in 1983 as "a hard-working woman who could operate a bulldozer by afternoon and serve dinner on linen and crystal at night."

Tim, thirty-eight, and Amy Nash, twenty-five, had been married Outside, the Alaskan term for anywhere outside of Alaska, during Christmas of 1982 and returned to Tim’s nearly completed log cabin in McCarthy on Valentine’s Day of 1983--only two weeks before March 1. A friend in McCarthy gave them a quarter of a moose and a mincemeat pie with a heart carved in it to celebrate the occasion. Tim, who had lived in McCarthy for seven years, worked construction in Glennallen and, following a divorce, had been living alone in the cabin he had been building with hand tools. He met Amy in the summer of 1982 when Amy ventured to McCarthy as a tourist.

Since 1966, Harley King, sixty-one, and his wife Jo had lived on a homestead fifteen miles west of McCarthy off McCarthy Road. Prior to his retirement, Harley King served as a commercial fisherman out of Cordova, and as a hunting guide. In the 1950s he hunted wolves in a predator-control program alongside another guide, Jay Hammond, who later became governor of Alaska.

On the morning of March 1, 1983, Harley King gave Donna Byram, thirty-two, a ride on his snowmobile, known as a "snowmachine" in Alaska, to the McCarthy airstrip. Byram, who lived off McCarthy Road between the Kings and McCarthy, was planning to fly out on the mail plane. Chris Richards, twenty-nine, who worked summer construction and collected unemployment insurance and food stamps during the winter, was preparing his breakfast using no modern appliances. In 1983, McCarthy had no running water, no telephones, and no electricity except for that produced by individual generators.

McCarthy is not a place where someone stumbles into residency. These pioneers made conscious decisions to live in isolation and under spartan conditions. Yet, despite their fierce independence and self-reliance, the citizens of McCarthy formed close bonds.

And on Tuesdays, these far-flung neighbors would gather at the Heglands’ home to socialize and wait for the weekly plane that delivered their mail. Tuesdays were weekly events, and often the only chance neighbors got to see each other. March 1, 1983, fell on a Tuesday.

He scrambled three-quarters of a mile up a steep hill to a neighbor’s unoccupied cabin. Hastings fired several shots at the fleeing Richards, nicking his right arm. At the cabin, Richards got boots, a parka, and snowshoes. From there he stumbled about one-tenth of a mile southwest to the newlywed Nashes’ cabin, which was situated on the trail connecting Kennicott to McCarthy. At the cabin, as the Nashes attended to his wounds, Richards told them what had happened. The Nashes said that they had seen Hastings heading towards McCarthy twenty minutes earlier. Richards then insisted that they arm themselves and go to the runway to warn the others who were sure to be congregating there for the mail plane.

The Nashes rode a snowmachine, pulling Richards behind in a sled, to the airstrip. At the north end of the airstrip, they met Gary Green, a local pilot and guide who was cleaning snow off one of his planes. Green said that he too had seen Hastings about twenty minutes earlier, heading toward the Heglands’. The Nashes and Green decided that Tim Nash would go check on the Heglands while Green warmed up his plane to fly Richards to Glennallen, about a forty-minute flight away.

After warming up his engine, Green taxied to the end of the runway to load Richards into his plane. Amy Nash then noticed her husband running down the strip approaching them. Green got out of the plane and met Tim Nash on the runway. Tim told Green he had just been to the Heglands’.

In the meantime, Hastings had backtracked toward the airstrip along a dog-sled trail. The trail snaked through dense brush behind a large mound of plowed snow across the runway from the Nashes. Hastings crawled atop the mound and, after Green took off, fired at least ten rounds at the Nashes two hundred fifty yards away. The Nashes fell. Hastings walked to within fifty feet of their prone bodies and fired another two shots. He continued to approach the Nashes and fired two more shots from close range into their heads.

Hastings then dragged the Nashes to the top of the snow bank opposite his sniping location to hide them in deeper snow. At about that time, Harley King and Donna Byram arrived at the north end of the airstrip on King’s snowmachine. Byram saw Hastings walking over the snow bank on the west side of the airstrip and then saw blood in the snow on the east side. She wondered who would be butchering animals on the runway. As they drew abreast of the Nashes’ bodies, Hastings started firing at them. Byram, who was standing on a sled that trailed the snowmachine, saw bullets hit King and the snowmachine. One bullet hit Byram in her upper right arm. King accelerated the snowmachine as more bullets hit it. Traveling south, away from Hastings, King lost control of the snowmachine. His leg had been broken by one of Hastings’s shots. The snowmachine threw King and Byram to the runway near the path that led from the airstrip to the Heglands.

As Byram attempted to load King back on the snowmachine, Hastings approached from one hundred yards away. Byram froze. King told Byram that he couldn’t move and that she should save herself. Byram hurried toward the Heglands. As she entered the spruce woods, she heard Hastings shoot King twice.When Byram got to the Heglands, she noticed that the door had been kicked in. She was afraid to enter, so she hid outside the Heglands’ greenhouse. After killing King, Hastings began to look for Byram. He approached the Heglands’ house, calling out, "One not dead. One not dead." Byram cowered outside the nearby greenhouse, tightly gripping her injured arm. All she heard was Hastings’s bootsteps on the Heglands’ porch and the wind whipping the Visqueen sides of the greenhouse.

Hastings abruptly ended his search for Byram and sped off on the Nashes’ snowmachine. His plan was starting to unravel. Hastings thought the police would respond in a fixed-wing aircraft and that, if he got away from the airstrip, he would be safe. However, the first state troopers to respond left Glennallen in an unmarked helicopter. They saw Hastings heading west on snow-covered McCarthy Road. When the troopers landed, Hastings waved and offered no resistance. He said that he was Chris Richards and that Lou Hastings had "gone berserk" and was "shooting up McCarthy." The troopers knew Richards was already in Glenallen receiving treatment for his wounds. They also had a description of Hastings. Based on the fact that Richards was already in Glennallen receiving treatment for his wounds and based on the description of Hastings that Richards and Green had given them, the troopers arrested Hastings.

They then flew on to McCarthy to search for survivors. At that point Hastings told the troopers: "I’m your man." Outside the greenhouse, the police found Byram. She shared the forty-minute helicopter ride to Glennallen with the police and Hastings. Inside the Heglands’ house the police found Les and Flo Hegland and Maxine Edwards stacked in the bedroom "like cord wood," according to one trooper. They also found several spent cartridges in the kitchen and in the back porch areas. A bloody, fur-covered silencer sat on the nightstand next to the bodies.

On March 15, a resident who was out of town when the murders occurred filled out a police report. In part it read: "...in the winter my exposure to Hastings was limited to mail days, when most everyone got together, and at the home of Chris Richards, where the three of us would play cards and talk. My general impression from these meetings was that he was quiet and reserved, not going out of his way to socialize and seemed to want to be left alone for the most part. Talking about science and technology, the world situation, the future of Kennicott, I felt he was certainly intelligent and fairly knowledgeable on these topics but disillusioned and down on society in general. He seemed not well prepared in skills or supplies to live out in the Kennicott area and it seemed a bit odd to come and go as he did to and from Anchorage. In general, people are accepted in spite of any differences, by the others in the McCarthy-Kennicott area, and a live and let live attitude seems to prevail, so much of what I mentioned here did not seem unlike things that could be noticed in others living out here."

Jim Miller had left McCarthy a few weeks before the murders. He too first heard about the murders on the radio, while he was driving to work.

"It was a ... I kinda figured it might’ve happened," Miller says. "I dunno. If anybody was going to do it, I figured it might’ve been [Hastings], bein’ a loner anyway. But, at first, it was kind of a shock. ... I suspected three or four different people, but, ..." Miller doesn’t elaborate either.

Given the fact that Hastings wanted to stem Alaskan development, his McCarthy target also seemed to surprise both investigators and townspeople. But, clouded by his depression and urged on by his suicidal tendencies, Hastings lacked clarity and patience. He failed to truly see McCarthy and Alaska and acted on these misconceptions.

If Hastings had been paying attention, he would have seen the irony in killing a town where the residents knew each other by their boot tracks, a town that existed with no electricity, running water, or telephones, to protest what he perceived to be an overindustrialization of Alaska.

"In the name of Alaska, he destroyed part of Alaska and the Alaskan life," Hastings’s prosecutor said in a 1983 newspaper article, calling McCarthy "a place where the spirit of Alaska lives on. The irony is that he comes up from overpopulated California, moves into the midst of such beauty, and then in order to protect the beauty, he singlehandedly wipes out a whole town."

"A nobody came in here and wiped out the pillars of one of the few self-sufficient communities in Alaska," Bonnie Morris said in 1983 as she stood near the body bags of her neighbors. "These people lying around here were not your average people...These are the people who inspired the rest of us when we came here to build a sane, healthy life."

Now, fifteen years later, as McCarthy struggles to control a burgeoning tourist industry, old-time residents still grapple with the effects of the murders. "This ain’t Chicago," Chris Richards says on an August morning in 1997. Richards sits at a picnic table on the porch of McCarthy’s pizza place. "It’s not New York. We’re not anonymous. Even the [neighbors] I don’t necessarily get along with all the time, they’re precious to me. Here, it was a major, devastating impact. If somebody killed fifty percent of New York or Chicago, Christ, they’d declare nuclear war over that. I mean it would mean the end of the world. And the equivalent happened here. It wiped out our elders, or most of ’em. It wiped out half the community"--a community that now finds itself changing despite, or perhaps because of, its remoteness. And old friendships are being tested by new developments.

Al Gagnon joins Jim Miller, owner of the pizza place, and Richards. At sixty-one, Gagnon has spent thirty-three years in the McCarthy area and is one of the few remaining town elders from 1983. "I’m out here at the end of the trail because I’m an outlaw," Gagnon says.

"Al talks about everything--water, sewer, putting in electricity," Miller says with a knowing grin. "Al’s always got forty scams goin’ at once." Gagnon’s latest idea is to drill for "commercial water" on his property in Kennicott. He plans to offer running water and a septic system to Kennicott’s growing number of residents and businesses--including Richards’s home and a site where Miller hopes to move his pizza place.

Miller and Gagnon haggle over what Gagnon will charge for this service. Miller half-jokingly threatens to throw an "outhouse party." Miller’s and Gagnon’s Kennicott properties abut. One corner of Miller’s land falls within a two-hundred-foot radius of Gagnon’s proposed well. Legally, you can’t drill a well within two hundred feet of an "established outhouse." If Gagnon’s price remains unreasonable, Miller will dig an outhouse and invite people over to "establish it." Miller and Gagnon will amicably work out their differences--they always have.

Gagnon points to McCarthy’s natural boundaries and its weather as natural means of security. "The river, in the summertime, keeps you honest," he says. "The snow, in the wintertime, keeps you honest because you can be tracked."

"This is a country where there’s no ‘ifs’ or ‘maybes,’" Gagnon adds. "It’s ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ And there’s no 911 and mom isn’t here and tears don’t do any good. You’re on your own."

"No, we don’t call 911," Richards says. "We call our neighbors...Anybody starts shooting around here, we’re gonna take out the people we don’t know first. We’ll figure out what your problem is later."

Richards has told his story of the murders dozens of times. He considers it therapeutic. He says that, as the years of telling it have slipped by, it becomes easier to tell. He no longer grits his teeth or feels the adrenaline rush. He has regaled dozens of voyeuristic tourists, strangers who look for the scars and ask what it’s like getting shot in the face by your nearest neighbor in a ghost town.

But who Hastings killed, not how many, still pains Richards, who now flies a skull and crossbones outside his cabin. As he recounts his near-death struggle, he maintains his composure and sense of humor. But he breaks down when he thinks of those who were murdered, particularly the Heglands.

"I’ve got nothing but total respect for them," says Richards, his eyes watery. "They’re old-timers. They were all here before I even thought of coming here. They had been there, done that, had a successful homestead, and raised healthy kids. All I could say is good stuff about them. I mean they were the original item as far as people living back here. They were the original pirates, even if they didn’t consider themselves that. None of those people ever had a harsh word to say to me. They were good people. They lived a good life. Shit, we can’t afford to waste ‘em--too precious. [Hastings] got rid of a whole bunch of ‘em all at once right there. And I would think a lot of people remember them and respect them. They were the good people...

That took a major chunk out of this place. It changed the way it will be, no doubt, forever."

Not only did Hastings kill a large portion of the town elders, but he nearly killed the most important day in McCarthy--mail day.

Every Tuesday, the Heglands’ place was where distant neighbors congregated, shared news from Outside, and exchanged gossip over tea and coffee. "See, Tuesday is mail plane day," a trooper who helped arrest Hastings said in a 1997 interview. "You can have Easter, and you can have Thanksgiving, you can have Christmas, but it’s not as important as Tuesday. Everybody meets at the Heglands’ house to visit and get the mail. Mail plane day, I mean you live for that. It’s correspondence. I check my mail box every day. They got [mail] once a week...and made contact."

People in McCarthy still conversationally refer to mail day simply as "mail," like it’s a place or an event. They still say, "I’m going to mail. Do you have anything going out that you want me to take?" But mail is no longer the event that it was when the Heglands hosted it. The townspeople now gather on the gravel airstrip outside a small mail shack. Since the shack is a simple wooden structure about ten feet by ten feet, neighbors now quickly sort the mail, then mill about on the airstrip. In the summer, some work their way down to McCarthy, a mile away, to congregate at Miller’s pizza place.

From Miller’s porch, Richards recalls how it used to be. "We’d sit around, have tea and cookies. It was, you know, the big social event of the week. And everybody from miles around that could get there would usually get there and swap bullshit and get their mail and leave. It was a good time. I miss it. It’s not the same anymore, not the same at all ..."

The survivors of Hastings’s rampage continue to be nagged by hindsight.

Almost all of them can remember something that they now feel should have clued them in to Hastings’s murderous intentions.

A few years later, a couple of young fundamentalist Christians had temporarily moved to McCarthy and were hoping to make their stay permanent. Green engaged one in religious debate. "I saw the same look," Green says, "the same lip curl, and he walked away."

Green reported this to the proprietor of the McCarthy Lodge who had been helping the two men get started. When he heard Green’s story, he said, "OK, those guys are out of here. No support, no land."

Chris Richards carried a handgun around in his back pocket for eight years after the murders. The only time he didn’t have it on him was when he slept. "It wasn’t like I was afraid for myself," Richards says. "It was, more or less, I owe this to my neighbors. I can’t lose any more of my friends and neighbors, even the ones that I don’t like. They’re my neighbors. Excuse me, I don’t need any other assholes comin’ around and shootin’ ‘em. They’re precious to me. I think of ‘em more as a big tribe of people. Most of us live here because we love this place and we have that much in common."

The old trams became the natural focus. Their cables sagged dangerously close to the Kennicott River and they were difficult to use. Locals had begun to plan for new trams prior to the murders, because they feared the state would build an automotive bridge that would threaten McCarthy’s isolation.

At that time Loy Green said, "If you could drive to McCarthy, it wouldn’t be here."

After Hastings’s murders, however, the trams took on a new meaning, and a heightened sense of urgency. The community got together and secured $90,000 from the state. Residents cut logs for support towers and salvaged unused cable from the mines. Because of their lives on the Alaskan frontier, all were handy with tools. Jim Edwards, Maxine’s widower, designed the tram cars. A state-hired foreman quit, because no one would follow his orders. Within two summer months, the new trams were completed.

"We felt like a community that had accomplished something and was together," Green says. "That was a healing catharsis. You bet it was."

But the new trams helped slowly increase tourist traffic. Then, in 1997, the state built a pair of multi-million-dollar footbridges in preparation for a surge in tourism. In the last decade, several businesses have opened — Miller’s pizza place, two air services, two guide services, a coffee shop, and an upscale lodge to name a few. With this increased development, political and business bickering has increased among long-time neighbors. Louis Hastings, who is currently serving a 594-year sentence at the federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, wouldn’t recognize the town he tried to kill en route to stalling Alaskan development. While local differences seem to occur more often than in 1983, none resonate like the murders. Old-timers simply remind themselves of March 1, 1983, for a dose of perspective.