Co-conspirator Richard Hunt’s first letter to Judge Schulz arrived in late January 1986, while the judge was in the midst of jury selection. Hunt wrote in a jailhouse scrawl that tumbled across a page filled with misspelled words. He begged Judge Schulz to believe him.
Ed. “Berry Yours” is Barry Ewers
There is a lot to unpack here, but let’s give it a try. We’ll start with (some of) Hunt’s many claims.
- Line Three: “That little girl is alive,” refers to Kimberly Coulthurst, whose body was among the first identified.
- Lines Five, Six: “I saw [them] merder and bery that little boy… I no where he is berryed.” Johnny Peel was, indeed, missing — so this was a tantalizing tidbit, if true.
- Lines Seven, Eight: “The merder weapon [was a] “357” mag.” The autopsy and FBI reports revealed that the Coulthursts were murdered with a .22 rifle.
- Line Nine: “There was a baseball hat in it.” Multiple witnesses testified that the skiff operator coming from the Investor fire was wearing a baseball cap.
- Lines Seventeen, Eighteen: “The cops have… the tin box, the hat, the T-bolt .22.” The “tin box” is a reference to the box the skiff operator was seen carrying off the Investor skiff on the day of the fire.
- Line Nineteen: “That gun [T-bolt .22] was used to kill little Mark.” Now Hunt introduces a second murder weapon. He also uses the wrong name for the Coulthurst’s son. His was name was Johnny, not “little Mark.”
- Line Twenty-One: “I’ll plea guilty for little Kimberly’s life.” So… is Kimberly Coulhurst alive… or dead? It’s hard to tell from this missive.
Mary Anne Henry unpacked this a little more succinctly. Here’s what she told reporters at the time:
“It was obvious that [Barry] Ewers was feeding them information, that he had made up the story, and that Teal and Hunt were embellishing it from news reports.”
Excerpts from the unpublished original manuscript, “Sailor Take Warning,” by Leland E. Hale. That manuscript, started in 1992 and based on court records from the Alaska State Archive, served as the basis for “What Happened in Craig.”
Copyright Leland E. Hale (2019). All rights reserved.
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