New Book, New Perspective

Well, maybe it isn't such a new book having been published in 06, and the subject is over 25 years old.

I'm speaking of "Angels to Ashes", the Largest Unsolved Mass Murder in Alaska History. The Author is Michael McGuire. I just finished it, and if you can get by the authors' misplaced on inappropriate "the"s, the occasional mis-statement of the accuseds' housing, and other insignificant entries, it does bring a new perspective to this very famous mass murder case in Southeast Alaska.

He brings in a new and additional suspect, and verifies his reasons for his determination of the facts.

I found his style of writing back and forth between time frames associated with the case sometimes difficult to follow, and his personal time between touching on the evidence that he found somewhat distracting, and the descriptions of his travels enroute to Anchorage very flattering and accurate, and yet a little boring.

Basically he does not totally disagree that the accused was innocent, but in fact believes that he was involved in a much lesser crime than the murders with a larger more organized group. His assessment seems quite plausable. However, thinking again of this horrendous event that took place back in the eighties I have wondered if in fact there were no other participants in the murder of his crew on his fishing boat, but could have been a murder-suicide-arson after a night of drinking and drugs. The murder of wife and kids (and other aquaintences) were rearely heard of back in those days, but certainly we are hearing of it more and more in the last few years.

A good book to read if you are at all interested in the Investor Murders and Arson that occurred in Craig in the early eighties.