Tag Archives: four deckhands

The Alaskan Mass Murder Thats Remained Unsolved For More Than 30 Years

In 1982, the F/V Investor, a commercial fishing boat, was set ablaze on an island near Craig, a remote fishing village in Southeast Alaska. The charred remains of eight people were later found onboard: The boat’s owner, Mark Coulthurst, his pregnant wife, Irene, their two young children, and four deckhands; all shot and killed before the boat was burned. By 1984, John Kenneth Peel, a boatyard worker, was arrested for the crime, but later acquitted. Speaking with People in 2017, David McNeill, a former Washington state police detective involved in the investigation, said this is less an indication of innocence than a prosecutorial failure to present sufficient evidence against Peel. >click to read< 09:10

Exonerated Suspect in Unsolved Alaska Fishing Boat Mass Murder Breaks His Silence

Thirty-five years have passed since the massacre of eight people on the fishing boat Investor first shocked the nation. For those whose lives were upended by the killings, the case remains a painful cloud that refuses to lift. For John Peel, the former deckhand who police and prosecutors suspected of committing the grisly slayings, the mystery is something else: a question mark that still hangs over his head. Peel was charged with the killings in 1984, but after two expensive, headline-grabbing trials, he was found not guilty. Decades later, the case is Alaska’s worst unsolved mass homicide. Video, click here to read the story 12:25