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  Claus hung up, got a few hours of sleep, and returned the next morning, Monday, to the logging road and relieved Taylor. A light rain continued to fall, and in the quiet of his Expedition, Claus reflected on the case and what he knew about the Waterman family. He toyed with the possibility that a stranger murdered Lauri—somebody who had drifted onto the island looking for work or was trying to get away from another life and somehow decided to commit murder, perhaps as part of a burglary or sexual assault. But this was a quiet time on the island. The seasonal workers on the fishing boats had long since left with the last days of summer, and few outsiders had arrived. One ferry came to Hollis from Ketchikan each day, and one ferry left. A handful of tiny floatplanes shuttled a few passengers.

  The more likely and unsettling possibility was that the killer was somebody known to both Lauri and people on the island.

  Police work on Prince of Wales Island offered its own unusual circumstances and challenges, but Claus knew that murder was murder anywhere. First rule of thumb: ties between victim and assailant usually were close. When looking for a killer, start close and move outward. The husband, in this case Doc Waterman, would normally be the first suspect, but he had an alibi: he had been 220 miles away in Juneau when his wife was killed. The next closest people to Lauri were her children, both also gone, Geoffrey in college in Washington State, Rachelle in Anchorage playing volleyball.

  That left Claus wondering who on the island would want Lauri Waterman dead. The concept defied reason. While people respected Doc, they adored Lauri. Warm, selfless, giving, she volunteered for every cause and had devoted her life to her children, coaching their sports teams, serving on school committees, leading Rachelle’s Girl Scout troop.

  But Claus, as a friend and trooper, knew things that others didn’t, and in the quiet of his Expedition, he began plotting what would be the road map for the investigation of Lauri Waterman’s death. Before it was over, the case would send shock waves through the close-knit island community, shattering illusions, confirming private suspicions, and leaving Claus disillusioned. He would retire early from the Alaska State Troopers, a job he had always enjoyed and found fulfilling. “This,” he recalled later, “is the case that took all the fun out of law enforcement.”

  While Bob Claus stood watch at the crime scene, James Donald See began his week by working Monday morning traffic patrol at Craig High School. Stationed at the car drop-off area in the driveway, See made sure harried and distracted parents didn’t collide with one another while fumbling with backpacks and heavy jackets. That Jim See was the chief of police spoke to the nature of the town and the size of its police department—three officers and a sergeant under See—and the personal touch residents could expect from their sworn officers. See’s second in command, Sergeant Mark Habib, had the same duties at the nearby middle school Tuesdays through Fridays. Chief See was known around town as Jim, and Sergeant Habib as Mark. It wasn’t unusual for them to give somebody a ride or chew the fat at the town hub, the post office. It also spoke to the safety and security of living in Craig. Residents kept their doors unlocked and felt safe walking after dark. After morning drop-off, See would stroll the halls, saying hello to students and staff and listening to people’s concerns.

  After school duty, See went to a coffee shop in Craig for a morning pick-me-up and the latest gossip. It was here, over a cup of coffee, that See first heard that a burned-out van with a body inside had been found off the road to Thorne Bay. Somebody had apparently picked up the report over a police scanner Sunday and by Monday morning word had spread across the island. Chief See had had the weekend off and nobody had told him about it.

  He went to the police station, up the hill from the coffee shop, and checked the weekend logbook, which confirmed that his friend Bob Claus at the trooper post in Klawock had called in that he was investigating an apparent homicide. The logbook also reflected that Doc Waterman had reported the disappearance of his wife and her minivan. Chief See had known the Watermans casually for years. He’d speak to Doc at the bank or post office and would see Lauri around the ball field at the high school. He knew they had a highschool-age daughter and a son in college, by all accounts good kids who had never had a brush with the Craig Police Department.

  See called Habib at home—the sergeant normally had Mondays off—to tell him to be prepared to come in for work. Habib had not heard about Lauri’s disappearance either. He, too, knew the Watermans; Doc had been the seller’s agent on the house Habib and his wife purchased. Chief See wanted to coordinate efforts with the state police as soon as possible. It was only a matter of time before the town connected the burning van rumors with Lauri Waterman’s disappearance, then the heat would be on the police department. See wanted to know more than the customers at the coffee shop.

  At about the same time that Chief See went to the coffee shop, a small float plane was buzzing through cloudy skies over Prince of Wales Island, headed toward a flare sent up by Trooper Bob Claus. Three men from Anchorage were aboard, among them Deputy Fire Marshal John Bond, who snapped photos of the blackened wreckage clinging to the logging road etched into the side of the mountain. Next to him sat crime scene technician Dale Bivens and trooper homicide investigator Sergeant Randy McPherron.

  After Bob Claus had called his supervisor for help on Sunday, a trooper commander contacted McPherron with orders to get to Prince of Wales Island to investigate the suspicious circumstances surrounding the discovery of remains in a burned vehicle. McPherron paged the on-call crime scene tech, Bivens, who was at a birthday party, and then called Bond’s supervisor. The men were told to pack their bags for what could be a week or more in southeastern Alaska. Within hours they flew to Juneau, where they spent the night, then caught a morning flight to Ketchikan with a floatplane connection to Prince of Wales Island.

  They landed forty-five minutes later in the bay of Hollis. With the weather worsening, Bond recommended they fly over the area to get photographs. From the ground Claus saw the plane pass by a couple of times and to help them locate the wreckage he sent up the flare. After Bond got his aerial photos of the scene, the plane landed off a logging and fishing town of six hundred people called Thorne Bay, sixty miles from Hollis, and they met a village public safety officer, peace officers who handle minor crimes and assist state troopers. The VPSO drove them west from Thorne Bay to Forest Service Road 3012, where Bob Claus waited. It was now ten a.m. and growing colder and wetter. The temperature had dipped to just above freezing with a light drizzle.

  After the men exchanged greetings, Claus briefed them: The van with the remains inside was discovered by a hunter, and several hours later Craig resident Doc Waterman reported his wife and her van missing. The body was too badly charred to make identification, and the license plate and VIN tags also were gone.

  Claus passed the leadership of the investigation to Sergeant McPherron, the ranking investigator.

  Claus had never worked with McPherron but knew his reputation, which was already legendary in Alaska. Tall and built like a linebacker, McPherron was a former army infantry officer with the 82nd Airborne Division, based in North Carolina’s Fort Bragg. In 1984 he moved to Alaska where he took odd jobs until entering the Trooper Academy. Like all fresh graduates, he rotated among posts: Anchorage, Kodiak, Ketchikan, Palmer, and finally Anchorage again. But rather than remain in an outpost and become a generalist like Claus, McPherron became a specialist—and a rising star—in the department. He worked his way up to a major case detective, investigating sexual assaults, sexual abuse of children, and homicides. For the last three years he supervised a unit at the Alaska Bureau of Investigation and had investigated about thirty homicides, eight of them as lead detective.

  McPherron built a national reputation with his work on the case of Robert Meyer, a businessman from Juneau who told authorities in 1996 that his wife and teenage daughter had been washed overboard when their fishing boat caught on fire. McPherron found that Meyer had in fact murdered them for the insuranc
e money and so he could be with his mistress. The case made headlines outside of Alaska and became the subject of Court TV documentary called Fire and Ice. People started calling McPherron the Columbo of Alaska, though any similarities ended with their shared knack for solving whodunnits. Unlike the sloppy, absentminded TV detective, McPherron operated with military precision and a calm relentlessness.

  Claus drove the three men in the Expedition up the steep, bumpy gravel road to within a dozen yards of the wreckage. As they walked toward the van, Bond snapped 35mm and digital photos and crime scene tech Dale Bivens scoured the area, collecting a cigarette butt, sandwich bag, gum wrapper and paper, paint chips, Coke bottle, and car parts that had apparently been knocked off the van on the way up the mountain. Claus stood by, driving back and forth to the highway to make phone calls and would serve as liaison between the out-of-town investigators and both the local police and the villagers.

  The task of processing the scene fell to Bond. With more than twenty years experience working for volunteer fire departments, he had joined the fire marshal’s office five years earlier, inspecting buildings, reviewing architectural plans and investigating fires—fifty-five to this point. Bond walked around the van checking out the burn patterns. The fire had melted the tires down to their steel belts and vaporized the twenty-gallon plastic gas tank. It burned so hot that the nitrogen-filled pistons that operated the back hatch exploded.

  From the tangled and blackened mass Bond could reconstruct what had happened. The blaze had started inside in the backseat area, the damage more extensive in the rear than in the front. For the most part the flames remained inside the confines of the van, with minimal charring to the log under the vehicle and the smaller shrubs on the surrounding hillside. The back hatch had been open at the time of the fire, evidenced by the back-window glass shards left on the roof of the van instead of on the ground.

  After taking more photos and making additional notes, Bond looked through the blown-out window into the backseat. All that was left of the body was the thorax, the pelvic girdle, and the large leg bones—the femurs—above the knees. The smaller leg bones and the tiny bones of the feet had burned and broken apart, some scattered amid the ash. Only the large bones of the arm remained, with nothing visible below the elbows. The skull was there but appeared brittle due to the high temperature of the fire, followed by the rapid cooling from the near-freezing temperatures. Several teeth lay in the ashes.

  When Bond completed his survey of the wreckage, the remains were removed and placed inside a white body bag liner. Alaska Fish and Game trooper Glenn Taylor carted the bag away on a litter and arranged for them to be shipped overnight to the coroner’s office in Anchorage for autopsy. As Taylor did this, Bond caught the odor of gasoline. His nose took led him to spots on the ground, where he collected rock and soil samples to be sent to the crime lab.

  As Bond inspected the truck, McPherron poked around the wreckage looking for a VIN tag. He finally found it: the tag had fallen into the engine compartment after the dashboard melted. Claus called the Craig dispatcher to run a DMV check on the number and got confirmation on the ownership of the van. It was now about one p.m., the rain getting heavier. A tow truck hauled the van to a Department of Transportation garage in Klawock while Claus called his supervisor to relay a message to Craig police chief Jim See. The van was registered to Carl and Lauri Waterman of Ocean View Road.

  Chief See said he would inform Doc Waterman. “I felt that he needed to hear it from me,” See recalled later at trial. “It was all over town. I felt it was my duty to make a notification.”

  Sergeant Mark Habib had two tasks. The first was calming the nerves of island residents who feared a homicidal maniac was on the loose.

  Habib hailed from hot and dry Texas but fell in love with Alaska and its outdoor sports when he was stationed in the state for the military. An avid fly fisherman, Habib keeps a rod in his office. He began his law enforcement career as a reserve officer in Anchorage before working full-time in Whittier, Alaska, on the Kenai Peninsula south of Anchorage, then moving to Craig in 1993 as a patrol officer. Promoted to sergeant, he supervised patrol cops, handled investigations, and oversaw the dispatch center and the jail. Gregarious like his boss Jim See, Sergeant Habib goes by his first name around town and knows virtually everybody in Craig—and knew that this morning they were on the brink of panic.

  He started the day at the middle school where Lauri worked and tried to sort fact from rumor. “There was a lot of concern by teachers. They wanted some answers,” he later said. “I told them at this point in time we could not confirm if the body was Lauri Waterman’s. We were investigating.”

  Next, Habib interviewed Lauri’s friends and coworkers, including those who had been with her the night before the van was found. On Saturday night Lauri arrived solo at the Craig Community Association building for the chamber of commerce dinner, telling people her husband and daughter were both out of town. She appeared as she always did, upbeat, energetic, happy to lend a hand even though she wasn’t a member of the chamber. This was a big night for the chamber—there would be guest speakers, awards and speeches for distinguished citizens and volunteers, a raffle with prizes donated by local merchants—and Lauri came dressed in business casual: a colorful tropical print skirt, black sweater top, black nylons, and black shoes.

  Janice Bush, who ran a contracting company operated out of her home in Klawock, organized the event and welcomed Lauri’s assistance. Janice and Lauri had long been friends; they attended the same church and both had school-age children. Lauri had called Janice earlier in the week asking if she needed help. Janice eagerly took her up on the offer.

  “It wasn’t something I asked her to do,” said Bush. “She was home and didn’t have anything else to do and helped us clean up afterwards.” They spent five hours together on Friday, talking about their children as they ran around Craig picking up plates, dishes, and decorations. Janice’s children also were involved in sports, and Lauri said that her daughter Rachelle was in Anchorage for a big high school volleyball tournament. Rachelle’s team had lost its first game.

  “We talked about how difficult it is to be away from your kids and not be able to keep in contact with them,” Bush recalled. “We discussed cell phones. She said Doc was in Juneau that weekend. He was hoping to look at getting cell phones for the family so that when Rachelle was traveling she would have a cell phone so they could find out more quickly what the status of the activity was.”

  On Saturday, Lauri set up tables and laid out the decorations: 750 little toy bears a woman had loaned for the dinner, the theme of which was “Welcome to Bear Country.” The no-host cocktail hour started at six p.m. and dinner began at seven p.m. “Lauri was able to relax at her table and just be able to visit with people at table throughout evening,” said Janice.

  Janice didn’t see much of Lauri during the dinner, since she was scrambling to keep things running smoothly. The emcee couldn’t make it because of bad weather, so they used a stand-in, “which meant I had to be at her side leading her through an unfamiliar program,” Janice later said. The raffle went without a hitch, and Lauri won a fleece jacket from First Bank. A friend of Janice’s took photos of the event, and several captured Lauri in her element, mingling with friends and picking up her First Bank jacket from Janice Bush.

  After the banquet finished at about nine p.m., a half dozen people stayed to take down tables put away the chairs. Among them was Lauri, who as always was one of the last to leave. By ten p.m. Janice turned off the lights and headed out with Lauri. The last thing Lauri said to Janice was to ask if she needed help the next morning. Janice said chamber volunteers already planned to return at eight a.m. Sunday to return the little bears.

  “I asked her if she was going to church,” recalled Janice. “She said yeah. I said I’ll see you there.” Church meant more volunteer work and more committees. Janice and Lauri were raising money for World Youth Day, a Catholic celebration of faith started by Pop
e John Paul II. Lauri’s daughter had planned to travel to Germany for the event the next summer.

  Janice watched Lauri drive into the night in her purple minivan. It was the last time she would ever see her.

  CHAPTER TWO

  For Rachelle Waterman, the morning of November 15, 2004, began like any other Monday in Craig, Alaska. Rather than stay home brooding over her missing mother, Rachelle trudged off to school, one of the hundreds filing past the chief of police on traffic patrol. Her volleyball practice and tournament travel had put her behind on her homework. She had calculus to catch up on. Rachelle had always been a busy overachiever, juggling sports, church, and extracurricular activities, all while keeping good grades.

  She seemed destined to follow her brother to college. But over the last year a change had come over Rachelle, starting with her appearance. She had long been fond of loose-fitting clothes, including her brother’s hand-me-downs, a result of her self-consciousness over her full figure, which developed earlier than other girls’. In recent months, however, she favored all black, including black clothes, black nail polish, and black leather collars, one of them studded. Although still friendly with the other girls, including Bob Claus’s daughter Stephanie, Rachelle had spent more time over the summer with a new circle of friends, mostly guys, some of them older, who shared an interest in video games and the elaborate fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. The computer store where she worked over the summer was a hangout for the D&D crowd.

  On this Monday morning she should have been returning to school as an object of envy. Her volleyball team had spent the weekend at the state championship tournament, and while they didn’t finish well, that was beside the point. The tournament was in Anchorage, and that meant something Craig lacked: shopping. The girls hit the mall and loaded up on Hot Topic clothes and boots.

  Instead, all eyes zeroed in on Rachelle as she limped through halls on an ankle sprained in volleyball practice before the tournament. The island rumor mill was in overdrive, with word already reaching the school halls that the body in the burning van found out near Thorne Bay was probably Rachelle’s missing mother. Rachelle’s emotions flew in all directions. For some of the day she was quiet and sullen, unwilling to talk about her mother. At another point in the day she seemed locked in denial, acting oddly glib.