When she was hired back in the 1970s, Mary Anne Henry was the first female prosecutor in the Anchorage District Attorney's office. Over the next 30 years, she managed some of the highest profile trials in Alaska, put a lot of bad guys in prison, rose to be head of the state Criminal Division and mentored a new generation of law enforcement lawyers.
Henry died Sunday in Portland, Ore. She had suffered for years from asthma and died of liver failure due to chronic hepatitis, according to a close friend who was with her at the end. She was 59.
A 1976 graduate of Harvard Law School, Henry started trying criminal cases that same year. Anchorage was a more tumultuous city then, full of grifters, hustlers and end-of-the-roaders here to feed off the wages of men and women building the trans-Alaska pipeline. Drugs were sold out of downtown hotel windows and hookers claimed whole blocks for their business. Street life often erupted in violence and uniformed police officers patrolled Fourth Avenue all night. In this atmosphere, Henry learned how to direct fast-breaking homicide investigations, at first working with police and, in later years, teaching the new ones.
Fighting crime is a war, said friend and former prosecutor Kevin Fitzgerald. "Mary Anne was one of those people you always wanted in the foxhole with you."
By the time she left the D.A.'s office, she had handled well over 100 jury trials and taken more than 20 murder verdicts, according to a group of colleagues who nominated her for an award in 2003. Among her headline cases were the so-called Mush Inn murders in 1991, the murder of a Loomis security guard by Jon Woodard during a 1992 armed robbery at the Aurora Village Carrs, and the savage 1993 murder of a woman and near-fatal slashing of her young daughter over a cocaine debt by Gregory Marino.
Henry was born and raised in Minneapolis and graduated from Creighton University with a B.A. in mathematics before heading to Harvard.
In addition to her long tenure as assistant district attorney in Anchorage, she was district attorney of Ketchikan for five years and a prosecutor in Juneau for one. She served as a pro tem District Court judge in Anchorage for seven months after the death of Judge Sam Adams.
Henry's time running the state Criminal Division proved contentious and she retired within the year, leaving the state soon after.
Before being named deputy attorney general in 2007 by then-Attorney General Talis Colberg, Henry served as director of the Office of Victims' Rights for about a year. And it's her service to victims throughout her career that should be best remembered, said five of her colleagues in the 2003 award nomination letter.
A small monument stands at the corner of Third Avenue and L Street, put up by Victims for Justice to honor more than 200 homicide victims. "Mary Anne Henry has personally prosecuted the killers of at least 20 of the people whose names are on that wall," the letter said. "... No single prosecutor has done as much, over such a long period of time, to so forcefully bring so many killers to justice."
No information was available Tuesday about whether a memorial service would be held.
By SHEILA TOOMEY
Anchorage Daily News