An Alaska State Troopers unit that has helped solve several high-profile cold case murders could be cut under the version of the state budget currently being considered by the Legislature.
Disbanding the Alaska Bureau of Investigation's four-person Cold Case Investigation Unit will save the Department of Public Safety $383,000 per year, according to the department.
The Department of Public Safety, along with all other state agencies, was asked by Gov. Bill Walker this spring to identify potential cuts, said Kelly Howell, administrative services director for DPS.
"We were asked to come up with reduction proposals, and that was one of the recommendations that came from the department," she said.
If nothing changes, the four cold case investigator positions will be eliminated as of June 30.
Nine times in the 13-year history of the group, the investigations led to new arrests or charges in cases, according to James Cockrell, director of the Alaska State Troopers.
In 2002, when the unit was founded, troopers had a backlog of more than 100 cold cases, including unsolved homicides or suspicious missing person cases where "leads had run out," said Cockrell.
Over the years, they "cleared" nine cases with new arrests or charges, Cockrell said. Twenty-seven additional cases were closed for good after they were determined to not be viable for further probing.
Currently, the group has four investigators in Soldotna, Anchorage and Fairbanks looking into 74 cases considered viable for further investigation -- 22 in Fairbanks, 33 in Anchorage and the Mat-Su Borough, 9 on the Kenai Peninsula and 10 in other parts of the state.
Retired troopers and other law enforcement personnel with deep investigative experience were hired to use new science, including advances in DNA testing, to solve old crimes.
"It's a slow, methodical method that the investigators use," Cockrell said. "They have time to focus."
The highest-profile example is the murder of Bonnie Craig, an 18-year-old college student who was raped and beaten before being dropped 40 feet off a ledge near McHugh Creek, south of Anchorage, in 1994.
Craig's mother, Karen Foster, says she remembers hearing about the unit and contacting investigators to make sure her daughter's case would be looked at.
In 2006, after the unit had begun reviewing the case, DNA revealed a link between a sample taken from Craig's autopsy and a New Hampshire man named Kenneth Dion. Cold case investigators interviewed witnesses and the suspect before the case went to trial, Cockrell said. Dion was convicted of first-degree murder in 2011 and sentenced to 124 years in prison.
In another case, investigators helped solve the 23-year-old case of a missing Sitka man after new information was unearthed in 2007 suggesting his wife might have killed him.
In 2010, Jane Reth admitted to shooting her husband, Scott Coville, in their Sitka trailer in 1988, cutting up his body and disposing of the parts in a municipal incinerator and pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. In 2011, she was sentenced to 36 years in prison.
"Some of the evidence, it couldn't have caught her 10 years before because the science wasn't there," Coville's mother, Reta Coville, told the Anchorage Daily News in 2010.
The unit also re-examined the case of Sandra Perry, a vacationing mother from Washington state who was shot in a Yakutat motel room in 1996. At first, the death was called an accident by investigators.
The case was re-opened after her then-boyfriend was convicted of killing another woman in Montana in 2008. Robert Kowalski was sentenced to 40 years in jail in July 2014 for the murder of Perry almost two decades earlier.
Other cases investigated by the unit include the Fairbanks Four case and the still-unsolved murder of Sophie Sergie, a young woman from the Western Alaska village of Pitkas Point found murdered at UAF in 1993.
Foster, the mother of Bonnie Craig, said she was disappointed to hear the unit that took on her daughter's case years after her murder would be disbanded.
"It's a sickening feeling that someone is getting away with murder," she said. "And that's essentially what is going to happen when they stop investigating their cold cases."
A sampling of solved cases
Work by the investigators has led to the resolution of some high-profile unsolved murders, according to information provided by Alaska State Troopers:
Fairchild was found dead from a gunshot wound in her home. Later, cold case investigators interviewed a suspect who was eventually arrested and tried for murder. Barry McCormack was convicted in Fairchild's death, as well as a Kansas homicide.
Richard Wilkins, who had been a suspect in Skowran's death, was charged in 2000 with the murder of his then-wife. In 2004, cold case investigators obtained a recorded confession from Wilkins and he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in Skowran's death.
Sawyer's husband initially told troopers their 2-year-old son accidentally shot her. In 2004, investigators reviewed the case and found that it would have been "virtually impossible" for a small child to have fired the shot that killed Sawyer. In 2007, Sawyer's former husband Derek Sawyer was convicted of first-degree murder charges in Glennallen.
Coville went missing in Sitka. In 2007, troopers learned new information about the case suggesting his wife may have killed him. Cold case investigators found Coville's former wife, Jane Reth, in 2008. Reth confessed to killing Coville and in 2011 pleaded guilty to second-degree murder.
Lister's body was found with stab wounds near the Seward city dump. In 2006, cold case investigators honed in on suspect Jimmy Lee Eaker, who was later convicted of murder but granted a new trial after it emerged that the prosecutor had withheld information from the defense. Eaker eventually pleaded guilty to manslaughter in Lister's death.
Perry was shot by Robert Kowalski in a Yakutat hotel room. Initially, Kowalski called the shooting accidental and said he had been armed with a shotgun after seeing a bear outside the window and stumbled, killing Perry. In 2008, Kowalski shot and killed a girlfriend in Montana, also claiming it was an accident. Cold case investigators disproved his story and he was eventually tried and convicted of second-degree murder in Perry's death in 2014.