Near the turn of the twentieth century, in the ridges above Kennicott, prospectors discovered the richest concentration of copper ore ever unearthed. This prompted the creation of Kennicott, a blue-collar, company town, and then McCarthy, its red-light sister. But by the 1930s, most of the ore had been depleted and copper prices had plummeted. The mines closed, as did their company town. The abandonment of McCarthy soon followed that of Kennicott and the two wilderness centers of industry became ghost towns. The railroad that transported the ore to a port nearly two hundred miles away fell into disrepair, and the rail bed eventually became McCarthy Road.
McCarthy Road begins where the pavement ends, just outside of Chitina, sixty-one miles to the west. In 1983, the road was covered with gravel and often scarred by washouts and washboard ruts. Railroad ties and spikes occasionally resurfaced and shredded the tires of unsuspecting motorists.
Ten years earlier, floodwaters had washed out the bridge at the east end of the road where it crossed the Kennicott River into McCarthy. The local inhabitants resisted state department of transportation efforts to build even a footbridge to span the Kennicott. As a result, the only land route into McCarthy in 1983 was to cross by means of a hand-powered tram.
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Hastings had worked as a computer programmer at Stanford
University in the late 1970s. He and his wife left California
for Alaska in 1980, initially moving
into a duplex in east Anchorage, where he operated a computer
services company out of their home. In the summer of 1982, about
eight months before the murders, Hastings and his wife bought a
vacation home in Kennicott. By the winter of 1982, both
Hastings’s business and his marriage were failing. He began to
spend more and more time alone at the Kennicott cabin, while his
wife remained in Anchorage. In Kennicott, Hastings began
refining an attack he had been planning for nearly a year.
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| Hastings had fled the overdevelopment of California for the wilderness of Alaska. Instead he found the state in the throes of development, largely due to the opening of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline, which winds from Prudhoe Bay south to the port of Valdez on Prince William Sound. The eight hundred mile pipeline cost $8 billion to build, renewed the natural resource economy in Alaska, and now is responsible for transporting 25 percent of the total U.S. oil production. When he lived in California, Hastings had once volunteered to clean oil-soaked birds following an offshore oil spill. Shortly after he arrived in Alaska, he began to target the pipeline. According to one psychiatric report, Hastings "was disturbed by the population growth and influx of money into the state and determined that the best way to interrupt this was to destroy the pipeline and thus cut off Alaska’s wealth and consequent growth." Destruction of the pipeline would be the end to his McCarthy rampage. It would begin when the weekly mail plane arrived. Hastings would kill anyone who showed up at the Heglands’ place--and most of McCarthy’s residents usually did. With most of the residents eliminated, Hastings would hijack the mail plane and kill the pilot. He then planned to land the plane near the pipeline at a pump station about eighty miles west of McCarthy and rig the plane to take off again with no one at the controls. At that point, Hastings would commandeer a fuel truck and ram the pipeline while shooting at it. He theorized that the cold winter weather would congeal the oil in the broken pipeline, thus minimizing environmentally damaging spillage while disrupting the oil flow. The fuel truck would burst into flames, charring his body beyond recognition. Hastings thought that because the entire town would be dead and his body would be unrecognizable, he could destroy the pipeline and commit suicide without revealing to his family that he had been a murderer and a suicide. Officials would believe he had died, along with the rest of Kennicott and McCarthy, at the hands of an unknown killer. In a 1997 interview, the prosecutor in the Hastings case described Hastings as "a very bright guy, a nerdy academic whose wig is on probably a little too tight...There are a lot of parallels to this guy [admitted Unabomber Theodore] Kaczynski." "If you really distill it down...Mr. Hastings thought he was going to be the savior of the Alaska wilderness," Hastings’s public defender said at Hastings’s psychiatric hearings.
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Although Kennicott’s 1983 population was in single figures, about two dozen people lived year-round within a 50-mile radius of neighboring McCarthy. Maxine Edwards, fifty-two, and her husband Jim, also fifty-two, homesteaded in a house they built on the west side of the Kennicott River in 1953. Called "Maxine the Diligent" by a friend, Edwards was described in 1983 as "a hard-working woman who could operate a bulldozer by afternoon and serve dinner on linen and crystal at night."
On March 1, 1983, Maxine Edwards crossed the frozen Kennicott River to visit the Heglands, pulling a small plastic sled behind her. They lived less than one hundred yards from the west end of the McCarthy airstrip amid a spruce forest on a bluff overlooking McCarthy. The Edwards were going to celebrate their twenty-fifth anniversary in two weeks.
Les, sixty-four, and Flo Hegland, fifty-eight, had lived in Alaska for twenty-seven years. In 1967, they moved to McCarthy, where they built an addition on their front porch and always left it unlocked so that groceries delivered by the weekly mail plane would not freeze and their neighbors could come by any time to pick them up. Locals considered the Heglands to be McCarthy’s unofficial postmasters
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The Heglands also made daily weather observations using a small
meteorological site at their home. They radioed this information to the Federal
Aviation Administration’s flight service station in Cordova, Alaska. The
Heglands’ two-way radio was the only one in McCarthy powerful enough to
contact the world outside of Wrangell-St. Elias. Without it, McCarthy
was totally cut off from the outside world. Tim, thirty-eight, and Amy Nash, twenty-five, had been married Outside, the Alaskan term for anywhere outside of Alaska, during Christmas of 1982 and returned to Tim’s nearly completed log cabin in McCarthy on Valentine’s Day of 1983--only two weeks before March 1. A friend in McCarthy gave them a quarter of a moose and a mincemeat pie with a heart carved in it to celebrate the occasion. Tim, who had lived in McCarthy for seven years, worked construction in Glennallen and, following a divorce, had been living alone in the cabin he had been building with hand tools. He met Amy in the summer of 1982 when Amy ventured to McCarthy as a tourist.
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Since 1966, Harley King, sixty-one, and his wife Jo had lived on a homestead fifteen miles west of McCarthy off McCarthy Road. Prior to his retirement, Harley King served as a commercial fisherman out of Cordova, and as a hunting guide. In the 1950s he hunted wolves in a predator-control program alongside another guide, Jay Hammond, who later became governor of Alaska.
On the morning of March 1, 1983, Harley King gave Donna Byram, thirty-two, a ride on his snowmobile, known as a "snowmachine" in Alaska, to the McCarthy airstrip. Byram, who lived off McCarthy Road between the Kings and McCarthy, was planning to fly out on the mail plane. Chris Richards, twenty-nine, who worked summer construction and collected unemployment insurance and food stamps during the winter, was preparing his breakfast using no modern appliances. In 1983, McCarthy had no running water, no telephones, and no electricity except for that produced by individual generators.
McCarthy is not a place where someone stumbles into residency. These pioneers made conscious decisions to live in isolation and under spartan conditions. Yet, despite their fierce independence and self-reliance, the citizens of McCarthy formed close bonds.
And on Tuesdays, these far-flung neighbors would gather at the Heglands’ home to socialize and wait for the weekly plane that delivered their mail. Tuesdays were weekly events, and often the only chance neighbors got to see each other. March 1, 1983, fell on a Tuesday.
| As Chris
Richards turned away from preparing his breakfast to greet Louis
Hastings on the morning of
March 1, 1983, he felt something strike his right cheek, something that
shattered his glasses. He ducked his head instinctively and then felt
something hit the top of his head. He spun around to see Hastings
approaching with a rifle. Richards and Hastings began to struggle. Richards screamed for Hastings to stop. Hastings replied, "Look, you’re already dead. If you’ll just quit fighting I’ll make it easy for you." Richards grabbed a knife from the drain board of his sink and stabbed Hastings once in the upper left chest, slightly wounding him, and once in the right leg. Richards then escaped into waist-deep snow wearing only socks and one slipper, a T-shirt, and light corduroy pants. He scrambled three-quarters of a mile up a steep hill to a neighbor’s unoccupied cabin. Hastings fired several shots at the fleeing Richards, nicking his right arm. At the cabin, Richards got boots, a parka, and snowshoes. From there he stumbled about one-tenth of a mile southwest to the newlywed Nashes’ cabin, which was situated on the trail connecting Kennicott to McCarthy. At the cabin, as the Nashes attended to his wounds, Richards told them what had happened. The Nashes said that they had seen Hastings heading towards McCarthy twenty minutes earlier. Richards then insisted that they arm themselves and go to the runway to warn the others who were sure to be congregating there for the mail plane. The Nashes rode a snowmachine, pulling Richards behind in a sled, to the airstrip. At the north end of the airstrip, they met Gary Green, a local pilot and guide who was cleaning snow off one of his planes. Green said that he too had seen Hastings about twenty minutes earlier, heading toward the Heglands’. The Nashes and Green decided that Tim Nash would go check on the Heglands while Green warmed up his plane to fly Richards to Glennallen, about a forty-minute flight away. |
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After warming up his engine, Green taxied to the end of the runway to load Richards into his plane. Amy Nash then noticed her husband running down the strip approaching them. Green got out of the plane and met Tim Nash on the runway. Tim told Green he had just been to the Heglands’. There, Tim had smelled a heavy concentration of gunsmoke and saw blood all over the inside of the house. Tim thought that the Heglands were dead and noticed that someone had attempted to clean up the blood in the Heglands’ kitchen. While Tim was standing in the kitchen, he saw Hastings on the back porch. Nash fired a shotgun blast at Hastings that struck a doorjamb and Hastings returned fire, striking Tim in the right leg. |
Green and the Nashes decided that the Nashes would remain to warn others away from the airstrip while Green took off with Richards to get help. As Green lifted off, he saw Tim and Amy Nash walking toward each other on the east side of the runway. On his way to Glennallen, with Richards bleeding in his back seat, Green contacted the incoming mail plane that was scheduled to land at 11 a.m. and told the pilot not to land in McCarthy. He then radioed the state police in Glennallen.
In the meantime, Hastings had backtracked toward the airstrip along a dog-sled trail. The trail snaked through dense brush behind a large mound of plowed snow across the runway from the Nashes. Hastings crawled atop the mound and, after Green took off, fired at least ten rounds at the Nashes two hundred fifty yards away. The Nashes fell. Hastings walked to within fifty feet of their prone bodies and fired another two shots. He continued to approach the Nashes and fired two more shots from close range into their heads.
Hastings then dragged the Nashes to the top of the snow bank opposite his sniping location to hide them in deeper snow. At about that time, Harley King and Donna Byram arrived at the north end of the airstrip on King’s snowmachine. Byram saw Hastings walking over the snow bank on the west side of the airstrip and then saw blood in the snow on the east side. She wondered who would be butchering animals on the runway. As they drew abreast of the Nashes’ bodies, Hastings started firing at them. Byram, who was standing on a sled that trailed the snowmachine, saw bullets hit King and the snowmachine. One bullet hit Byram in her upper right arm. King accelerated the snowmachine as more bullets hit it. Traveling south, away from Hastings, King lost control of the snowmachine. His leg had been broken by one of Hastings’s shots. The snowmachine threw King and Byram to the runway near the path that led from the airstrip to the Heglands.
As Byram attempted to load King back on the snowmachine, Hastings approached from one hundred yards away. Byram froze. King told Byram that he couldn’t move and that she should save herself. Byram hurried toward the Heglands. As she entered the spruce woods, she heard Hastings shoot King twice.When Byram got to the Heglands, she noticed that the door had been kicked in. She was afraid to enter, so she hid outside the Heglands’ greenhouse. After killing King, Hastings began to look for Byram. He approached the Heglands’ house, calling out, "One not dead. One not dead." Byram cowered outside the nearby greenhouse, tightly gripping her injured arm. All she heard was Hastings’s bootsteps on the Heglands’ porch and the wind whipping the Visqueen sides of the greenhouse.
Hastings abruptly ended his search for Byram and sped off on the Nashes’ snowmachine. His plan was starting to unravel. Hastings thought the police would respond in a fixed-wing aircraft and that, if he got away from the airstrip, he would be safe. However, the first state troopers to respond left Glennallen in an unmarked helicopter. They saw Hastings heading west on snow-covered McCarthy Road. When the troopers landed, Hastings waved and offered no resistance. He said that he was Chris Richards and that Lou Hastings had "gone berserk" and was "shooting up McCarthy." The troopers knew Richards was already in Glenallen receiving treatment for his wounds. They also had a description of Hastings. Based on the fact that Richards was already in Glennallen receiving treatment for his wounds and based on the description of Hastings that Richards and Green had given them, the troopers arrested Hastings.
They then flew on to McCarthy to search for survivors. At that point Hastings told the troopers: "I’m your man." Outside the greenhouse, the police found Byram. She shared the forty-minute helicopter ride to Glennallen with the police and Hastings. Inside the Heglands’ house the police found Les and Flo Hegland and Maxine Edwards stacked in the bedroom "like cord wood," according to one trooper. They also found several spent cartridges in the kitchen and in the back porch areas. A bloody, fur-covered silencer sat on the nightstand next to the bodies.
"There was a lot of shooting that went on inside that house," said one state trooper in 1983. "There were a lot of bullets sprayed around."
| What seemed to surprise locals most wasn’t so much that the murders were committed, but who committed them. Perhaps his lack of conversation distanced Hastings most from his neighbors. Long-time residents are practiced raconteurs, their narrative skills honed from years gathering at the Heglands’ to get their mail and visiting isolated neighbors in the winter, when time is marked simply by firewood cut, books read, and stories told. Other than Hastings’ lack of narrative skills, however, little else about him stood out. |
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March 15, a resident who was out of town when the murders
occurred filled out a police report. In part it read: "...in the
winter my exposure to Hastings was limited to mail days, when
most everyone got together, and at the home of Chris Richards,
where the three of us would play cards and talk. My general
impression from these meetings was that he was quiet and
reserved, not going out of his way to socialize and seemed to
want to be left alone for the most part. Talking about science
and technology, the world situation, the future of Kennicott, I
felt he was certainly intelligent and fairly knowledgeable on
these topics but disillusioned and down on society in general.
He seemed not well prepared in skills or supplies to live out in
the Kennicott area and it seemed a bit odd to come and go as he
did to and from Anchorage. In general, people are accepted in
spite of any differences, by the others in the
McCarthy-Kennicott area, and a live and let live attitude seems
to prevail, so much of what I mentioned here did not seem unlike
things that could be noticed in others living out here." Loy Green, a McCarthy-area resident since the 1960s, considered Hastings’s clothing "strange." But in a 1997 interview, he recalls a conversation with Gary Green, the local bush pilot unrelated to Loy. The Greens were standing on a McCarthy path when Hastings approached. Loy said, "You know that Lou? He’s kind of strange." "Well, so are you," Gary answered. "We all are. So what?" Loy echoes that two-word refrain and amplifies it. "Everyone here is a little strange in their way," Loy says. "So, OK, here’s just another strange guy and he’s not doing anything. He’s anti-social, but we’re not tremendously social anyway. And so we really don’t pay too much attention. So Lou’s strange, so what?"
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The survivors of Hastings’s rampage continue to be nagged by hindsight. Almost
all of them can remember something that they now feel should have clued
them in to Hastings’s murderous intentions. Loy Green, who no longer greets the mail plane, thinks back on the times that he made what he thought were benign comments, only to have Hastings glower at him, his lip twitching. "So after he did his number," Green says, "I’m thinking, ‘Oh, my God. I saw something in that man. I definitely saw something.’ But I wrote it off as just ‘So what?’ "And right then I said to myself, ‘OK, if I ever see that in another person’s eyes, I’m not going to stand idle. Period.’ I am not going to say, ‘Oh, well, blah, blah, blah.’ No, I am going to do something. I don’t know what, but something." A few years later, a couple of young fundamentalist Christians had temporarily moved to McCarthy and were hoping to make their stay permanent. Green engaged one in religious debate. "I saw the same look," Green says, "the same lip curl, and he walked away." |
Green reported this to the proprietor of the McCarthy Lodge who had been helping the two men get started. When he heard Green’s story, he said, "OK, those guys are out of here. No support, no land."
Chris Richards carried a handgun around in his back pocket for eight years after the murders. The only time he didn’t have it on him was when he slept. "It wasn’t like I was afraid for myself," Richards says. "It was, more or less, I owe this to my neighbors. I can’t lose any more of my friends and neighbors, even the ones that I don’t like. They’re my neighbors. Excuse me, I don’t need any other assholes comin’ around and shootin’ ‘em. They’re precious to me. I think of ‘em more as a big tribe of people. Most of us live here because we love this place and we have that much in common."
For weeks, McCarthy’s survivors devoted nearly every conversation to the murders and, at least indirectly, how to redefine their community. And for weeks, they nearly sleepwalked among daily reminders of the murders--blood stains soaked deep into the snow. Impromptu meetings were held. Options were considered. One person said, "We can’t trust anybody that comes in here anymore." Another countered, "Wait a minute. If we do that, in a larger sense, Lou’s the winner."
Loy Green said, "If we don’t trust anybody, if everybody who comes in is a suspect, then we are putting out negative energy and we’re creating a suspicious atmosphere and then we can’t expect to have people here. Better if we open our arms now to everybody—aaah, but have a little caution."
The old trams became the natural focus. Their cables sagged dangerously close to the Kennicott River and they were difficult to use. Locals had begun to plan for new trams prior to the murders, because they feared the state would build an automotive bridge that would threaten McCarthy’s isolation.
At that time Loy Green said, "If you could drive to McCarthy, it wouldn’t be here."
After Hastings’s murders, however, the trams took on a new meaning, and a heightened sense of urgency. The community got together and secured $90,000 from the state. Residents cut logs for support towers and salvaged unused cable from the mines. Because of their lives on the Alaskan frontier, all were handy with tools. Jim Edwards, Maxine’s widower, designed the tram cars. A state-hired foreman quit, because no one would follow his orders. Within two summer months, the new trams were completed.
"We felt like a community that had accomplished something and was together," Green says. "That was a healing catharsis. You bet it was."
But the new trams helped slowly increase tourist traffic. Then, in 1997, the state built a pair of multi-million-dollar footbridges in preparation for a surge in tourism. In the last decade, several businesses have opened — Miller’s pizza place, two air services, two guide services, a coffee shop, and an upscale lodge to name a few. With this increased development, political and business bickering has increased among long-time neighbors. Louis Hastings, who is currently serving a 594-year sentence at the federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, wouldn’t recognize the town he tried to kill en route to stalling Alaskan development. While local differences seem to occur more often than in 1983, none resonate like the murders. Old-timers simply remind themselves of March 1, 1983, for a dose of perspective.
And while the dogs of McCarthy don’t have to contend with tourist vehicles yet, they still consider the increasingly numerous visitors with wary eyes.
This article originally appeared in the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication in the Spring of 1998 --R.S.