Anesha Katherine “Duffy” Murnane was a 38-year-old woman living in Homer, Alaska, when she disappeared on October 17, 2019. She lived in a supportive-living facility in downtown Homer and was known to travel around the community on foot. That day, Murnane left her residence to walk to a medical appointment only a short distance away, but she never arrived. Later reporting placed her departure at about 12:15 p.m., when surveillance footage captured her leaving the housing complex.
In the confusing first days of the case, some reports placed a possible sighting later in the afternoon on Pioneer Avenue, but the investigation ultimately focused on her disappearance after she left for the appointment. Search dogs traced Murnane's scent through downtown Homer until the trail abruptly ended near Pioneer Avenue, suggesting to investigators that she had entered or been taken away in a vehicle. Her failure to arrive at the appointment and her sudden disappearance were deeply concerning to those who knew her, particularly because family members later described her as cautious, regimented, and unlikely to voluntarily vanish without contacting anyone.
The search for Murnane quickly expanded throughout Homer and the surrounding area. Homer police, Alaska State Troopers, firefighters, volunteers, family members, and friends participated in ground and aerial searches, while residents distributed flyers and checked roads, beaches, trails, abandoned buildings, cabins, shops, and other properties. Searchers on foot and all-terrain vehicles covered large areas, and a helicopter was used from the air. In November 2019, approximately 50 community members participated in a coordinated door-to-door effort that stretched well beyond downtown Homer. Her disappearance became a deeply personal cause within the small community, where the campaign to “Bring Duffy Home” continued long after the initial searches failed to locate her. Police followed hundreds of tips and interviewed numerous people, and the Homer Police Department eventually hired investigator Matthew Haney to work specifically on determining what had happened to Murnane. As weeks became months and then years, there was still no physical recovery of Murnane, but investigators increasingly treated the circumstances as suspicious rather than a case of someone simply becoming lost.
For more than two years, the investigation continued largely outside public view. According to later accounts, Kirby Calderwood, a former Homer resident who had worked at the supportive-living facility where Murnane resided, came under consideration as a person of interest by 2021, although investigators did not then have enough evidence to charge him. A decisive development came in 2022, when a caller contacted a Kenai Peninsula Crime Stoppers tip line and provided unusually specific information about Murnane's disappearance while identifying Calderwood as responsible. Investigators said the caller knew details that had not been made public, including information that Calderwood possessed Murnane's watch. The tip also directed police toward a house connected to Calderwood and to allegations about what had happened there. Authorities subsequently learned that the caller was Calderwood's wife. She told investigators that Calderwood had confessed to her that he killed Murnane and described circumstances surrounding her abduction and death. Investigators also established that Calderwood knew Murnane through his previous employment at the facility where she lived, a connection that became an important part of reconstructing how she could have encountered someone familiar to her on the day she disappeared.
According to the allegations set out during the investigation, Calderwood had told his wife that he encountered Murnane while driving in Homer and offered her a ride. Prosecutors alleged that he then took her to the unoccupied home of his then-girlfriend's parents. His wife told investigators that Calderwood confessed to taking Murnane into a crawlspace there, sexually assaulting her and killing her, and later disposing of her body. These details were initially allegations based on the charging investigation, but later forensic discoveries strengthened the case considerably. Homer police and the FBI examined the crawlspace, and evidence recovered from it was tested by the Alaska Department of Public Safety Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory. According to the Alaska Department of Law, that evidence contained Murnane's DNA. Investigators in Utah also searched Calderwood's residence after he had moved away from Homer. There they found a watch identified as Murnane's in a drawer along with a missing-person flyer bearing her information. Despite the extensive investigation and the evidence establishing what happened to her, Murnane's remains have never been recovered.
Calderwood was arrested in Ogden, Utah, in May 2022. Later that year, a Kenai grand jury indicted him on nine felony counts that included murder, kidnapping, and sexual assault. Homer Police Chief Mark Robl described the investigation as unlike anything the department had encountered during his decades in the community and credited assistance from other law-enforcement and forensic agencies with helping build a prosecutable case. The investigation ultimately involved the Homer Police Department, FBI, Alaska State Troopers, Ogden police, Utah authorities, and forensic specialists. For Murnane's family, friends, and the people who had spent years searching for her, the arrest brought an agonizing form of clarity: the hope that she might someday walk back into their lives was replaced by evidence that she had been killed. Her mother, Sara Berg, described the news as bittersweet because her family finally had an explanation and the prospect of justice, but that explanation confirmed a devastating loss they had endured without answers for more than two and a half years.
The criminal case eventually reached a definitive resolution. On February 5, 2026, Calderwood pleaded guilty in Kenai Superior Court to second-degree murder and admitted that he had murdered Anesha Murnane. Under the plea agreement, the remaining charges were dropped and Calderwood agreed to a sentence of 99 years with 12 years suspended, leaving 87 years to serve followed by 10 years of probation. In July 2026, the court imposed that sentence. Judge Kelly Lawson characterized the circumstances as exceptional and acknowledged both the extreme violence of Murnane's killing and the profound effect her disappearance had on the Homer community. Family members described how immediately alarming Murnane's absence had been because of her careful habits and how relentlessly relatives, friends, police, and community volunteers had searched for her. Official reports therefore establish that Murnane is deceased even though her remains have not been recovered. What began on October 17, 2019, as the disappearance of a vulnerable 38-year-old woman walking through the familiar streets of Homer became a years-long missing-person and homicide investigation sustained by her family, an unusually determined community, and investigators who continued following leads after the searches had ended. A detailed Crime Stoppers tip ultimately connected the evidence investigators had accumulated, forensic testing linked Murnane to the location where she was killed, her personal property was recovered from the man responsible, and his eventual guilty plea confirmed what had happened. The case ended in a murder conviction and an 87-year prison sentence, but the continuing absence of Murnane's remains leaves an enduring measure of grief for those who loved her and spent years hoping to bring Duffy home.Last Seen: Oct 17, 2019
