White/Caucasian male Jeff Diffee, age 39, was a miner at the Greens Creek silver mine outside Juneau. In mid-March 1991 he met long-haul trucker John Joseph Fautenberry at a local bar; the two went back to Diffee's Juneau apartment, where Fautenberry beat, handcuffed, and stabbed him seventeen times. Diffee's body was discovered on March 14, 1991, a killing that shocked the small community clustered beneath the Mendenhall Glacier.
A memorial record places his birth on December 2, 1951, and confirms his death in Juneau on March 14, 1991.
Detectives quickly focused on Fautenberry. He was arrested in Juneau within days, after investigators found fingerprints tying him to the scene and evidence linking him to other crimes; reports from the time describe him as a suspected multi-state killer already under scrutiny for additional homicides. Contemporary coverage noted the arrest in Juneau in connection with Diffee's stabbing, and local historical timelines later summarized the case as the end of a cross-state spree that had reached Alaska.
Court records show what followed: in August 1991, Fautenberry pleaded guilty in Alaska state court to murdering Jeff Diffee and received a 99-year sentence. Multiple legal summaries and archival newspaper accounts corroborate the plea and sentence, while later retrospectives and encyclopedic entries recount how he was subsequently extradited to face charges elsewhere. Years later, he was executed in Ohio for a separate murder, but in Alaska the Diffee case closed with that 99-year term.
The portrait that emerges from these records is of a 39-year-old Juneau miner whose generosity to a stranger turned fatal, and of an investigation that moved rapidly from a brutal scene to an arrest, confession, and conviction. While one early report misstated his age, cemetery and biographical records fix Jeff Diffee at thirty-nine, and the legal filings fix responsibility squarely on Fautenberry, whose arrest, guilty plea, and sentencing are documented across contemporaneous and official sources.
