Asian male Kumajiro Yamamoto was living and working in Petersburg, Alaska, when he vanished in January 1913. Contemporary accounts that survive today do not record his age, but they do name him among the early victims linked to a growing pattern of disappearances around the fishing town. Witness recollections and later investigations placed him last in the company of a Petersburg local, Edward “Ed” Krause a man who cultivated respectability while quietly running a theft ring and preying on
unattached laborers and fishermen. In the weeks after Yamamoto was last seen, the town's rumor mill churned with unease, and by year's end Southeast Alaska held the uneasy knowledge that men were disappearing without bodies, graves, or goodbyes—only the common thread that Krause was there at the last.
As investigators dug into financial records and property transfers tied to the missing, a picture formed of Krause as Alaska's first known serial killer: he charmed or coerced men into isolation, profited from their assets, and left no remains to tell the tale. In that widening investigation, officials tallied victims whose final hours traced back to him—Yamamoto in January 1913; and, later, others such as James O. Plunkett and James Christie—while Petersburg residents whispered about a “murder gang” operating from their own waterfront. The lack of bodies hampered prosecutors, but the circumstantial web—fake deeds, forged identities, sudden withdrawals—tightened around Krause and kept Yamamoto's name in the case files as one of the first who vanished along this grim path.
By 1916, a grand jury repeatedly indicted Krause on a slate of crimes, including property and mail fraud—and, crucially, the murders of Kumajiro Yamamoto and James Plunkett—marking the moment when Yamamoto's disappearance was formally cast as homicide. Trials followed in 1917. Jurors convicted Krause in the Plunkett case and a judge sentenced him to hang in Juneau, even as the state still lacked the bodies of the men—Yamamoto among them—who had first drawn investigators to Krause's orbit. Two days before his scheduled execution, he sawed through the bars of his cell and fled, only to be shot dead by a homesteader on Admiralty Island during the territory's largest manhunt to that date. With Krause's death, the chance for a confession died too. Yamamoto, an Asian man whose quiet life in Petersburg ended in January 1913, remains one of the earliest names in a case that defined an era of fear; the record shows no recovery of his remains and no separate trial for his murder beyond the indictments that named him, yet his disappearance is inseparable from the spree that finally brought Krause down.
