White/Caucasian, male. On May 8, 1915, William Christie stepped away from the bustle of the Treadwell Mine on Douglas Island after a stranger arrived with the air of authority and a story to match. The visitor introduced himself as a U.S. marshal carrying a court summons for Christie. William Christie left the mine office in Douglas in the man's company and vanished, a disappearance later reported in some accounts under the name James Christie but tied to the same ruse, place, and date. No body was recovered, only the rumor of a skiff and the quieting of a familiar face in a tight-knit mining town.
Suspicion soon coalesced around a drifter with aliases and a practiced confidence: Edward Krause, also known as Edward Slompke/Klompke, a man later remembered as Alaska's first known serial killer. In October 1915, authorities in Washington arrested him “for the alleged crime of kidnapping one William Christie in Alaska,” and a U.S. commissioner ordered him sent to Juneau to face a grand jury. Newspaper lines from that autumn whispered of Krause slipping through Southeast under another name—“K. Moore”—and of Christie's mysterious disappearance. Salvage searches later focused near where Krause was said to have anchored his boat by the Douglas shore.
The case against Edward Krause grew as investigators linked him to other missing men from 1912 to 1915. He was ultimately convicted on related crimes and sentenced to hang, but he sawed his way out of jail in 1917 and fled into the brush. His flight ended in gunfire; a homesteader killed him for a posted reward, leaving behind a trail of questions that included the fate of William Christie. With no remains recovered and the prime suspect dead, the disappearance of William Christie from Douglas in 1915 remains a grim fragment in the larger story of Krause's predations along the Gastineau Channel.
