Riba DeWilde, a 51-year-old female Alaska Native artist from Tok, Alaska, was found dead on November 26, 2016, in the remote home where she lived and worked, crafting intricate pieces from bone, fur, and other materials gathered in the Interior. Known within Alaska's art community and cherished by a large extended family, she had moved to Tok years earlier after a childhood and early adulthood lived along the Koyukon River country, raising six children and practicing a subsistence life that fed
both her table and her art. Friends and relatives celebrated her as an accomplished maker whose pieces appeared in galleries and clinics, and her obituary later traced a life spent hunting, fishing, sewing, and encouraging others to create with whatever they had.
That Saturday morning, Alaska State Troopers arrived after a call from her youngest child, 21-year-old Eli Simpson, who reported that his mother was dead inside the residence. Investigators found the body of the 51-year-old mother and artist covered with a blanket; a subsequent scene examination determined she had been shot four times with a Winchester rifle, at point-blank range. Simpson told troopers he had endured years of abuse and that he shot in self-defense, then covered her after determining she was dead.
Authorities arrested Eli Simpson that day and transported him to the Fairbanks Correctional Center. By Sunday, November 27, he had been arraigned on charges of first- and second-degree murder. Court documents cited in local reporting recorded his self-defense claim, even as investigators concluded the fatal shots were fired by a family member. Early dispatches described him as unharmed at the scene and taken into custody.
In the days that followed, DeWilde's name spread beyond Tok as word of the killing reached Alaska outlets and the wider public. Memorial pages and community posts marked the date, her age, and her role as a mother of six, while the obituary published in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner sketched the fuller arc of her life—the long river miles of her youth, the two-story cabin she built with her children in Eagle, and the art that carried her reputation around the Interior. Those remembrances fixed November 26, 2016, as the day an admired artist's voice went silent, even as the criminal case against her son moved through the courts in the months and years that followed.
