She was a 30-year-old Alaskan Native woman, a female from Anchorage whose life ended on June 27, 2016. That night, police came upon a car that had crashed into a light pole along Debarr Road near Alaska Regional Hospital. The driver appeared intoxicated. When officers looked into the back seat, they pulled back a sleeping bag and found the body of Jacqueline Goodwin, age 30.
Her wrists had been secured with zip ties, her head wrapped in plastic, and she had been shot and savagely beaten before being hidden beneath that makeshift shroud. The scene told a story of torment that had ended only moments before the crash revealed it.
In the first hours after the discovery, officers arrested the driver, Benjamin Edward Wilkins, at the scene on suspicion of driving under the influence and quickly identified him as the suspect in the killing. As detectives retraced the hours leading up to the crash, they documented the extent of Jacqueline Goodwin's injuries: a gunshot wound to the abdomen, extensive blunt-force trauma, and asphyxiation inflicted by tape and a plastic bag sealed with duct tape and zip ties. Early court filings described a brutal attack; later summaries noted broken teeth and plier marks, underscoring the deliberate cruelty.
The investigation led back to Wilkins's Anchorage residence, where police collected evidence consistent with a homicide and built a case that the assault and shooting occurred before he drove off with Jacqueline Goodwin's body concealed in the car. Within days, prosecutors charged Wilkins with multiple counts, including first-degree murder, while the city reeled from a spate of homicides that summer. Through the pretrial months, the details remained stark: a young woman's life taken with extraordinary violence, a suspect already in custody from the night of the crash, and a community watching for resolution.
Years later, in 2024, the legal outcome arrived. Wilkins pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 75 years in prison. In court, the judge described what happened to Jacqueline Goodwin, age 30, as torture marked by “extreme, deliberate cruelty,” a conclusion rooted in the physical evidence of the shooting, the beating, and the suffocation that ended her life before the crash exposed the crime. Family members spoke of long-delayed closure as the sentence was handed down, the official record finally matching the horror first uncovered on that June night.
