White/Caucasian female Crystal Denardi, 30, was found dead on June 5, 2016, near Wasilla, Alaska, alongside 43-year-old Ben Gross. Troopers were called to a possible shooting just before dawn and arrived to find the residence ablaze; autopsies later showed both victims died of gunshot wounds, while a third person at the property was injured and hospitalized.
Within days, investigators publicly identified the victims as they pursued a double-homicide investigation that began amid the charred remains of the scene.
In the emerging narrative pieced together by state and federal authorities, the violence traced back to a detached garage on Gross's property by Cloudy Lake. An armed intruder kicked in the door and, after firing warning shots into the ceiling, opened fire; the garage and home were set ablaze to erase the evidence. Detectives followed a trail that would soon center on a Palmer man with a pattern of home-invasion robberies linked to alleged drug targets in the Mat-Su.
Weeks after the killings, investigators arrested 30-year-old John Pearl Smith II. In 2017, a federal grand jury indicted him for the murders of Ben Gross and Crystal Denardi and for related robbery and firearms offenses, with prosecutors initially signaling they would seek the federal death penalty. The government later formalized that intent in 2018 as the case moved toward trial, outlining allegations that Smith had intentionally killed the two victims and tried to destroy the crime scene by fire.
A jury convicted Smith in August 2022 on ten felony counts, including two murders, after an eleven-day trial that detailed the sequence of home invasions across 2015 and 2016 and the night the garage door burst open on Cloudy Lake. Although prosecutors had once aimed for capital punishment, the death penalty was taken off the table following the verdict.
In February 2023, a federal judge sentenced Smith to two consecutive life terms in prison, closing the criminal chapter that began with a pre-dawn call, a fire-lit sky, and the loss of Crystal Denardi, 30, and Ben Gross, 43, in a quiet stretch outside Wasilla. The sentence reflected not just the murders, but the attempted killing of a third person and the attempt to erase the evidence in flames.
