White/Caucasian male Scott Michael Coville was 26 years old when he vanished from Sitka, Alaska on April 12, 1988. He and his wife, Jane had been married only months and were living together in a trailer when contact with him ceased. His mother grew alarmed after she failed to reach her son around his birthday and later reported him missing; for years there was no body, only the unresolved absence of a young husband.
Official records list that last contact date as April 12, 1988, the day he turned 26.
Nearly two decades later, the quiet case stirred. In 2007, Alaska authorities reopened the investigation, developing evidence that pointed back to the small home where the 26-year-old male had last been seen alive. According to investigators and later court proceedings, Jane described shooting her husband while he slept, then dismembering his remains and disposing of them so completely that no body was ever recovered. The grim details emerged through investigative work that included recorded conversations and forensic findings linked to the residence, transforming a long-standing missing-person file into a homicide case.
Arrests and charges followed. On January 8, 2010, a Sitka grand jury indicted Jane Limm, also known as Jane Reth, on counts including first-degree murder and evidence tampering for the killing of the 26-year-old male. That fall she entered a plea to second-degree murder, admitting she had killed her husband in 1988. In March 2011, a judge imposed a 55-year sentence with 19 years suspended, leaving 36 years to serve—an acknowledgment both of the severity of the crime and the long arc from disappearance to accountability.
The case thus shifted from a mother's unanswered phone calls to a rare conviction without a recovered body. Memorial and missing-person listings continue to mark April 12, 1988, as the end of the 26-year-old male's life, while public records and reporting preserve the name of the spouse who ultimately admitted responsibility. In Sitka's history, the disappearance and murder of a 26-year-old male who left no remains behind stands as a stark reminder that even long-buried secrets can surface—and that justice, however delayed, can still find its way to the door.
