White/Caucasian female, age 52, Maxine Beverly Krussow Edwards died on March 1, 1983, in McCarthy, Alaska, during a sudden shooting rampage that shattered the quiet of the isolated Wrangell Mountains town. She and her husband, Jim Edwards, were long-time homesteaders and fixtures of the tiny community, which in winter counted only a couple dozen residents scattered miles apart.
The day began like any other mail-plane day, with neighbors converging toward the airstrip and along the road—until gunfire erupted and plans for an ordinary Tuesday were replaced by chaos.
The violence came at the hands of Louis D. Hastings, 39, an out-of-work computer programmer who had embedded himself in the area and, according to later findings, prepared extensively for a calculated attack. He had stockpiled multiple firearms and thousands of rounds, even fashioning a silencer, then moved through the hamlet as residents made their way to meet the weekly plane, shooting people he encountered. Six were killed and two others wounded before the terror ebbed, leaving snow-packed roads and cabins suddenly, terribly still.
Among the dead were neighbors whose names the town knew by heart—Florence “Flo” and Lester “Les” Hegland, Harley Bain King, Charles Timothy “Tim” Nash and his wife, Amy Lou Ashenden Nash—and Maxine Beverly Krussow Edwards, age 52. Their absence opened an aching void in a place where every capable hand mattered through the long winters, and where Maxine, with decades of frontier know-how, had once been the kind of person who could run heavy equipment by afternoon and set a table by lantern-light that night.
Hastings was taken into custody and soon faced charges that matched the scale of the devastation. He was arraigned on six counts of first-degree murder, alongside attempted murder and assault charges tied to the two wounded survivors who lived to describe how the gunfire began “out of the blue.” The arrests and swift charging decision anchored the case that would follow, even as investigators pieced together how the ambushes unfolded across multiple points near the airstrip and along the road.
In court proceedings and later accounts, a grim rationale surfaced: Hastings had harbored a plan to attack the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and believed killing off the settlement would help mask or advance that plot. He ultimately entered a no-contest plea and received a sentence measured not in years of a single lifetime but in centuries—reported as 634 years—ensuring he would never leave prison. The case has remained one of Alaska's starkest examples of premeditated mass murder in a remote community, its memory carried forward in legal records, news archives, and the memorial pages that preserve the names of the dead, including Maxine Edwards, age 52.
