On September 7, 1982, deckhand Chris Heyman, a White Male, age 18, was among eight people killed in and around the 58-foot seiner Investor near the small fishing town of Craig, Alaska. The boat's owner, Mark Coulthurst, his pregnant wife Irene, their young children Kimberly and John, and three other teenage crewmen died alongside the 18-year-old male deckhand as the vessel was moved away from Craig and later found burning off Fish Egg Island.
Investigators concluded the victims had been shot—likely with a. 22-caliber firearm—before the killer tried to erase the crime by setting the vessel ablaze. Witnesses recalled a lone figure piloting the Investor away from the harbor at dawn and, later, a young man in the Investor's skiff waving off rescuers as the ship burned, details that framed an audacious escape carried out in plain view.
That week, Craig's docks had been busy with the final days of the salmon season. After the Coulthursts' quiet return from a birthday gathering, the Investor slipped from its berth without engine noise, later reappearing at anchor a mile out, an odd sight when other boats were back on the grounds. When flames finally tore through the vessel on the afternoon of September 7, the crime scene was already badly compromised; the fire consumed crucial evidence and the boat ultimately sank while under tow. In the months that followed, remains were gradually identified, while some crew—among them 18-year-old male deckhand Chris Heyman—were at first listed as missing before investigators confirmed the scope of the massacre. The absence of a recovered weapon, the destructive force of the blaze, and conflicting eyewitness recollections left detectives with fragments: a man described as stocky with light-brown hair and a red-and-black plaid jacket at the wheel that morning, another sighting of a slight young man in a baseball cap with a pockmarked face, and reports of someone buying gasoline in town.
Two years later, the investigation culminated in the arrest of 24-year-old former deckhand John Kenneth Peel in September 1984. He had previously worked for Coulthurst and was placed in the swirl of witness accounts from that weekend. Prosecutors brought an expansive case built largely on circumstantial evidence and eyewitness identifications, and Peel was extradited to Alaska to stand trial. After a lengthy first trial in 1986 ended with a hung jury, the state retried him in 1988 in Juneau; the second jury acquitted Peel of all charges, and the case returned to uncertainty. Peel later sued the state for wrongful prosecution and received a settlement reported at $900,000, while authorities ultimately closed the case without naming another suspect. For the 18-year-old male victim and the others lost aboard the Investor, the official record remains a story of a mass killing carried out in the open, with no one held criminally responsible.
Chris Heyman's death is recorded in memorial and archival sources as occurring on September 7, 1982, in Craig, Alaska, alongside the other victims of the Investor murders. Those listings, together with contemporary and retrospective reporting, cement his place among the eight who died in Alaska's most infamous unsolved mass homicide, even as the identity and motive of the killer remain unknown.
