White/Caucasian male, Michael “Mike” Stewart was 19 when he died in Craig, Alaska, on September 7, 1982. A teenage deckhand and cousin to skipper Mark Coulthurst, he had come into the little fishing port aboard the 58-foot seiner Investor at the end of the season. Within days, the vessel that carried him, his family friends, and crewmates was reduced to a scorched hulk offshore, and the town awoke to the realization that eight lives had been taken. In the roll call of loss that locals still recite, Michael “Mike” Stewart, 19, stands with the Coulthurst family—Mark and Irene and their children, Kimberly and John—and the other young deckhands, Jerome Keown, Dean Moon, and Chris Heyman.
They had offloaded fish in Craig over Labor Day weekend and were seen around town before the horror set in. By early morning after, witnesses later described the Investor easing away from the harbor under the hand of a lone figure, as if nothing were amiss, a small wave tossed casually to another fisherman. The boat was found burning at anchor outside town; when the flames were beaten back and investigators boarded, they discovered what the fire had sought to hide—everyone on board had been killed, likely with a. 22-caliber firearm that was never recovered. For Michael “Mike” Stewart, 19, the promise of a season's hard work ended in ash and silence.
Detectives chased threads through a tight fishing community, focusing on someone who knew the people and the rhythms of the docks. Two years after the killings, in September 1984, they arrested 24-year-old John Kenneth Peel, a former deckhand with ties to the victims and who had been in Craig that weekend. The state's first attempt to prove its case ended in a hung jury; a second, high-profile trial in 1988 ended in Peel's acquittal on all counts, including arson and eight counts of first-degree murder. The arrest, the mistrial, and the not-guilty verdicts left the families with courtroom memories instead of answers.
In the years after, Peel pursued a wrongful-prosecution claim that underscored how uncertain the evidence had been, while memorials in Southeast Alaska and in Washington kept the victims' names present—among them Michael “Mike” Stewart, 19, whose family ties to the skipper stitched him into the heart of the voyage. To this day, Alaska still knows the Investor case as its worst unsolved mass homicide, a story that began as a routine end-of-season stop and hardened into a mystery that has never yielded a definitive suspect beyond the man the courts cleared.
