Benjamin Franklin Strong, a 29-year-old white male Anchorage Police Department patrol officer, was working a voluntary stakeout on the night of January 4, 1968, after a spate of armed robberies in the days following Christmas. Hidden in a storeroom at a Brown Jug liquor store in the Government Hill area, he waited for hours, armed with a. 45 pistol and a 12-gauge shotgun, the door propped in place with stacked cardboard boxes.
Around 11 p.m., two masked men entered, forced the clerk into a back room at gunpoint, and began rifling the till. Strong revealed himself; a struggle broke out; his shotgun was kicked from his hands. Gunfire followed—both suspects were wounded, and Strong was mortally shot, his End of Watch recorded that Thursday in Anchorage.
Police swiftly focused on two brothers, Dewey Spencer Gray and Willie Lee Gray, Jr. At trial, prosecutors linked them to the crime through clothing, the car Dewey drove, ballistic evidence from a. 45, and witness accounts that placed the pair near the liquor store; the store clerk could not directly identify them. Ultimately, Dewey took the stand and admitted the robbery and the shooting, asserting a self-defense theory tied to an “illegal arrest.” A jury convicted Dewey of first-degree murder on both premeditated and felony-murder theories and Willie of first-degree felony murder and second-degree murder. Dewey received two concurrent life sentences.
On appeal in January 1970, Alaska's Supreme Court adjusted the results: it affirmed Dewey's conviction for premeditated first-degree murder but set aside his felony-murder conviction; for Willie, it reversed and ordered a new trial on the felony-murder count while directing dismissal of the premeditated-murder count. In a subsequent opinion in 1971, the court recorded that, upon retrial, the remaining appellant was again found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Separate memorial accounts state the captured suspects had originally been sentenced to 99 years and were released after serving six years—a claim repeated in officer memorial materials and family reflections.
In the years since, Strong's killing has remained a solemn marker in Anchorage law-enforcement history—the department's first on-duty slaying of an officer—and is memorialized on state and national honor rolls. He had served just one year with Anchorage PD and left behind his expectant wife and a young daughter. The store stakeout that began as a quiet vigil against holiday robberies ended in a close-quarters gun battle that cost the 29-year-old his life and sent two wounded suspects into the courts, where their names—Dewey Spencer Gray and Willie Lee Gray, Jr.—became part of Alaska's criminal jurisprudence.
