The wilds of Alaska are a vast and untamed frontier. Alaska has a wild serenity about the place. She can be a hero or a villain. That’s the magic about Alaska. But the rugged wilderness also hides dark secrets. In a remote mining village, isolation is enough to make a man go mad.
“I never ever thought it’d happen in this small community, not something like that,” one resident said.
And for this small town, there is no escape.
“There wasn’t much time to think. We didn’t waste time at all,” another said.
Some 250 miles outside of Anchorage, McCarthy, Alaska, is an isolated paradise. It is a place without electricity or running water. If someone stumbles into trouble here, help may not find them alive. There’s no 911.
“Like the little sign says, I don’t dial 911, and there’s a guy standing there with a gun,” a local explained. “Lots of people out here, you know, packed guns all the time.”
McCarthy is a place caught in time, the Wild West of the Alaskan frontier, where the road ends and the wilderness begins.
“When I first came, there were six in the valley, and the valley is 100 miles long by 45 wide,” a resident recalled. “When there were six people, see their boots and identify that boot with that track, and you probably know where 90% of the people were, 90% of the time.”
The tiny village had its time in the sun long ago when the Kennicott copper mine was in its heyday in the early 1900s. Gold miners came up here to explore and hope to get rich. McCarthy was one of these places where it had great deposits of certain types of minerals. By 1930, miners had drilled Kennicott dry. But some 50 years later, wildcatters struck gold—black gold. The Trans-Alaska pipeline had just been finished. Oil had just begun flowing through the pipeline. The state was in line for untold riches. The state was going to grow. It was inevitable.
Today, McCarthy is still a ghost town, a spot where hardy individualists settle.
“It’s about the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen,” one resident noted. “My front yard is as fantastic as it gets.”
In 1983, McCarthy is home to less than two dozen people. All live in relatively primitive cabins within a 50-mile radius of the airstrip, including Les and Flo Hegland, the town’s unofficial postmasters. In the winter, the town’s only link to the outside world is the mail plane that lands once a week if the weather is good. Without the mail plane, McCarthy is totally cut off.
“There was no communication in 1983 in the middle of winter,” someone explained. “There’s nobody here that owned a single sideband or a radio. You had to go out to make contact or talk to the mail pilot when he came.”
Every Tuesday, the town’s people gather at the Heglands for coffee and cobbler and wait for the plane to deliver their mail and groceries.
“Everybody would just kind of descend on the place. It was a social event,” one local remembered. “We would drink coffee and chat and you know what was going on.”
After socializing, residents drive to the airstrip via snowmobiles and dog sleds to meet the plane. The gathering is a weekly ritual. But one snowy March day, the get-together takes a fatal turn.
Louis Hastings was a mild-mannered environmentalist who loved wild places. Hastings left California and his job as a computer programmer three years earlier. During the long winters, he liked to play chess with his neighbor, 29-year-old Chris Richards.
“Checkmate,” Hastings would say.
“He occasionally would go play games or cards with Chris,” a neighbor noted, “but for the most part, he didn’t interact with other people, and he was somewhat aloof, but not in a cold way.”
Hastings’ visits to Chris’s cabin were rare, so Chris is surprised to see Louis on the morning of March 1, 1983. He looked out and saw Hastings coming up to his cabin, so he reached over and put a pot of water onto the stove for tea.
“Hey, what’s going on?” Chris asked.
“I’m not playing no more chess,” Louis replied. “But I do have some warm tea on. You want some tea?”
“Yeah, go ahead,” Chris said.
As Chris reaches for a mug, Louis raises a gloved hand and pulls the trigger of the pistol he has hidden inside.
“He stuck his fist in Chris’s face and shot him,” a witness explained. “And Chris, seeing this big fur mitten coming at his face and hearing the pop and the impact, he thought he had been punched in the face by some Jack-in-the-Box type toy. It was completely out of the blue from his viewpoint that this person would come to do him harm. It was totally unexpected.”
He doesn’t know what’s hit him when he’s first shot because Hastings has put a homemade silencer on his pistol. So it finally occurs to him that harm is being done to him.
“What is wrong with you, Lewis?” Chris asked.
“Chris, if you’ll just stop fighting, I’ll make it easy on you,” Louis responded.
“First off, you don’t want to believe one of your neighbors would do this to you,” a resident said. “And then you go into a rage and go, ‘Well, that dirty SOB is not going to do this to me.'”
In an instant, Chris prepares for the fight of his life. He grabs a knife and wrestles Hastings to the floor. He was having a hard time using it, but they were struggling, and he did manage to stab Lou in the leg with it. He bolts from his cabin and escapes into waist-deep snow, but Hastings continues his assault.
“Lou’s gun jammed inside of his mitten, so he went and got his .223 which he had left outside,” a witness said. “And Chris was 100 yards down the trail by now, and Lou started shooting at him and shot at him several times.”
Wounded and bleeding, Richards heads toward his neighbors to get help. He fears Hastings has gone mad and that he may not be his only target. Richards must find a way to warn his neighbors that a crazed gunman is on the loose.
Outside the remote mining village of Kennicott, Alaska, residents are gathering at the home of Les and Flo Hegland for mail day. They have no idea that a lone gunman is on the prowl, already wounding Chris Richards. Richards is making a desperate attempt to get to the airstrip, anxious to warn his neighbors of the harm he’s already met face to face. Richards knows the residents are completely cut off from the outside world. They have to rely on each other if they are going to survive.
Pilot Gary Green has long called McCarthy home. He moved to the area in 1973, swelling the town population to seven.
“If you don’t like a little more hardship, a harder way of living, McCarthy won’t agree with you,” he said. “We’ve not kept pace with the modern world.”
Despite the indescribable beauty, the terrain is severe and unforgiving. During the harsh winter months, McCarthy is inaccessible by road. 81-year-old Jim Edwards is considered one of the pioneers. More than 50 years ago, he logged in the timber to build his house by hand.
“The people that live here, the ones that succeed in living here, are the ones who will do it for themselves,” he said. “You fix it yourself, or you build it yourself, and whatever. If you want electricity, make it. If you want water, fetch it, you know.”
On the morning of March 1, Jim Edwards and his wife, Maxine, are just two weeks shy of their 25th wedding anniversary.
“Okay, she was very capable living out here doing this,” Jim said. “She helped build this house. I did the structural work, and she did a lot of the finish work herself, and she could take in and get into it and do it and complete it, take care of things first class.”
To get her mail, Maxine crosses the frozen Kennicott River and heads toward the Hegland’s house. She’s expecting an anniversary present from her children.
“Oh, there was a silver platter for 25 years being mailed in,” Jim noted. “My kids, they mailed us a silver platter as a gift.”
As Maxine heads toward the Hegland’s home, she has no idea that Chris Richards is fighting for his own life to try and save hers. Bleeding profusely, Chris churns through the snow toward the tourist lodge, looking for someone to help him warn the others.
“You know, until you get into a situation like that, the will to survive, you don’t really think about it,” Chris said. “But once you’re in that situation, you will do anything you can to make it better, to get out of that situation. You wanted to live.”
“Hello? Is anybody home?” he asked.
Unfortunately, the lodge is empty. He goes through the building and comes out the other side with a plan to make it to somebody else’s cabin to get help. Meanwhile, Chris has no idea that Hastings has followed his bloody tracks to the lodge.
“And Hastings apparently doesn’t know that he’s gotten out of the building and thinks he’s still in there,” a witness explained. “And so Hastings sets the building on fire and burns the building down, hoping to burn him up with the building.”
But Chris makes his way through the wilderness toward another cabin. He plays it smart in that he doesn’t go down the trail. He thinks, “If I go down the trail, I have a chance of being found by Hastings.” So he goes through the snow. He’s cold, he’s been shot twice, and he makes it to a cabin.
Believing he left Chris Richards for dead, Hastings turns his sights to the home of Les and Flo Hegland, the town’s unofficial postmasters. He believes the weekly traditional mail-day gathering will give him the opportunity to take out all of McCarthy at one time.
“There was nothing, nothing in his behavior that tipped anybody off, and he was completely out of the blue,” a resident said. “I mean, it’s unbelievably out of the blue. This is just one of those circumstances where nobody would have guessed that this person was going to do something like this.”
Pursuing Chris Richards, Hastings has hiked through the bitter cold for four miles to the Hegland’s home.
“Yes, it’s so nice,” someone said.
Hastings bursts through the door of the Hegland’s home.
“What are you doing here?” someone asked.
“Les owned several firearms and kept them handy,” a local noted. “I don’t think to protect himself from people, but I mean he was a hunter/trapper. But you can’t defend yourself from someone that you don’t know who’s going to shoot you.”
Les, his wife, Flo, and their friend Maxine, who had just arrived, are killed instantly. The intruder is intent on making sure no one survives and fires a final shot into each of the victims.
“It’s the classic coup de grace,” a witness said. “It’s done, it’s over. It’s just a matter of, there is no coming back from that shot.”
He then methodically moves the bodies into a back room before any others arrive.
“The idea was just hide the evidence, make people feel like this is the norm,” one said. “Everything’s normal. I’m here to get my mail, and he could just pick people off one by one as they came in through the door. He’s just set up a trap for those people.”
One by one, they head toward the home of Les and Flo Hegland, completely unaware of the carnage inside. Knowing the mail plane is fast approaching and that others will soon be arriving, he scrambles to hide the evidence.
“He even took a rag rug from one part of the house into the kitchen to cover up the pool of blood where he’d killed these people,” a witness recalled, “so that the subsequent people arriving would come on into the house like they normally do and not see anything out of the ordinary. Once they’re inside, he’s got them. There’s no way for him to escape before he has an opportunity to kill him. At the time, it just seemed like the act of a madman.”
The remote mining village of McCarthy, Alaska, is nestled in near-complete isolation. People live there in solitude, knowing if they hear a neighbor cry for help, there’s no one to call. Life in Alaska, when you’re living in a place as remote as McCarthy, can be incredibly dangerous.
“It’s life or death. There’s nothing in between,” a local said.
Three residents of McCarthy are already dead, and a lone gunman lies in wait, ready to kill again. Louis Hastings has already taken out Les and Flo Hegland and their friend Maxine Edwards and is now poised to shoot the other residents as they arrive at the traditional mail-day gathering.
“You want some tea? Okay, go ahead,” Chris Richards remembered.
Chris Richards is the only one in town who knows Hastings has gone berserk. It seems Louis Hastings won’t stop until all of his neighbors are dead. But Chris Richards has no idea why.
“He was extremely intent on warning the neighbors,” someone said. “He was also extremely intent on surviving, and people do some incredible things when they’re trying to survive.”
He breaks a window and rummages through the closets of a neighbor’s hunting cabin. There, he outfits himself in boots, a parka, and snowshoes, but there are no weapons to be found.
“It’s a frightening situation when there is no one really to turn to,” a resident noted. “And again, the troopers are a plane ride away.”
Unarmed and terrified he might cross paths with the neighbor who already shot him multiple times, Chris makes his way to the cabin of Tim and Amy Nash, newlyweds who had only recently returned home to McCarthy.
“He couldn’t make the snowshoes work, and he crawled on his hands and knees for forever, just thinking, ‘I got to warn my friends,'” a witness said. “And he did make it to Tim and Amy’s house.”
“It’s been such a nice afternoon,” someone remarked.
38-year-old Tim Nash and his 25-year-old wife, Amy, had been married outside of Alaska the previous Christmas.
“I think it started out as almost like a distraction, and then she just went with it,” a neighbor said. “Amy came out and stayed in a cabin. I’m thinking she might have been staying by herself. And when a young gal comes to McCarthy in the winter and stays at a cabin, they usually need some help, or there’s somebody that thinks they do.”
So they met, the two quickly fell for one another, and tied the knot only months after they met. They had just returned to Tim’s cabin on Valentine’s Day.
“What are you doing? What happened?” Tim asked.
“Lewis has gone mad,” Chris replied. “First thing is we got to warn the others. They shot me. I ran out the back door. He shot me again in my arm. He came over. You got to go to the airstrip. You got to warn the rest of them.”
They took him in and bandaged him up, and he is telling them they got to get their guns and go down to the mail and warn everybody. The Nashes scurry to the airstrip with Chris in tow. There, the trio frantically tells Gary Green a killer is loose in McCarthy.
“He was ranting and raving about Lou Hastings having shot him and that we needed to go warn everybody,” Gary recalled. “I didn’t really know what to think. I thought that Chris Richards and Lou Hastings had had a fight at Kennicott and that Lou had shot Chris, and then that was it.”
Gary tells them he saw Hastings heading toward the Hegland’s earlier that morning.
“He just stood there, and I recognized who he was from the clothes he was wearing,” Gary said. “But I considered him strange and a person without common sense, and he was a hard guy to communicate with. I knew I didn’t care for the guy, so I decided not to go any further. I just stopped at my plane, but I had no idea what was going on.”
Chris needs medical attention, and Gary is the only one who can help. He warms up his plane to get Chris to the nearest hospital. Tim Nash decides to risk his own life and goes back to check on the Hegland’s. Tim arrives to find the Hegland’s door off the hinges. He has no idea where Louis Hastings is.
“Tim snuck up to the door,” a witness said. “And down low, there’s windows that went from the house to the porch, and Tim tried to stay below those windows.”
He cautiously enters the house with his finger on the trigger of his gun. He smelled the gun smoke, saw blood. He’s met by Hastings’ gunfire. He is shot in the leg and hastily fires back. Tim rushes out of the cabin and runs for his life. He hobbles back to the airstrip and confirms Chris Richards and Amy’s worst fears.
“What happened to you?” Amy asked.
“It’s Lewis,” Tim replied. “He shot me.”
He had been shot in the leg. He said that he had got a shot at Hastings inside the house. There was already gun smoke in the house. He could smell it, and he thought the Heglands were dead. Gary insists he evacuate Tim and Amy immediately, and they fly to the hospital with Chris. But the couple wants to stay behind and warn the rest of their neighbors.
“Hastings was still down at the Hegland’s house as far as we knew, and other people would be arriving for mail,” someone said. “We were just the first ones, and so they were going to keep anybody else away, and that’s how we left it. They had the opportunity too to get in that plane at that time, but decided to stay and warn other people coming to mail.”
“I took off as they were standing on the runway,” Gary noted. “I took off right beside him and flew past him. I had just gotten airborne and I thought, ‘What if he comes out the driveway to shoot at me as I’m flying by?’ So I turned. I banked away from that driveway very steeply—a radical maneuver.”
While en route to nearby Glennallen, Chris pleads with Gary to warn the pilot of the incoming mail plane to turn back.
“I just turned on the radio to 1.36 and started calling, ‘Lynn Ellis, can you hear me?'” Gary said. “And I did that for at least 5 minutes. I just kept repeating it, and finally he answered. I told him that he needed to get back and notify the troopers. He was much closer to Glennallen than I was.”
Minutes later, the mail pilot alerts the Alaska State Troopers that the tiny community of McCarthy is under siege.
“We knew that people were being shot; we just didn’t know any of the details,” a trooper explained. “We didn’t know how many or who, or where exactly in McCarthy it was occurring.”
The only three troopers in the area quickly spring into action.
“The three of us were basically it for everything within 100 miles in every direction,” a trooper said. “We were it. We had—there was nobody else to help, and we couldn’t very well wait for help to come from Anchorage. We had to go out there and do something to try and stop whatever was going on.”
They armed themselves, then commandeered an Alaska pipeline chopper and take off for McCarthy, but the slow-moving aircraft will take an hour and a half to reach the secluded village. At the airstrip, Tim and Amy Nash are standing guard to warn anyone coming to mail. But they have no idea that Hastings has grown tired of waiting for people to come to him and now he is on the prowl.
“Hastings goes out the back of the residence and down along with inside the tree line behind the snow berm and sets up his firing position down the runway,” a witness said.
The newlyweds are now standing in the crosshairs of a madman’s rifle, their lives in his hands. The mountain village of McCarthy, Alaska, is under siege, gripped by the terror of a demented gunman. As pilot Gary Green scrambles to lift a wounded Chris Richards to safety, newlyweds Tim and Amy Nash are preparing for the fight of their lives.
“There wasn’t much time to think. We didn’t waste time,” Tim said. “I made a decision, I got to get Chris out of here and get help. I mean, it’s hard to believe. I’ve never experienced anything like that, and I hope to never again.”
Louis Hastings, one of McCarthy’s two dozen residents, is on a killing spree. The Nashes don’t know Hastings has crawled atop a snow berm behind them. In an instant, he shot Tim in the back, and then as Amy ran towards Tim, he shot her too. Hastings has now killed five of his neighbors. He tries to hide the Nash’s bodies behind a snow berm out of sight of the approaching mail plane. He doesn’t know that Gary Green warned the mail pilot to stay away. But he hears the roar of a snow machine and sees Harley King and Donna Byum approaching the airstrip.
“Harley King was from that older breed of gentlemen, you know,” a witness noted. “‘You got to prove yourself to me, youngster, before you know,’ but after I got to know him good, [he would] give your shirt off his back to help you out on things.”
Ordinarily, Harley and his wife would wait until after the mail flight to see if any mail had arrived for them, but their friend Donna planned to fly out on the mail plane, so Harley offered her a ride. They could see Tim and Amy lying on the runway up ahead.
“Donna ran up to help,” someone said. “And Harley, he could see Hastings walking down the runway towards them, and he told her to run, go get help, that he couldn’t do anything, but that she had to run.”
Donna runs to the Hegland’s home for cover. Afraid to enter, she hides out in the greenhouse. Within minutes, she hears the crunch of snow under the weight of footsteps.
“The other one ain’t dead yet,” someone heard.
“She had read many Louis L’Amour novels,” a witness said. “And it got in her mind when she hid to stay quiet, not move, do nothing. ‘The other one ain’t dead yet,’ and Lou kept calling out. He’d say, ‘Come on out, he’s not dead yet.'”
“Said ‘yet?'” someone remarked. “Um, she didn’t budge.”
Unable to locate Donna, Hastings gives up his search. Knowing he’s leaving witnesses behind and his plan is unraveling, Hastings loads two duffel bags filled with weapons, ammunition, and survival gear onto the Nash’s snow machine and heads off into the wilderness. Five and a half hours after the massacre began, the police chopper approaches the airstrip.
“I told the helicopter pilot to fly as low to the ground as he dared fly and as fast as he could go down the runway,” a trooper said. “We got about halfway down the runway, there was a body laying off on the left side with a snow machine. And we got a little bit farther down the road on the right side, there were two bodies laying in the snow. And the helicopter pilot came on the intercom, and he said, ‘Wow, man, this is just like ‘Nam.'”
The chopper takes off to conduct an aerial search. While circling, the pilot spots a snow machine heading into the mountains. The driver refuses to stop and barrels on through the large pines. Investigators wonder if it’s a victim who got away or the killer himself. A chase quickly ensues. The driver races out into a clearing. The chopper swoops down, and the driver acknowledges the authorities with a wave.
“We were not in a trooper helicopter,” a trooper said. “We were in a commandeered Alaska Helicopters helicopter, which turned out to be quite lucky for us.”
Hastings thought he was going to get a ride into town. As the chopper lands, police are about to come face to face with an ice-cold killer. Nearly six hours after a lone gunman wages all-out assault on secluded McCarthy, Alaska, authorities are desperate to catch the killer. They’ve surrounded a man frantically fleeing the area on a snow machine but don’t know if he’s a victim or the gunman.
“We were on the ground and pointed in on him with our weapons,” a trooper said. “And we were yelling at him to get down on the ground, put his hands up, get down on the ground.”
And he stood there. He hesitated. He would start to put his hands up, and then he would put them back down. There was a Mini-14 with a 30-round clip, round in the chamber and the safety off, laying from the seat of the snow machine up through the handlebars, and what he was doing was trying to decide whether or not he could win the gunfight. But the troopers don’t back down, and the driver quickly concedes, hoping he can fool police with a quick-witted scheme.
“Oh, hey, hey, hey! Who are you?” the man asked.
“I’m Chris Richards,” he lied. “I come from Louis Hastings. Hands up! Keep them up! Louis Hastings is shooting other… I’m one of you guys.”
“The problem, a major problem for him, was that he had his driver’s license on him with his picture,” a trooper noted. “So we were then quite certain that we had the right person.”
“All right, let’s go,” a trooper said. “Let’s take a look in these duffel bags.”
Authorities search Hastings’ duffel bags and uncover an arsenal of weapons along with 2,000 rounds of ammunition. Even more disturbing, they find what appears to be a hit list of names of state representatives and other prominent figures.
“One thing that was a little bit troubling was that he had particular people marked out, called out on that list,” a trooper said. “And so there was some indication that he had some intention of doing harm to the people on the list.”
With Hastings in custody, troopers returned to the airstrip to search for survivors.
“Is there anybody here? Alaska State Police! Anybody out here?”
“I’m here, over here,” a voice called out.
They find Donna Byum, still hiding out behind the Hegland’s greenhouse.
“Alaska State Troopers, ma’am. Are you okay? Have you been hurt?”
“Shot in the arm,” Donna said.
“You’re going to be okay,” the trooper said.
“The fact that it was 20 below probably kept her from bleeding to death,” a trooper observed. “She hid out in the woods basically until we got there, and we were able to entice her out of the woods. We’re the good guys, it’s okay.”
Inside the Hegland’s home, troopers find the bodies of Les and Flo Hegland and Maxine Edwards. It is clear that all have suffered multiple gunshots from a high-powered rifle, including one shot to the head. A bloody, fur-covered silencer sat on the nightstand next to the bodies.
“People wonder why Hastings chose to use a silencer,” one said. “And I think it fit with his plan. He wanted to kill everyone in town, and in the wintertime, in a place like McCarthy, it’s silent. You may hear the hum of a generator, you may hear someone out cutting firewood with their chainsaw, but the snow really deafens the place. Had somebody heard a gunshot, all of those people would have now been hunting him.”
Meanwhile, unaware of what’s happened, Jim Edwards is becoming increasingly concerned about his wife, Maxine. Radio coverage is spotty, but he manages to tune in.
“She went over there to get the mail and didn’t come back,” Jim said. “And usually she would have got back maybe early afternoon. Finally, I thought I better turn on the news, just for the hell of it. Well, the news was that there’d been a shooting in McCarthy and several people were dead.”
Jim borrows a neighbor’s snow machine and races to the Hegland’s home to find his wife of nearly 25 years.
“One of the policemen took me around through one bedroom or one little extra room, and then back into the bedroom, beside Les and Flo’s bed,” Jim recalled. “And there’s a pile of bodies there, and Maxine was on top of the pile. Finally, I saw her, and it was just, ‘Wow,’ you know? And I—I just kind of went numb.”
“It wasn’t half the town. It was more than that,” a resident noted. “It was incomprehensible.”
“That night I stayed with Lynn Ellis,” Jim said. “And I don’t drink. I mean, I’ll have a drink, but I asked him for whiskey, which he had a bottle in the cabinet, and I took it to bed with me that night and drank myself to sleep.”
Louis Hastings is charged with the murders of six of his neighbors and the attempted murders of two. Hastings pleads no contest, but no one has any idea what triggered his shooting spree.
“Apparently Louis Hastings had been angry for a long time, but nobody knew it,” a witness said. “He also practiced shooting rabbits because he had never killed anything before, and he wanted to see if he could do it. And I just can’t relate the fact that in his mind, if he could kill a rabbit, he could kill a human. Um, he was definitely off.”
An environmentalist, Hastings loved the wild, but he hated the Trans-Alaska pipeline and considered it a violation of the natural world.
“He may have had his vision, you know, and his coming from California and what he had seen in the world, the over-industrialization,” one observed. “But he was in a place that was perfect.”
Hastings despised overdevelopment and overpopulation and believed Alaska should stay in its pristine, untouched state.
“There’s always been a struggle in Alaska,” a local noted. “Everybody who comes to Alaska says, ‘I want to be the last one in. Close the door after I come in,’ you know, kind of thing. There are a lot of folks who don’t want to see Alaska grow anymore.”
Hastings ultimately confessed that he had concocted an elaborate plot. He planned to hijack the mail plane and fly to nearby Glennallen. There, he would commandeer a fuel truck and drive it into a Trans-Alaska oil pipeline pump station and blow it up.
“It’s in the middle of winter,” a witness explained. “Virtually all of the pipeline is in below-zero weather. As soon as that oil cools enough, it congeals in the pipeline, and it would take them months to get the pipeline started again.”
Hastings also planned to kill himself in the act, but he wouldn’t be the only one to die.
“He needed to kill all of the people on McCarthy because they would have been able to identify him potentially,” a local said. “And he had a strong desire that his family not find out that it was him who had done all of these horrific things.”
Oddly enough, police believe problems at home may have pushed Hastings to the brink. The weekend before the shootings, neighbors told police Hastings apparently discovered his wife was having an affair.
“What did you expect?” someone asked.
In his hostility, Hastings couldn’t see the paradox in killing a town that existed without electricity, running water, or telephones, all to protest what he perceived to be the over-industrialization of Alaska.
“What Hastings did was he stripped life in rural Alaska of its innocence, of its purity, of its peace, its tranquility,” a resident said. “There’s nobody in that community who wasn’t touched by that that day, so of course he changed it, and he changed it for many years to come. But it’s almost like water that gets disturbed and then ultimately seeks its level again. It’s a peaceful place.”
In July 1984, Louis Hastings was convicted of six counts of murder and two counts of attempted murder. He was sentenced to 634 years behind bars. Prison records show his release date as 2617.
“It costs us $40,000 or so a year to keep him there,” a local said. “My feeling is that 10 cents would have fixed it, you know. Maybe 10 to 20 cents to clean the gun afterwards.”
Donna Byum left the area shortly after the killings and left no forwarding address. She did not stick around at all, just had too many bad memories, she said. Chris Richards carried a handgun in his back pocket for 8 years after the murders.
“It affected him pretty bad,” a neighbor noted. “‘Cause he tried to warn everybody. He did the best he could, and still a bunch of people got shot. And we understood why, you know, why he felt that kind of survivor’s guilt. But man, he just—it just wouldn’t go away. It didn’t let go. It was a fatal wound for him as well. It just took a long time.”
Sadly, Chris later succumbed to a fire in his cabin. For Jim Miller, Chris’s best friend, the massacre on mail day isn’t the only memory that haunts him. He remembers another disturbing encounter at the airstrip the summer before, when Hastings brought a rifle with him.
“Being a vet, I thought at the time, I said, ‘You know, that rifle is just made to kill people with,'” Jim said. “I never thought much more of that rifle until this incident happened, in which that was the gun he used to shoot people with.”
Jim’s not the only one who’s continued to ask if there was anything that could have been done to spare his neighbors.
“I would reflect on my, you know, on my conversations with him, my personal conversations with him,” one resident said. “And, uh, you know, was like, was I being, you know, respectful or friendly? And did I say anything wrong? I couldn’t think of anything, and you know, nobody could really think of anything, but we all thought about it.”
Nearly three decades after the massacre, the population of McCarthy remains virtually the same despite signs of progress.
“Mail plane, when I first came here, the mail plane was scheduled once a month,” a resident said. “Now they come twice a week. It’s almost too much.”
Jim Edwards and Gary Green still call McCarthy home, and neither could envision life anywhere else.
“Look at the freedom we have right out the window and at the mountains and up the glacier,” Jim noted. “There is where God is, if you’d want to put it that way. There are animals walk right through the yard. I hope to be in the hot tub someday with friends when a moose or a bear walk right by the—in the yard, and we can sit there and watch them go by. I think that’ll be a highlight.”
“It’s a piece of wild Alaska,” a local concluded. “As soon as you step out your door, I mean, there’s the wilderness is there, and it’s beckoning. And sometimes evil answers the call. There’s an emotion called solitude, and that can be one of the most amazing things about living in a place as remote as McCarthy. But that solitude over time can become psychotic.”
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