#533 - Mountain Massacre - McCarthy, Alaska
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This week, in McCarthy, Alaska, a tiny, isolated town is nearly destroyed when a sudden massacre takes place and the crazed killer is possibly the last person anyone would have expected this from. Welcome to Small Town Murder. ♪♪♪

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Small Town Murder. Yay! Oh, yay indeed, Jimmy. Yay indeed. My name is James Petrogallo. I'm here with my co-host. I'm Jimmy Wissman. Thank you, folks, so much for joining us on another wild, crazy murder adventure here in Small Town Murder. Let's do it. We have one of the smallest towns ever, one of the craziest murders ever. It's all mixed up in this weird one here. Alaska is nothing but weird.

Like whenever, whenever, whenever we do cases there, it is just weird. Stacked on top of weird. Anybody who's not from there that's there is there because they're running from something. It's a very weird place. We'll talk a place that somehow exists and fucking shouldn't. It's like people live there. And like, yeah, strange. This is this town is remote. It's crazy. We'll get to it. First of all, shut up and give me murder dot com.

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You bet. Every last damn one of them. This week for Crime and Sports, we're going to talk about the entire 1993 Florida State football program scandal. Oh. They won the national championship and had tons of scandals. They had like a payroll and free shoes and it was a whole big thing. We'll talk about it. Then for Small Town Murder, something I'm very excited for, we're going to talk about Ted Bundy's psychological evaluation.

Man, is that a witch's cauldron of weirdness there? It just keeps coming. It's from the 1976 arrest in Utah when he did a 90-day diagnostic testing to see about his sentencing. Deep dive. Deep dive into that. What does Ted think about pictures and what stories does he make out of them and shit like that? It's wild stuff. We'll talk about all that and more. Patreon.com slash Grime and Sports. Disclaimer, it's a comedy show.

It is. We are comedians, so we're going to make jokes. We can't help that. That's definitely going to happen. So expect that and expect murder as well. Sure. How does that work? Well, very easily here. We don't cross the streams like Ghostbusters. That's what you got to do here. No crossing the streams. We don't make fun of the victims.

or the victim's family. Why, James? Because we're assholes. Yeah, but... But we're not scumbags. That's pretty... That's it. That's pretty relevant, I think. It's good stuff here. So if you think that that sounds good, you're going to hear a wild story. If you think true crime and comedy should never, never, ever mix, then I don't know why you're here to begin with. First of all, you read the description of the show. Sure.

But maybe, maybe we're not what you think. So give it a chance. And if you don't like it, no complaining later. That said. Maybe you don't know either. Maybe you don't know what you like. Who knows? Maybe we'll show you something new. You never know. Maybe. That said, I think it's time, everybody. Yeah. Let's all sit back. Let's clear the lungs, everyone. And let's all shout. Shut up and give me.

Let's do this, everybody. Let's go on a trip. Feels good, yeah. We're going real far. We're going all the way to Alaska. And this is McCarthy, Alaska. Where's that at? You've never heard of this because people don't even know it exists. It's so remote. There's no way to get here except for a couple of very specific ways. Airy and plains? Plains. There's a bridge thing that you can walk. There's...

There's a road. You can walk it. There's a road, too, but sometimes it's shitty, sometimes it's not. It's really sketchy here. McCarthy, Alaska. It's in southeastern Alaska over there. It's six and a half hours to drive to Anchorage from here. My God. And it's only like 200-something miles, so it's just you have to drive through.

Bad terrain, around mountains, all that kind of shit. Here, the last Alaska episode we did was Palmer, Alaska, which was episode 428. So it's been more than a year since we've done Alaska here. That was the one with those barracks things, the military things, right? Weak motives and wilderness gangsters, that one was. This is area code 907. The zip code here is 99588. And the motto is...

This place isn't really a place. That might as well be what it is because they don't have a motto because wait till you hear how few people they have. It's remarkable. Little bit of history. This is a cool historical town in terms of what it was. It's this rugged kind of old timey thing here. The natives hunted on this area for a long time. It was a big native deal here. And they would collect copper nuggets from the creek.

and make shit out of that. So their permanent camp was on the Copper River at the village of Terral near Chitina, which is a town that's close by, where they fished for salmon. Now, copper was discovered between the Kennicott Glacier and McCarthy Creek. Kennicott's like the next, they're kind of twin towns there in McCarthy right next to each other. So this was in 1900 they discovered copper.

So after which the Kennecott Mind and Kennecott Mining Company and the company town of Kennecott were created. There was no towns here before this. They found copper and made a town just to get the copper out. Fuck yeah. That was it. Now, Kennecott and McCarthy were kind of sister towns for a reason because alcoholic beverages and prostitution were forbidden in Kennecott. That was the company town. Right.

So someone said, well, let's just build a street in the town right next door here in McCarthy and make that fucking Deadwood. You know what I mean? Sodom and Gomorrah, Alaska. Make that whatever we want. Amazing. So yeah, McCarthy grew as just basically an area to provide booze and women for copper miners. That's all it was. It grew quickly into a major town, actually. Had a gymnasium, a hospital, a school, a bar, and a brothel.

Isn't it crazy what beer and pussy will get for you? I love that they were like, well, we'll open up the school. The school and the brothel we'll put right next to each other.

That'll be good. These kids need to learn some lessons, I'll tell you that much. So the Copper River and Northwestern Railway reached McCarthy in 1911. In 1938, copper deposits were gone by then, over. Wow. They sucked all the copper out. It's done. That was fast. So the town is basically abandoned after that. The railroad discontinued service to the town.

What's the point? There's nobody there. There's no copper there.

And they fucked it out in no time flat. Pulled every drop of it out of the ground and said, done. Left it behind. Oh, my God. We're in so much trouble. Like a Kentucky holler. Just like a holler where the mine's out of coal. Just those people are fucked now. Oh, my God. So the population of McCarthy and Kennicott fell to basically nothing until about the 1970s. There was nobody here. It was like two mountain people up here, like, you know, trapping for fur and shit.

And then it started to draw young people who were hippies basically. This is the end of the hippie era who these people were looking for a naturalist lifestyle here. And then there was also people coming for the money involved in the Trans-Atlanta or Trans-Alaska Pipeline Project because it's good money to build up there. So in the 80s, this area was designated the Wrangell St. Elias National Park area.

And then it began to draw some adventurous people coming out to climb shit and walk through an untouched wilderness, basically. Let's go see a bear. Let's go see some shit. We're going to see a bear. So they said there's always been at least one family living in the McCarthy area since 1953. There's always at least one family in the area, a whole area.

It's crazy. So the old mine buildings, the artifacts and the history, that's why people come here for this shit. Only in the summer, though. In the winter, we're talking negative 60 degrees in the winter. Oh, I'm sure. It's extremely freezing, fucking brutal cold. You'll die out here. The McCarthy and Kennicott area ranks as one of the United States' most endangered landmarks by the National Trust for Historic Places. They did emergency stabilization of some of the old buildings, but they need to do more.

It's all falling apart. Because there's earthquakes here, too. So shit just falls apart. That's right. It's part of the fucking ring of fire, too. Yeah, it's crazy. So reviews of this town, there's no reviews of anywhere near this town, except there is reviews of the McCarthy Lodge and the Ma Johnson's Hotel, which are one place. The what?

Howard Johnson's mom has a hotel. She's got Ma Johnson. Hey, Ma, you want to open some stuff up? I got it, Sonny. Don't worry about it. I'll open it up. The Ma Joe where Howard Johnson learned. That's it. It's the McCarthy Lodge and the Ma Johnson's hotel. They say the McCarthy Lodge Bistro is an authentic Alaskan fine dining establishment using local ingredients in extraordinary ways. Enjoy wild-caught Copper River red salmon, local-grown yak,

I'm not eating yak. That's where I draw the line. Yak is what I call it when it comes back up. Yeah, I'm not eating any fucking yak, man. That ain't happening. Yak? Are you kidding me? We have that in America? That's like a joke where if there was a Mongolian fucking fur trap, we'd be like, eat your yak, son. And you'd be like, oh, God, no one wants to do that. And it'd snow all around them. Yeah. Yak? Yeah.

In like year one, that movie with Jack Black, that joke would be in there. Yeah, it's fucking awful. Who the hell is eating yak? And they also have, they boast an extraordinary wine list as well, which you wouldn't expect.

Yeah, but you got to drink wine to get that shit down. Here is a couple reviews of that. Here's five stars from Luke. Amazing hotel that is an absolute time capsule taking you back to the early 1900s. Not only in the feel of the hotel itself with period furniture, it's probably fucking the same furniture they've always had.

Yeah, it's just old. But also the staff and friendliness you receive. Step back in time with your stay in this hotel that is centrally located within a stone's throw of everything you need in McCarthy, which is like there's like a pizza place and this place and a pizza place and this place. Yeah, but how was the yak? Okay, people in this town. Yeah, people in this town in peak season now, summertime and all that, it tops out at about around 100.

In the winter, it's anywhere, and I've seen different sites have different things, anywhere from two people...

Just a fuck session. To 22. Anywhere from two to upwards of less than two dozen. Yeah, it's fucking crazy. They had 28 people in 2010, and they've lost some people here. At this point in time, what I've seen from a census website, this is the best stats I can get on this place here, is that there is 16 males and 12 females right now.

Four dudes are sitting around. It's like, fuck, man. Well, or maybe they've taken it upon themselves to say, or they're fucking each other. What the hell? Listen, there's very few options. You know how prison is? This is worse. Okay. At least there's female guards in prison. We are in the middle of the forest, guys. Let's all just take our dicks out and see what happens. What do you say? I know none of us are really into it.

Someone's getting cornholed today is what I'm telling you. The median resident is about 48 years old, which is older than normal here. I see religions. It's about 35% of the people here are religious here.

I think that's not really – it's hard to find great stats on this. It looks like evangelical Protestant is the leader there in religions. Now, here is a thing called – they call it McCarthy compared to Alaska state average. Okay. Median household income significantly below state average. Median house value significantly below state average. Unemployment percentage significantly above state average. There's no jobs here.

Yeah, I guess everybody's unemployed, huh?

Number of rooms per house. It's like a stay-in. No, people come here to get the fuck away from everything and hole up. This isn't like, oh, it's pretty up there. This is, I hate everyone, and I need a way now. I gotta be a way. Before I fucking kill them all, I need to get out of here. The number of rooms per house is significantly below state average. House age is above state average. These are all old. People live in mining cabins from 1900. They just redo them. Oh, my God.

and also number of college students significantly below state average. Where the fuck are they going to go to school? There's not a person. In a tree? No. Is Winnie the Pooh going to teach a course in the fucking forest? The cost of living here averages 100. Here it's 104 because the housing's relatively cheap. This website's all fucked up, but I found it hilarious. Estimated median household income here.

Negative $680,182. I don't know how that's possible. They're in debt every year, half a million dollars. But the median household income in 2000 was $17,188, which is not good at all. It's still not good. So that's less than half of what it was in the country then.

And stuff, like products there are very expensive because it's hard to get things there, right? Fuck yeah, that's the thing. And there's not a lot of stores to buy them in either. So it's, you know, you kind of make your own way. This is fascinating. These people survive on their own and they have to stack food for the winter and then there's the only way to get any supplies is...

In the winter, really, is a plane that comes in once a week with the mail. Really? With expensive shit? With expensive shit. Emergency shit? Housing units lacking complete plumbing facilities. What? 72.2%. No. No. Housing units lacking complete kitchen facilities. Same. 72.2%. No. You can't live like that. That's bonkers. But you know what, though? The estimated median home value here... Mm-hmm.

is negative $706,289,307, which I don't know how that's possible. They'll give you $7 million to take a house? But in 2000, it was $90,000. So it kind of seems like it goes about what it is. So if we've convinced you, you've had it with the world.

My God. You're done. You are done. You're going to move to the middle of nowhere, never to be seen or heard from again. We have for you the McCarthy, Alaska real estate report. Okay, there's one thing for sale within 100 miles of this place, literally. And it's in Chitina, or Chitina, Chitina, or Chitina, or whatever the fuck it is. C-H-I-T-I-N-A. And it's...

It's the closest place to here. It's where the mail plane flies in from. Right. This is a two-bedroom, zero-bath, but there is a bathroom upstairs, I found out. 1,430 square foot. It's a fucking storefront. It's built in 1910. It's this. I'll show you. It's the Spirit Mountain Artwork Store.

Yes, with a little bit of livable upstairs. That's what it is. And it's a national historic site with upstairs living quarters. Upgrades galore from 1978 through the present. So a sweet avocado refrigerator in there. Dope goldenrod countertops. Yeah, those are going to be nice.

Upgrades galore. And they're the false front building with side stairs to access living quarters. This is $225,000. Outside to go in the house. Yes. Well, you can see on the side they have like a corrugated steel roof on the outside stairs. And that's how you get into your living quarters. You can't get to it through the store part of itself. Okay. Things to do here.

Well, nature shit. Survival is really hard. Run from bears, I would say, is probably an activity. Figure out how to wake up tomorrow. Fucking look at the abandoned buildings, though. That's the main thing. People go here just to look at abandoned shit. Really? Yep. They have an abandoned copper mining camp. That's kind of the whole camp is abandoned copper mining camp. It's a National Historic Landmark District.

And this is what they do. They come here. They say that the iconic view in Kennecott is the giant red mill building from the old Kennecott Copper Company, which stands 14 stories above the Kennecott Glacier.

So that's a big building for there. Just go to Jerome, Arizona. It's the same shit. It's much more accessible and it's the same thing. A little closer. They said, how do you get there? Getting to McCarthy is part of the experience, it says. Oh, boy. The drive is approximately seven hours from Anchorage, eight from Fairbanks, and the final two hours are on the scenic, rugged McCarthy Road. This is a gravel road.

And many Alaska car rental companies don't allow their vehicles on non-paid roads. So your insurance is out. No. Alaska 4x4 rentals in Alaska Overland are based in Anchorage, too. So you can get something specifically for this. At the end of the McCarthy Road is the footbridge into McCarthy. Cars aren't permitted in town, so you park your vehicle and walk across the footbridge. This is absurd. It's like going to Nogales. It's fucking ridiculous. Yeah.

Also, there's the you can fly in the Copper Valley Air Service provides scheduled flights between Anchorage and McCarthy and Glen Allen and McCarthy. And there's that. And also, this is a funny thing. See the locals, it says.

stare at because they're weird stare at people who came here to get away from you stare at them that sounds fun right come here and look at a guy that hates your guts on site he looked at us oh he really wants us to die in the forest you could tell i can see it he wanted us to fall off the footbridge fuck it says check out the wrangle mountain center to observe local models of sustainable living practices

These are mountain people who shit in a bucket. They're acting like they got fucking giant organic greenhouses and shit. No. It's not impressive. No, they eat yak and shit in buckets, these people. This is...

Your shit doesn't go bye-bye. This is weird. You have to fucking throw it out. Practices and learn from those living on site. You can see the organic produce gardens and talk with the resident staff about Alaska's permaculture. Almost called it Atlanta's permaculture. Local artists from around the state gather here to unplug in the rural environment while building their individual craft. Families are invited to the music camp in mid-June to hone their musical talents and learn from local musicians who

It won't take long for you to discover that residents delight in sharing their unique skills and passions to those passing through. Yeah, that's why they moved here. So they could deal with a bunch of tourists from fucking Seattle. So...

That said, crime rate in this town. Oh, my fucking property crime. Who got zero? Not one big, big goose egg. There's 20 people here. We handle it in house. They'll cut that shit out. That's that's crime in this town. What the hell are you doing? We'll kill you and bury you in the forest. No one will find you for years. I'll feed you to a fucking. Yeah, but you never know. Violent crime, murder, rape, robbery and assault. The Mount Rushmore of crime. Yeah, fucking zero.

Zero. Which just means last year they had no crime at all. Right. So, zero. But one year they did. One year. One year. And we're going to talk about that year right now. Here we go. Let's talk about a whole bunch of murder. Let's do this. Okay. Okay. Now, got to set the, we've kind of set the tone of where we are, but to set it a little bit more. It's wild.

A little bit more about the Wrangell Mountains that is kind of more specific here. Like we said, this was established in December of 1980 as a national park and preserve. This area is roughly the size, the Wrangell St. Elias National Park is roughly the size of West Virginia. Oh, it's big. It's fucking huge. They have parks the size of states in Alaska. It's huge up there. It's six times the size of Yellowstone.

Oh, my. That's a big fucking area. That's the biggest one in America, right? I don't know. I have no idea. It doesn't say. I mean, maybe. It has to, I would think. They have four major mountain ranges that converge in the park and nine of the 16 tallest peaks in the U.S. rising from within the park's boundaries.

Oh, my. This is like the most, like if you want to see nature in this type of shit, you're never going to get another place like this. This is the place to go. Is this where Denali is? I don't have any fucking idea whatsoever. Unlike, it's somewhere up there, I know, but I don't know exactly where it is. I know it's in Alaska, I just don't know.

Unlike the most national parks, the land along the McCarthy Road and along the road from McCarthy to Kennecott is a checkerboard of private and public lands. That's the other thing. It's all mixed together. More than a million acres within the park's boundaries are still privately owned.

It's a national park, but they – recognizing land rights of the people that lived there before that. The settlement's year-round residents are cut off from roads by a river bluff. And in summer, the only way to cross the river is to pull oneself across in a cable car hand over hand. With the rope?

That's how you get across. Otherwise, you walk across it because it's frozen. It's so stupid. It's fucking crazy. They said there's been a recent wave of outsiders, first hippies who squatted in the dilapidated homes in town, then the National Park Service made it a park, so then lots of tourists come. They said that a lot of people would come here and they're from Anchorage, but they'll dream of living this lifestyle here.

You know, they'll come out here like, yeah, I came to Alaska, but it wasn't far enough for me. This is where it's at. I want to camp every day. Oh, man, this is good. I want to never hear from another human for the rest of my life. Yeah.

One guy here said so many of them don't adapt. They keep their city values and we don't see them around very long. But it's a good life when you live it over time. You learn to see things differently. You learn patience is what you'd learn. What exactly is a city value? City value. I want things so I can go get it now. You know, anything. The luxury of running water. Anything since, you know, like 3000 years ago is a city value.

If you'd like to go to the store and purchase something, those are city values. Okay. City boy? Jesus. What, do you want to turn a light on? What, do you want to flush a toilet, you pussy? Light the candle, pussy. Yeah, Jesus Christ. They said in a winter only a handful of people remain. Nancy Gilbert, who we'll talk about, they're her families in this story, said around here there are so few of us that we know each other by our boot tracks.

No. She said, no, I'm serious. You walk out for water and you say, hey, so and so has been by the path. I don't want to know your Timberland fucking tracks. I don't. I don't want to know anybody's shit. Is that a fucking nine right there? Ted was over here. Wow. And then it said Bonnie Morris, who we'll hear a lot from in this episode. This episode, by the way, is a story of massacre and fucking survival. This is like.

It's wild how the two emotions here. This person said, I always said it could be 60 below here, but at least there are no weirdos.

You are the weirdo. You're sitting around going, it's fine that it's 60 below out. That's fucking weirder than anything you could imagine. Whatever Charles Manson was doing, all that, this is weirder to me. To go, yeah, that's no problem. Nobody's diddling my kid. I could walk to my girlfriend's if I wanted by the light of the moon. You won't have to worry about getting mugged, but you'll have to worry about getting eaten by a grizzly bear or freeze frozen in your tracks as you walk.

And by the light of the moon, don't act like you don't have a flashlight. No, light of the moon. Get out of here. So by the McCarthy Road...

begins where the pavement ends, just outside of Chitina, 61 miles to the west. In 83, the road was covered with gravel and often scarred by washouts and washboard ruts. Railroad ties and spikes occasionally resurfaced and shredded the tires of people driving on it, though. Wow. Because if some water came through and washed it out, they'd get a railroad spike. Yeah.

Shit.

to span the Kennecott, the river there. As a result, the only land route into McCarthy in 83, our story is, was by means of the hand-powered tram, the cable that you go. That's the only way you could fucking get here. Or fly. Or fly in on a little plane. So, all the neighbors know each other, obviously.

Clearly. They know their footprints. They know them so well. Yeah, they know exactly. And there's only 20 people. I mean, you're going to know everybody. So let's talk about a guy who moved here. And there's the people who've lived here for generations. And then there's the people who moved here to get the fuck away from everything. And that is Louis D. Hastings. We'll talk about here. And this is all taking place. Our story is going to be in 1983. But we'll talk a little about him. He was born in Kansas. Okay.

Hastings, Leawood, Kansas in 1944, January 1st, 1944. New Year's baby here. His father, who was a real asshole from what everybody says, mother, sisters, everybody, and a real difficult guy, returned home at the end of World War II. And when he got home at the end of World War II, he was a completely different guy than when he went to World War II. Sure. You know, saw some shit.

So when he got home, he had come home on break, impregnated his wife, the kid's born. He gets home. Now he's got a son. He, quote, disapproved of his infant son. That's not good. I don't like him. That's a bad one. Look at him. I don't like him. That's what it is? Shitting his pants all the time. You're a disgrace. Not a fan. Not my son. My son doesn't shit in his pants. I'll tell you that right now.

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Thank God. From what everybody said. Everybody said Lou, everybody calls him Lou, by the way, Louis Hastings. Everybody said his mother, his sister, everybody said he was a very shy child. And as a youth was, we're talking in the 50s, went to a psychiatrist. Hell yeah. Which, yeah, hell yeah. But back then. He was super fucked up. Back then that was like, I mean, the extreme of holy shit. They tried to throw themselves out of a window. I guess maybe you talk to a psychiatrist. Yeah.

And he was treated for chronic depression in the 50s as a child. Yeah.

Which, yeah, most people didn't take their kids to shrinks back then. In the 60s, that became more popular. But in the 50s, it was like, no way. He's just a young... He's a young... He's not even a young man. He's a young child still. Yeah. And that means that that rejection of his father had to sting so bad. I never liked him at all, the father. I always called him a piece of shit. So that can't help. And then left. Yeah. Even if your father's just kind of uninterested, it feels terrible. Never mind fucking...

actively abusive and then leaving vocally, vocally reminding you how much they don't approve. So he received counseling for two years as a teenager because he was depressed. And his sister said that he started having trouble keeping himself organized, especially to do schoolwork. This is,

His brain was doing all sorts of shit. They said, though, as he got older, though, he was very gentle, very gentle, very caring animal lover, that kind of guy, protector of animals and shit. His sister blames the father for any of his problems as a teenager. She said it's an older sister. So she was like, I remember him. He was a fucking monster, treated him terribly.

It's awful. Her sister's name is Madeline. And she says his constant belittling criticisms and patronizing attitude left all three of us children with a poor self image, shy and unable to relate to other people easily.

Yeah. And it hurts. You have no steady ground to stand on at home. You're, you know, nobody likes you there. How do you expect other people to like it? Well, home base is like, that's where you're supposed to feel you're most comfortable. And that place is awkward and not what you need it to be. How do you get any confidence of anybody else liking you? You know? So they said he seemed to improve with treatment.

But he remained a somewhat shy and lonely child, according to his sister. The doctor described him as a rebellious loner who suffered chronic depression and frequently entertained thoughts of suicide.

Oh, this kid's going to get married. So he's so depressed. Yeah. He's so depressed. He then became an environmentalist after that because he's into animals and shit. So that was kind of the next thing. And he once volunteered to clean birds after an oil spill in California. He came in and was one of those bird cleaner people after school. He'll go in the Air Force, I guess, to try to.

put himself into the world and get confidence. A lot of people go into the military back then to get confidence. That was the thing. And stability. Stability. They come out, they're in a uniform, they have to stand up straight, they have good posture, people are impressed by them because they look like they have their shit together. A lot of people back then, that was the straight and narrow. And it looks like you're

Yeah, but it also gives you the opportunity to straighten your life out, but gives you a path to success or whatever. That's what it looks like, but sometimes it backfires. Yeah, well, yeah. Back then, though, that was kind of like the kind of it was considered like you'll come out all straightened out if you go in the military. That'll fix you. Yeah. Judges used to tell youthful offenders you can either go to jail or go in the army and they'd go, you know, that'll straighten you out. So he ended up doing he's a really smart guy.

He's a computer programmer later on, and he apparently held a top security clearance for

For a good portion of the three and a half years he was in the Air Force. Oh, yeah. Because he was doing computer shit and later became a computer programmer. Wow. And he worked as a computer programmer for Stanford University in the mid-70s. Oh. So, yeah. In the mid-70s, very few people were doing computer programming. That was considered... Yeah. That's cutting that shit. That's crazy. That's like launching a space shuttle. Yeah. Nobody knew what the fuck anything about that was. So...

It's very different. So he's considered a very cutting edge, kind of a smart guy. People at work described him as an introverted person, which makes sense from his background. Computer guy. Didn't talk much and was excessively worried about his personal safety. Was real...

paranoid about anything happening to him. And he was, you know, Oh, I'm gonna get in a car accident or that's going to hurt me. Or yeah, he's like fucking monk from the TV show. Basically always with the accident, always anything could happen. Anything. Uh, they also said, this is fucking great. His, uh, his coworkers also said that he had a very high opinion of his work, although they all thought his programming skills were pretty mediocre. Yeah. So,

One thing you'll get computer people, they are fucking pricks when it comes to shit like that. They are all just, well, you don't know what you're doing, obviously. I do.

They're fucking jerks like that. I lost all respect for those fucks when I watched the movie Hackers. I definitely avoided that pile of shit. It's an Angelina Jolie movie where they all had rollerblades. I'm like, fuck all of you. Yeah, I remember that. Fucking terrible fucking movie that was. So, yeah, he sucks at it, but he thinks he's hot shit. He's an uppity nerd is what he is. So, June 1979, he gets married.

And this is he's 35 years old. So, you know, this is about time to get this going here. He marries Madeline D. Stovall, S-T-O-V-E-L, who is a librarian at Stanford University. Here we go. So a co-worker. That's good. And a smart woman. And she's they seem to be a good couple of librarians.

Usually a little more introverted. You know, they're a little quiet. That's a couple of people that keep track of their glasses. They can pull back into themselves, those people, you know, together. Into a nice book. So during their honeymoon, they stay at the Kennecott Lodge.

Oh, they want to go on their honeymoon to a remote Alaskan wilderness honeymoon. That's what they wanted. So they while they're there on their honeymoon, they decided we're quitting our jobs and moving here. That's it. I want to fuck you with a belly full of yak every night. I want to have a yak fucking every night. Yeah, I'm going to smell your yak. We're going to have hot yak sex every single night.

Yak on yak fucking business is what we're going to do out here. Put your yak inside me. Can't wait. Oh, by the way, there's your shit buckets over there. Romantic.

So that's what they said. So in 1980, they're talking to Liz Gelineski, who owned the Kennecott Lodge here. She was among the first people in McCarthy to meet Lou and his wife, Lonnie, she goes by, by the way. As honeymooners, that's where they stayed at the lodge in 79. She ran the lodge. They sent her a Christmas gift that year after they went home. Yeah.

You changed our lives. Not long afterward, they wrote to her to tell her they were moving to Alaska. You did it. And the lodge owner said both of them were very bright. They seemed like bright, smart people. Yeah, they're both. They're nerds. What the fuck? Yeah. Yeah, that's all.

So they eventually moved to Alaska, but they don't move right to McCarthy because that's a, how do you get your shit there even? It's a tough haul. So instead they first move into a duplex in Anchorage, which is the same as living in a fucking apartment in Costa Mesa at that point. What's the difference? You know what I mean? It's a duplex where Lou operated a pretty unsuccessful and unremarkable computer service company.

He's one of the first dot-coms who's like, we're going to make websites. We're going to fucking kill it. We're going to make billions. And it didn't work out. He started them all and sat back and waited for people. That's it. And there wasn't a lot of computing going on in Alaska back then, apparently. So he didn't like the fact that Alaska, Anchorage in particular, was having an economic development and population growth.

He didn't like that at all. It's booming. And the reason why that's happening is because of the Trans-Atlanta or Trans-Alaska pipeline to bring oil down. So he didn't like that at all. And he was trying to figure out a way to have it stopped.

Oh, he wanted to get in the middle. He's going to get in the middle of it. A psychiatrist said that he considered himself the savior of the Alaskan wilderness. Is that right? This guy from Kansas is the savior of the Alaskan wilderness. OK, so he's he hates the pipeline and not happy about it. The pipeline brings shitloads of oil here. Yeah. Down to here. Did you know that the U.S. is the number one oil producing country in the world?

Yes. But they always...

shitloads. They always say, oh, we gotta stop dependence on this and that. We have the most. We produce the most. We need more oil. We produce the most already. What are we talking about? But we want everyone else to fuck theirs out so that we're the only ones. We're gonna just save ours in the fridge. We keep it in the fridge like some bomb pops that we might want later. Let's eat your Oreos and then we'll eat mine last. And then you have to pay a dollar per Oreo. That's what it is. Summer of 1982.

This is when they lived there for a while. This is when he and his wife purchased an unoccupied house on the property of the old Kennecott copper mine. It's about five miles outside of McCarthy.

And it's an old copper miner's house. That's what it is. It's like one of the workers' houses. And he spends, or both of them spend the summer of 1982 repairing it. They fix the house. They install insulation. They fix the roof. All the shit you would need to survive there in a winter. So it appeared to the residents that Lou was working hard to succeed out here. One person said he went to an incredible amount of effort on that cabin. Really worked it out. He really

fall of 82, he'll remain at the house while his wife goes back to Anchorage.

and lives in the duplex. So he goes back and forth to Anchorage often to see his wife. He's going to stay out there this fall and winter and get this place going. He's going to be like the pioneer. He's like, I'm going to live out here and see if it's possible, and then you come next year, if it is, basically. Now, she, Lonnie, is working with the State Division of Energy and Power Development at this point. So she has a job in Anchorage. That's why she has to stay.

So in 1983, his computer business is a disaster. Yeah, it sucks. His marriage is falling apart because she's in Anchorage most of the time and he's living in the fucking woods like a lunatic. So that's not helping much. And he's increasingly mad at the pipeline.

Hates it. Increasingly more pissed off about it. Yeah. Because the pipelines, why our relationship sucks. Well, yeah. Well, obviously. When there's oil flowing beneath your feet, you can't communicate. That's usually how it works. I can't do it. I can hear. We've got to get out there. I can hear. And your job is here. So now this is all the pipeline's fault. The pipeline cost $8 billion to build, by the way. Yeah. Literally. It's an 800-mile fucking pipeline. Yeah.

Oh, you don't like it? We'll kill the idea. Don't worry about it. It's now responsible for transporting 25% of total U.S. oil production. Don't worry. We'll shut it down. Shut it down. Well, you know what? He's going to really make a case for it. You never know. Really? Maybe a convincing and passionate argument would get people to say we don't need energy at all or independence or money or anything else.

According to one psychiatric report, quote, Hastings was disturbed by the population growth and influx of money into the state and determined that the best way to interrupt this was to destroy the pipeline and thus cut off Alaska's wealth and consequent growth. So to keep this the forest, we have to kill this pipeline. We have to destroy it. That's what he was. So.

Somehow he decides he himself doesn't have an environmental group. There's not 100 people. He one guy is somehow going to destroy the transit Alaska pipeline.

Which seems difficult. It probably does. It doesn't seem like it's just sitting on top of the ground ready for you to fucking bash with a sledgehammer probably. You've got to be real good and strategic. I think he can do it. And then if you do destroy it, unless you destroy all 800 miles of it or whatever, they're just going to fix what you broke and get the oil going again. So what are you going to do? Yeah. Well, he bought a bunch of guns is what he did. He bought a bunch of guns and at least 2,000 rounds of ammo.

Which, honestly, in the Alaskan wilderness doesn't seem excessive. Everybody's got that. Yeah, it seems you could get a whole family of bears could attack you or something. You have no idea what's going on out there. Anything could happen. Fucking, like, prospector ghosts and, like, copper miner zombies could come at you. You never know. He also built a silencer. Yeah. Which he... Wait. Yeah. No. He built a silencer. That's not the weird part. Okay. Weird part is he covered it in beaver fur.

Oh, he had a beaver fur silencer. Why? Yeah. Make that motherfucker. What the fuck is that about? Why would you want that? That's his going out silence. I pictured him petting it while he's holding the gun.

Like a fucking dog's head. That's your fall silencer right there. Beaver. He started shooting at rabbits to get good at shooting. Okay. He also compiles a list of 200 of Alaska's political and civic leaders...

Nope. Including phone numbers and home addresses of the members of the Anchorage Police Department's Crisis Intervention Response Team. He's a little pissed off at them. What's going on? The neighbors like him, though. Up here, that's considered folksy.

Some wild information to be culling. Up here, this is considered just normal. Everybody up there wants to blow something up. Golden Gate Bridge, you? This guy over here? Oh, you want the Lincoln Tunnel you're going to blow up. This guy's doing the pipeline. We're all in this together.

We're all crazy fucking anti-society lunatics. So the neighbors like him. The Liz, who owns the Kennecott Lodge, said, if I'd have needed help with something, I never would have hesitated to ask him for help. Good guy. Bring your beaver silencer. Let's get after it. Let's shoot some shit. His neighbors, if I need a shipment of yak to come in, he can help me with it.

His neighbors describe him as quiet and said he rarely took part in group events. Don't like that. And people, no, but there they go. That's normal though. Some people here are here cause they're not into people. So people let him be and nobody even worried about it. That never stood out as any, it's everybody up here. It's such aberrant behavior to be up here. Yeah.

Whatever weird shit you're doing, people just go, well, I mean, I'm sure I do weirder shit. That's what they all do. He just likes to keep it to himself. He don't want us to know. Well, that's exactly what Bonnie Morris said. Everyone lets everyone be themselves out here. If you want to come by for tea or just keep to yourself. So whichever you want to do is fine. Everybody minds their own fucking business out here is the point. So others mention that he had a Lou had a big passion for reading detective novels.

Okay. Very much into that, which is a terrible sign.

Does he start fires too, James? That's fucking the Bundy BTK special there. Those fucking detective magazines with the half-naked woman who's being held against her will in some way on the cover. That's Kemper's favorite fucking thing. Every sex pervert murderer of the era, of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, all were like, I loved those things. I cut pictures out. Those are novels.

Holy shit. Who wrote those? Let's arrest that motherfucker too. That's him. Yeah. So people under assume names, I would think back then. Probably. So the Jim Harrower, who owns Great Kennecott Land Company, owned the land under Hastings Cabin. So he only owns the cabin, not the land under the cabin.

Okay. So it's basically a trailer park, an Alaskan trailer park. It's a permanent trailer. Yeah. He describes that he had, that Lou had an ornate hand-carved wooden plaque mounted on his cabin wall. And it read, good luck, you fucking goons. Okay. That's what it read. Okay. This guy has an explanation. He said he read a lot of detective books and detectives in those books are referred to as goons.

Is that right? So, yes, he's in the 50s. Yeah. These old 50s books. So he is saying, good luck, you fucking goons being with detectives. So later on, another person who wrote all of their thoughts down about Lou said in the winter, my exposure to Hastings was limited to mail days when most everyone got together. Mail day is Tuesday, by the way.

Everyone gathers on the airstrip and waits for the plane to come in with the mail. And I assume more yak sauce because you got to have that. You can't have yak without the sauce. It's just not the same. You know what I mean? Somebody puts A1 on it. You think they look down on them? Yes. You got to have yak sauce. It's called Y1. It's different.

One why. So this read, in the winter, I was limited to mail days. Most everyone got together. And at the home of Chris Richards, which is his closest neighbor, by the way, Lou's closest neighbor, where the three of us would play cards and talk. My general impression from these meetings was that he was quiet and reserved, not going out of his way to socialize, and seemed to want to be left alone for the most part, which I would think would describe everybody out there.

Talking about science and technology, the world situation, the future of Kennecott, I felt he was certainly intelligent and fairly knowledgeable on these topics, but disillusioned and down on society in general. He seemed not well prepared in skills or supplies to live out in the Kennecott area. Oh, no. Yeah, you got to know what you're doing out there or you're dead. And seemed a bit odd, and it seemed a bit odd to come and go as he did to and from Anchorage.

What the fuck do you care where he goes? Seemed odd that he keeps leaving and coming back. Fuck you. He's got a wife out there, bro. Maybe he's trying to just go get some trim from his wife. Yeah, quick fucking blowjob and get back in and down here. He said, in general, people are accepted in spite of any differences by the others in the McCarthy-Kennicott area, and live and let live attitude seems to prevail. So much of what I mentioned here did not seem unlike things that could be noticed in others living out

here. So saying this is not unique to him. Everything I said about him, you can put it on Bill and Bob and fucking Betty and anybody else whose name starts with a B. So the gal that runs that fucking lodge. Liz. So they said the lack of conversation maybe distanced him from a lot of his neighbors because one thing the neighbors all do is socialize out there because there's no fucking TV. There's nothing. The only entertainment you have is to go talk to your neighbor maybe. So

They gather and they talk a lot, and he doesn't really participate in it that often. So they look at that as a little weird. So they said that longtime residents are really good storytellers there. You got to be able to – there's no TV. You are the entertainment. So it's like campfire times, the 1800s and shit. You got to be able to tell a story, spin a little yarn. So they said that this is a –

you know, a practice skill around this area is to be able to tell a good story because that's all they have. They get together and what happened to you? Well, I was doing this and that and all that kind of shit. So they said that other than

His lack of talking, nothing really stood out at all there about him. He's just kind of a quiet guy, just like a lot of other people. Is he strange? That was the question. And some people can answer this. Lloyd Green, who has lived in this area since the 1960s, considered his clothing strange.

I don't know. I think you just wear whatever the fuck keeps you warm. I don't even think the clothing matters, man. Um, he recalls a conversation with Gary green, who was the local Bush pilot. Uh,

Here, by the way, not related to Loy Green. There's 22 people and people have the same fucking name. Of course they do. Okay. And is it Loy, not Lloyd? Loy, just L-O-Y, Loy. So Loy and the pilot were standing on a McCarthy path, just a trail, when they saw Lou Hastings approaching. Loy said, you know that Lou, he's kind of strange to the other guy. So Gary, the pilot, answered, quote, well, so are you. We all are. So what?

Which is a fucking great answer. Well, you're a fucking weirdo, too. What do you think? You're normal? You think you're better than anybody? We're standing in the middle of the fucking woods, hundreds of miles from civilization, and you're going to be judging people on whether they're weird or not?

Apart from this local area, nobody else is called a bush pilot. Yeah. Oh, shit. Not since the fucking, you know, the 1910s. The only other place that a bush pilot exists is in Australia. In Australia or whatever that movie was with fucking Mel Gibson and Robert Downey Jr. where they were flying. I think that's what they were doing. Was it Air Dumbo? No, it was the one. I think it was a Vietnam movie, but they were like flying a little plane. I don't fucking remember. It's a shit movie. It doesn't matter. All right.

So he said, we all are. So what? So he says that everyone hears his lawyer. Everyone hears a little strange in their way. So, OK, here's just another strange guy and he's not doing anything. He's antisocial, but we're not tremendously social anyway. And so we really don't pay much attention. So lose strange. So what?

Now, Tony Zack, who is a local resident here, says he wasn't very friendly. But then everybody here is running from the rest of the world. All these people, there's no red flags here. You can't raise a red flag because any red flag is like, yeah, but I'm fucking weirder than that. I do weirder shit than that all the time. There's no way around it. Any thought you have, then you walk past a mirror and go, well, fuck that thought. Well, look at me. Look at this guy. Look at my cheek beard.

Haven't shaved. It's about a half inch from my eye right now. I should probably shave that. My eyeballs are almost hairy. Jesus. So here is Judy Miller, who also is around this area. She says, my very first impression of Lou was he was a walking computer. Such an emotionless person.

She said she encountered him at the Bush airstrip several weeks, you know, a year all the time. She said she replied vaguely when he asked the whereabouts of her cabin, which is difficult to find in the woods. She was like, I'm not telling this guy where I live type of thing. He's like, so where you live, which is seemed to be a normal conversation there, but not with this guy.

So Lester and Florence Hegland. Let's talk about them. The Heglans. Mr. Hegland, Lester, is 64. His wife, Florence, goes by Flo. She's 58. They're both from North Dakota.

And they have a son and two daughters, and they've raised them. A couple of the kids have moved to Minnesota. One of the kids lives in Wasilla. They have their grandparents. You know, they're just living out here. They're doing it. And they've been here for a long time. Their home here, I'll read from this article, the home of Flo and Lester Hegland is tucked away in the woods just off the McCarthy airstrip.

You get there by walking a mile up the road to Kennecott, turning right at the far end of the airstrip and backtracking nearly a half mile. These people. Mile and a half in the middle of nowhere. Imagine if you started getting chest pains there. What are you, just die in the snow? Like, fuck it. I'm going to die. Chest hurts, babe. See you around. There's not a hospital for hours around here. Yep. So they said, or by taking a shortcut.

This is a quote. Go up past Tony Zach's place and look for the red boot. Go right and look for the path. There's a red boot that's a landmark of this is where you turn at Tony Zach's house. That's where they find the footwear in the woods. That is crazy. Well, hopefully before it snows, because after it snows, you're never going to see it.

So they said finding Tony's axe is no problem. It is in the legend of many colloquial maps. To find the cemetery, go up past Tony's axe and look for the rock on the right. To find the old roundhouse, go toward Kennecott. If you see Tony's axe, you've gone too far. No, that's not directions, man. Wow, the faded rubber boot was upside down on a stick just off the road. They put a stick in the ground, stuck a boot on it, and they were like, there's a landmark.

Start giving directions based on this shit. That's a fucking street sign now. So they said behind it was a path that zigzagged and up a long and steep slope. At the top, the trail vanished into a clearing surrounded by tall spruce and aspen trees. The old caterpillar trail led from clearing to the Heglin's house.

The Haglunds answered the door always by saying, it's open. They never do this. They know who it is. It's one of 20 people. So unless you got beef with somebody. That's a fascinating way. They genuinely tell people just come in. Come in, yeah, because they know who it is. That's insane. They live on the airstrip, and that's where people. Don't care. That's where people. Oh, in the house they get the mail. No.

No, the mail comes, but everybody waits for the plane rather than standing in the middle of an airstrip with 80 fucking mile an hour winds. They go in this people's cabins for five minutes away from the plane. You would never sight unseen. I wouldn't live in Alaska in the middle of nowhere. So I wouldn't do any of this shit. Everything that happens, we can go. I wouldn't do that. And I think it's not any of this shit.

You wouldn't shit in a bucket. We wouldn't fucking ride the cable tram into town. I wouldn't eat yak. I'm not doing any of this shit. They put up with every bit of this. They put up with all of it. Every bit. And they love it. And they tell all of it. It's open. All the yaks come in. Everybody comes in. No one gives a shit. Come get your mail, Mr. Yak.

That's fucking great. This article says Lester Hagelin is 60 at the time it was written. He has a pinch of Copenhagen snuff under his lip. From time to time he leans to one side to find the spittoon beside his chair.

Another time, man. An actual spittoon on the ground he has. Not a cup. In the 80s. This is like in 79 this article is from. Mrs. Hagelin does most of the talking. She's an energetic 55. She looks at the floor when she smiles. The Hagelins move to McCarthy from Homer, which is also not

Like a well-populated place. Is that Alaska? Yeah. Yeah. Up there in 1967 for peace and quiet, they say, which is, um, yeah, that's all it's up there is peace and quiet. They said at first the couple settled down in a house in town. Flo spent her winter days painting, making jewelry and tutoring the couple's children under the state score correspondent school program because there's no schools there. Yeah.

The courses arrived on the weekly mail plane. Waiting for your math test. Yeah. Comes in on the plane. Along with the correspondence art courses, Mrs. Hagelin followed to learn how to paint. Lester ran a trap line. This is something we've never heard this as a profession. This is his job. If you wanted this to be your job, you couldn't have it be your job. He ran a trap line for Wolverine's.

Well, I didn't even know those were real. No, I didn't have any idea. I just found out right now that's a real animal. Wolverines, wolves, fox, and lynx selling the furs commercially. He worked a diamond drill at a mining operation on Nikolai Creek. And Lester said, we lived good. We had some money. I wasn't too worried about it. You can't just have a cinch all your life.

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You can't just have a cinch all your life. Everything can't be easy, maybe. I guess it's a cinch. Yeah. Mrs. Hagelin said they found peace and quiet, particularly in the wintertime when the air was just so still. You went outside and it just rang.

Yeah. Yeah. The silence. When it's cold. Yeah. You can hear shit crackling. Yeah. You hear it crackling. Loud silence is the worst. I don't like it. It's fucking blaring up there. It must be. Yeah. Geez, there's nothing other than the Wolverines to fucking. He's a real man, huh? This guy's a real son of a bitch. Yeah. He's a man. Yeah. But then McCarthy began changing. The road from Chittina was improved in the early 1970s and the state built the infamous bridge over the Kennecott River.

Tourists poured in and more people bought property and homes. In Mrs. Heglin's word, the essence left this place. The trap lines began yielding less and less. We're running out of Wolverines up here, everybody.

I'm still wearing last year's Wolverine trousers. Come on. Jesus Christ. Got no Wolverines to sell people. Wolverines. Holy shit. And the money grew tighter. The Heglins began looking for other income. Heglin became a real estate agent for a decedent of John E. Barrett, the original homesteader of McCarthy. The Heglins became notary publics, and Mrs. Heglin began marketing her artwork.

Then they hooked it up. They got the plum job in this area. What'd they do? They got the post of the aviation weather observer for the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. What is that? They're going to monitor shit, monitor weather. Weather station. Yeah. They're going to be the people there. They're it. Yep. They said that 13 times a day, 365 days a year, the Hegelans read wind and weather instruments in their front yard and radio in their findings.

That's their job. This is what it is here. And the government's going to pay them. Well, they got paid $1,200 a month in 1979 for that. That's pretty good. That's a living back then. That's great cash. Absolutely. Up there? Forget it. That's around what the average person's

income in the states was back then for work you know for like a job get up there you don't need anything totally yeah it's a steady income not subject to the vagaries of wildlife migration you don't have to worry about what the wolverines are up to this season populations low fuck yeah they said the checks come in sure as winter and dependable income is as much of a luxury in the bush as liquor and women once were in mccarthy

The Haglunds now live in a house they built near the airstrip, a contemporary one-level frame structure that would be at home in any Anchorage middle-class subdivision and is the most modern in McCarthy. They had money. The long shelf on the front porch is the community post office, a service the Haglunds provide for free. They don't need a fee for that.

Every Tuesday, the couple sorts mail delivered by the mail plane, piling letters, catalogs, and magazines in piles labeled only by a piece of paper with a name. There's only 20 fucking who cares. Yeah. Let's not say piles. There can't be lots, right? How much can there be, right? A couple of magazines. I would be fucking subscribing to everything if I lived up there. Please send me something.

I don't like that they get to touch everybody's shit and they're just regular people though. Yeah, they're not getting paid for it. Well, they're the weather people. We're trusting them with the weather. That's the government people right there. Trust me with my Playboy subscription too.

So they said, there's no post boxes. It's too much fuss with combinations and keys. Under the Hegelin system, if someone moves, the name is simply thrown away. There's no need for that piece of paper anymore. The lifestyle is one of very few diversions. The Hegelins can pick up KCAM radio from Glenn Allen, and they have a citizens band radio, a fucking CB, to talk to who? There's nobody there.

Who are you talking to? The Yaks? What are we talking about? There are repeaters out there to tell the Wolverines to come in. It's time to get in. Yeah, come on in. Calling in the Wolverines. I love it. There's no television reception, no movie theater, no store of any kind, and no church. There isn't even a street corner or a park bench. The nearest neighbors are a mile away.

So when Lester and Flo want conversation, they talk to each other over and over the years. They have learned to clip their sentences to the essentials. All Lester has to hear is the subject of Flo's comment. He already knows her views about it. Yeah, there's not...

You've heard every story that person has, you know, every drop of what they think about everything. You just be like, will you shut the fuck up at some point when you he says say less than he fucking means it. Oh, my God. You'd be like, let's just say trash. I'll take it out. Your left nostril makes a sound when you breathe.

I've got to pin down to the left. I know what that whistle means. Oh, man. That whistle means it's time for the shoes on. Lester stops thoughts mid-sentence. Flo completes them in her mind. When the conversation involves a third party, the Haglunds do a verbal pass-a-do. Flo begins a sentence and hands it off to Lester to polish off. So they're like a 90s hip-hop group. They're like the Beastie Boys. Yeah.

They just go back and forth. Yeah. Or they're the Sklar brothers. Or they work over an entire... That's impressive. It is impressive. That's motherfucking impressive.

Work over an entire paragraph together, each one slipping in phrases as if on cue. Yeah, you'd have all of your shit bits. These are bits that you have now. That's it. The sentences roll along without missing a beat. Flow to Lester to flow on why they moved to Alaska. We moved to get away from the rat race and then to Lester to get back to living with nature like we did in our childhood in North Dakota and then back to flow. We're at home with it.

And Flo and Lester – and Flo to Lester and back and then to Lester again on government intervention on national monuments. There was too much government intervention in farming, so we just quit. And they jump in. The other person sold out lock, stock, and barrel. And then the other one jumps back in. Now we're living in a national monument. And the other one says, and we're ready to leave that too.

I just wanted no structure whatsoever. I'm ready to leave that too. They said they've bought a home in Wrangell and they say they will move when they sell the house and they get the weather job goes along with them. They say the people in Wrangell are easygoing. They're not going to set the world on fire and they know it. They're losers and they're fine with it. It's fine. They're comfortable with mediocrity. See, what you got to be is comfortable with failure. Then you just settle on in.

You look on inside yourself and go, you're a piece of shit and just never going to get any better. Huge piece of shit. So February. No, go ahead. Go ahead. Wrangle. Is it like Wrangler? Just Wrangle? Is that where it is? Oh. Wrangle.

Okay. Yeah, yeah. Not Wrangler, yeah. So February 28th, 1983, Chris Richards. Yeah. We talked about him before. I think he's 29 at this point. He is Lou Hastings' closest neighbor. Okay. He works summer construction and then collects unemployment and food stamps during the winter, as everybody here does because if you don't have any money. So the only other person living near this area by the mines is Lou Hastings.

So these are the only two people in this area, Lou and Chris. And Chris says, quote, I didn't really like the guy personally, which is fucking brutal if he's the only guy literally on the mountain with you. He said, but I was trying to get along with him because I figured I was stuck with him as a neighbor. Sure enough. Yeah, you'd have to try. So, I mean, I talked to the fucking mailman and, you know, he says crazy shit sometimes. Yeah.

I'm trying my best. They do that, yeah. When Richards mentioned that several persons in McCarthy were on a skiing trip that day, Hastings seemed disappointed, Richards said, like nobody invited him. Like, oh, one of those. Yeah, Hastings played a board game with Chris here. This is in Kennecott, which is a few miles north here. Hastings won.

During the course of the conversation, Richards mentioned that a couple of McCarthy's residents were away on a skiing trip. Like I said, he felt mad again. Richards also warned Hastings about cutting firewood from dead trees on land that had been subdivided recently and thus might be off limits to such activity. Who's going to notice or care? There's nobody here.

They said he seemed to – this is Richard – said he seemed to appreciate the fact that I was concerned about him at the time. He's like, oh, thank you for letting me know. Now, the next day is March 1st. It's a Tuesday, and it's mail day. So the Heglins, who we talked about, where their place is and who they are, they are where everybody congregates.

shares news from the outside they have tea and coffee and bullshit and gossip of everybody around and one trooper a state trooper said see tuesday is mail plane day some big day they said quote you can have easter and you can have thanksgiving and you can have christmas you can take them

We got Tuesday. He said, but it's not as important as Tuesday. Everybody meets at the Haglund's house to visit and get the mail. Mail plane day. I mean, you live for that. What happens if Christmas lands on mail? Oh, fuck us. We're screwed. They said it's correspondence. I check my box every day. They get mail once a week and made contact.

They just go to say hi because they're bored. These people are fun. They can say they hate. They love. I don't like people. I like living out here. But then when they're out there, they just want to talk to people because that's what humans do. They like the box every day. No. Well, nothing showed up. Yeah. I would kick this guy out of my house. Yeah. You show up on Tuesdays. Asshole. That's not the guy you allow. That's it. You're out.

Yeah. Wednesday through Monday. Who is it? Is it Frank? Is it anybody but Frank? Okay, come in. Wednesday through Monday, you answer it, racking your shotgun and then screaming, who the fuck is it? I just leave a little paper sign that says, come in, except Frank or whoever this guy is. See you Tuesday, asshole.

He said people in McCarthy still conversationally refer to mail day as simply as mail, like it's a place or event. I'm going to mail, they say. Wow. Yeah. They still say, I'm going to mail. Do you have anything going out that you want me to take? So this is the day, March 1st, 1983, 830 a.m., the beginning of an exciting fucking mail day, man. This is a huge day, big time. Chris Richards is hanging out at his cabin and Lou Hastings shows up.

And Richard was preparing his breakfast using no modern appliances. He's literally got a wood stove that's got a stove on it. He's one of those people. Hastings had been over the night before and, you know, they were talking about all this shit. And Richards here thought that Lou had come by to go down to mail.

Like, maybe we'll go together. Maybe he wanted to see if we wanted to walk to mail together. To mail. And so Richard said, well, you want to come in for a cup of coffee? I'm making myself a little breakfast, and then we'll go to mail, right? Have some Wolverine chorizo. That's great. Wolverine chorizo with yak patties. You got to have the yak patties. They make it all the better. Yak links. So...

Hastings had a big, heavy backpack. He sets that down. And they said he set it down. And before entering, he took a deep breath. Big, deep breath. But he's a big guy, too. So maybe he's just winded from the walk. We don't know. It's a big backpack. Yeah, we don't know. Big backpack, all that. So Richards, Chris Richards, turns his back to the door and face the stove to continue preparing his breakfast. Then he began to turn his head to say something to Lou again. Like, hey, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

As he reached for a cup of coffee, Chris does, Richards, he reaches for the cup of coffee. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, Lou shoots him twice with a handgun, shoots him, hit him in the neck and grazed his head with a shot. Bang, bang. Oh, he's going for headshots. Yeah, absolutely. So at this point, Chris said the first shot went through the lens of my glasses and on in.

To my head, by the way, on in means. Yeah. Which is really a light way to say that. And he said it scrambled inside the right part of his face. It's a .22 bullet, so it bounced around a little bit in there. He said that this unfolded very quietly because he's using the beaver-coated...

He's got that out. And he said that the silencer, he said he kept firing at Adam. Yeah. So Chris said he felt like it was a scene in a silent movie because there's these shots coming, but there's no gunshots. Nothing happening. Yeah. It's really weird. So he said it was strange as fuck. There's, he said that he had no time to figure out what was happening. There was no like, Hey, let's evaluate the situation. That didn't exist. No time to prepare. So he said another bullet hit him in the back of the head and,

And then a larger caliber bullet hit him in the arm, like grazed his arm. So he's got a rifle too. He's got a rifle and a handgun. So Richard said before he knew it, he was on the floor at Lou's feet. And he said that, you know, he was listening to Lou. He looked up at Lou and Lou said to him, and I quote, you should see yourself. You're down on the ground. You're already dead. Just stay down there and I'll make it easy for you.

That's what he tells him. You should see yourself scrambling around like you're going to get away from me. This is crazy. Stay down. I'll make it nice and clean. I'll give you a shot to the head and get it over with. Making it real uncomfortable to watch, man. So Richards was like, what the that woke him up to what was happening before that? He was trying to figure it out. He goes, oh, this motherfucker is trying to kill me. I'm going to fight. Yeah, I'm going to fight for my life.

So then he said that turned at first to surprise. Then he was scared. And then it was after this, he said it was adrenaline filled rage. Once he said, I'll shoot is on. So Richard's. Yeah. He said it was funny. He said, suddenly I was goddamn mad. That's what Richard said. He said,

He said, you talk about someone dying with their boots on. I almost died with one on and one off, as we'll talk about here in a second. So Richards then reaches up and grabs a knife off the kitchen counter and stabs Lou in the thigh with it.

Okay. This is a scene, man. Like every fucking horror movie. All of this in a cabin that looks like it's from 1912 because it's got nothing. No electricity, modern appliances, none of this shit. He's on a wood-burning stove. It's fucking crazy. So he stabs him in the thigh and then runs out the door. Richards does. Hastings is there with his thigh wound. So Chris Richards escapes into the waist-deep snow, by the way. It's March 1st up here. Shot three times?

Shot, yeah, four times, I think. Four times, yeah. Four times, wearing only socks and one slipper, a T-shirt, and corduroy pants. Waist deep. Waist deep. Corduroy pants, one shoe, and a T-shirt. So, yeah, he scrambles three-quarters of a mile up in the snow. Four gunshots. This is a rugged son of a bitch, this Chris Richards. Yeah, that's a tough man. Up a steep hill to a neighbor's unoccupied cabin.

During this, by the way, as he's running, Lou is firing shots at him from his cabin as he's fleeing with the rifle. He's taking aim and shooting at him. He nicked his arm with a shot, too. And it's, I think, a .223 he's got. Yeah. So it's a decent rifle here. It's a good hunting rifle. Yeah. At the cabin, at the unoccupied cabin, this guy knew that these people go for the winter.

Richard's found boots, a parka, and snowshoes. Nobody's there. To try to make his escape here. Oh, my God. So from there, he's bleeding. He stumbles about one-tenth of a mile southeast to another cabin that's there, the cabin of Tim and Amy Nash, who this cabin was situated on the trail connecting Kennecott to McCarthy. Chris said he was expecting to be shot in the back as he ran down the trail from Kennecott, but he made it. Right.

So he makes it to Tim and Amy Nash's cabin. Tim is 38. Amy's 25. They've been married in the continental states and moved up here during Christmas of 82. Tim had a nearly he was building a log cabin and he returned to his log cabin here. Then he was building it. Then the Nash's had just gotten back.

From a trip to the East Coast where they were married at Christmas time. They got back on Valentine's Day. It's March 1st. Now, Tim had lived in McCarthy for seven years, worked construction in Glen Allen and then got a divorce. So he was living alone in a cabin that he was building as he was living in it with hand tools.

Nope. No power tools because there's no electricity. Imagine building a house with hand tools. You see it on Instagram all the time and I don't believe any of them are doing it. There's a lot of time lapsing going on there. You betcha. They show you this, they show you that, and then it's all done. I think some electric shit did some work here and there. How many times did you fucking miss that screw and go, God damn it, motherfucker, and all that shit? Yeah, give me a break.

So he's been living alone in a desolate cabin. And then Amy showed up in 82, a 25-year-old woman as a tourist showed up. And he somehow charmed her into fucking staying here with him. Suckered. Yeah.

Wow. One of the neighbors said the day they came back was Valentine's Day. Isn't that sweet? And then the neighbor wanted to be real sweet and real accommodating, so he said, quote, we brought them a quarter of a mousse and a mincemeat pie with a heart carved in it. Isn't that nice? Mincemeat pie.

Have a moose part and some mincemeat pie with a heart carved in. How romantic. Got you a quarter moose. Whenever I think romance and a gift, I think, man, bring me part of a moose or a yak or some sort of weird Alaskan mountain animal. A quarter of a moose and a mincemeat pie. A quarter of a moose is the funniest gift I've ever heard. It's the weirdest wedding present ever, isn't it?

What'd you get from them? Quarter moose? They gave you a quarter moose? Geez. That's not bad. And if you think about it, the mincemeat pie had some thought behind it. It wasn't just a pie they had sitting around. They made a heart in it for them. There you go.

What is mincemeat? A bunch of meats mixed together. Oh, that's so gross. It's pieces you've picked off of. It's like a yak foot, the meat off a yak foot mixed with like a moose ear. An eighth of the moose that nobody eats. Alaskan head cheese. Alaskan haggis, we'll call it. How about that? Mincemeat. So back to the action. At the cabin, the Nash's are trying to help him

you know, fix him his wounds. He's bleeding all over the place. They're like, holy shit. And he's trying to tell them what happened. He's badly wounded, Richards. I mean, he is wounded. He's got a bullet in his face for fuck's sake. One in his neck. And so he said, nobody could have done anything more for me. Richard said of the Nash's, they helped me out so much. He said, I feel particularly bad for them. Hastings had already been by their cabin. Now, when Richard neared the house, he called for help.

He hadn't been able to lace his boots. And they said, Tim was, Richard said, Tim was sure I had cut myself under the eye. I screamed, God damn it. I've been shot. Lou shot me. As soon as you see him start blasting. He said, fucking start blast. Cause this guy came out. He goes, Oh no, you cut your eye. And he goes, fuck cut, cut my ass. Lou shot me. Fucking shoot him. If he comes up here, he's a psychopath. Start blast. Start blasting.

Now, Nash wanted Richards to relax. He's like, let's calm down. He figured that Chris and Lou had gotten in a fight over something. Right. So he's like, and up there, you don't take sides or judge. You just go, hey, listen, that's between the two of you guys. I don't want to take sides here.

So he said he thought you guys were fighting and that the incident was probably said it's probably over now. He said, you guys were fighting. Now it's over. And Richard said, but that wasn't the case. I told him, I'll calm down when you load all your guns. That's what I'll calm down. All your guns. One for each of us. Yeah. The Nash's said that they had already seen Hastings heading toward McCarthy 20 minutes earlier, heading toward town.

Richards then said, we have to arm ourselves and go to the runway to warn the others because we don't know what his deal is. He just shot me for no reason. Maybe he'll shoot other people. So he said they're going to be congregating for the mail plane. It's coming soon. We have to. You've been shot. You need to go to the doctor. I'll tell them. Well, to get to the doctor, you have to go to the airstrip. Oh, you got to get on that fucking plane. So.

So either way, we got to go to the airstrip and bring the guns is what he's saying. Got any outgoing? Sure do. This shot man. This guy here got a bullet in his neck. Anything else we need to tell you about him? You're going to have to put some stamps on his face to get in this plane. Got one of them big envelopes.

One of them, one cost for whatever you put in it. Got one of them, he's going to be heavy to ship. If it fits, it ships. If it fits, it ships. So the Nash's ride a snowmobile, pulling Chris Richards' injured ass in a sled behind them like a water skate. Imagine this guy bouncing on the snow. Hang on.

This is awesome. Okay. So they're doing all this. At the north end of the strip, they meet Gary Green, who's the pilot we talked about before. He's the local pilot and guide who was cleaning snow off of one of his planes. That's who they see. Green said that he, too, saw Hastings about 20 minutes earlier heading toward the Hegelin's house. So the Nash's and the pilot Green decide that Tim Nash, they make a plan. Tim, you go check on the Hegelin's. Okay. Make sure they're okay. Okay.

green, I'll warm me green. I'll warm up my plane to fly this guy to Glen Allen to go to the hospital. Okay. It's about a 40 minute flight away. So, holy shit. Um, here we go. Uh, about at the house, halfway up the airstrip, Nash was alerted. He's going to the Hagelin's house when he sees blood and smells gun smoke.

Oh, no. He's like, uh-oh. So he's like, this is not good. When he shows up in the house, he opens the door and Hastings is in the house standing there with his gun in his hand. And he shoots fucking Tim Nash in the leg. Wow. Turns and just blasts Tim Nash in the leg. So Nash is all fucked up.

Now he's got shot in the leg just now and he's going to try to take off with a leg wound now. So on the way, by the way, because we heard of Hastings kind of took us out there. So Hastings, he had stopped at the Kennecott Lodge, which is the area's only hotel. Remember Liz, who he sent a Christmas gift to, who owns this place? And he burned it to the fucking ground.

What? Burned it to the fucking ground. It was closed for the winter. Nobody was there. He burned it to the ground, man. That's it. A fierce fire broke out. It's a log structure. Yeah. Caught real quick. Done. So the Hegelin house, what's going on there? Okay. The Hegelins, obviously, they do their weather shit and all that kind of stuff here. They're unofficial postmasters, all that. They also, at their house, they had Maxine Edwards was hanging out waiting for the mail.

She's 52. She crossed the frozen river to get some exercise to get here.

Her husband, Jim, stayed home. She's lived here since 1953, Maxine Edwards. Is that right? In the valley where her and her husband built their own house and raised two children through correspondence school. So they actually are. They did it. They didn't come after the kids got, you know. I could see the kids are gone. Well, let's move up there or before you have kids. But they said, oh, no, this is our family. You don't have to do this. Nope. Her friend, all of her friends called her Maxine the Diligent.

She was a hardworking woman. They say she could operate a bulldozer in the day and then serve dinner on linen and crystal at night.

She was Alaska and fancy all at once. She was quite the lady. Maxine walked to a house 100 feet off the McCarthy airstrip and pulling a small plastic sled behind her. And this is where they were all gathering. Also there was Bonnie Morris. Remember we talked about her, got some quotes earlier. She's lived here for about seven years. She arrived in her dog sled to drop off some mail. People are coming by dog sled, literally.

She's mushing. Dogs drove me here. Yeah. Hold on. I got to check my ride and see if it's done shitting yet. Wait, are you done? Can you get a DUI on one of those? You got to, right? I would assume so, although the dogs are really driving, honestly. I mean... They've been drinking. Yeah, that's another thing. One of her dogs was in heat, so she couldn't stay. So she left before Hastings got there. There might be a gangbang out there right now. It's crazy. Yeah, they're all fucking...

So, yeah, I guess I was distracting because everybody's got dogs. That's why. Yeah. So they they have a she's got some mail. She's dropping it off. She invited Maxine Edwards after she got the mail to come by for some cookies. I got some cookies. I just made stop on by on the way home. And then Bonnie sledded home. OK, so.

Now, Green, who was warming up his engine here, he taxied to the end of the runway to load Chris Richards, and it was plain. It's at that point that Amy Nash noticed her husband running down the airstrip here with a fucking gunshot wound in his leg. Yeah.

So he's returns to the end of the runway and tells them what he had just seen. He said, I just went to the head Hegel and I smelled heavy gun smoke, saw blood all over the fucking walls in the house. It was like a butcher scene in there. He said, I think the Hegel and are probably dead.

And he said, it looks like someone tried to clean up the blood in the kitchen. There was like white marks on the blood and shit like that. He said, while I was standing in the kitchen, I saw Hastings on the back porch and Nash fired a shotgun blast that struck a door jam and Hastings returned fire and hit him in the leg. That's what happened. Okay. So Richards flies out with Gary Green, takes off to go to the hospital. They got to get him to the hospital.

So Green and the Nash's decided that because the Nash's, they were like, should we get into and they all decided, no, you remain here to warn others away from the airstrip. So nobody shows up to get their mail and gets killed. So and then Green took off with Richards in the plane as Green lifted off. He saw Tim and Amy Nash walking toward each other on the east side of the runway. Now.

On his way to Glen Allen, with Richards bleeding in the back of the plane, the pilot contacted the incoming mail plane that was scheduled to land at 11 and told the pilot not to land in McCarthy. Don't do it. He then radio stationed the state police in Glen Allen as well. They radioed them. So...

he made contact with all of these people. Um, and he said, you know, call for help. So Tim and Amy Nash, um, you know, are at the airstrip trying to keep the mail plane. They're there. They don't want the mail plane to land too. They're going to tell them, no, no, no, stay, stay, stay. And they have a shotgun. Um, meanwhile, while this is all going on, they're thinking, okay, we're going to warn people. Everything's fine. Hastings Lou is circling through the woods at the end of the runway, uh,

Where Tim and Amy Nash were standing to warn people off. On foot. Yes. Hastings had backtracked toward the airstrip along a dog sled trail. The trail snaked through dense brush behind a large mound of plowed snow across the runway from the Nash's. So they couldn't see him. It was a giant pile of snow. Hastings crawled atop the mound of snow. No. Waited for Green to take off in the plane and then fired 10 rounds at the Nash's.

who are about 250 yards away, which is a long shot. It's a long shot, yeah. Both of them fall. He hits them both. He hits them both. He's been shooting rabbits, man. That's why he's been doing it. No shit. Hastings then walked to within 50 feet of their bodies and fired another two shots, one each to make sure. Yeah. They're dead. So then, by the way, did that. Then he continued, walked up to them close range and fired one into each of their heads as well. Mm-hmm.

Dead. They were dead before that. It was over, yeah. Then he drags their bodies to the snow bank opposite his sniping location and piles snow on top of them. Just piles them there. So then he can wait and no one knows that he's there. Right. No one knows what happened except the pilot.

Harley King, let's introduce into this. Harley King is this man's real name, by the way. Which if you look up in a newspaper archive, Harley King, it just shows a lot of people selling Harley Kings. A bunch of road kings. That's exactly what it is. He's 61 years old here. And he's lived here since 1966. He and his wife, Jo, lived on a homestead 15 miles west of McCarthy off McCarthy Road.

Prior to his retirement, he was a commercial fisherman out of Cordova and a hunting guide as well. Real outdoorsy. Oh, yeah. In the 1950s, he hunted wolves in a predator control program alongside another guide, Jay Hammond, who later became governor of Alaska. Wow. So shooting wolves is just a springboard to power in Alaska. Yeah.

Right up the governmental chain if you can hit a fucking wolf in the face. Holy shit. So Harley King, his wife is home, but Harley King is out. He is giving a ride to Donna Byram. B-Y-R-A-M. This lady's tail. Holy shit. She's 32 years old.

Yeah. Harley King drove a snow machine. So now we're talking about we have had every possible form of snow. No, the snow machine that they're talking about is the big loud one like the guy in The Shining has. Like a car? Like a big truck that's a snow thing that goes through. Like a plow? No, it's a.

A big truck. Yeah. It's a snow thing, not a plow. I'm mad at myself because I don't know how to explain it. It's like a tank. It's like a snow. Have you seen The Shining? No. What? No. Okay. Did you just look over your shoulder? I did. I just looked over my shoulder at nobody. I just looked over. You just looked for a second opinion. No one else is here but us. It's really sad.

You should have told her a second opinion if that's crazy or not. Yeah, I did. I really did. Is that crazy? Have you never seen The Shining, number one? I know the fucking pop culture references to it. But it was on TBS constantly for our entire childhood years. I know. I never saw it.

Well, he drives a giant snowcat, they call it. Okay, a snowcat, yeah. That's kind of what it is. It's the thing that just got Jeremy Renner's leg. Yeah. It's like a fucking snow tank, essentially. Yeah. Big for deep, deep snow. Yeah. That's what he's got, basically. Okay. So he drove the snow machine 20 miles from Long Lake Tuesday morning to deliver Donna Byram, who was planning to fly out with the mail. He's just giving a ride to Donna.

So, wow. Donna is riding on, she's got a snow, like a snowmobile being towed behind Harley. Like he's towing her in because I don't know if it's too deep for the snowmobile and spots or some shit. So Donna Byram sees Lou Hastings walking over the snow bank on the west side of the airstrip, then saw blood in the snow on the east side.

Uh-oh. She wondered, who's butchering animals on the runway? That's weird. Yeah. That's crazy. That's your first thought. That's her first thought. There's a herd animal out here. Someone's quartering up a moose right now. We got to get in there and see what's going on. There's been one gifted. We got three quarters left. Something's gone. So we can score some of this. So as they drew closer to the Nash's bodies...

They started seeing the bodies here. Byram, who's standing on a sled that trailed the snow machine, was trying to yell to Harley, but couldn't hear. He couldn't hear her over the fucking snowman. Those are loud as shit. Yeah, yeah. So as this is going, Hastings starts firing at them as they're coming in. Oh, my God. Oh, yeah. He's still there. One bullet hits Donna in the upper right arm.

And Harley King guns the snow snow machine as it's being fucking rain bullets upon it. I mean, they're just this guy is firing at the snow machine. He is fucking gunning it. He tries to get away, but he keeps glancing over his shoulder here as he's glancing over his shoulders, basically looking back the whole time. He runs into a snow bank and he's thrown off of the snow machine, thrown out of it and breaks his leg.

No. So now he's in the snow, totally prone with a broken leg and can't do shit. 61-year-old man with a broken leg. Yeah. Donna Byram runs up and tries to try to get him back onto the snow machine here, the snowcat.

And they can see Hastings approaching as this is going on. He's walking toward them like just in a pace, not even running, walking calmly with a gun. Yeah, this is disturbing. So she's like frozen going, holy shit, he's coming. He's coming. We got to get out of here. We got to get out of here. Carly King told her, I can't move. Save yourself.

Get out of here. He said, now look, both of us don't need to die. Get out of here. Oh my God. That's a fucking man right there. No shit. Both of us don't need to die. I'd be like, fucking try harder. Drag me. You got two legs, man. Jesus Christ, don't you fucking lift logs or chop wood? You live in the middle of fucking nowhere. How do you not? Are you able to drag me, you fucking loser? Come on.

Jesus Christ. Those buns of steel videos did nothing for you. She's been winged too. He should be like, this is one leg. I'll be all right. I'll hop my ass out of here. So he said, no, go get the fuck out of here. So she ran away. She had no choice. He was about to get killed. So she ran away toward the Heglin's house. As she entered the spruce woods, she heard a shot.

Hastings walked up. Lou walked up real slow, really deliberately. Walked up point-blank range, shot Harley King in the head as he laid there in the snow. To be fair, though, that's kind of how you expect a Harley King to go out. If your name's Harley King...

It's either that or jumping 13 school buses. Yeah, doing an Evel Knievel stunt or some shit. Yeah. I tried to jump the Snake River. It didn't work out. On a motorcycle that had bald tires. It wasn't going to make it, but I did it anyway. So Byram got to the Hegelands, and she noticed that the door had been kicked in.

So she didn't know what to do. She's like, oh shit, he could be in here. So she hid outside. The Hegelins had a greenhouse. She went outside to the back of the greenhouse and just basically hunkered down. Just sat there and waited to either be killed or be saved. One of the two. She's gripping her arm. She's been shot for Christ's sake. She said all she could hear was Lou's boot steps on the porch and the wind. That's it. Just boom, boom, boom. Then...

Holy shit. This is pretty fucking interesting to what he says here. While he's doing this, he's telling them he's saying, quote, one dead, one not dead. He keeps saying that over and over. One dead, one not dead. In other words, I'm going to kill you, motherfucker. I'm going to find you. I'm going to find you. That's this is terrifying. Yeah. You.

You can see the movie. You can see her looking through boards and seeing him with the gun in his footsteps going, one dead, one not dead. Seeing the rubber sole of those work boots. Yep. She's like Bruce Willis in fucking Die Hard, basically, with an injury laying there fucking waiting to be saved. Yeah.

So she's doing that, and that's all she could hear. He then eventually just gave up on her. Really? And sped off on the snowmobile of the Nash's. So he flees across a frozen river and out of the road west out of town. It's an old railroad that was torn up after the copper mine closed. Remember, they shut that down.

Hastings thought the police would be responding in a fixed wing aircraft. That's why he did this. This is his escape plan. He's like, they're not going to be able to see me. Instead, though, he said, once I get away from the aircraft, I'll be safe. But instead, they release helicopters to go after him. Oh.

Which is completely different. They can go low. They can fucking search around. It's a very different thing. Very mobile things. Yes. And they don't have to swoop. They can kind of slow. Oh, yeah. They can hover. They can hover right over you. Yeah. They can just say, hey, asshole. Yeah. What the fuck? I'm going to land on you, you dickhead. Yeah. Stop. We know who you are and where you are. Come out with your hands up. They do that shit all the time. So they said that...

They're going to look for Hastings here because they've heard all about it now. And they said that also they found out that the lodge has been burned to the ground. So they asked. There's a police officer that says, all I know is that it got burned to the ground Tuesday. I think there's an assumption that it's related to the killings. And that's about as far as I can go at the moment. You think there's never any other crime. Now, today, it's a crime spree from everywhere.

It'd be a crazy coincidence if it just caught on fire on the day that there's a massacre. There's fucking 20 people here, for Christ's sake. So no one was living there. No one was hurt in the fire, by the way, because it was wintertime. They then spot Hastings. From the air. From the air. They're coming in from Glen Allen shortly before 2 p.m. So this has been almost a six-hour massacre this guy's been putting on.

As they're over him, he got off the snowmobile and waved. Yeah. This is fucking great. He was armed with a rifle, they said. They landed. He's armed with a rifle. He didn't resist at all. He was waving. And they said, what's your name? And he said, Chris Richards. Okay. Chris Richards. And they said, what's going on? And he said, there's this guy, Lou Hastings. He went berserk and shot up McCarthy.

What the fuck? Yeah. There's this great gotta get him. He's somewhere. Go get him. That's what he's saying. The troopers, though, they're here because Richards landed and told them about this. They know who he is. So like, well, we know the guy. It's Chris Richards. And it ain't you. And yeah. And also the description of him is very specific. He's a big guy with a crazy beard, red hair, bald. His beard.

He's a really specific description, this guy. So it's not like he's blending in. They've described him to a T. So they do that. They arrest Hastings here. He had a .223 caliber rifle and two 30-round clips of ammo on the snow machine with him. They then flew to McCarthy to search for survivors with him in the helicopter, by the way, they're searching.

And they said Hastings stated words to the effect of, OK, you got your man. It's me. We know. We get it. Dipshit. Yeah, we weren't. We were not believing you at all. So outside the greenhouse, the police finally found Donna Byron Byron. She's still there.

She's been there. Is she alive? Yeah. Freezing for a long fucking time. Bleeding and freezing. Probably the best thing for her was that the weather was what it was. Probably slowed her blood circulation down. That's the thing. She didn't bleed to death. Slows the bleeding down. It helps a lot. Plus, it's pretty freezing over, for Christ's sake. All right. She had to get into the helicopter with Hastings. With him? No! To fly. Yes, she had to. No choice. Oh, my God. No choice. Here's the deal. We can leave you here and come back and swoop you later. Yeah.

Or you can come to the hospital and we'll protect. We'll sit a cop between you two. How's that? We'll make it. I can share a seat. Talk about an awkward conversation. We've never had a victim have to share the same space with the murderer on a ride. Holding your arm, staring at the whole, you son of a bitch.

You fucking asshole. So she did that. Now, one of the people who knew him about his detective books said he read a lot of detective books. The detectives are referred to as goons. I'm sure he figured they wouldn't be able to track him down. And they said if he had killed Chris Richards, he would have been able to get everyone in town and then head for Anchorage to work on his list. Yeah, Chris is a hero.

He's the one guy that stopped all this, they said, because he got out. They found a firearm silencer among his belongings as well as a computer printout of 200 persons in Anchorage, Alaska. He was going to try to kill 200 people? Well, he had more plans than that, as we'll talk about here. What? This is just the beginning of a grand plan. This was just to kill all these people to be able to get the plane to get out of town. That's all the reason he killed these people was to get the plane.

He thought he was going to shut down the pipeline. Check it out. Okay. Holy shit. So the police come back. They found the bodies of the head, the Heglins and Maxine Edwards, all three of them. Bonnie was lucky. She took off early, man. They are all stacked on a bed in a bedroom in the back of the house, stacked up, quote, like cordwood. According to the truth, he stacked the fucking bodies.

That is disturbing. They found several spent cartridges in the kitchen and in the back porch areas. A bloody fur-covered silencer sat on the nightstand next to the bodies. He left them. He left that one. So he had another silencer, by the way. He said there was a lot of – one of the cops said there was a lot of shooting that went on inside that house. There were a lot of bullets sprayed around. It was a massacre. He came in just massacring these people, shooting them over and over and over again.

Harley King was left in the snow until the troopers were able to load his frozen solid body onto the plane the next day. He sat out overnight in negative 50 degree temperatures. Freezing solid. What else are you going to do with him? They had nothing else they could do. So they were like, well, he's cold here at least. So that's how Harley went out. That's really sad, man. Um,

Wow. The one guy said here, this is one of the pilots. Wow.

Huh? That's what you get out of this? He must have read some bad books. Goddamn Fahrenheit 451. Holy shit. It's a massacre book. He's got yak scratch fever is the problem. I think that's just as likely. Yeah. You read Animal Farm and then you do this shit. You do this shit. That's it. Fucking Orwell. Fucking yak scratch fever comes in and you're screwed.

So Chris Richards said, I kept wondering, why would you put a silencer on to kill the only other person in a ghost town? He was like, I didn't understand why he was shooting at me with a silencer. There's nobody around but your cabin. That's the only other people here. You could have shot rounds as long as you want to know what I heard you.

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is very upset because six of his friends and neighbors are dead. He killed six people. Six people. Six out of 22 at the time. That's unbelievable. That's almost a third of the whole fucking town he killed. That's crazy. That's goddamn more than a quarter of the town he killed. He heard about it, the murders, over his portable radio.

And he says, it wasn't necessarily a surprise. Really? Okay. Come on, Loy. Yeah. I'm never surprised, Loy, over here. I expect this every day. Always expected. He said, however, Hastings wasn't the one that I thought it probably was. I expected it, but not from him. He said nobody even thought he had a rifle in his house, he said. Really? Because that's not what he was about. So they didn't even know he was armed at all.

I guess one guy, Jim Miller, he left McCarthy a few weeks before the murders, and he first heard about the murders on the radio, too, when he was driving to work. He said, I kind of figured it might have happened. I don't know. If anybody was going to do it, I figured it might have been Hastings, being a loner anyway. Now, this guy thinks it was. This guy thinks. He said, but at first it was kind of a shock. I suspected three or four different people, but, and then he just trailed off. Yeah.

So Bonnie Morris, he's in the top five out of 22. And I don't think Maxine's going to go on a fucking spree. Probably not Amy Nash going on a spree. I don't see Donna going on a spree. Let's whittle this down a little more, guys. I got a feeling the top 15 are all men. They're all guys. I could probably put them in rank order of who you think would do it.

So Bonnie Morris, the one who was lucky as shit, she said she listened for the mail plane until midday when she heard on the Glen Allen KACM radio show on their midday caribou clatters section. Caribou clatters. That's the news that's going on. Yeah.

They just announced that it wouldn't be coming that day. They announced that the mail plane's not coming to McCarthy. In case you're in McCarthy, mail plane's not coming. Anyway, here's the Bee Gees. Like, what the fuck? Must have been post the guy taking off and telling them back there don't come. So they said, well, let's tell radio clatters, caribou clatters. Caribou clatters. So Bonnie went into the woods with her friend Malcolm to cut logs and later just cutting them, ripping logs out.

Shit and massive logs. Cutting logs, babe. Then she recalled hearing a few gunshots, but gunshots aren't unusual. You're in the woods. No. Happens all the time. It was only that evening they turned on the local radio news. They learned of the killings.

Which are a half a mile from her cabin. So she heard the gunshots that were going on. Bonnie said, we thought they make flubs sometimes on the radio, so we switched to the Anchorage station. Six people. That was just about everyone we could think of. About that time, the helicopter came circling overhead, shining its beam down into the woods. We were huddled under the bed.

Finally, the troopers found us. We were the only light, the only surviving couple in town. Everybody else had one member of them killed. She thought that I flubbed and accidentally heard six people are dead in her town. That's a common mistake the radio makes.

They said six people are dead here. I said, oh, let's see if they're telling the truth. Bullshit, right? It's one of the more of the world's things, ain't it? You're not going to get me on a Tuesday. Bonnie said these people lying around here were not your average people. She said these are people who inspired the rest of us when we came here to build a sane and healthy life. A nobody came in here and wiped out the pillars of one of the few self-sufficient communities in Alaska.

A nobody. Another person, here are some other people here, other residents. One person said it would have never crossed anyone's mind that this kind of thing could happen here. This is Rick Kenyon. He said, I'm sure he didn't even know some of these people, meaning Lou didn't know these people. He said, I never saw anything that would have brought this on. He said he was a decent enough human being, meaning Hastings. Seemed fine to me.

Now, Chris here later on from this is a much later interview. He gives some perspective. He says, quote, This ain't Chicago. Really? Calm down. No shit. He said, It's not New York. We're not anonymous. Even the neighbors I don't necessarily get along with all the time. They're precious to me. This guy doesn't like many people. There's 22 people. He's like, I don't like most of them. I'll be honest with you.

They're still precious. He said here it was a major devastating impact. If somebody killed 50% of New York or Chicago, Christ, they'd declare nuclear war over that. Yeah, because that would be 4 million people. That's why. Christ, they'd declare nuclear war. If 4 million people were murdered, we should probably look into that. Yeah, there's 6 and 4 million. Yeah, they started a whole world war about it. Wow. Kind of apples and oranges, Chief. What do you think? Holy shit.

He said, I mean, it would mean the end of the world. And the equivalent happened here. It wiped out our elders. Well, most of them. It wiped out half the community, a community that now finds itself changing. So, yeah. He said one guy here, Al Gagnon.

He's gagging on something. You betcha. He is the owner of what will be a pizza place that will open up later here. And he says he spent 33 years in McCarthy, and this is one of the few remaining towns here. He's one of the few remaining town elders from 83. He said, I'm out here at the end of the trail because I'm an outlaw. He owns a pizza place. Well, outlaw.

Jim Miller says Al talks about everything. Water, sewer, putting in electricity because that's what Al wants because he's an outlaw so he wants sewer. What outlaws want? A clean and efficient sewage system. That's what I want. Outlaws got to charge their phone. Miller says Al's always got 40 scams going at once.

He says his latest idea is to drill for commercial water on his property in Kennecott. He plans to offer running water and a septic system to Kennecott's growing number of residents and businesses, including Richard's home and a site where Miller hopes to move his pizza place. Real outlaw drilling wells. Drilling wells to get people sewage.

Miller and Gagnon haggle over what Gagnon will charge for the service. Miller half-jokingly threatens to throw an outhouse party. Miller's and Gagnon's properties abut. One corner of Miller's land falls within 200-foot radius of Gagnon's proposed well. He said, legally, you can't drill a well within 200 feet of an established outhouse. That's the joke, yeah. He said, if Gagnon's price remains unreasonable, Miller will dig an outhouse and invite people over to establish it.

Y'all come shit in my yard, would you? Establish the shitter. Establish it is in quotes. That's great. Miller and Gagnon will amicably work out their differences. They always have. They say that Gagnon points to McCarthy's natural boundaries and its weather as a natural means of security. They said the river in the summertime keeps you honest. Okay. I don't know what that means. The snow in the wintertime keeps you honest because you can be tracked.

Oh, because in the snow, everybody knows your boots. This is a country where there's no ifs or maybes. It's yes or no. There's no 911 and mom isn't here and tears don't do any good. You're on your own. By the way, let me dig you a nox septic system here. Yeah, this doesn't. That's why we love it.

You die out here in a snow mound with yaks biting at your nutsack, and that's how we like it. Nobody knows your name. Yeah, this is the opposite of cheers. You just die and return to the earth, and nobody knows. He said, and then Richard said, no, we don't call 9-1-1. We call our neighbors. Anybody starts shooting around here, we're going to take out the people we don't know first. Gee, don't be, don't vacation here. What?

He said, we'll figure out what your problem is later. We will shoot first and ask questions later of people we don't know, even though the only guy who massacred everybody was a guy who fucking lived here. No one from the outside has done anything.

And perhaps we'll get the right guy. Well, if you came in from the outside, you'd be terrified of these people. Yeah. No, but even if you were a serial killer, you'd be like, these people are fucking frightening. And they'll take your life with a whisper, James, with a fucking suppressor. Come on. Imagine there's Wolverines around here. I'm getting out of here. You'll take my life and not even disturb a Wolverine family. Hey, so Hastings is charged with six counts of first degree murder.

one count of attempted murder in the first degree, and one count of first-degree assault. So that's what he's got. Now, the investigation, they search everywhere in his house, and they find, quote, a large quantity of evidence collected from the home, which is mainly the shells that match the ones that the victims were shot with and all that kind of thing. They had a team of seven state troopers and assistant district attorneys and an assistant district attorney

were looking over everything and getting in there. This, by the way, as you might imagine, is all the town talks about after this. I mean, most of them...

So they said the survivors near devoted nearly every conversation to the murders and at least indirectly about the murders. They said for weeks people were basically sleepwalking. The bloodstains were still soaked in the snow. You could see them. And they said meetings were held. They considered options of what to do. Do we keep telling everybody nobody can come in here? And one at one of these meetings, one person said, we can't trust anybody that comes in here anymore. Yeah.

Yeah. And another said, wait a minute. If we do that in a larger sense, lose the winner. That's what he wanted was for people to fuck off out of here. And this is so we're going to give him what he wants. Lloyd Green said, if we don't trust anybody, if everyone who comes in is a suspect, then we're putting out negative energy and we're creating a suspicious atmosphere. Yeah. This town is creepy. Everyone's staring at me and pointing guns at me when I came to look at a fucking Wolverine. This is crazy.

So he said that we can't expect to have people come here. Better if we open our arms now to everybody, but maybe have a little caution. Let's not look weirder than we already look is what it is. We look weird to begin with. Then somebody shoots a resident, shoots most of the town. Now we look super weird. And now we want to shoot strangers. Yeah. Now we're in some Twilight Zone shit here.

So the prosecutor in a later interview describes Lou Hastings as a very bright guy, a nerdy academic whose wig is probably on a little too tight. No, he's a bald guy. No wig. But he then says there are a lot of parallels to this guy and Ted Kaczynski. Uh huh. Later on. This is after the Ted Kaczynski thing. Sure. He said, if you really distill it down, Mr. Hastings thought he was going to be the savior of the Alaska wilderness. Right.

He said if he had been paying attention, he would have seen the irony in killing a town where the residents know each other by their boot tracks, a town that existed without electricity, running water or telephones to protest what he perceived to be over industrialization. Like there's no industrialization here. There isn't even electricity here. He said the prosecutor said in the name of Alaska, he destroyed part of Alaska and the Alaskan life.

So, yes. So this was when was Kaczynski? Wasn't that in the late 90s? They caught him in the 90s there. He started in the late 80s and then caught him in the 90s. So I remember it was like late 90s when they had his. Yeah. I remember that sketch was the joke. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is well before that. That was a later interview. They said.

They said the irony is that he comes from an overpopulated California, moves to the midst of such beauty, and then in order to protect the beauty, single-handedly wipes out a whole town.

Yeah, because he's been to Anchorage and he's seen what the industrial revolution does to – He doesn't like it. And he doesn't want that happening here. But it's not happening here. It's not happening here. As evidence is, by 40 years later, it's still the same. We would have to have 7 billion people in America, just in America, for people to start moving into this area. Yeah.

We're out of space completely. Fucking Nebraska's all full. We took the corn down. Montana's fucking tit to tit. There's people rim to rim at the canyon. It's full. It's full of people. They're stacked on top of each other miles high. Rim to rim. So there's a bail hearing. The prosecutor wants to raise his bail to a million dollars.

They say that he's a relative newcomer to the state. He's unemployed. He could flee if he's freed on bail. They also said that he needs to go in under psychiatric evaluation here. But the judge decides to continue the bail at $300,000. That's his bail here, which seems low for killing six people, I feel like.

Yeah. A little bit. Wood co-worker again? That's what I'm saying. It's higher than that, isn't it? Seems like a, wow, six people? That's a lot of people. That's a lot of people. That's a slaughter. That's a massacre. That's a mass killing. That's crazy. Mass shooting, yes.

So they said they're concerned also during this court hearing. They were concerned about security because they thought one of these remaining 18 people or whatever would fucking try to kill him because they were pissed off, obviously. So it prompted them to move up the time of the hearing. A trooper dispatcher had said earlier that Anchorage switchboard had been flooded with telephone calls from friends and relatives of McCarthy residents.

And they heard some threats against Hastings basically. Like, hey, you better watch out and all this type of shit. So they took a bunch of security precautions and nobody showed up. Nobody cared. Nobody gives a fuck. Fuck. Nope. So he's trying to say that they conducted an illegal search of his shit.

There's no warrant, no nothing. And the judge rules that the troopers who apprehended him would have been negligent not to have inspected his duffel bag and wallet, especially because he was lying about his identity. And they knew it. They knew he was lying. They knew that he wasn't Chris Richards and they knew that he was the shooter. So they said that, you know, that's how it works. So the search was fair, they said. Also denied by the judge. By the way, this judge hates him. The judge's name is Moody, Judge Ralph Moody.

Yeah. He hates this guy. Every ruling, no matter how reasonable of a request, it is anti-Hastings. Fuck, he hates him. It's wild.

So the judge also denied a defense lawyer's motion to rule on the constitutionality of an amended state law regarding insanity defenses. Oh, OK. This lawyer was supposed to have told the court prior to yesterday's hearings whether he intends to plead Hastings was not guilty at the time of the murders because he was insane here. Now, the public defender here told the court that.

that he couldn't make such a filing because he feels the new law, because they just changed the law, we'll get into that, is unconstitutional. So he's like, I can't work within it. He's previously said the current statute allows defendants to be convicted even if they didn't understand at the time of the crime what they were doing. This is the new insanity law that came later. Remember, if you're pre-1980, if you were insane, they'd look at whether you were crazy. He's insane, so we called him insane. Now it's

You don't only have to be insane. They could say you are the craziest person in the world, but he knew where he was and what planet he was on when he killed somebody. So now it's that you're, that's sane now, which is, that's crazy. So,

They said that he, yeah, they said that Moody, the judge, said until the defense attorney submits his intention to enter an insanity plea, there's nothing before the court and no ruling that the new law would be forthcoming on the new law that would be forthcoming. I can't rule on shit unless you submit something.

So the state legislature amended the law to give juries new options in dealing with insanity pleas by adding a category of guilty but mentally ill. Basically, don't give a fuck how crazy you are. That's what that means. Guilty but rather than not and.

exactly yeah so the criminals convicted under that standard are subject to regular prison sentences but are also entitled to treatment for their illnesses before being transferred to prisons i like that better so that would be yeah you get treated for your mental illness then they put you in a prison but at the end you're still going to prison still going there yeah you're still going to prison which the point is if someone doesn't know what the fuck they're doing because they're madly crazy they don't belong in prison they

They belong in a mental institution. Yeah. But you're saying we'll fix them. But you're not fixing severely paranoid schizophrenic people. You're not fixing them. But eventually they're going to just go throw them in a prison. Yeah. So that's weird. The changes were made following murders in 82 in Anchorage of four teenagers who was found innocent by reason of insanity.

in a previous murder. So that's what happens. People get mad that one person got away with something, so they change a law that made sense for 100 years. It happens all the time. New jerk reaction just to go too hard for this one case. Yeah, yeah. If we had this, then this guy wouldn't get away. But it's going to fuck something up later, so let's just let it go. That's the problem. This guy is a little wacky. So the judge, a judge here, rules no interview and no insanity plea. We'll talk about that. He refused, basically...

He doesn't want to talk to state psychiatrist Hastings. He wants to talk to defense psychiatrist but not state psychiatrist. So the judge granted a request to postpone the trial and try to figure this out. The trial be delayed so a psychiatrist hired by the defense has time to complete his examination. Hastings has refused three times to talk to state psychiatrist Hastings.

So the defense attorney assured the judge that he would cooperate now that he's received a report from the defense psychiatrist, Dr. Joe Satin of San Francisco. The defense attorney said that he did not want to expose Hastings to the state's doctors until he was sure an insanity defense would hold up during the trial. The judge said here the next time he refuses, the insanity defense will be stricken. There will be no insanity defense.

But a really crazy person might refuse. Yeah. So then you're going to – that's the – he's too crazy to be examined, so we're not going to let him plead insanity? Like I get what the court has no other choice, but it's not logically –

We're all people, so I guess you've got to have the same rules for everybody. But all people are not all the same people. You've got to have different rules that can be applicable to each situation. Fucking wild. So the judge rescinds an order requiring the Public Defender's Agency to pay the district attorney's office $180, the bill for one of the doctors that he refused to talk to. So he's going to plead not guilty, just has to plead not guilty.

Okay. Now, will he have to pay for a lawyer? Because that's a big thing. They indicated that he owns two vehicles and more than $10,000 worth of computer software and that his wife has a $40,000 in her retirement fund. So they got $56,000. So they said he does not, this is the judge, said he does not fit the pattern of being an indigent. An indigent. The judge said if this man's got assets, the state should not be paying for an attorney. Okay.

So that's how that works. Now, Richards, Chris Richards, as he recovers, he continues to work summers on a road construction crew here. But not the next year because he's healing from his bullet wounds. Right.

And basic terror, you know, that sort of thing. Yeah, I imagine those machines make loud noises. You know, banging and clanging. Something slams on asphalt, you might fucking flash back a smidge. A little bit. They said now he's also heavy in debt because his injuries have prevented him from working. And he says he's still bitter over the shootings. Well, when you find out what's up with him, you'll know why he's bitter. Yeah. Permanent double vision.

That would piss me off, constantly rubbing my eyes and having that not work. A plastic eye socket because it was shattered by the bullet. And glaucoma are among his physical injuries. His friends say he is all fucked up mentally. One is hurt and guilt, he says he feels, for the gnashes.

because they helped him. It was his idea to go to the airstrip and they both died and he got away. So he feels bad. He said, I don't know if I'll ever be able to work again. I really don't. I don't feel like Chris was real into working to begin with based on his past. Yeah. First sentence out of his, I don't know if I'll ever be able to work again.

It's not like he's like, I'm an artist and I do this thing I love or whatever. He's a road construction guy. Damn it, I won't be able to shovel gravel anymore. Just pretend like you're building two roads, Chris. If you see two, build two. Build two. I got two guns, one for each of you. So the town wants blood here. Yeah. Town wants fucking blood. Sally Gilbert, one of the residences, said there's been a lot of soul searching since the murders about why they happened and no one seems to know.

They said until he's convicted, there will be no peace. Lloyd Green said Lou Hastings is the very personification of evil. He has forfeited his right to a life on the planet Earth.

Well, he's made his mind up. I don't think he's going to be on the jury. I doubt. I think he gets to be judged. Jesus Christ. So the survivors now imagine what that's all about. Jesus Christ. Yeah. There's a lot of people just all fucked up here. They're Lloyd Green said, you can't put it out of your mind. Lesson flow came here the same year I did.

He said, that day I didn't come down for the mail. He didn't come for mail day, so he would have got shot too. And Gilbert said the same thing. The woman said, it was a fluke. That was the only Tuesday all winter I didn't come for my mail. Is that right? Yep. She had some other shit going on, so she couldn't go. So the Liz, who owned the lodge that burned down, said she hasn't been to McCarthy back because she said her lodge was her life, her dream, and her reason for being. Oh.

She said, I very much feel like a victim. That was my life savings. There was no insurance. It's just gone.

There's nobody that's insuring you out there. You can't get insurance in the woods. You can't? No, they won't insure you out there. Is that right? Earthquakes and everything else. Yeah. Forest fires. Avalanches. There's a million things that could happen. So she said she's been seeing a doctor for health-related problems after what happened. She said, initially, all I heard was six of my friends had been murdered. When you hear that even one person you've been close to is dead, it kind of knocks the wind out of you.

She said, I'm just not able to deal with it like a lot of people, to cry and scream and get it out of my system. Everything I had is gone. And she says, but you can't look back. You've got to look forward. And they said they need to welcome newcomers. Richards even said, I don't see anyone down at the tram throwing rocks at strangers. The tram is the cable thing that you have to pull yourself in on. Now, the Nash cabin...

They have a coroner seal over the door. Oh, Jesus. Yeah. Looks like someone. Well, it is now because the parents, one of their parents said that the mortgage hold told the mortgage holders that they're going to come down from the state and come up from the states to see for themselves about it and try to understand how this could happen. And then they'll probably sell the place, too. So they said they told him we'll make the payments till we figure out what we're doing. So Lou is about to go to trial.

Here. And he's got a... There's not a lot he can really do at a trial. No. He doesn't have a lot of defense other than I'm batshit crazy. That's all he can say. So he pleads no contest. Really? He's hoping for some mercy on the sentencing if he pleads no contest. Unfortunately for him, this judge hates his fucking guts. So we'll find out how that works. So...

They said there was about a dozen or so spectators out there. No special security precautions. They had a single uniformed state trooper. It's all security. They said the trial was nearly an hour late to get started. The defense attorney renewed his request to declare the insanity police statute unconstitutional. Hastings pleads no contest to all eight crimes after his attorney failed to have the new psychiatric defense statute overturned.

So although the evidence seemed to have little doubt as to his guilt, the question is why the fuck did he do it? What the hell, man? And they don't know. And he won't say? No. He's not telling anybody. He's not saying shit.

So the prosecutor nibbles around the edges, they say here. But at some point he had to get into specifics. And when he starts to, he's objected to by the public defender. And, you know, then the prosecutor drops the matter of why, because they don't know. So he said, how's he going to have him speculating on this shit? We have no idea why. Yeah.

So they said through it all, the balding, bushily bearded computer programmer sat quietly dressed in a tan sport coat and yellow sweater. He's going with the Menendez fucking wardrobe defense. He said nothing other than yes or no in response to questions from the judge. Now, such a verdict of this entitles the guilty but crazy shit, entitles a convict to psychiatric care in prison, but requires them to serve their entire sentences unlawfully.

Even if they are considered cured. That's the difference. It used to be you're crazy. They keep you till you're not crazy anymore. Now it's like you're crazy and we're keeping you for 75 years anyway. Yeah. So that's no. It's changed that way. Half of your sentence or whatever the fuck. No. No. Enjoy a good a good time day or none of that. No. No.

Good behavior just means you get to do your time. Well, you know, back then, I mean, if you were found pre the 80s, if you were found insane, that meant you went to a mental institution. And when the mental institution deemed you sane, you were released.

Wow. You were released. There was no jail involved. It was help. Don't like that. But now it is, we'll get you sane enough to stay in jail for 75 years. So there's really no reason. It basically made the law completely irrelevant and they don't care if it's crazy, not crazy. There's got to be something in between that is what I'm getting at. That's all. So-

They said that he pleaded no contest and they said the post-conviction hearing will be held to determine whether he's mentally ill. The judge says it appears to be appropriate here.

Yep. Hastings answered the questions. He did everything. They asked whether he was under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time, and he said no. The prosecutor said it was not a negotiated plea. No promises had been made at all. He's just pleading no contest. He said in light of the deliberate cruelty and sheer enormity of the crime, the state will ask for a sentence that will approach the upper limits of what's permissible.

We're going to ask for a lot of years here, basically. We're trying real hard to get all of it. No shit. He describes how Hastings was a serious environmentalist, came to Anchorage from Palo Alto to escape the, quote, taint of the big city, which can be stinky. You don't want to be in the taint of the city there. That is very funny that he said that before he knew what taint meant. That's awesome, isn't it?

Instead, he was depressed by what he considered to be the degradation of Alaska caused by progress in general and oil in particular. This is the prosecutor. The transatlantic, I keep saying it, transatlantic, because it's the transit, I don't know what it is, oil pipeline. That's what I'm going for. Exactly. Transatlantic became a focus for the defendant, an embodiment of a particular evil.

He said at that point, that's when the defense interrupted and said that matter wouldn't be pursued further. The prosecutor said his plan was to kill as many people as possible in McCarthy. And then he was going to head to Anchorage, I suppose. So they talked about the victims ranging from their 20s to their 60s.

At least one suffered a gunshot wound to the back of the head at close range. That was Harley. They also said there's been an extensive effort to clean up the bullet riddled cabin where the bodies were found and stacked in the bedroom so that when people arriving wouldn't see the bodies. That's why he was trying to clean the blood. He was trying to get everybody gathering in the house and then it's fish in a barrel is what he was trying to do. Wow.

That's amazing. So that's what they're going to do. July 30th, 1984. So he's guilty. Pleads no contest. But now we're going to find out about mental shit. Here are some editorials here. This is something someone sent this to the Anchorage Daily, whatever the fuck newspaper. Why allow why allow killer a sanity hearing is the title of this letter. I want to thank Superior Court Judge Ralph Moody for sharing with the public the letters from the Lewis Hastings family.

I understand that their shock and their pain must be they must be experiencing, and I can also understand them fighting for Lewis Hastings life. But we must not forget that this man shot down and killed six people. A shy, nonviolent person does not kill six people. He might have been a good, kind man at one time, but he is not a good, kind man now. And he is a criminal. I know that's hard for a family to accept, but often the family is the last to see how a family member really is.

Ted Bundy's mom still says he's innocent while he was being executed. My conflict with this issue is why is there going to be a sanity hearing? Because we got to know. We have laws. That's why. There are many people in our country who have had hard childhoods filled with emotional and physical abuse, but they don't kill people. Okay, then say he's fine and send him to prison. What the fuck are we talking about? That's all we're doing is evaluating.

Uh, we've all been given a base from which we develop our lives. We're responsible for the direction in which, in which we go. If Lewis Hastings had a hard childhood, he had therapy, a therapy available to him through work, uh, to work through those issues. Uh,

The article mentions counseling as a teenager. How about as an adult? Lewis Hastings made choices in his life that got him where he is today. By making certain choices, he's given up other choices like his privacy. He took away the lives of six people. He took more than their privacy, and yet he's reluctant to give up his own. Mr. Hastings doesn't want his mental health debated in public. We'll talk about this because he's saying, can we have closed-door hearings on the mental health?

He said they go on to say, how can one be cured in quotes of killing six people, especially if he lost his sanity just on that day? How much of the sanity hearing? How much is the sanity hearing going to cost the people of Alaska after the hours of attention from psychiatrists, attorneys, court costs, et cetera? For what? Six people are still dead. I don't know. For justice. This is America. That's why we don't just take you out behind the courtroom and shoot you in the head.

Because people used to raid the courthouse with bags on their heads and take the person and go do horrible things. We can't do that. We're a civilized society, you fuck. We're trying to be civilized here. We're living in a society. Lewis Hastings is still guilty and he's still going to be locked up for the rest of his life. Then what the fuck do you care then? Why are you so mad? November 29th, 1984. Letter to the editor again. Murderers don't deserve rights is the title of this one. Okay.

Last week, I read about Mr. Clemens, who, while serving time for manslaughter, was not only allowed to enter the land lottery, but was then let out of jail to stake his land. This week, I read about mass murderer Louis Hastings, who was allowed to receive his Alaska Permanent Fund dividend check.

Okay. Permanent fund because they do so much oil shit there. Yeah, yeah. And basically to make up for the fact that they're destroying all this shit that they give everyone a check. And it's somewhere now between $1,000 and $2,000 per person per year. Okay. That's about what it is. So it's not a ton of money, but it's something. Okay.

He gets some. He gets some. So they said, what rights do prisoners have to participate in state functions while in prison? Do not officials in this state realize these two men have taken the lives of innocent people? As far as I'm concerned...

Mr. Hastings' check and any other convicted murderer's check should be given to the families of their victims. Mr. Clemens should lose his land. He gave up his right to when he committed manslaughter. After all, the victims of these two men and men like them will never again receive a dividend check or be able to enter the state land lottery. I ask where is the justice in this?

And again, another person. Mass murder. He's still a landlord? Forfeited his rights. Yeah. He said he basically, he recently said, talking about Hastings, recently filed suit in superior court over his possible transfer to federal prison. He states the system violates his rights. Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't he forfeit his rights when he pulled the trigger on six innocent people? No, that's when your rights are activated, when they...

When you're in the back of a police car, that's where the rights are activated. They read them right to you. Me and you right now, we don't need any rights. No. We're sitting here. I'm good. No one's asking me shit, telling me shit. I don't need rights at all. I'm in my house. I'm fine. But that's when you need rights. How dare him even to file the suit in the first place, let alone let the court entertain it.

He's supposed to be properly chastened and just want to go fucking live in a hole and die. So they said, count your blessings, Mr. Hastings, that you didn't commit these atrocities in the states of Texas, Florida or Georgia, to name a few. If that had been the case, you wouldn't have to worry about the system violating your rights. No, you'd be in 30 years of fucking appeals that would cost even more that you bitch about then.

That's what you do. Why can't we just convict him and then turn his chair in the court into an electric chair? Why can't we just use an ejection button and just shoot him out of the room? Right through the ceiling.

Just make the defendant's chair as an electric chair. And if you're found guilty, they throw the switch right there. That's what they want. The chair turns into a rocket and then we shoot him to the moon. There you go. Be comforted in knowing Alaska doesn't take advantage of capital punishment. Instead, you will be housed, fed and pampered for the rest of your life at the expense of the same type of law abiding citizens you so viciously victimized.

So the judge releases letters. The prosecutor and the defense attorney both said, please don't release these letters to the public. And he said, oh, I'll release them. Oh, they're going out. Oh, they're going out. He said. Put them on the plane. This is a Moody set. If people write me letters, they better expect them to be published. Is that right? Yes. So this is to because his family, Hastings family, was writing letters of support. So he published them. So people would shame them for doing that. Yeah.

That's essentially what he did. He hates his guts. They said the exchange came Friday at a hearing to determine whether Hastings will have a chance to try to prove he's mentally ill. Such a finding would enable him to spend at least the first part of his prison sentence in a mental hospital. Okay. So his mother and one of his sisters wrote Moody supporting Hastings' claim that he must have been insane at the time. They said he was a shy, gentle person who never showed any violent tendencies. Okay.

Public defender said question Moody's decision to release the letters. District attorney echoed those concerns. He said the stories could have a disturbing effect on survivors closely following the case. And also the prosecutor suggested media access to such materials please be limited. They're not, by the way.

But Moody said the letters were sent directly to him by certified mail and not part of the classified pre-sentencing information. These are mine now. I'm keeping them. These are addressed to me, man. He said, if I make these letters available to you, how can I not make them available to the public? I don't know, because you're the lawyer's concern in this case, and I don't have shit to do with it. Maybe that's why. He said that he'd been following that policy for 22 years as a judge. That's all there is to it.

So he's being evaluated. Why did he do this? Did he give any reason? Yeah, he's got a reason. He's got a reason. Apparently, after he killed everyone in town, he planned to sabotage the pipeline. The whole thing started with Chris Richards, but it all unraveled from the very first guy because he didn't die. And that's what fucked the whole thing up.

He said it's supposed to start. He's supposed to kill Richards. Then when the weekly mail plane allowed landed, Hastings would kill anyone who showed up at the Hagelin's house. Yeah. Most of the residents with all of them eliminated. He would hijack the mail plane, kill the pilot, of course, you know, hijack the mail plane. I guess he can fly now, too. Evidently.

He then planned to land the plane near the pipeline at a pump station about 80 miles west of McCarthy and rig the plane to take off again with no one at the controls. How the fuck does that work? How are you going to do that? I don't know. Don't you got to do flaps and shit? At that point, he would commandeer a fuel truck.

And ram the pipeline while shooting at it. This sounds like if an eight-year-old, if you asked an eight-year-old, how do you destroy an oil pipeline? This is what they would come up with. I don't know, you like drive a big truck at it while you shoot at it and stuff. You just got to get a snow plow and hit it. Yes. Now, he theorized the cold weather would, because you're an environmentalist, but you want oil to spill all over everywhere. Yeah, yeah.

He said the winter weather would congeal the oil in the broken pipeline, thus minimizing environmentally damaging spillage while disrupting the oil flow. He said so there was more. He thinks it just it just flows and oozes.

Yeah, it'll just turn to slush. Dude, it is under so much pressure, man. High pressure. No, it's not your fucking bathroom sink. It's not a sewer line. No. It's not oozing. Jesus Christ. He doesn't even understand what it is. How is he so pissed? It's ridiculous. The fuel truck, in his mind, would burst into flames, charring his body beyond recognition because he's going to kill himself in this. Yeah.

He thought of that. He thought that would be good because the entire town would be dead and his body would be unrecognizable. So he could destroy the pipeline and commit suicide without revealing to his family that he had been a murderer that committed suicide. They would think that he died in the town. They thought he died in the town. That's why he burned the one thing down because he wanted him. That was part of the plan. Oh, boy.

And that would be at the hands of an unknown killer, and everybody would feel bad for everybody, but the pipeline would be fucked up. This is the dumbest computer scientist I've ever heard of. He's a dipshit. Complete dipshit. So yes, he wants his competency hearing to be held in private.

Yeah. The judge, on the other hand, Moody here. Yeah. He rejected arguments by Hastings attorney that the man who killed all these people has put on NBC has any rights to privacy. Court TV will be airing this from eight right after OJ coverage tonight.

How can a defendant say his interest is greater than the public's in a case like this? Right. Also countering the defense motions was the prosecutor who said any right of privacy has disappeared March 1st when he committed those killings.

The legal issues involved in this deal caused the defense attorney to ask for a closed-door session and proved frustrating to people. People are waiting for this, and it's taking a long time, and they want instant justice. He says to the layperson, all the victims know is their parents or grandchildren are gone. That's what the prosecutor says. Sentencing comes around.

Before the hearing, Hastings smiled and laughed with his defense attorney. He was seen doing that. One McCarthy resident said, I never saw him smile the whole time he was in McCarthy. Is that right? Yep. He said if Moody finds him, the judge is up. This is up to the judge now. If he finds him guilty but mentally ill, he'd remain in a mental hospital until he's considered cured and he would serve the remainder of his sentence in prison.

Now, the shrinks come in here, psychiatrists come in, and they say he hatched a bizarre suicide scheme to blow up a pipeline in an effort to make his death meaningful and spare his family the pain of knowing what he'd done. They diagnosed him with having a longstanding personality disorder, which made him incapable of appreciating the wrongfulness of his conduct. One guy said he welcomed the solitude. It became a place where he could think about things. He began to brood in a morbid way about various things.

He said his crimes were planned as somehow a protest statement on the ongoing development and increasing number of people coming into the state. That's what the prosecution's guy said. He said he began to develop the idea that he would like to make his suicide meaningful in some way. He said one thing he liked about Alaska was the lack of crowds, and he didn't like that the pipeline was causing more people to come here.

He said that one of the shrinks said that in developing his scheme, he demonstrated the dichotomy that characterizes his personality. He said he felt a separation between the way his thinking went on and the way his feelings went on. A psychiatrist for the defense also diagnosed him as having a major depression episode with psychotic features at the time of the slaying and described him as having a personality disorder common to, quote, many people walking the streets today who do not break the law.

Okay. The state psychiatrist here, he says, when I asked him how it would have affected him if people, his victims, got down and begged, he said he made sure that didn't happen. He hurried up and got it over with.

He didn't know how he would react to that is why. He didn't know if maybe he would have stopped and said, oh, shit, I'm sorry. Because if you're not a killer like that, someone begging for their life is probably, you don't do this all the time. If you're not a cold piece of shit, you might fucking have some emotion. If you're Ted Bundy, that makes your dick hard. If you're a normal person, you might go, oh, this isn't good. This kind of ruins the whole thing for me. Yeah, I thought they were going to be like, fuck you, you asshole. And it would feel great.

So, however, Hastings does suffer from an inflated opinion of himself. Remember that from work? Yeah. And is susceptible to grandiose schemes with little chance of success.

Which is most people living in this area, I would think. This is a grandiose scheme to move here. It's fucking crazy. You're going to wake up tomorrow and survive this. It's crazy. Yeah, that's what I mean. They also said that the psychiatrist doubted Lou's claim that his plan was to end his own life in a tanker truck explosion.

Hastings reportedly planned, obviously, the final stage of the crime as being that. Referring to a list Hastings had been carrying at the time of his capture, which included government officials, judges, police and civic leaders, the psychiatrist said it seems fairly unusual that a person who planned to be dead in a few days would go through the trouble of making out this sort of list. Right. True. The list, which included Anchorage area names, was not admitted to the public court record and will be sealed in appeals as well.

No explanation was offered. Don't want to give anybody ideas. Hey, that guy is an asshole. He's right. He is a jerk. He had a pretty good list going. No explanation was offered in court as to why Hastings compiled his computer printout list. Some courtroom discussion had him had it referred to as a hit list. He added on that old printer paper. He had to like pull the sides off. That's how he had it printed.

A pink, yellow, and a white one? He folded it back and forth three times and then fucking slowly took the perforations off. Yeah. That is hilarious. Wow. I worked for a place in 2003 that still used a printer like that, by the way. Yeah, it was fucking crazy. It was like, what are you people doing? A printer's $92. Get a fucking decent printer in here.

Yeah, but that thing just keeps going. It did. It's so loud. It took forever, too. It'd be like, Jesus Christ. And any documents you gave to people are like, when was this printed? 1986? What's happening right now? How long have you guys been looking for me? Jesus. So Lou's family pleads for him. Pleads for him. His sister and mother wrote to the judge, as we know, and then he released it to the public.

This is his mother. Maud Marie Gunn is her name. Maud. Maud Gunn. That's a great name. Yeah. She said, with all my heart, I believe Lewis's sanity completely left him on that horrible day. He said that he's never demonstrated any threatening or violent tendencies toward anyone. He could be trusted. He held top secret security clearance during a stint in the Air Force. Yeah.

She said, I knew Lou to be a good, kind man, not a criminal. I think it's evident that he's a good, good boy. I think it is evident that he could have committed these crimes. He could never have committed these crimes had he been sane at the time. Okay.

His attorney here called it a crazy, irrational scheme that had no chance of succeeding and illustrated his mental illness. He's delusional if he thought that. Yeah. He urged the judge to resist public pressure and give Hastings hope and an incentive to live. Noting that he said, come on. He said he doesn't have any prior criminal record. You shot six people. I don't care if you shoplifted a Twix bar when you were 14. The fuck out of here. I

I don't give a fuck if you've never gotten a ticket. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. And never before had demonstrated violent tendencies and said it's totally inconsistent with the way he lived his previous life and the way he would live the rest of it. Well, yeah, because he'll be in prison. So the district attorney, though, said that it was ironic that Hastings moved to Alaska because of the wilderness, then turned around and erased such a vital part of it.

So, yeah, he said in the name of protecting Alaska, he destroys part of Alaska. The defendant took the life of McCarthy in order to make a statement. The judge says being an environmentalist, he was going to get a message across. This guy doesn't like environmentalists. He says shit about his environmentalism repeatedly in a scathing way. It's crazy. He said he was going to get a message across. He chose the wrong manner in which to do it.

He said, I think it could have been decided without psychiatrists at all. He wasn't listening to those people at all. He let them talk because he has to because that's the law and the way shit works. I don't need any of you people. But he says right now that I didn't even pay attention to that. He said, I think it could have been decided without psychiatrists at all. The facts are so clear, so undisputed, you don't need any psychiatrists. Yeah.

Any decent lawyer, that is an appeal fucking bait dangling right there, boy. He just said, I didn't fucking even pay attention. I'm not taking any of that into consideration. He said, no one with any common sense can say there's anything wrong with this man. Really? You can see that right through his skull. Common sense is what it is. He's the second biggest asshole in the story, this judge. Yes.

When asked by Moody if he had any comment, Hastings said that he didn't have any time to prepare any remarks. Okay. And the judge said, quote, I'm not buying it. He said, these are delaying tactics is what you're doing. I'm not buying it. I think you're fucking fine. He said, there's no question in my mind that he knew exactly what he was doing when he killed nearly one third of the town. He said, you shall never again walk a free man.

He said he sentences him to, and I'll give you a total in a minute, the maximum sentence of 99 years each on six counts. Holy. And on the first degree murder, the max of 20 years on each of the two counts of that. He ordered the sentences to be run consecutively. You, sir, may fuck off 634 years in prison.

634 years in prison he gave him. Next Christmas I'm going to come around and go, that's one. That's one. Put the hat on and a big bag Santa thing. There you go. 633 more of these to go.

Now, the reaction here at the town, one of the neighbors said, quote, they all shared a love of the land. The one thing they all had in common was that they had all helped him, meaning Lou, at one time or another. Jesus. Now, where will he serve the sentence? He's resisting the efforts by Alaska prison officials to send him to a federal prison to serve his time. Oh.

He's appealing correction officers officials decision to request federal placement with a suit he filed in Anchorage Superior Court. He claims that the in the suit that prison officials inmate classification system is unfair. It's usual procedure to ship high security long term prisoners to outside facilities meaning outside Alaska. The state has not received any notice of acceptance from federal officials but we anticipate our request will be accepted here.

Hastings may be placed in the federal system, would come after this decision, obviously. And they said that we really don't have any facility that can deal effectively with Mr. Hastings, is what one of the Alaskan spokespeople said. They said she noted that the state's only maximum security facility capable of handling prisoners with long sentences is in Juneau. So she said, and it's quite crowded.

They said also in his appeal, he's talking about the vaguely worded policies to classify him for prospective federal system placement that violated his rights to due process and equal protection under the law. You know it. Also, he says he has received money from the following sources in the last 12 months. The Permanent Dividend Check Fund, $331. Prison work payments amounting to $180. $10 from his mother.

And he says he has about $305 in his prison account. And he said the remaining funds from the account shown, from the income shown, have been used for personal maintenance and hygiene. I do not own any stocks, bonds, notes, automobiles, real estates, or other valuable properties. Now, so he's sent away. Gone. Goodbye. We'll find out. He's going to be sent to Leavenworth, Kansas. Golly, back home. Bye. Yeah. So that's something anyways by his family. Wow.

So Chris Richards says he carries a handgun around in his back pocket ever since the murders. He said the only time he didn't have it with him was when he slept. He says it wasn't like I was afraid for myself. It was more or less I owe this to my neighbors. I can't lose any more of my friends and neighbors, even the ones I don't like them, the ones he hates. They're my neighbors. Excuse me. I don't need I don't need any other assholes coming around and shooting them.

I think of Amore as a big tribe of people. Most of us live here because we love the place and we have that in common. Then they talk about the tram. They talk about how the cables are sagging dangerously close to the river and were difficult to use. The hand cables? Yeah. So the locals began plans for a new tram because of this because they feared the state would build an auto bridge instead. They built a bridge. And they said if you could drive to McCarthy, it wouldn't be here. None of us would be here basically. Okay.

So they said Hastings was invited to join in the planning of the tram project, but he refused. Loy said idiosyncrasies are welcome here, but Lou couldn't see that. He didn't fit in. He felt that, but it was his own projection he was seeing, not ours. For a while, everybody just sat around and talked about the murders until somebody would say they've got to talk about something else, and then we'd talk about it some more.

But the tram project was right there to slip into. It gave everybody something to do. So they all did it. The people rebuilt it. They secured $90,000 in funding from the state. Oh, my God. Residents cut logs for support towers and salvaged unused cable from the mines. $90,000 is what that thing costs? Yeah. And that's with them building it themselves. Like, that's not even like equipment or power shit. That's not a government contract. Right. That's a guy with an ax out there chopping fucking logs. My God.

And they said, yeah, they said that after the killings, this took on meaning. And they said, it's not like we are cutting down the old cable and putting up signs that say go home. We don't want any of that influence anymore. It's just the opposite. We're opening our arms to the world. Come here. We're not weird. Seriously. We got a new tram. Look at us. It's easier now. Come on.

So, yeah, they talk about that. And then Chris sues Lou in 1985. Yeah. He sues Lou for $3 million. Wow.

I don't know where he's supposed to get that from, but... Might as well sue him for a trillion. What's the matter? Fuck. In the suit filed, he seeks $1 million in actual physical damages and $2 million in punitive damages. Sure. It alleges that Hastings acted willfully and maliciously with single-minded purpose and intent in grievously wounding and atrociously injuring Richards and attempting to take his life. I disagree. 1985. He changed his mind. He wants to change his plea. Can we have a trial now? I don't like 634 years. I got...

That one ended bad. I'd like to plead contest. Is that possible?

I'd like to contest the hell out of this. He's asking that he needs a jury to listen to his claims that toxic poisoning prompted him to murder these people. Nah, we're good. You got it. You're all right. He says the former attorney failed to pursue the copper toxicity defense. Oh, boy. A thorough investigation of this claim may have explained the defendant's criminal conduct as being the product of a psychosis, or at the very least, it may have nullified the mental state necessary to prove first-degree murder.

He also said his original pennies I sucked on as a kid. I'm fine. The original the original attorney here mistakenly believed he was on one of Hastings hit lists and therefore was unable to defend Hastings wholeheartedly. Is that right? Yeah, that's exactly what they said. They said, yeah, he didn't want to do it. Hastings claims laboratory tests after the murder showed he had high levels of copper in his body because he lives on the copper mine is what they're saying.

In the summer of 82, he inhaled fumes while applying preservatives to logs at his cabin. He also says that he'd bring the winter he had inhaled during the winter. He inhaled a substantial amount of dust while scraping paint off the cabin windows. So lead paint, copper in the air, and what else was it? And fumes for fucking lacquer fumes.

Made me snap. Okay, sure. He says that the district attorney says the doctor who found the traces of toxins in his system concluded they might be a sign of low blood sugar levels in his blood, but themselves do not seem sufficient to cause him to be unable to appreciate the nature and quality of his conduct. Yeah.

It's a little much. You just need an orange juice, man. That's all it is. Then he refused to allow his attorney to participate in a court hearing. Oh? He planned to seek permission to withdraw as no contest, please, and he doesn't want his attorney there. He says, I don't want this guy here. Yeah. He said he asked the guy not to implement any decision on today's hearing until the defense appeals Carl's, the judge's refusal to remove himself. So now they're fighting the judge, this one, that one.

It doesn't fucking matter. He's pretty fucked here.

1987, he appeals again, blaming the copper. He blames organic copper. Really? They say, my review of a large body of medical research indicates that exposure to intoxicants involved can cause psychiatric effects sufficient to explain my bizarre thinking between 1982 and 1983. That's what he wrote. He said his thinking led him to design a plan apparently meant to protest the deals here, the pipelines.

and he said that, yeah, so it's got to be that. That's all it is. Yeah, did his own research. He knows. Did his own research. He Googled it, and imagine if this guy had YouTube. He would have killed everybody long before this. He didn't even have crazy people on fucking Twitter or on YouTube telling him what he wants to hear, and he still fucking did it. He didn't even get confirmation bias. Oh, it would have been so bad.

Oh, my God. 1988, he's been serving his time in Leavenworth. Some prisoners are being returned to Alaska. They got Robert Hansen, the serial killer and rapist. They got him back. They also got Joseph Contreras back here as well. But I guess the prisoners, he chose to stay in Leavenworth. He had a choice. April 1993, this happens at Harley King's house.

A woman shoots and kills her husband after he beat her all day and threatened to kill her. Susan Berg walked 12 miles to her nearest neighbor, who drove her another 27 miles to the nearest telephone station.

To call and say he's dead? To report shooting her husband, Ralph. Susan has not been charged. She was admitted to the hospital and released. The shooting happened Monday evening in a cabin on Long Lake at mile 50 of the McCarthy Road. The couple was caretaking a cabin belonging to Joe King. King, remember that name? Harley's kid? Who was out of state. King's husband, Harley King...

Uh-huh. Was one of the six McCarthy residents killed in the 1983 shooting. Yeah, Joe King. That's his wife, Joe. Yeah. So this is... I'm leaving if I'm hurt. Okay? I'm out. I'm done. I'm done with the shooting. Fuck that. 1996, Hastings files another appeal seeking post-conviction relief, seeking to withdraw his pleas still.

saying that he had ineffective assistance of counsel. The judge says, get the fuck out of here. That's good. There's a four-course yak meal waiting for you somewhere.

1998, the town's catching up here. Richard said, I've got nothing but total respect for them, meaning the Heglins. They're old timers. They were all here before I thought of coming here. They had been here, done that, had a successful homestead and raised healthy kids. All I could say is good stuff about them. I mean, they were the original item as far as people living back here. They were the original pirates, even though they didn't consider themselves that.

So they said that took a major chunk out of this place. It changed the way it will be, no doubt. And the mail is no longer the event it used to be. They said the townspeople now gather on the gravel airstrip outside of a small mail shack in

Since the shack is simple wooden structure, about 10 by 10, they quickly sort the mail, then mill about on the airstrip. And in summer, some head on down to McCarthy to congregate at Miller's Pizza Place. Ruined the day. Ruined it all. Mail day isn't even funny anymore. It's over. Damn it. Not even fun. Nope, it sucks. It sucks. Loy Green.

I'm thinking, oh my God, I saw something in that, man. I definitely saw something, but I wrote it off as so what? And right then I said to myself, okay, if I ever see that in another person's eyes, I'm not going to stand idle, period. I'm not going to say, oh, well, blah, blah, blah. No, I'm going to do something. I don't know what, but something. I'm going to shit that motherfucker.

Let's hope Loy is a very good judge of character. Just look in the eyes. Someone has an astigmatism and he's like, I'm going to shoot him in the fucking head. I don't like the way he's looking at me. It's a fucking vampire right there. Oh, my God. Jesus. A few years later, a couple of young fundamentalist Christians had temporarily moved to McCarthy and were hoping to stay permanently.

Oh, shit. Loy's a fucking menace. Yeah.

Lloyd disagrees with him on religion, so he can't live here. His lip curl, we got to get rid of him. Get rid of that curl now. 2004, he appeals again, and the court rejects it again. And he does get resentenced, though, because... That's a crazy sentence. No, no, no. It's only for the attempted murders. So it's like 610 years now instead of 634 years.

Yeah. The judge should have dismissed the attempted murder counts because of the lengthy delay is what he said. They said, no, no, but you should get resentenced because there's different factors. And that's what it is. So he's got 610 years now. Do they bring him into court to tell him that? I think so. That's 610. Goodbye. He had a lot of hope, too.

From what I understand, I don't know, that's the last we hear of him is 2004. If you look up everywhere, it never says that he died. So he might still be alive and 80 years old at this point in federal prison. In the media, by the way, this was the worst mass shooting in the history of Alaska. Yes. And the case and the town were just showcased on Discovery Channel's Alaska Ice Cold Killers episode Frozen Terror. Yeah.

So there you go, everybody. That is McCarthy, Alaska and some goddamn crazy shit. If I do say so myself, that's the funniest sentence I've ever heard. Fucking ridiculous. If you like that show, tell the world about it. Tell everyone, you know, to listen to the show post on social media,

Follow the page as we are at Small Town Murder on Instagram, at Small Town Pod on Facebook, at Murder Small on Twitter. Follow us on all that shit. Keep hanging out with us. Head over to ShutUpAndGiveMeMurder.com. Get your tickets for live shows. Kansas City, you are up, baby. You're up next. What is it, October 18th, I think? That's right. Get your ass in there and come see us in Kansas City. Still some tickets available the next night in Oklahoma City. Those are sold out. Sorry about that. Definitely get your tickets for the virtual live show August 18th.

October the 30th, Halloween, the day before, Halloween Eve. That's what we're calling it. Yeah. Hollow Eve. We'll run it right into Halloween. Fuck it. We'll run it right into that shit. We're going to wear costumes. You can watch it anywhere in the world that has Wi-Fi in your house, just like a regular live show. The pictures, everything. It's so much fucking fun. Get in there and be a part of it. You can watch it for two weeks. Let's say you can't watch it that night. You got two weeks to watch it, and you can watch as many times as you want and do whatever you want with it for two weeks. So hang out with us there. Shut up and give me murder.com.

patreon.com slash crime in sports is where you get all of the bonus material. Holy shit. There's so much. You're going to get anybody $5 a month. You're going to get hundreds of back episodes, so much new ones every other week. One crime in sports, one small town murder. You get it all this week, which you're going to get for crime and sports. We'll talk about the 1993 Florida state seminal football team, which was just engulfed in all scandals and they won the national championship. So that's fun.

For Small Town Murder, we are going to talk about Ted Bundy's 1976 psychological evaluation. Oh, boy. Right before he was sent to Colorado where he escaped. Yeah. That did more shit. Well, he escaped twice in Colorado. This is the evaluation to see if he should be sent to prison or if he was, quote, a violent person.

I think we figured that out. We'll check all that out. Patreon.com slash Crime and Sports. And you get a shout-out at the end of the show, which is right fucking now. Jimmy, hit me with the names of the most wonderful people who would never, ever, ever force us to eat a four-course yak meal. This week's executive producers are American Light Fixture and Showering Company. My favorite. John Candy will sell. Del, you can sell me anything. Yeah.

Jessica Boucher, happy birthday. They're lighter. What is it? The rings, they're lighter. Yeah. Helium, sorry. Cole Sperlin built his own house listening to us. Good for you, Cole. Good for you. Congratulations. Holy shit. I hope it stays up because if it falls on you, you got no one else to blame but yourself. And that's hard for me to deal with. There's no warranty there. No. No.

And Jessica Cagnolotti, thank you so much. You guys are terrific. We can't do this without you. Other producers this week are Janice Hill, Drew DeWard, Liberty Medic, Joe Scheiste. I think that's Joe Burrow's nickname, actually. I think something like that, which is not a compliment, but it's funny. This is a guy named Joe that likes that. Hi, Joe.

Maybe he's a big Bengals fan. We don't know. Thank you, Joe. We're sorry you have to live in Cincinnati. You're a good dude. Christian Mastan. Amory A-Heart. Amory? Amory. Amory? Amory. That's Amory. It's that with a Y, not an E. That's Amory. All right. A-Heart. That's all I know. Deanna. Oh, Deanne Price. That's what it is. Guy Campina. Campinha. Campinha? How do you do that? Campina? Campina?

Campina? Is it with an H? I don't know. Yeah. Is it just Campina? Campina, maybe? No, the H is way after the P. Oh, it's way over there. Yeah. It's fucked up. I don't know. You're on your own, asshole, not you. All right.

Jasmine Gravely. April with no last name. Dana with no last name. Genevieve with no last name. Marcus M. Adele Zilber. Kristen Marks. Jason with no last name. Roxanne Slaughter. Damon Rice. Jenna McThina. McThinia. Aiden Walters. Walters. Walters? Who says that? Meredith Smith. Lourdes with no last name. Cheryl with no last name. Kate Pankowitz. Pankowitz. Merrick with no last name. Russell Strohschein.

William Lowe, Sweethearts, Chelsea Lind, Brian Roach, Rebecca Johnson, Terry with no last name, Megan with no last name, Rebecca with no last name, Michael Kozlowski, Stacy Winsett, Christian with no last name, Lacey Compton, Katie Zolar, Heather Robertson, Jess Vixen, Erin Corona, Kathy with no last name, Ellen Albright, Michelle Sweat,

Scott Tillman. Tillman. Hey, Scott. Thank you. Adrian would know last name. Kara would know last name. Peyton Mull. Sam Sides. Maura would know last name. Tara Hostetler. Probably not related. Jude. Hey, Jude. Tara would know last name. Caitlin Clark. Probably not that one, but it's the exact same.

Same spelling. I hope it's... All right. Travis Nunez, Josephine Barrett-Badge, Sandon, with no last name. Kelly, no last name. Danny, with no last name. Straw Bebby, Savannah Carrier, Jamie Jones, Evan Mazen, Angela Perea, Jake and Rachel Lindemuth, Sally Tate.

Shelly Blake. Mel with no last name. Julie Kessler. Bethan. Bethan Saunders. Mark Nixon. A girl named Linda Lou. Didn't think it was a dude. But whatever. Asuka. Oh, is that a thing? Is that a song? Okay. Give me three steps. Oh, that one. Yeah. Yeah.

Asuka Forrest, Beth Rode, Lisa Danielle, Daniel, Terry Love, not a stripper, but possibly a porn star, Britt Foster, Amy Breckenridge, S.D. Fuller, Jimmy's asshole scuba buddy. Oh, those scuba guys. They're such assholes. Alistair...

Essence Ray. Holly with no last name. Teresa Bartow. Rebecca Brady. Drew Harefield. Jana. Jana Von Segern. Segern? R-N. Segern. Joanna. Joanna Kilburn. Probably not...

Brian Knott, Mary Coleman, Beach Norton, Graham Boyd, Jessica Pomerleau, Andrew Edwards, K&H. This show brought to you by the letters K&H. Tony Riddstrom.

Daniel Mendez, Betsy Brickett, Brexit, Brexit, uh, Tara Kent, Eric R. Bradley G. Anthony would know last name. Richie B. Yell. What is this? B. Yell. What am I doing? Richie B. Yellen motherfucker. That's what it is. Richie B. Yellen, uh, Adelaide Evans, uh, Adam Crabb, uh, McKenzie sizzle, uh, Cindy K. Allison D. Orlando, Thomas Pitta, Pitterer, Pitterer G. What the fuck is that? Um,

Michelle Dyer, Clayton Dever, hey Michelle, Clayton Deaver maybe, Lawrence Brennan, Carly Grimes, Caitlin Shuler, Claire with no last name, Jennifer Morris, Molly Condon, Charlotte Castillo, Kai with no last name, Joaquin Gomes, Crystal Winters,

Georgina Thompson, Joanne D'Onofrio. Hey, I hope you're related. Jessica Bates, Michelle Reich. Oh, boy, that's tough. John Galt, Adobe Yoder. Maybe it's Frank's kid. Gab Serv, Jacob Tabo. Tabo fucking what? Tabasinski? Tabo, wow. Tabo, Tabo, something Polish. Tabo.

Time of time, we're going to work here. Grace M., Jill Cooper, Claire Newell, Amanda Gray, Andrew Harris, and every goddamn patron. You guys are terrific. Thank you. Thank you so much, everybody. You sons of bitches. We love you so much for all that you do for us, honestly. Thank you for what you do. And keep coming and hanging out with us if you want to follow us on social media. Head over to shutupandgivememurder.com. Drop down menus right there.

Keep coming back and seeing us. And until next week, everybody, it's been our pleasure. Bye. If you like Small Town Murder, you can listen early and ad-free now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.

In the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Peru and New Zealand, lies a tiny volcanic island. It's a little-known British territory called Pitcairn, and it harboured a deep, dark scandal. There wouldn't be a girl on Pitcairn once they reached the age of 10 that was still a virgin. It just happens to all of them.

I'm journalist Luke Jones and for almost two years I've been investigating a shocking story that has left deep scars on generations of women and girls from Pitcairn. When there's nobody watching, nobody going to report it, people will get away with what they can get away with. In the Pitcairn Trials I'll be uncovering a story of abuse and the fight for justice that has brought a unique, lonely Pacific island to the brink of extinction.

Listen to the Pitcairn Trials exclusively on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify.