The Woman Who Married a Bear (3 page)

“Those bubbles get in your blood and they can cause extreme discomfort.”

“I can imagine. Listen, we got any coffee?”

I looked out the windows above the sink overlooking the channel. A beautiful steel-hulled crab boat was passing, gulls diving in its wake. I noticed there was coffee on, and Toddy had done all the breakfast dishes. I walked over and took a mug down from one of the brass hangers.

“Cecil, do you think you could salvage boats from underwater? It is very dangerous and there is a great amount of discomfort involved, but very often it can be quite lucrative.”

“I don't know, Todd. I bet between the two of us we could get it done. But, listen, do you think you could turn down the radio some? I've got to read all the crap in these boxes, and I'll have to make some phone calls.”

“You have another case, Cecil?”

“You don't have to ask in such a tone of shock, do you? I have plenty of cases. They're mostly inactive at this point.”

“Sunken,” Toddy murmured, and he chuckled as he padded toward the radio.

“Funny! To answer your question, I don't know if I have a new case or not. It might be more storytelling than investigation.”

“Will it be quite lucrative?”

“Excessively lucrative, Todd, and particularly free of extreme discomfort. So much better than raising sunken ships.”

I sat on the couch facing the woodstove. It had started to rain, which is what it mostly does in southeastern Alaska in October. The stove created a pleasant bubble of heat in the room. The rain sounded like birds dancing on the tin roof. I was drinking coffee with half-and-half and as the afternoon progressed I added one small shot of Irish Cream. Todd flipped through the T's and listened to the radio while I read the history on Louis Victor's murder.

In May of 1982, Louis Victor had hired a young farmhand from Illinois named Alvin Hawkes. Hawkes worked as a deckhand on the charter boat. Victor needed an errand boy to help meet the needs of the German industrialists who come to Alaska and pay an average of ten thousand dollars for the privilege of shooting a brown bear with a high-powered rifle. Hawkes also packed lunches, filled gas tanks, and started lunch fires on the beach to warm the clients.

There were several people who came forward later to say that Hawkes seemed strange; that he talked to himself, and would sometimes stand alone and seem to be arguing with himself. There was a transcription of telephonic testimony from a well-known Hollywood actor who had been a client of Victor's. He told the grand jury that at the time he thought Hawkes “had a screw loose” but he had never mentioned it to anyone until contacted by the district attorney's office.

On October 2, 1982, Hawkes was supplying a remote hunting cabin on Admiralty Island. Hawkes had stayed in the cabin for a week, cutting wood and hiking, trying to get a fix on the bears in the area. For ten thousand dollars you don't want just any bear, you need to take home the skin of an awesome man-eater, the only other slavering omnivore in North America. And you don't want to walk too far to find it. So the guides learn the habits of the local bears to give their clients the shortest walk and the best shot.

On October 3, Louis Victor received a radio transmission from Hawkes that sounded like he was in some kind of trouble. Victor and his two adult children, Lance and Norma, took their boat, the
Oso,
from Juneau up into Seymour Canal on Admiralty Island. A close family friend, Walter Robbins, traveled with them in his own vessel along with his daughter De De, who was his deckhand that season before she started college. It was early evening when they arrived.

Robbins said in his statement that he saw Louis go ashore with his rifle to speak with Hawkes. The next morning, Alvin Hawkes was raving about how Louis Victor had gone crazy and tried to kill him and then had run off into the woods. Hawkes had a cut across his cheek and a bruise where it appeared he had been hit with a blunt instrument. There was blood on his shirt and a great deal of blood on the steps and door latch of the cabin. Hawkes maintained that all of the blood was his own, and that Louis had attacked him with a splitting maul.

There was a statement from Lance Victor that he had seen Hawkes throw a rifle into the bay early that morning. Lance showed the state troopers where the rifle had been thrown. Later, a dive team recovered it from the water.

I flipped through a dozen packets of 3-by-5 color prints: Shots of the cabin from the air. Shots of the cabin from the water. Shots of blood spattered on the outside of the door. Shots of troopers holding rulers next to blood spattered on the doorjamb. Shots of gray hair caught in the splinters on the edge of the chopping block. And shots of the rifle. It was a 45—70, not the most common caliber in this part of the country, but it was the rifle that Louis Victor carried when he hunted Sitka blacktail deer.

They found Louis Victor's body lying in the grassy flats of an estuary about half a mile from the cabin. His body had been partially consumed by brown bears.

There were some notes back and forth from the FBI and some bear experts at the university in Fairbanks. The experts expressed the opinion that it was unusual for a brown bear to have destroyed the body, and the only possible way to explain it would be if the man was dead before being consumed. Brown bears won't eat their human prey, it seems; black bears do.

The photographs of the body were 8-by-10, in color, showing long strands of meat clinging to the skeletal remains of an upper torso. The thin bones of the sternum had been snapped into splinters where the bears had rooted around in the chest cavity snuffling up Louis's internal organs. The cuffs of his blue wool shirt were still intact around his wrists. His head was shorn of its scalp where a massive paw had slapped across it. The bone of the skull was glaring white. The head was propped on a rock, and the eyes in the sockets were brown, the lids gone, the eyes staring at the photographer as if in shock.

I imagined the D.A. putting those pictures in the files to give to the victim's mother: “The meddling old bitch wants to see everything, we'll show her everything.”

There were transcripts of four interviews the state troopers had conducted with Hawkes on the fourth, fifth, seventh, and tenth. On the fourth, Hawkes seemed nervous. He was stammering, and he must have moved around the interview room a lot, because he showed up as “unintelligible response” on the typed transcripts, but he stuck to his story: Louis had gone crazy and had come at him with a splitting maul. They had struggled briefly, and when Hawkes had slugged him, Louis had run into the woods. Hawkes knew nothing about a killing.

The transcripts of the fifth and seventh showed a much more nervous Hawkes. His stuttering was more pronounced, and he blurted out non sequiturs as if speaking to someone not in the room: “Shut up, you bastards.” It was noted that Hawkes shook his head violently and kept digging in his ear with a wooden match, repeating: “Shut up, you bastards.”

On the ninth, the autopsy report was released, indicating that Louis Victor had been killed by a gunshot wound in the head. There were no powder burns nor signs of heavy bruising, indicating the shot was not fired at close range. The entry wound was a small hole below the right eye that originally had been mistaken for the puncture of a large canine tooth.

On the tenth, Hawkes spit out his words in spraying stutters. The typist who had worked on the tape was clearly struggling; she punctuated his comments with question marks in parentheses. Hawkes claimed to be an agent of “a great power.” He heard voices generated from the center of the earth. A transmitter had been implanted in his inner ear at birth, and this allowed Alvin Hawkes to hear the instructions. He had tried to explain to Louis Victor that the voices had foretold his death. The voices had said that Louis would be killed by the great power. He would be killed, he had to be killed. And wasn't Victor now dead? Didn't that prove that he was telling the truth—that the voices always told the truth? They foretold the future perfectly, perfectly.

In Alaska, there is no insanity defense that's worth anything to a defendant, so the troopers weren't worried about that, but they were worried about the fact that Hawkes seemed to be confessing before he had answered yes to the Miranda questions as to whether he understood his rights. The typed transcript of the last interview was obviously more worn than the others, and the critical statements constituting his Miranda warnings were marked in yellow, probably the work of Hawkes's attorney.

The interview had started off as a friendly talk. “You understand, Alvin, we just need to clear things up. You were there. You can help us. Now, Alvin, you have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. … Do you understand, Alvin? Do you understand?”

Although Hawkes had answered yes to several questions, including the one about the Miranda warnings, whether he understood them was left open, since by the end of the interview the transcripts indicated “unintelligible sobbing” and profanity: “Oh, Jesus fucking Christ. Christ. Oh, Jesus.”

For the next six months, Alvin Hawkes underwent a battery of psychological evaluations while he was in custody. His court-appointed lawyer decided to make the question of his sanity moot and tried to force a deal with the D.A. to reduce the charge to manslaughter by threatening to take the case to trial on the self-defense issue. Crazy or not, Hawkes's story seemed to be that he had been attacked by Louis after he had given Louis the disturbing news from the center of the earth. He had been attacked by Louis and had fought back in self-defense.

There had been a witness to the fight. Walt Robbins's daughter; eighteen-year-old De De, had been on deck while her father's boat was anchored in the bay. De De Robbins told police investigators and the grand jury that she had seen two men fighting in front of the cabin after Louis went ashore. She had seen them wrestle out the door and then roll back into the cabin. She thought it looked more like horseplay than a real fight. She went down to the forward berth where her father was sleeping. He had gone below shortly after dinner. Walt and De De pulled anchor early the next morning to go hunting. They only came back to the cabin when they heard the emergency radio transmissions from the
Oso
to the state troopers' office in Juneau.

The D.A. wanted murder one and tampering with evidence: Hawkes had dragged the body to the estuary to destroy the evidence of the crime. The defense attorney was holding out for a manslaughter plea bargain. Otherwise, he would take it all the way and either try to get Hawkes off on a Miranda-violation motion or make the state try him on the self-defense angle. He intended to keep Hawkes off the stand and introduce the first taped statement because Hawkes wouldn't sound as crazy as he would if the D.A. got hold of him on cross-examination. The jury would love the crying on the tape.

The best part of a murder trial is the victim never gets a chance to testify.

I
poured a little more Irish Cream into my cold coffee. Todd got up and turned off the radio and went to the refrigerator to pour himself some milk. Up to this point, the case seemed unremarkable, although it did seem to have some sad touches of drama. But as I read the next section of the file I had a funny reaction: In spite of my hangover and the first blurring effects of the Irish Cream, my skin crawled like I had just eaten some bad Chinese food.

On the eve of the trial, De De Robbins, the only defense witness, was found floating next to a pier off the docks in Bellingham, Washington. Friends had seen her walking out of a rock concert with a date. The witnesses stated that they thought De De and her date had been drinking, they appeared to be weaving and stumbling. The autopsy indicated an elevated blood-alcohol level. There were pictures of her body on the stainless steel examining table. She was milky white, and the insides of her arms and her chest were abraded with scratches and bruises where, it appeared, she had tried to pull herself out of the water by climbing up one of the mussel-encrusted pilings. In one shot her head was tossed back and hidden from the camera by the strands of wet hair clinging to her face. The next shot showed her full face: lifeless eyes open, stunned and afraid.

There was a memo from the Bellingham Police Department speculating as to whether Alvin Hawkes could somehow be tied in to an organized-crime network. The state troopers couldn't work up much enthusiasm for that theory, so they focused on the defense attorney, Sy Brown. Could he have wanted to win the case so badly that he would arrange a key witness's death?

“She was
my
witness. Why in the hell would I want her dead? Grow up.” That brief message was handwritten on a yellow memo pad.

Two days after her death, De De's father, who'd claimed the body, was packing up her room. He read the diary that was inside her night-table drawer. In the entries for the last five days of her life she had written that she was worried about a doctor's appointment. She didn't know how Rudy would deal with the situation, if it went the wrong way. She'd written poems, rhymed couplets, asking God to take care of her and Rudy and “please not to give us gifts that we are not ready for.” The last entry was written in an uneven scrawled hand. It said that she had prayed a lot and had decided she couldn't live without her baby. There was a photocopy of this page. The last two lines read, “There are so many lies—there are so many lies. There is nothing I can do. Papa, do you understand? There is nothing I can do.”