by Nick Jans
Lowman, a stranger on the far side of the continent, confirmed to Harry the truth of his dream. Peacock had been boasting to anyone who’d listen that he’d killed “a famous wolf” on his most recent trip to Juneau that past September, and that before the year was out he’d have a full body mount of the animal as the centerpiece to his living room. At first, Peacock found an attentive audience in fellow hunters at the plant, Lowman and Meyerhoffer included. “He told everyone in our department,” remembers Lowman. Peacock may have been a blowhard, but he’d hunted the land they’d all dreamed of. Knots of workers gathered in the break room to be regaled by his stories and to ooh and aah over photos of a huge black wolf—first alive, then dead. However, as Peacock dished the details, what the workers heard and saw shocked the most hard-core hunters among them. Considering his desire to be seen as a sportsman nonpareil, one might have expected Peacock to spin some self-aggrandizing tale of tracking the wolf up and down a mountain, and saving himself with a last-second shot as the animal leaped for this throat. Instead, he chortled over a truth as naked and troubling as the image he proffered of the wolf’s bloody, skinned-out carcass.
As Peacock related to his listeners, he and his Juneau buddy, Park Myers III, had known exactly who Romeo was and what he meant to Juneau. Lowman wrote, “In fact, Peacock told me, one of the main reasons for killing this particular wolf was that it would cause a lot of anguish in the community. [He] seemed to derive a lot of satisfaction out of doing something specifically designed to hurt people in this way.” Not surprisingly, Peacock’s and Myers’s plan bore far less resemblance to a sport hunt than a gangland hit. The idea was a quick, easy kill with no witnesses, and a body that vanished without a trace. The thrill, Peacock made clear to anyone who would listen, lay not in the chase, but in the killing and the suffering he caused. All that and more would be memorialized in the trophy that he would display as a supreme accomplishment. “He just didn’t get it,” said Lowman. “And he thought we wouldn’t care.”
Peacock and Myers had tried and failed to find and kill the wolf in the autumn of 2008. Though Peacock had returned in May 2009, they had decided to wait until the following September, when Romeo’s coat would be more grown in, though short of full prime condition. Myers and Peacock did manage to kill a black bear that spring, in predictable style. They spotted the animal from The Road, grazing new shoots along the beach in a closed-to-hunting area between a home and a Catholic retreat park known as the Shrine of St. Therese. The stalk was hardly what the word might suggest; bears in protected areas often learn to ignore humans, discovering quickly that they pose no threat. Peacock blasted the bruin dead twice over with one shot of his prized Smith & Wesson .460 Magnum revolver (a caliber large enough to poleax a moose); then, according to what he told Lowman, Myers kicked and taunted the animal as it died, then gutted it and dragged it up the hill with a rope tied to the bumper of Myers’s truck. Back in Pennsylvania, Peacock flashed around photos of the gaping exit wound, barely covered by a tennis ball held there for graphic illustration; and despite the illegal and unsporting circumstances, Peacock would point to the bear as one more emblem of his prowess.
Whatever his workmates thought of Jeff Peacock, his partner Park Myers III seemed determined to set a lower standard. Back in the days before he moved to Alaska, Donnelley staff recall two character-defining episodes. Once, in the plant parking lot, Myers pulled up for work with a pile of geese he’d just shot in the back of his truck. A few birds were still alive, gasping and struggling. As Myers sorted through the heap and wrung their necks, an upset onlooker asked him why he’d shot so many—more than he needed, and over the legal limit. “Because I can,” he shrugged. Another time, workers watched as Myers chased down a possum crossing the parking lot, kicked it around like a soccer ball with his steel-toed work boots, then stomped it to death as people shouted for him to stop.
No surprise that Park Myers’s attitude leaked into his social behavior. According to a 1999 police criminal complaint filed by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Myers and his wife were accused of serving two juvenile girls (thirteen years old, one of them the family babysitter) “alcohol and marihuana [sic],” then playing a game of strip poker that ended up with everyone in their underwear, and one of the girls (in the words of the police report) being fondled by Myers in her “breast and pelvic area.” In a plea bargain designed to shield the girl from traumatic cross-examination by a defense attorney, Myers pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors: corruption of minors and furnishing them alcohol. Local rumor was that Myers’s wealthy, well-connected grandmother had not only funded his defense, but exerted influence behind the scenes. In any case, Myers escaped with four years of probation and no jail time, even though he was twice charged with violation of that probation. The ongoing fallout was apparently enough to persuade Myers, his wife Pamela, and their two sons to move somewhere far away, in search of a fresh start; and that somewhere ended up being Juneau, Alaska.
Park Myers found a job at Alaskan Brewing, helping to make the beer we all drank. Pam got hired to cut hair (at least once, mine included) and worked behind the counter for Southeast, the city’s largest veterinary hospital, owned by admirers of Romeo. The boys enrolled in local schools, and the family, after trashing out and abandoning a rental trailer, put down money on a modest house on Birch Lane, in the heart of the Mendenhall valley. Park made a few friends with regulars at Channel Bowling and among local outdoors types, with whom he developed a reputation for killing to excess, talking freely about it, and shrugging at the law. In an odd, contradictory wrinkle, Myers often stopped in at Fish and Game headquarters to check on regulations and seek clarifications. “He was insistent, often borderline weird. He’d grill me about minor points and get pretty aggressive in his questions,” remembers ex–Fish and Game sealing agent Chris Frary. Myers also hooked into the local drug subculture, set up his own commercial-scale indoor marijuana growing operation, and hosted whoop-it-up parties that were rumored to regularly include a variety of controlled substances, as well as minors of both sexes. Some, from troubled homes and situations, stayed at his place for days or weeks at a time. Cloaked beneath a veneer of normalcy, Park Myers III went right on being himself.
The exact circumstances of Romeo’s death, in the third week of September 2009, will never be certain. On a grainy, blurred cell phone picture that Peacock showed to Lowman and others, a black wolf drifts along the edge of a gravel lot with some highway repair equipment in the background, later identified by Harry and confirmed by the Alaska State Wildlife Troopers to be the Herbert River parking lot near mile 28 of The Road, where a widening and resurfacing project was taking place. In Peacock’s words, recounted by Lowman, “We saw him the one day, but we had only our large-caliber bear rifles with us, and were concerned about the noise. . . . When you are hunting an icon like this wolf, you got to be careful. We returned the next day with a .22 rifle and found him in the same place, where we then shot him. One shot—straight through the heart!” Peacock also told Lowman that they stalked him from their truck, which further confirms a near-road, illegal killing. Peacock told Nancy Meyerhoffer, “The stupid prick just looked at me, just stopped and looked at me, never had a more cleaner shot, fucking idiots, they didn’t know how easy they made this one.” Fatally struck, the wolf bounded off. The killers found him twenty yards away, curled in his last sleep. The one kindness was the relative speed of his death.
Myers would later swear under oath that he, rather than Peacock, shot the wolf, and not in the parking lot, but a mile or more up the trail network that began there; that the wolf was in the company of two gray wolves, so they never stopped to consider it might be Romeo; that his perfectly placed shot was “instinctive” rather than carefully aimed, let alone planned; and that they were actually carrying the .22 (a light-caliber weapon too small for legally shooting big game) to hunt ptarmigan.
Harry Robinson, though, believes that the wolf was shot miles away, in the West Glacier Trail parking lot i
nstead, and he remains unconvinced that the shadowy lupine form on Peacock’s cell phone camera was Romeo. He points to information gleaned from Lowman’s conversations with Peacock, indicating Romeo was killed in the early morning, and that Myers and Peacock had a regular pattern that fall of first visiting the West Glacier Trail area—a detail that makes total sense, since it was just several miles from Myers’s house—and heading out the road in the afternoon and staying into the evening. If so, Myers and Peacock would have claimed the Herbert River parking lot as the kill site to evade the additional charge of hunting in a closed area near the Mendenhall Glacier. Harry pointed to the killers’ concern over noise in further support of his theory, bolstered by the fact that he’d recently been meeting the wolf there. It all makes sense; but the distinctive profile of the live wolf in Peacock’s cell phone picture, obviously taken at the Herbert parking lot, seemed to me to be Romeo. He could have easily made a quick traverse between the two sites, and the abundance of salmon in the Herbert River at that time of year would have been a prime attraction. Keeping down noise at either place made sense.
Peacock and Myers slung the dead wolf in the back of Myers’s truck, covered it with a tarp, and drove back to Myers’s house, where they called taxidermist Roy Classen, who lived nearby. They hauled the carcass to his place, just a few blocks away, where they weighed the dead wolf and posed for pictures. According to Wildlife Trooper evidence files, the time imprint on the cell phone images indicates the skinning at Classen’s house was recorded just before 8 P.M.; one could infer they hauled the carcass there as soon as they returned; or perhaps they’d waited all day for cover of darkness. In the end, who knows? That was just one issue in a complex case that would be marked by a hodgepodge of differing opinions, conflicting statements, and varying interpretations. In death as in life, the wolf that lived both beyond and among us would prove a magnet for human wrangles.
Classen skinned the carcass and placed the rolled hide and severed, skinned-out head (the latter to be stripped and bleached for a skull trophy, the former to be sent to a tannery) in his freezer, standard taxidermy practices. The naked, headless carcass would be disposed of—maybe in the woods somewhere, at the local landfill, or sunk in the ocean for the crabs to dismember. A full body mount of the wolf would be made with the tanned hide stretched over a wire-reinforced Styrofoam form; the agreed-on pose would be the wolf with a red sockeye salmon crosswise in his jaws. The raw hide was sealed with Peacock’s locking nonresident big game tag (which could be used for either black bear or wolf), supposedly to deflect potential public anger away from Myers, a local resident, if the killing were discovered. According to Classen, Myers was considering keeping the original skull (not implanted in the mount) and having it bronzed.
Mum was the word, except that already the pair couldn’t resist talking. According to Myers’s neighbors Douglas Bosarge and Mary Williams, Peacock and Myers showed up at their house that same day or the next. In Bosarge’s words, “Myers stated to me that he had just killed Romeo the wolf. He appeared to be very excited and pleased that he had done this, dancing around. He acted like he had been out to get him. . . . These acts disturbed me to the point that I no longer associated with Park Myers.” Williams added, “I asked him why he did it but he didn’t really answer me.” Classen, too, blabbed around that he was mounting Juneau’s black wolf—including to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Special Agent Chris Hansen, who had stopped by his studio on other business. As far as Classen was concerned, no one had done anything wrong, and he couldn’t resist telling the story.
The ill-advised, seemingly compulsive lip-flapping didn’t stop there. A Tlingit woman working as a safety flagger for the widening project along The Road near Herbert River that fall approached me more than a year later with a story she needed to tell. Peacock and Myers, stopped at her checkpoint that September, had showed her the same cell phone images the Donnelley workers would see. She described the same odd, gleeful excitement that Bosarge noted, and felt a similar personal revulsion. Peacock went down the line of several waiting cars and showed the drivers, strangers all, the same photos.
Soon after Peacock’s departure from Juneau, Myers was talking up the Romeo killing to his bowling league crowd, just as Peacock, back East, launched his own tell-all campaign, the intensity of which seemed to grow as winter set in, the lake froze solid, and Juneau reacted to the black wolf’s absence. According to Lowman, “For months after the killing, Peacock bragged about the effects his and Myers’s actions had on the community. . . . Peacock would get online in the break room and invite others of us to come with him. . . . He would go on YouTube and also read the comments to the stories about Romeo in the Juneau Empire. . . . He would say, ‘Those morons! Ha! What idiots! I killed their beloved wolf! Ha!’ He would shout at the screen, saying, ‘You fucking idiots! Sobbing over your poor missing wolf!’ A lot of us at the plant were disgusted by his behavior, and after a while it got pretty strange, to see him gloat over this.” In a conversation with me two years later, Lowman reflected, “What amazed me was how stupid he was to give us all the details. That really surprised me. . . . If he hadn’t talked, he’d have gotten away with it. He really thought he was superior to the rest of us.”
Peacock apparently took particular delight in a January 22, 2010, Juneau Empire article titled “Where Art Thou, Romeo?” Nancy Meyerhoffer (with less than perfect spelling and so forth) relates Peacock’s words as she heard them: “Yeh I know wherefor is your Romeo, he is gonna be in my living room, why don’t ya tell Juliett to put her head on my lap and tell me all about it.” And around that time, I received an online order for my collection of Southeast Alaska essays, The Glacier Wolf, which featured Romeo’s silhouetted, howling image on the cover, as well as several short pieces describing the wolf’s life among us. A request for a special inscription accompanied the order: “Wherefore art thou, Romeo?” The commonly misinterpreted phrase (rather than where, it actually means why are you called Romeo) stuck in memory, as did the unusual name, Peacock. At the time, the name meant nothing to me, and of course I didn’t know of his plan to accent his trophy display with my book, to prove both the wolf’s fame and his own sadistic cleverness. All that would snap into focus soon enough.
Though in retrospect, the chattering of Myers and Peacock seems voluminous, most of it was disconnected, confined to limited circles, and far beneath the radar of enforcement agencies, state or federal. The myriad but scattered dots between Romeo and his killers would depend on the unflagging persistence of Harry Robinson, backed up by Michael Lowman, whose own dedication to solving a wildlife crime thousands of miles away, affecting people and a single wild animal he’d never seen, stands as a singular act of altruism—and not without personal risk, either. In February of 2010, Lowman and Peacock traded words as they worked in the Donnelley plant: “Peacock mentioned a $1,500 reward being offered for information leading to the identification of Romeo’s killers. I jokingly told him that ‘for enough money, I would turn you in myself.’” Peacock looked me dead serious in the eye, and said, ‘If you did, I would shoot you!’” Unfazed by the threat, Lowman recorded Peacock’s words and added them to a growing, damning pile.
Through the winter of 2009–2010, Harry Robinson persevered. Matching up information he received from Lowman with research into public records and Alaska and federal statutes, he compiled a veritable grocery list of violations Myers and Peacock might be charged with, complete with names, dates, and other specifics. These extended far beyond Romeo, as far back as 2006 when Peacock killed a rare, blue-gray phase black bear known as a glacier bear. He bragged back East he had killed “Juneau’s spirit bear,” a title he apparently invented to augment his personal legend. The rug of the two-year-old juvenile (the size a buddy of mine used to call a suitcase bear, because if it had a handle on its back, you could pick it up and walk away with it) was so small that some Donnelley workers snickered. Other potential violations included illegal killing of that larger black bear in
2009, illegally mailing a handgun across state lines, making numerous false statements, multiple counts of possessing and transporting illegally taken game, Peacock’s hunting and fishing without a license in some years, and several more.
With the input of local attorneys and Romeo watchers Joel Bennett and Jan Van Dort, Harry opted to present his findings to federal rather than state authorities. The potential charges at that level were far greater—notably, violation of the Lacey Act, which targets transport of illegally gotten animal parts across state lines. Special Agent Sam Friburg of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was impressed by the thoroughness of Harry’s documentation. He’d been handed far more than the usual citizen’s tip; the pile of evidence amounted to a blow-by-blow journal of activity for two serial poachers. And, thanks to Michael Lowman’s continuing reportage redirected through Harry, there were details of Peacock’s upcoming return to Alaska in the spring of 2010, and so the opportunity to catch Peacock and Myers, red to the elbows.
When Peacock arrived as scheduled in early May, he lacked any clue that he and Myers were being tailed. In fact, they were the focus of a cooperative investigation by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Alaska State Wildlife Troopers. (Such joint investigations are common in Alaska, whenever jurisdictions overlap.) Federal agents Friburg and Chris Hansen staked out a baiting station (an area where food is left to attract bears, with a blind or tree stand nearby) that Myers had established Out The Road, weeks before Peacock’s arrival. The idea, of course, was to set up Peacock for another easy kill or two. As a guy who poked at the regulations, Myers surely knew that bait stations weren’t permitted in the Juneau area, but he and Peacock stoked it with stale bread and burnt honey all the same. Friburg and Hansen watched and videotaped the poachers at the site and, late on the evening of May 14, heard a single gunshot. They recorded Myers and Peacock on video carrying and loading yet another suitcase bear into the back of Myers’s rig—a scrawny, dog-sized two-year-old, perhaps even a yearling. Peacock was set to leave on May 23 with one more conquest recorded on his cell phone camera. He had no idea that his aura of invincibility was about to implode.
