The Woman Who Married a Bear

by John Straley

  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 b
e 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.”

  The autopsy report, stapled to the police report, indicated that the corpse had been a pregnant female Caucasian.

  There was also a police summary indicating that the police had talked to De De’s boyfriend (in his wife’s presence), and he had reported that on the evening of her death, De De had been extremely upset, had been drinking, and had gone out to meet someone else. He didn’t know whom and apparently he didn’t care.

  In a letter to the Alaska death investigators, the Bellingham Police Department reported that, as a result of their investigation, they had concluded that De De Robbins had committed suicide. The findings were based not only on the diary and the police reports, but on statements from her college classmates, all saying she was “despondent during the last few days of her life,” and from her boyfriend, Rudolfo Anastanso, a Filipino floor-covering contractor, who was in the process of separation from his wife at the time of De De’s death.

  With the death of the only independent witness (and maybe because of a little fear of the official heat created by the Robbins death investigation), the defense attorney folded. On July 7, he pleaded Hawkes guilty but mentally ill to the murder two count and to the offense of tampering with evidence.

  But there was one last surprise. The D.A. produced several doctors who had examined Hawkes. They testified that while Hawkes “had suffered periodic psychotic episodes, he was not currently legally insane. The best therapy for him would be to serve whatever sentence seemed appropriate not in the Alaska mental-health system but in the correctional system.” Hawkes was crazy, but not crazy enough.

  Sy Brown had been taken by surprise by the state’s assertion that Hawkes was sane. I read through a flurry of official memos from him to the Department of Law.

  One from Brown read, “If this guy is so sane, how about a third-party work release into your custody?”

  The response: “He’s not crazy and you know it. He’s just your basic murderer. We might consider a twenty-four-hour release to you. It’s going to be a long winter for the bears.”

  There were others complaining about the ethics of surprise tactics and about the propriety of handshake agreements when dealing with the “protection of the citizens of the state.”

  The memos never changed a thing. Hawkes went down hard. On October 15, 1982, he was sentenced to forty years for murder two and five years for tampering with evidence. His case wasn’t appealed on the Miranda issue.

  Hawkes is presently being held at Lemon Creek jail until he can be shipped to Leavenworth where he will serve no less than three-fourths of his original sentence: thirty years of Salisbury steak and instant mashed potatoes, weight lifting, skull picks made from toothbrushes, and listening to the voices scream inside his head.

  THREE

  IT WAS FIVE o’clock, pitch dark and raining outside. I stood and looked out the window to the channel. There was a little wooden troller at the fuel dock and a skiff was running toward the fish plant dock. Through the dock lights I could see the driver of the skiff was wearing bulky yellow rain gear and had a tarp across his lap. The lights of the Pioneer Home reflected in the water of his wake.

  After I was fired from the Public Defender Agency in Juneau I was out of commission for a while and then came to Sitka. It seemed foolish to the people in Juneau, some of whom I had grown up with. They said I could never run a business in Sitka. It’s only about seventy miles by air from Juneau but to Juneauites Sitka is almost the Third World. For all of its historic charm and Tlingit/Russian heritage, it’s a hick town. “Come on,” they said, “mysterious blondes never go to Sitka when they want to hire a detective to find the rare coin stolen from their father’s mansion.” It’s true. But still, I seem to get enough of the work that keeps me busy. Rape, assault, an occasional murder, always for the defense, and an occasional personal injury civil suit. I don’t do divorces or insurance work unless I’m completely broke, which is about four times a year. I don’t do all that much of my work in Sitka but travel out of town. Because of my reputation, I can’t charge what most of the ex-cop-type investigators get, so I get work from skinflints from all over the state who don’t care as much about reputation as they do about billings. I’m not too disappointed that I don’t do much work in Sitka because I’m not liked all that well around here as it is, without having every sex offender who surfaces in my new hometown as a client.

  Having a lot of enemies has few advantages, but one of them is being able to trust the couple of friends that you have. My friends have to suffer some public humiliation just by being associated with me, and that gives us a certain esprit de corps not enjoyed by people with more morally comfortable lives. We judge each other by what we don’t have as a consequence of being together, what we’ve given up. It was pointed out—rather dramatically—by the woman who used to love me that this was a bonding based on emotional and spiritual poverty. She laid these insights on me about six months ago as she was leaving. She said she wanted more than ego, irony, and alcohol. I agreed, but I couldn’t imagine what was left—other than silliness, and maybe despair. She walked out the door. I waited ten minutes and then went to the bar.

  The bar was where I was headed now. My eyes were tired. I had read enough and needed to hear a good story about Louis Victor’s murder. The particular bar that I was walking to was the Beinecke Rare Book Library of gossip. The walls are lined with photographs of fishing boats, and the ceiling is studded with dollar bills tacked to the chipped acoustical tiles. If I was lucky, and if today was like any other of the three hundred and sixty-four, I would find the master of the Julie M, in his booth by the package-goods store. His name is William; he’s my friend, and also the curator of the gossip collection.

  As I walked in, he was talking with a young woman fisherman. William has long gray sideburn whiskers that he ties under his chin. He was wearing an insulated canvas work suit. She wore a thermal underwear shirt, black jeans, rubber boots, and a purple beret. She was drunkenly describing a mule ride in the jungles of Costa Rica. She reeled back in the booth and fixed her eyes on the tropical distance, describing the slap in the face of a palm frond. William smiled into his plum brandy and pushed the frond from his face with his forearms. I held up two fingers to the barmaid and made a circular gesture in the direction of William’s booth. The barmaid nodded, and I went over to sit down.

  “Cecil Younger, the subarctic gumshoe, have you ever considered opening a fishing lodge in Costa Rica?”

  “Can’t say as I have, William. Mind if I sit down?”

  The woman with the beret looked up in surprise at finding me so suddenly in the jungle and said, “Well, if you don’t want to open a fishing lodge then just fuck off, both of you.” She stood up and began a port tack to the other end of the bar.

  “An excitable child,” William said. “But she knows Costa Rica. Business or pleasure, Cecil? If you’re here to ask
me what I know about the shoplifting, I’m a dead end for you.”

  “Shoplifting?”

  “Today at the gun shop. Someone ran out of the store with a hunting rifle. The police have been tearing up the waterfront.”

  “No, I don’t know anything about that. I’m here to buy you a drink and see if you know any good stories.”

  “Plentee stories, the finest kine!” William said in mock Hawaiian pidgin.

  “What do you know about Louis Victor and Walt Robbins?”

  William smiled up at me and twisted the braid that was tied under his chin while he acknowledged the drinks the barmaid brought to the table.

  “A murder, is it? Well, you know the basics, I take it.” He didn’t wait for me to answer.

  “Louis and Walt grew up in Juneau together. They stuck out; Walt took a lot of teasing for being friends with this Indian kid. Walt was a year or two younger, I think. Louis was a better hunter, or at least he brought more and bigger game in. Louis was better with the women and always seemed to have more money. I always kind of suspected that it was humiliating for Walt to work for Louis all those years. Louis made his money on the North Slope, enough to buy his guide business.

  “I’ve heard rumors that Walt was sleeping with Emma, Louis’s wife. I don’t buy that. Emma’s a knotty piece of wet rope. I don’t think she could loosen up even if she wanted to.”

  “Did Robbins want in on the hunting territory?”

  “Yeah, I guess Walt wanted that territory. It was great bear hunting, it had a fair anchorage.”