Solved cold cases in Alaska
2 documented cases.
Sandra Perry
Sandra Perry, a mother of three from the Seattle area, was shot and killed by a 12-gauge shotgun at about 3 a.m. on July 21, 1996, in Room 10 of the Glacier Bear Lodge in Yakutat, Alaska, where she was on vacation with her boyfriend, Robert Kowalski. A guest in the next room told troopers he heard the couple arguing before the gunshot. Kowalski said he had grabbed the shotgun after they heard a bear outside, tripped and fell on her, and that it fired as he got up. Troopers treated the death as an accident, and prosecutors, who could not disprove his account, declined to charge him. In 1998 the case's evidence was discarded. In March 2008 Kowalski shot another girlfriend, Lorraine Kay Morin, in Montana, again calling it an accident; he was convicted there and sentenced to 40 years. The similarities led the Alaska State Troopers' cold case unit to reopen the Yakutat case, and in September 2011 a Juneau grand jury indicted him. At a four-week trial in 2014, jurors heard firearms and crime-scene experts and evidence of the Montana shooting. On April 11, 2014, they convicted him of second-degree murder and deadlocked on first-degree murder. He was sentenced to 50 years with 10 suspended, and the conviction was upheld on appeal in 2018.
Sophie Sergie
Sophie Sergie, a 20-year-old former University of Alaska Fairbanks student, was sexually assaulted and murdered in a women's bathroom in Bartlett Hall on the UAF campus in April 1993. The case went cold for roughly 25 years until investigative genetic genealogy traced crime-scene DNA to Steven Downs, a former dorm resident then living in Maine, who was convicted of murder and sexual assault in 2022.