ALASKA
The Shrouded Secret
What was hiding beneath the tarp in the backyard of an Alaska home?
Buried secrets rarely decompose as we hope. Instead, they sprout like seeds.
On June 4, 1991, a friend came to stay at the house Dana Hilbish shared with Charles Dalby. Though unmarried, Dana, 31, and Charles, 44, had lived together for a decade and had four daughters. The couple’s modest hillside cottage in Ketchikan, Alaska, was walking distance from town, which was helpful. Having no car, Dana depended on friends when she needed rides.
Like most people in town, the couple scraped by. Ketchikan — and Alaska more generally — wasn’t a destination for people trying to get rich; it was a place for people who wanted to be left alone. Charles was good with engines and worked as a diesel mechanic at a forestry facility on a nearby island reachable only by boat or plane. Charles wasn’t home when the friend, Benita See, arrived. Dana said he’d left for his logging camp job the previous day.
Dana cautioned Benita to be careful on the carpet; it had just been cleaned. Benita sat on the covered porch, which contained some chairs and a few flower pots. She noticed a lot of flies. That was weird; the coastal areas of Alaska tended not to have many flies. There was an odd smell, too. When Benita mentioned it, Dana said she didn’t know where the odor was coming from; perhaps it was a dead cat. Benita didn’t want to make trouble. Part of the Alaska ethos is minding your own business.
Later that week, Adrian Powers stopped by the house. He was married to Charles’s daughter from a previous relationship. He and Sonja lived with their children on another island in the archipelago along the Alaska Panhandle. Dana told him that Charles had moved to the YMCA or maybe he was out fishing in the Bering Sea. She wasn’t sure. Adrian noticed that a .22-caliber handgun was missing from its usual spot on the wall in Dana and Charles’ bedroom.
A week later, Sonja stayed at the house for one night. Dana again said Charles was away fishing, either in Hawaii or in the Bering Sea. Sonja observed that a large hanging blanket blocked the far end of the porch. She couldn’t help but notice the stench and the plethora of flies. Dana told her that a cat or a dog had crawled under the porch and died.
Benita was still at the house, and on her birthday in mid-June, some friends stopped by to celebrate with her. They, too, commented on the rotting smell. Dana said it was dead fish. The two men offered to clean up the mess, but Dana said they shouldn’t, it wasn’t necessary.
By the Fourth of July, Charles’s friends began to wonder where he was. Charles had promised to work on a friend’s truck that weekend and never showed up. When the friend stopped by the house, Dana told him Charles had been fired from his job. She didn’t know where he was. While the friend was there, one of Dana and Charles’ children asked, “Is Daddy coming home?” The man heard Dana respond, “No, he’s gone for good.”
Ketchikan was once a gateway to the Yukon Gold Rush. Afterward, the town became the salmon fishing capital of the world. As the catch declined, the timber and pulp industry took over. Then the federal government protected wilderness areas and reduced logging. Forestry, too, receded. Today, tourism from Alaska cruises is Ketchikan’s main economic engine. One of those ships brought me there. I’d been to 49 of the 50 states, and this summer, Wayne and I took an Alaska cruise so that I could explore the remaining state.
The ports that Alaska cruises visit are funny places. The parts of town closest to the docks are filled with shops selling silver jewelry, souvenir clothing, and native folk art. I felt claustrophobic on the ship and walked as much as possible on port days. Beyond the tourist zones, I got a sense of each town. A mile from the port, in the neighborhood where Dana and Charles lived, were the cell phone dealers, hardware stores, hair salons, and liquor stores that keep a town going. All the port cities had at least one Filipino restaurant, usually far from the dock, where the ships’ crew ventured for a taste of home.
I found Charles and Dana’s hillside cottage easily. Like others around it, the yard was filled with plants and weeds enjoying summertime growth spurts. Small wooden decks provided a path from the house to the paved street. Lawns get awful muddy here, where 140 inches of precipitation fall yearly. Almost all of that is rain, not snow.
On July 17, after one of Charles’s friends contacted the police, Officer Andrea Jacobson visited his home. Dana told her that Charles was “probably in Hawaii.” Officer Jacobson stopped by again on July 29. Charles still wasn’t back.
Late one night, a neighbor across the street, curious about the odor that wouldn’t go away, noticed Dana in her yard beside a tarp. This far north, even at 10:30 p.m., some daylight remained. Dana realized she was being watched and looked up. She began picking up sticks from the ground as if cleaning the yard.
At the end of July, the paymaster at Charles’s lumber mill was surprised when Dana appeared. She asked for Charles’s last paycheck. He told her he couldn’t release it without a signed authorization. She returned on August 2, again transported there by neighbors. When they’d asked during the ride over where Charles was, Dana said the two had fought. He’d suspected she was having an affair and had gotten angry. Then he left for Hawaii.
Dana presented the paymaster with a signed note from Charles authorizing her to collect his paycheck. The paymaster was suspicious and brought the paper to the personnel office. The signature didn’t match the way Charles had signed other forms. The company told Dana it wouldn’t hand over the check without a notarized signature from Charles. She never returned.
Life would be too overwhelming if we considered all possibilities at all times. So our brains discount interpretations that seem outlandish. And evolution has wired us with disgust to prevent exposure to pathogens.
On August 12, Sonja, Adrian, and their kids stopped by the Ketchikan house as they began a vacation. They asked Dana if they could camp in the front yard. As they erected their tents, Sonja noticed a green tarp she’d previously left at the house. It was now on the ground in the backyard, covering something large that was emitting a strong, foul odor. That evening, her kids played in the grass and ran up and down the tarp-covered mound. She told them to stay off of it. When Sonja asked Dana what was underneath, she said she didn’t want to talk about it.
The next day was particularly hot, and the bad smell intensified. Her kids whispered to each other that the tarp covered something dead. Sonja decided to call the police but identified herself to the dispatcher as a concerned neighbor. “There’s something in 142 Austin’s lower yard,” she reported, “it might be deer or fish or something, but it’s big.”
Officer Jacobson returned to the home and walked with Dana toward the tarp. Dana said the mound was a load of fish her landlord had retrieved from a basement freezer and forgotten about.
Jacobson peered under the tarp and saw “a white goo, sort of jelly-like, and with maggots and worms and things crawling all through it.” When Jacobson asked how she could contact the landlord, Dana said he was out of town and couldn’t be reached. The officer told Dana she could not leave the mess as it was, and Dana promised to bury it that night once it got cooler.
Sonja and Adrian spent that day in town. Driving back to the cottage that night, Sonja revealed to her husband the horrifying thought bouncing around in her head. The tarp, she said, might be covering the body of her missing father. Adrian said she was crazy. They argued vigorously as they parked in front of the house. A neighbor, worrying that an assault was occurring, called the police.
As she and Adrian entered the cottage, Sonja asked Dana again what was under the tarp. “It’s nothing,” Dana said. “None of your business.” The couple went out to the yard, and Sonja tried to get her husband to lift the tarp. He refused, and the argument resumed. A police sergeant, Charles Mallott, arrived to check on the reported assault. Sonja said they’d just had an argument, there’d been no assault. The sergeant left.
Afterward, Sonja complained that no one was taking her seriously and looked under the tarp herself. She saw a “bunch of white slime stuff.” Trembling, she walked to a nearby bar for a tequila. Returning home later, fortified by the alcohol, she lifted the tarp again. This time, she saw denim. It looked like Levi’s, which is what her father always wore.
Sonja went inside and confronted Dana, asking again what was beneath the tarp.
“It’s none of your fucking business,” Dana replied. Sonja threatened to call the police, and the tension became physical. Dana bit Sonja’s finger; Sonja bit Dana’s cheek. Adrian stepped in to stop the melee.
Responding to an anonymous 911 call, police officer Jerry Seufert appeared at the home about 8:00 p.m. Sonja seemed intoxicated and was muttering about a tarp in the yard. She said her father had been missing for some time and she feared his body was beneath the tarp. She walked Seufert outside and lifted a corner. Now, seeing more of the remains, she exclaimed, “Oh my god, it’s my daddy.”
Seufert saw some kind of cloth, but he wasn’t sure what it was. But whatever it was, it sure smelled awful, and he went back inside with Sonja to escape the odor. About that time, Sergeant Mallott returned. As Seufert talked to Dana and Sonja, Mallott activated a tape recorder.
Dana accused Sonja of “trying to trash my house again.” She said the fight between the two wasn’t the real issue. What prompted the 911 call was the fight between Sonja and her husband. “This is not between me and her; this is between the two of them. As far as I’m concerned, she didn’t lay a hand on me, okay?”
Then Sonja, redirecting the officers’ attention, said, “We’re going to look in the tarp now, Dana.”
Dana replied, “Go ahead, why don’t we.”
When Mallott lifted the tarp’s edge, he immediately recognized human remains. He instructed Seufert to secure the area. Inside the house, he arrested Sonja for her violence. Later that night, Mallott returned to the property with a search warrant, and a crew recovered the body.
The next day, Mallott interviewed Dana. She said she’d last seen Charles around the first of June. She’d asked him to get out of the house, and he’d done so. She claimed there had never been any firearms in the home.
A medical examiner determined that the human remains belonged to Charles Dalby. He found two .22-caliber bullets in the skull and another in the torso. Forensic entomologists counted the generations of living and dead insects on the body. They calculated that the remains had been under the tarp for ten weeks, which placed the murder in early June.
Detectives found indications of blood spatter consistent with gunshot wounds in several locations in the living room. On the wall above the couch, it appeared that someone had tried to clean a bloodstain that dripped down the wall. Dana claimed she wiped the area with a spray cleaner after one of her daughters cut her finger. Luminal testing also showed blood residue on the carpet and sofa. One foam cushion was found to be blood-soaked. The blood’s DNA matched to Charles.
A month after the discovery of the body, a carpenter working in the home’s bathroom discovered a box of .22-caliber bullets hidden under the tub. One of the couple’s daughters confirmed she’d seen that box of ammunition and a gun above her parents’ bed. Dana’s fingerprints were on the inside of the box. Testing by the FBI revealed that the bullets in Charles’s body came from that box or another manufactured the same day.
The police conducted a slow and deliberate investigation over seven months. During that period, Dana married a man I’ll call Joe. Tracking the life histories of individuals in Alaska is quite tricky. Many people changed their names when they left the Lower 48, and others operated under multiple names. I feel confident I have identified the right person, but he has somewhat common first and last names. If he’s the person I think he is, Joe was later imprisoned for sexually abusing young girls. Dana’s daughters would have made her an attractive target.
As detectives pieced together the events preceding the murder, they learned that Dana had become involved with Joe in the spring of 1991 while Charles was away at the logging camp. Word gets around, and Charles heard about the affair. Angered and upset, he flew home on May 30 to address the situation.
Charles didn’t have enough money to pay for his float plane flight home. He promised the agent at Ketchikan that he’d return with a check later in the day. When he failed to do so, the agent called his home. Dana told her, “The son of a bitch is not here,” and hung up.
Charles approached his pastor and explained that Dana was having an affair. He asked for help keeping his family together. The pastor said marriage would provide a stronger foundation for the relationship. Charles thought that made sense. He called his mother and asked for her support in convincing Dana. Dana told his mother she loved someone else, not Charles. She “hated him so much she didn’t care what happened to him.”
On June 2, Charles walked into the Derby Room, a scraggly tavern a block from the house. He was looking for Joe. Charles was visibly angry and disruptive, and the bartender asked him to leave. A half-hour later, Charles returned and calmly apologized. When Benita See called Dana that day to arrange her stay at the house, Dana told her she was seeing another man and had asked Charles to move out.
The following day, Charles went back to the Derby Room. He apologized again and ordered a soft drink. No one saw him alive after that. A neighbor later heard a loud argument between two men in Dana and Charles’s yard. He recalled hearing something like, “Stay away from my daughter or my wife,” and “You don’t know me. I’ll kill you.” Fifteen or twenty minutes later, the neighbor heard a gunshot.
In March 1992, police arrested Dana and charged her with first-degree murder, along with evidence tampering. In a jury trial the following year, she was convicted of all charges and sentenced to 37 years.
It is unclear why the man I’ve called Joe wasn’t implicated. It seems likely he was present during the murder. However, nothing in the news coverage or detailed appellate court decision indicates that Joe was a suspect. Perhaps he had a strong alibi.
A 2014 blog post recounted the murder and ascribed Dana’s motivation to her affair with Joe. According to the blog, Dana’s defense lawyer did try to blame the murder on Joe, who the writer said was left unnamed during the trial. I found his name in a news article.
An anonymous comment left on that blog post in 2022 said, “Where did you get the information on why she killed him? I was told my whole life my dad beat my mom and that drugs and alcohol were involved and that is why she killed him.” Assuming the comment was written by one of Dana and Charles’s daughters, it’s entirely possible that physical abuse, drugs, and alcohol were also part of the story. Though not raised by the defense during the trial, that explanation was used during Dana’s sentencing hearing. However, the judge concluded, “The degree of oppression, the degree of emotional abuse is certainly not enough to justify in any way or to mitigate the charge of first-degree murder.”
In prison, Dana joined a newly formed inmate orchestra and learned to play the cello. She also ran the prison’s gardening venture, which raised flowering plants in greenhouses and sold them to the general public, and participated in a program that trained service dogs. She was paroled in 2013.
A few months after Dana was arrested, a Ketchikan man named Ronald Wyatt chatted about her case with a coworker. He said that if he were trying to kill his wife, he’d wrap the body in a tarp, weight it down, and drop it in the water.
Later that year, the body of Wyatt’s wife was found shoreside bundled in a tarp and weighted with anchors. An office worker for Alaska Airlines, she’d told Ronald she wanted to escape their troubled marriage and his intimidating behavior. She demanded a divorce. Then she’d gone missing. Her body was found a week later in shallow water near a sawmill outside Ketchikan. Ronald was convicted of her murder and sentenced to 104 years. Note to future murderers: weighting a body and submerging it in water rarely works. Gases inside the body expand during decomposition and raise the corpse to the surface.
And that is the moral of both stories. The truth will out. But denial and obstinacy lead us to wrap shameful secrets in tight tarps and allow our brains to believe they will stay hidden, despite their foul odors and ballooning gases.
Alaskans have a dry sense of humor. After the second murder, people around Ketchikan began joking that tarp purchases ought to require a mandatory waiting period. Even today, buying a tarp in Ketchikan generates raised eyebrows and quizzical smiles.
Copyright © 2024 Lou Schachter • All rights reserved
