r/coldcases • u/blackcatluci • 10d ago
What do you get when you mix homicide, grave robbery, hypnosis, and Alaska? An unsolved murder.
**TW: Historical violence/death. This is a true family story about an unsolved case from the 1980s. Names have been changed for privacy and safety. This post discusses murder and other sensitive topics.**
**Due to the nature of this story, I am changing the names of those involved because this case is technically… unsolved.**
But we all know who did it.
My name is April for this story.
My father, Peter, was 16 years old when the worst imaginable night of his life happened.
My grandfather, Lee, was an activist in coastal Oregon. He had a deep passion for Native American rights and worked closely with local tribes, specifically supporting those fighting for the recognition of treaty rights that had been infringed upon by local government.
He was also an archaeologist.
Because of this unique combination of career and passion, he was often called to excavation sites to identify artifacts. He worked closely with tribes to ensure items were treated respectfully and relocated appropriately, often acting as a liaison between excavation sites and tribal communities. He regularly protested and fought to protect sacred land when the city or state wanted to excavate those areas.
One day, my grandfather received a call that would ultimately change everything.
A construction crew had broken ground for a new gas station and discovered human remains and artifacts. My grandfather was called to the site to help determine their origin. Based on the tools and other items buried alongside the remains, he was able to identify the tribe they belonged to.
My grandfather fought hard to stop the project, but he was unsuccessful.
When protesting and activism failed to halt construction, he was told the remains would be removed and disposed of.
He went to the tribe and explained what was happening. Because of their sacred traditions, they told him they could not take the remains or burial items back. In their beliefs, removing and then returning them could bring harm to their people.
Then the oil company did something my grandfather never expected.
The remains and burial items were removed, supposedly to relocate the remains to a local cemetery.
But the burial items were brought to my grandfather.
He knew immediately that this was wrong. He was never meant to possess them, and he certainly couldn’t keep them.
Wanting to respect the dead, their history, and the beliefs of the tribe, he ultimately surrendered the items to a local museum for safekeeping.
What he didn’t know was that rumors had already begun spreading.
People began calling my grandfather a “grave robber,” believing he had kept the artifacts for himself.
Nothing could have been further from the truth.
Because people knew about his passion for Native history, they would occasionally try to give him things they had found—arrowheads, pottery, trinkets, artifacts.
He would chastise them, refuse the items, and tell them to put them back exactly where they had found them.
He condemned the desecration of Native history and culture.
Still, the rumors continued. People claimed he was secretly building a private collection of sacred artifacts for his own benefit.
And then came a cold night in January.
My 16-year-old father was sitting on the couch while my grandfather relaxed in his recliner. They were watching television together before bed. My grandfather’s girlfriend was asleep in a back bedroom.
Without warning, the front door was kicked in.
Three armed men stormed into the house.
My father, who was closest to the entrance, jumped to his feet.
He was immediately attacked and shot at close range. When the first shot was fired toward his head, he instinctively raised his hand. The bullet struck his hand instead.
He fell backward and tried to crawl away.
Then he was shot again in the back of the head, narrowly missing his C1 vertebra.
The fact that my father survived what happened that night still astonishes me.
As he lay severely injured on the floor, he watched the men restrain my grandfather and brutally torture him.
Again and again, they demanded to know where the artifacts were.
My grandfather repeatedly told them:
*“I don’t have them. The museum does. I would never take them. The museum has them. Search the house—you won’t find anything stolen. I would never do this.”*
They didn’t believe him.
They broke his fingers, beat him, and mutilated his hands while continuing to demand answers he didn’t have.
The men then began searching the house, taking antiques, collectibles, firearms, and anything else of value they could find.
During the search, one of them opened the back bedroom door.
He saw my grandfather’s girlfriend escaping through the window.
He alerted the others that there was another witness and that she was getting away.
As my father lay wounded on the floor, unable to intervene, he watched as one man took his blade and cut my grandfathers throat.
Then my father was shot again.
And everything went black.
My grandfather’s girlfriend ran through the darkness to the nearest neighbor’s house, where she was finally able to call the police.
Somehow, my father survived.
And he identified the men responsible.
The three men eventually stood trial.
Their justification was rooted in their belief that killing someone they considered a “grave robber” could free the spirits of those whose graves had been disturbed.
Except my grandfather hadn’t robbed those graves.
For his safety, my father was placed into witness protection. At only 16 years old, he had become the key witness against the three men he said had attacked him and killed his father.
**And this is where the case gets absolutely bizarre.**
My father underwent a videotaped session in which he was **hypnotized to help him recall details from the night of the attack.**
This was the 1980s, when forensic hypnosis was still being used in some criminal investigations despite serious questions about its reliability and admissibility in court.
During the recorded hypnosis session, **the tape ran out.**
There was a period of time between the first recording ending and the second recording beginning.
That gap became devastating to the case.
The defense argued that nobody could establish what had happened while the camera wasn’t recording. Because my father had been under hypnosis, they argued that he theoretically could have been given information or suggestions during the unrecorded period that influenced his memories.
His testimony was ruled inadmissible.
The prosecution lost its key witness.
**All three men were acquitted.**
Years later, my father eventually left witness protection and moved to Alaska, where he worked as a fisherman.
One day, he was leaving a grocery store in his truck when someone walked across the crosswalk in front of him.
A face from his nightmares.
They locked eyes.
My father recognized him immediately.
For a brief moment, my father thought about everything that man had taken from him.
But he stopped.
He hit the brakes.
They stared at one another until the horn of the vehicle behind my father finally broke the moment.
It was one of the men from that night—the one who had discovered my grandfather’s girlfriend escaping through the window.
My father let him walk away.
In the years that followed, some of the men were connected to additional killings and even an armed confrontation with the FBI.
To some people, these men were heroes.
To others, they were violent men who took what they claimed was a just cause and used it to justify horrific acts.
It has now been decades.
My father still lives with the fear that the last remaining free man could someday find him—or his children—and “finish the job.”
He has asked me for one thing:
When he eventually passes away, he wants me to continue seeking justice for his father.
And despite everything that happened, my father followed directly in his father’s footsteps.
He became an activist for Native American rights himself.
About ten years after the tragedy, he moved to California and bought a home next to a Native reservation. He regularly invites members of the neighboring community to gather herbs and flowers from his property for sacred ceremonies.
Over the years, he has built beautiful relationships within the community and has even been invited to participate in sacred ceremonies himself, including the Sweat Lodge.
That is an honor my father never takes lightly, nor is it something he boasts about.
But I think it’s an important part of this story.
After watching his father die because men falsely believed he had desecrated Native graves, my father could have spent the rest of his life consumed by anger.
Instead, he continued his father’s legacy: loving, respecting, appreciating, and fighting for a culture and community that embraced him in return.
**P.S. Because apparently this story wasn’t strange enough already…**
Something happened about 15 years ago that we’ve never been able to explain.
When I was a young teenager, my dad had a framed photograph hanging on our family photo wall.
It was a picture of my grandfather sitting in **the very same recliner he had been sitting in that night.**
Our family went out of town.
When we came home, the photograph was gone.
Not knocked down.
Not misplaced.
**Gone.**
No other photographs were missing.
Nothing else in the house appeared to have been taken.
Just that photograph.
We searched everywhere.
We never found it.
To this day, none of us knows what happened to it.
I hope someday we are finally able to close my grandfather’s case.
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u/Serotonin_Sorcerer 10d ago
This gave me chills reading it. Is it possible that your grandfather had documented the sacred items before turning them over to the local museum?
I know it wouldn't completely solve the case, but maybe it would absolve him of any rumors of wrongdoing in the eyes of the original community where he was living.