Police Suspect Everyone In Town In Mystery Of Postmistress' Slaying

RUBY, Alaska - The mosquitoes swarmed so thick out of the Yukon River that you had to pick them out of your ears. Worse than that, somebody shot a bear out near the airstrip, and the wounded predator was pacing the outskirts of the village. But that's not why Ruby, this squat cluster of houses on the banks of the dreamy Yukon, was keeping its children inside.

It's because Agnes Wright, Ruby's popular postmistress, was beaten behind her mail counter in June and then shot in the head. The Athabaskan elders said the dead never go alone, that Wright's spirit could be scouting for company.

But the parents knew better. They kept the children in because Ruby is only a mile long by a quarter of a mile wide, and somewhere in that postage-stamp space, they believed, was the killer.

This is a story of murder finding its way into the Alaskan bush, a place so remote that you take a small plane at Fairbanks and point it toward nowhere and fly 1 1/2 hours just to get there.

It is about what happens when a whole town climbs up the bluff to bury the postmistress, and everyone standing around the grave is under suspicion; about how police, faced with one of the most perplexing investigations ever to confront them in the Alaskan wilderness, finally cracked the case of one of the few U.S. postmasters ever to die in the line of duty.

"Very seldom is there a whodunit in a bush village," said Sgt. Jim McCann, a seasoned homicide investigator who headed up the inquiry for the Alaska state troopers. "Typically in a bush village, everybody knows exactly who killed who. Usually booze is involved, we go out and put it together as quickly as we can, and in a day or two, we're outta there.

"This one's a little bit different," he said. "This one's a lot different."

In the days and weeks that followed her death, almost no one could figure out who could have killed one of Ruby's most beloved personalities - and in a fashion that demonstrated such rage.

Equally perplexing, how could any murder happen in a village of 200 people, separated by hundreds of miles of squat hills and thick woodlands from anywhere else? After doing it, where would the killer go?

Wright's car was found at the airstrip, but no plane was known to have taken off. Police scoured the river for miles looking for a boat, but never found one. The wilderness outside Ruby is considered barely survivable.

Slowly, the villagers came to understand. Very likely, the killer hadn't left at all, the state troopers kept saying. Why would a stranger have beaten her so brutally before shooting her, breaking the fingers on her hand as she raised it to defend herself? And how would a stranger get out of Ruby? If Wright's killer hadn't left, they theorized, the killer must still be there.

People started keeping guns by their doors. They started whispering about drug trafficking, and how some of the village's most powerful families were profiting from it. Even if somebody knew something about what had happened to Wright, people said, how could they tell the police and not worry that the same thing wasn't going to happen to them?

Finally, after a week and a half of intense questioning, McCann and the team of U.S. postal inspectors assigned to the case left the village - to give everyone time to think, the investigator explained.

McCann said he remained convinced that the murderer was still somewhere in the village: perhaps a drug trafficker whom Wright had caught shipping merchandise into the post office.

Wright's estranged husband, Joe, was questioned. He had been seen arguing with Wright at the post office, and he was going to have to pay her a lot of child support once the divorce went through. But Joe Wright was dismissed after he produced an alibi and passed a polygraph test.

Dead men don't murder

People kept talking about Abram Walter, a backwoodsman, trapper, prospector and musician who lived with his parents and brothers at a remote cabin up on the Nowitna River, about 70 miles away near McGrath. Walter had been scheduled to appear in Bethel on a burglary-and-theft case. But his canoe had been found on June 5, overturned on the Nixon Fork in the Kuskokwim Mountain drainage, about two weeks before Wright's June 20 murder.

Walter could have walked through 70 miles of woods and hills, the villagers said. The fact that he was probably dead did not dissuade the village elders, who started talking again about spirits looking for company.

When Katie Kangas, a friend of Wright, proposed Walter as a suspect, the state trooper questioning her sighed. "Ma'am," he said, "first of all, dead people don't murder. And second of all, if somebody had just walked through miles of some of the meanest tundra you've ever seen, he's not gonna kill the first person he sees, is he?"

Robbery was dismissed as a motive. The safe was wide open, and everyone knew the post office never had much cash. The money order machine and several money orders were gone, but who would hold up a post office for traceable money orders? And why would you beat the postmistress before shooting her?

People remember Wright, who was 32 when she died, as a playful person. Before she and Joe were married, when she was a single mother raising daughter Jenasey, now 15, she'd go out with her girlfriends every once in a while, tip back a few beers, laugh. The song "Wooly Bully" would play, the song everyone around here calls "The Battle Hymn of the Yukon," and Wright would get up and just whoop.

"She was just outgoing," said her father, Harold Esmailka, who owns a local flying service. "She'd burst through the door and say, `Good morning, Dad!' and it would light up your whole day."

"The thing that was important to Aggie was her own family. Her kids. Her mom and dad. That was the important thing. Aggie's dream was to get married and have more kids," recalled Deanna Captain, her best friend.

The case breaks

McCann was getting ready to head back to Ruby, go over the list of possible suspects again, question everyone about the events he'd already questioned them about.

But then something happened that nobody could have foreseen. On July 16, the post office at the village of Ester was held up by a man with a gun. The suspect demanded blank money order slips and then walked out the door.

A day later, police with scent dogs found a set of keys labeled "LeMans" near the post office. Sending out a radio alert, a stolen 1992 LeMans was tracked down and stopped. In the driver's seat was Abram Walter.

Walter confessed to killing Wright, authorities said.

"Based on our previous ongoing investigation out of Ruby (and) statements made by the defendant last night, including admissions, the defendant will be charged with murder as a result of the death of Ruby Postmaster Agnes Wright," state prosecutor Jeff O'Bryant said at Walter's arraignment July 17 in Fairbanks.

Walter's family had spent a year or so living in Ruby before moving out into the back country, residents recalled.

Joe Matty, who has traveled into the back country for years taking supplies to the Walter family in exchange for furs, said Walter could easily have walked through the woods from Ruby back to McGrath.

"It takes a good man about four or five days. It's up and down rolling, forested hills and meandering rivers and stuff all through it. Somebody from L.A. would probably die out there. But he could do it."

In any case, Ruby now has a big case of the I-told-you-sos when the state troopers come to town.

"This has been our thought all along, all along, and nobody would believe us," said Ginger De Lima, Wright's sister.

"It's over," said Hollie Koyukuk, an elementary school teacher in Ruby. "But will it ever really be over?"