The wilds of Alaska are a vast and untamed frontier. Alaska is absolutely breathtaking, but you have to have your guard up at all times. There’s a razor thin line between safety and peril.
In the rugged wilderness, a mountain man’s dark desires take root. He harbored horrible, vicious thoughts and sexual fantasies. And on one day, he was willing to carry those out, leaving Alaska state troopers scrambling to hunt down a survivalist before he strikes again.
Very important that we find him and find him fast.
In the shadow of Alaska’s majestic Mount McKinley lies the backwoods brush of Chitina. Chitina, Alaska is not actually a city or a village. It’s a railroad stop of a sort.
It’s a place with a name on a map. You’d think close to God’s country because you feel like you’re higher up in the sky than most any other place because the air is clear there. You don’t have industry or near the vehicles and it’s good clean air, good clean water.
So trying to describe it is very difficult until once you get up there, you know, it’s like trying to tell a blind man what the color blue is.
I think the few who call this untamed wilderness home rely on their own resources, carrying in supplies by four-wheeler or snow machine. The reason people pick these cabins is because you can’t get there any other way except by the railroad, by foot, or by an ATV, four-wheeler. It’s hard for people to imagine what life in rural Alaska, a place like Chitina, is like.
Imagine you have to get your own food, your own firewood, your own fuel for various machines, your generator. You have to prepare yourself for an extended period of time without contact with humanity.
The winters here are rugged, but the spring thaw exposes a picture perfect paradise. However, for Don Tidwell, the spring of 1997 was anything but perfect. Just after Memorial Day, he gets an alarming phone call.
His sister Debbie, who spent the long weekend at her cabin in Chitina, didn’t show up for work. That was unlike for her because she had a radio phone she could have called. This was like 9:00 in the morning.
So for her not to show up or call, you know, she didn’t start, I think, till 8:00. So something was wrong.
Don knew Debbie and her husband had planned a weekend getaway, and he couldn’t shake the thought that the remote wilderness may have proven too mighty a match, even for a Vietnam veteran like his brother-in-law. My main thought was they had a bad bear encounter. That was the only thing that I could think of.
Desperate for answers, Don contacts his brother-in-law, Rick’s boss, only to learn he too is absent from work that day. I just had this black cloud over me, this eerie feeling, you know, and I couldn’t explain it. I mean, it’s a feeling up your backbone that there’s no explanation for it.
I just was worried to death.
Rick Bering, a 48-year-old electrician, headed to the cabin on Thursday. His 40-year-old wife, Debbie, a customer service representative for a utility company, drove up from their home in Big Lake to meet him the following day. They lived there and loved there because it was a lifestyle where they wouldn’t be interrupted by a telephone, where there was no television, and they put all their stuff together and go out to Chitina on the weekend, and it just became a real part of their family culture.
That was going to be their retirement home. They planned to move there and live there for most of the year. They lived a lot of the frontier lifestyle, ate moose meat, salmon.
Debbie liked growing a nice garden and stuff.
In 1983, friends introduced Debbie to Rick. The lifelong bachelor fell hard for the red-haired beauty. Debbie was equally as smitten.
They had that kind of energy between the two of them a lot. You just can kind of feel it and it’s kind of palpable and touchable. You can almost pour it into a measuring glass and measure and look at it.
Wonderful to be around. You kind of wanted some of that.
Hours after learning his sister didn’t show up for work, Don Tidwell arrives at the cabin in Chitina and finds things seemingly out of sorts. Their cabin was just like somebody had walked out. There’s a beer on the table, cheese and crackers laid out like he had just walked out.
They were good housekeepers and stuff. He wouldn’t leave a beer on the table and cheese and crackers out and then just never come back. Don also notes that the couple’s two dogs appear agitated and uneasy.
They had been in the cabin so long that they had defecated on the floor. And these dogs were very well raised. There’s no way that they would have did this on the floor of the cabin unless they were trapped in there for hours on end.
Knowing it’s too soon to file a missing person’s report, Don searches for clues and waits anxiously. The following morning, there is still no word. I was at my wit’s end, you know, looking around and there’s just no explanation for why or where Rick and Deb is.
As dawn breaks, Don decides to conduct his own search. He scours the area around the cabin, but comes up empty. He then decides to look down by the creek where Rick and Debbie like to fish.
He’s startled by the sight of Rick’s four-wheeler in the water. I called the troopers. I said, “You know, I know that you’re supposed to wait 48 hours, but I believe something has happened longer than 48 hours because they’re four-wheelers in the creek.”
Alaska State Troopers immediately launch their own investigation, combing a two-mile radius around the couple’s cabin. Within hours, they make an unsettling find. The body of Rick Berry.
Troopers quickly surmised that Rick had met with something far more sinister than mother nature. When you look at the case facts as the troopers first found them, this man’s four-wheeler is in the water and a single gunshot wound to the head. Things indicative of murder.
It looks like Rick was shot at point blank range and never saw it coming.
Even more troubling, Debbie and her red four-wheeler are nowhere to be found. It appeared he’d been murdered and the wife was missing. Was she a victim or is this a lover’s spat?
Did she ππΎππ her husband and then flee and take off after that happened? Takes a different perspective, of course, at that time. Now we’re looking at the follow play aspect of it and where do we go from there?
The world is open to you at that point in time.
In the remote Alaskan wilderness some 200 miles from civilization, a chilling discovery leaves state troopers grasping for answers. The body of Rick Berry is found in a creek just two miles from his backwoods cabin. He has been shot execution style.
I just couldn’t believe that he could be dead. I was supposed to die before him. That wasn’t okay.
To make matters worse, there is no sign of Rick’s wife, Debbie, or her red four-wheeler. The odd scenario paints her as a likely suspect in the eyes of police. Had she and Rick had a lover’s spat?
Might she have left Chitina to cool off? Or was it something more sinister? Might Debbie have killed her husband in order to be with someone else?
We keep narrowing that focus down in terms of where that investigation would lead. We still have a missing person. No indication that there’s any problems between Rick and Deborah, but you don’t rule anything out at that point in time either.
But the couple’s family insists Debbie would have never caused her husband harm. I knew something had to happen to Deb. You know, Rick was Deb’s savior, and I knew somebody had to killed him, and I was sure that he was probably trying to protect Deb.
So, you know, I was worried to death about my sister. Police are met with as many questions as family members. Rick had been gunned down along the only path in and out of Chitina.
Might someone have stalked him? Had he been the only target? Or had Debbie met the same fate?
Desperate to find Debbie alive, police set up a dragnet and first question electrical workers who had been installing cable along the railroad tracks near the creek where Rick’s body was found. They tell troopers they noticed Rick’s four-wheeler in the creek on both Saturday and Sunday, but that it had been pulled out to dry land when they passed by again on Tuesday. The workers also say they heard gunshots being fired from a nearby campsite.
And they recall the encampment being marked by a disturbing makeshift flag. A pair of women’s underwear. Certainly somebody who’s in the area shooting off at 22 and hanging women’s underwear in the trees becomes somebody that you’re looking for when there’s a woman missing and you believe foul play.
For sure.
Days later, authorities get a lucky break when the mystery camper comes forward. 21-year-old Gavin Seaha tells police he became lost and was heading towards some smoke from a cabin when he got tired and pitched camp. He slept just yards from Rick’s corpse, but claims he never noticed the body.
His goal was not to camp there at that creek. His goal was a good fishing river some four or five more miles further down the tracks. But he gave up and stopped right there near that creek to pitch his little camp on a little spot of ground.
Unbeknownst to him that he’s camped right at a murder scene, this kid came along and camped right there and even put up a flag to let everybody know that he was there.
He tells police he found some of Rick’s belongings. He found the submerged four-wheeler belonging to Rick in the creek and went down and salvaged some soft drinks, I believe, and maybe something else out of the saddle bags that were on the four-wheeler. Seaha claims he helped himself to a soda and a piece of gum.
When pressed further, he’s embarrassed to admit he hung a pair of his girlfriend’s panties at the campsite. He was somewhat ashamed, but he did acknowledge that it was him that did it as a practical joke. Now, he presented a number of interesting circumstances.
Certainly, he picked the wrong place to pitch his camp at the wrong time. But troopers find no evidence to suggest Seaha was involved in Rick’s death or Debbie’s disappearance.
At a loss for leads, authorities decide to take a closer look into Rick and Debbie’s past. They learned that Debbie had sought refuge in Alaska after a bitter divorce. Meeting Rick gave her a new start.
He wanted someone who cook a good meal and be with him and keep him company and read together in the evening. And it wasn’t easy to find somebody like that or he found it very difficult. Of course, a lot of it had to do with where he was looking.
But anyway, they just found each other. But I think it was one of those God things that she wound up in that same area that he was.
The two didn’t date long before Rick’s renegade nature put their romance to the test. You just can’t fight the IRS and United States government, but he seemed to think he could. It wasn’t that he was unwilling to pay his income tax.
He did pay income tax, but he was unwilling to pay anything more than what the tax code said he was supposed to do. So that’s what he went to jail for. He ended up doing 10 or 11 months in jail because he disagreed with the IRS.
He was very stubborn in that aspect. But Debbie weathered the storm and the two eventually wed. She would go up and visit him every other weekend.
I guess that proved to Rick that, hey, this little girl, she’s a keeper.
Rick’s run-in with the law raises suspicions. Police question whether Rick may have had a beef with an old cellmate. Maybe someone had promised to get even with him on the outside.
As authorities scramble to track the killer, searchers continue to comb the rugged terrain for any sign of Debbie. The troopers did a heck of a job. They had, oh shoot, I think like 7 to 12 troopers in there on four-wheelers and stuff.
And we were just scouring the countryside and just trying to think of where Deb could possibly be. And even to this day, helicopters bring back memories because they used a helicopter a lot up there looking for any possible cabin that they might have been at.
But they come up empty and family members become increasingly concerned. I was worried to death about my sister. I didn’t sleep, didn’t eat.
I even thought of trying to get a psychic involved in possibly helping because we had traveled all over looking for her back there and we couldn’t locate her nowhere, you know, back in the Chitina River area and I know she would never leave Rick. So, you know, I was just tearing my head apart. The thing that worried me about not finding Debbie is that either she was being tortured somewhere or that she was tied up and being hurt.
Police are also at a loss. They have no idea whether Debbie left of her own accord or had been abducted or if she had witnessed Rick’s murder and been attacked by a bear on her way for help. Seven days after discovering Rick Berry’s body, investigators scoured the thick underbrush along the creek and learned firsthand what really became of Debbie.
The officer noticed something that was out of the ordinary. And as they investigated further, that’s when they found her body. Her body is buried beneath grass and tree limbs.
Her clothes were partially removed. She was lying on her pants and her panties. There was some semen at the scene.
An autopsy reveals even more disturbing details. Not only was semen present, but there were a number of contusions, abrasions, and other findings that are not indicative of consensual πππ. So, she was shot to death similar or identical to her husband.
And there is enough evidence to suggest the killer may have had πππ with Debbie’s corpse. Authorities are shaken by the sadistic nature of the crime. With no suspects or motive, they are plagued by a single terrorizing thought.
What if the crazed killer vanished into the vast wilderness of Alaska?
Alaska state troopers discover the bodies of Rick Berry and his wife Debbie in the remote Alaskan wilderness. Both have been shot execution style. People were very frightened.
Somebody was still out there who killed two people in cold blood and no one knew where they were. Panic grips the tiny town of Chitina. Neighbors fear a predator is lurking among them.
But who could it be? And when might he strike again? It just seemed like somebody who was very angry.
That was the fear. Was it a neighbor who they knew very well who was still in their cabin acting like nothing happened, still in the vicinity? Was it a mystery person who was just a mountain man who is still living in the wilderness and homeless out there?
Was it a stranger who just came through and left town and is already on their way? So that was the fear. The fear was of the unknown.
Rick Berry had been found executed in a creek. A week later, the body of his wife Debbie was discovered downstream. She had been buried among limbs and debris and brutally victimized.
It was tragic enough what happened to my brother, but I don’t think he suffered. You know, he had a shot to his head and the lights were out, but I think Debbie suffered and it’s amazingly not okay. That’s again like pulling the wings off a fly, watching it squirm till it can’t squirm anymore and just let it die.
Police know the killer is as dark as they are desperate. Well, in every case like this where there’s a murderer at large, law enforcement, wherever you are, wants to find this person as quickly as possible. They’ve killed two people.
They could easily ππΎππ more.
Troopers consider the 21-year-old camper who slept near Rick’s corpse might have something to hide, but he’s easily ruled out after his DNA fails to match that found on Debbie’s body. Police question Rick and Debbie’s neighbors and come up with a lead. The neighbors say the couple got along with everyone.
Everyone except Paul Stavinord, a 46-year-old mountain man who lived about a mile away. He didn’t live like the rest of us. He lived in the shadows.
Not in city shadows, but he lived in the wilderness. He would while away his days out there in that cabin.
Neighbors claimed Stavinord had stolen fuel from Rick and Debbie’s cabin, and that Rick further suspected Stavinord had taken a snow machine and a . 22 rifle. There had been some bad blood.
There was that belief apparently that Paul Stavinord was taking their property and I think he had confronted him over that in the past. Neighbors reveal that Rick once sold Stavinord a cellular antenna. During the transaction, Stavinord took a cable that was not part of the deal.
When Stavinord learned that Rick wanted $50 for the cable, he returned it cut to pieces. Certainly at this point and after all the troopers at our meeting told me, Paul Stavinord is definitely a suspect. You know, Stavinord, in my opinion, was the prime suspect.
Debbie’s brother, Don, offers further credence to the neighbor’s claims. He tells troopers about a chilling encounter with Stavinord the night he arrived in Chitina and questioned Stavinord about Debbie’s disappearance. Now, we don’t talk anymore.
We had a falling out a little while back. Okay. Thanks.
You’re welcome. I can’t explain the feeling, but you know, it was like walking through a pit of rattlesnakes, you know, this chill going up and down my spine when I backed out of there. What are you doing?
I thought I’d look around, too. Don’t sweep me after you. When I went back to the cabin, I crawled all the way in the back into the top of the cabin and was in a dark spot.
I didn’t sleep on the bed. I just curled up in the back in case anybody walked in that they wouldn’t see me. And I slept with my pistol right by my side.
Police delve deeper into Stavinord’s background and find he has been on the wrong side of the law before. At age 20, Stavinord pulled off the biggest bank heist in Alaska history. He and I think two other young friends of his had robbed the bank and then they had escaped into the mountains.
But the trio hadn’t calculated the weight of their loot. They were forced to stash the cash in the woods in order to stay on the run. They were out there for a while.
It was tough to track them. Two days later, Stavinord walked out of the brush and into the arms of police. His cronies were also captured and the money recovered.
After a three-year prison stint, Stavinord reportedly became a different man. He married, got a job with the railroad, and started a family. 15 years later, the marriage fell apart, and he came unhinged.
He began dressing like an old-time trapper and buried himself in crafts, carving small arctic animals and flutes out of wood to sell at local shops. He was an accomplished flutist. So, we saw that part of Paul Stavinord, but we also would see him out at the vents dressed up as a mountain man with his black powder musket.
And so we did see some interesting paradox about who Paul Stavinord was. So he had that kind of chameleon personality and he could be very, very charming. Very, very charming.
But he also had this kind of stormy menacing feel about him. So you really couldn’t read him well. It was a little bit like looking at Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
The isolation seemed to swallow him whole. Had Paul Stavinord become a wild man in a wild place? Was it possible the mild-mannered musician had become an ice cold killer?
Alaska state troopers are anxious to determine if bank robber turned backwoodsman Paul Stavinord may have embraced the isolation of Alaska to the extreme. Is it possible such seclusion made him snap? We were all kind of wondering at the time who could do this.
What type of person could ambush a couple on Memorial Day weekend? What kind of person could do this? Brutally ππΎππ a couple and rape a woman after she shot.
When questioned about the murders, Stavinord claims he wasn’t anywhere close to Chitina at the time. Where were you Memorial Day weekend? He said he went to Fairbanks for Memorial Day weekend.
He stopped at a grocery store. He stopped to have lunch. But police remember that the man who camped near Rick’s corpse said he saw smoke coming from a nearby cabin Memorial Day weekend.
Stavinord’s cabin is the only one in the area. Troopers find that’s not the only discrepancy in Stavinord’s story. Said he was in here last week that he had steak for lunch.
We don’t serve steak for lunch. There were a number of places up and down the highway where he said he had either gotten gas and some snacks or had actually stopped and had dinner. Places he was at in Fairbanks.
You check your receipts to verify that, please. Sure. None of these things checked out.
We couldn’t verify anything. Stavinord didn’t have receipts to prove these purchases. None of it checked out.
A court order forces Stavinord to allow police to take a DNA sample. The crime lab determines Stavinord’s DNA matches the semen found on Debbie’s body. He’s charged with two counts of first-degree murder and one count each of rape and theft.
Troopers immediately issue a warrant for his arrest. We thought we’d go back up there and maybe try and talk to him one more time, but went to his cabin, not there. Clearly, he had run out.
Authorities search Stavinord’s cabin for clues and uncover something of interest. Never seen a criminal suspect leave this sort of stuff behind. Listen to this.
They were notes about my conversations with Stavinord. And then basically his narrative, a story, a script if you will. This sounds exactly like what he told me.
If you’re going to lie, you better write it down and repeat it over and over and over and over until just like any good actor, you’ve got it down pretty good and it becomes you. It becomes his story, his truth. Very damaging evidence.
Troopers also find a journal in which Stavinord describes his lifestyle. I am an artist and musician, he writes. I build flutes, drums, rattles, and other musical instruments.
I don’t have a watch. I don’t have credit cards. I don’t have a checking account.
All of this is my choice. But most unsettling are his writings about Rick Berry and his wife. He describes Rick as liking to stir things up and says Debbie bowed down to her husband.
According to Stavinord’s written account, he went out for a walk the Friday before Memorial Day weekend and met Debbie by the creek. He describes a romantic rendezvous in which he played his flute for her. He talked himself so much into thinking that he had a relationship with Debbie or that she could have one with him or that he had some kind of mystical powers over women and that there was some kind of real response going on there that he actually thought that was true and then he wrote it down and recorded it.
I think that he wanted a relationship with my sister and if he said it enough times and did enough things it would make things so. You could tell this guy is not dealing with a full deck whatsoever.
He also says Debbie called her husband at 7:30 that night. In his journal, he said that she in fact called her husband at the cabin at a certain time and there were no records that she actually called anybody during that time. Desperate to bring Stavinord to justice, authorities launch an intensive manhunt.
His face was out there all across the country looking for this guy who we had no idea if he was still in Alaska in the wilderness or already made it across the border. It was a major case up here. People were concerned.
I mean, he could have been in the wilderness right in their backyard. I mean, he was a survivor. He can make it.
Meanwhile, Debbie’s brother, Don, hopes to capture the elusive mountain man himself and camps out at Stavinord’s cabin just in case he returns. He came back to the cabin. We was going to get right down to the truth of what did happen.
If I could have got him in my sight, I’d have shot him in a New York second. But Stavinord never comes back. Railroad workers report seeing Stavinord walking along the tracks on the day authorities obtained his DNA.
They tell police he had shaved his beard and mustache. A security guard working the same area says he saw Stavinord crash a red four-wheeler and take off running into the woods that same day. We thought he probably had gone into the woods and stayed there.
He had the skills to do that. He had the background to do that. He had a propensity to do that kind of thing.
Troopers locate Debbie’s four-wheeler, but find no sign of Stavinord. Meanwhile, his family maintains his innocence and hires an attorney. A public appeal is issued for Stavinord to turn himself in, but the plea goes unanswered and the manhunt continues.
As weeks pass with no sighting of Stavinord, troopers are forced to come face to face with their worst fear. He’s already snapped. He’s already done two murders.
It’s very important that we find him and find him fast, but not easily done in wilderness Alaska.
Authorities scour the woods near Chitina, but Paul Stavinord has seemingly vanished. One more among the missing in Alaska. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack, quite literally.
For a guy like Stavinord who really knew Alaska and knew how to live in remote Alaska, there are a lot of places to hide. Nearly four weeks after the brutal slayings of Rick Berry and his wife Debbie, suspected murderer Paul Stavinord seemingly walked into the Alaskan backwoods, never to be seen again. The posters were out there.
The Canadian authorities had been notified. So, we were hoping he’d be caught in that net, but no, we didn’t know. We didn’t know how far away he was or if he would be caught.
Troopers in there, they were looking for him. They were armed and they were serious about finding him and they considered him dangerous from what his past consisted of and stuff. And you know if he was out there one of them troopers are looking for him and if he went to pull a weapon or something I’m sure they were told to shoot on sight.
As state troopers conduct an intense manhunt, people in the remote village of Chitina arm themselves against the dangerous fugitive. He clearly had some skills that would prolong this whole search that was going on here. And when people become desperate like that, in order to keep their freedom, they may resort to more violence.
They may resort to more criminal activity. Surprisingly, Stavinord opts for a more peaceful end. Giving myself up.
After four weeks on the run, he calls the attorney his family hired and says he’s ready to turn himself in. I know there were some people who he himself, I think, said that if he hadn’t turned himself in, we never would have found him. That can happen occasionally.
It happens.
The attorney convinces Stavinord to meet her at a local park to arrange how and when he would turn himself over to authorities. She later speaks to the media, but won’t reveal how Stavinord managed to avoid such a widescale manhunt, only that troopers would likely never have found him. In April 1998, Paul Stavinord stands trial for double homicide and rape.
He acknowledges killing Rick Berry, but argues it was an act of self-defense. He claims Rick caught him and Debbie in each other’s arms. According to Stavinord, what happened was he and Deborah were at the creek.
They were having a sexual encounter at the time when Rick pulled up with his four-wheeler and caught them in the act. His statement was when Mr. Berry saw what was happening that he was having sexual relations with his wife.
Mr. Berry said, “I’m going to blow your head off.” Pulls out his weapon and he starts shooting.
At which point in time, Mr. Stavinord had no choice but to pull out his weapon and shot Mr. Berry.
He was shooting at me and I believed that I was going to be killed.
After the confrontation, Stavinord says he saw Debbie lying on the ground with a bullet through her head. According to the defense, Rick Berry killed his own wife in a moment of inexplicable rage. They further argue that Stavinord panicked.
He had said that at the time he knew no one would believe him. With his criminal past, no one would believe that it was accidental and self-defense. He carried Debbie’s body to a grassy spot down the creek and covered it with branches.
By then, Rick’s body had floated into a deep pool where Stavinord left it.
In a strange twist, on the last day of testimony, Stavinord asked to play a song on one of his hand-carved flutes. He decided to play his flute because his attorney said he could express himself much better through his music. And it was a song that he said that he played for Deborah right before Rick found them.
He thought he was going to be like a snake charmer to the jury. Once they heard his melodies, that would be it. How can you convict somebody who can make such beautiful music?
I guess how could Debbie, you know, do anything other than have relations with this band after he played his flute? But the judge doesn’t allow the jury to hear Stavinord’s song. And in the end, they don’t buy his story either.
Nor do the victim’s relatives. He lied so much, you know, you didn’t know what to believe or what not to believe. If he told me the sun was shining, I’d go to the window and look.
Debbie didn’t like Mr. Stavinord, so she wasn’t going to stop and listen to anything he was going to do, say, or play. She would have been more likely to copulate with an alligator than that man.
Prosecutors contend it’s more likely that Rick Berry arrived in Chitina that weekend to find more of his belongings missing, then confronted Stavinord. Hours later, Stavinord set out to get even. Knowing Rick would head to the pass to meet Debbie when she drove in, Stavinord ambushed them.
He had actually laid in wait at the troll end of the bridge waiting for them to come over and took them out. Don and George seen Rick going in to get Deb. Stavinord waited on the opposite side with a 22 rifle because you know Rick, I’m sure, said I’m going to break your neck if you don’t quit stealing my gas.
And when he was coming back in that’s when he shot Rick off his four-wheeler and shot him dead. If he didn’t ππΎππ Rick, Rick would have died trying to get to him to take him out. Deborah, you know, she would have fought tooth and nail to save Rick, too.
Paul Stavinord is convicted of two counts of murder. Stavinord can be described as a cold-blooded killer, but his friends and family saw him in a different way. That’s what’s so ironic.
They saw him as this peaceful, spiritual man, but when the verdict was returned, it was very clear that there was a very different side to Paul Stavinord. He’s sentenced to 198 years in prison. The judge notes the steep sentence stems from the fact Stavinord never expressed any regret.
My first thought was ππΎππ the sob, you know, and to this day, you know, I really believe in eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. And, you know, as far as I’m concerned, he’s breathing my good air and taking up too much space. This was a senseless murder of what appeared to be two really good people for what appears to be no reason at all that anybody could tell other than bad blood.
No matter what the words were, they certainly didn’t justify the death of these two people.
Patricia Jalon is haunted by the eerie feeling she had about Stavinord from the moment she first met him at Rick and Debbie’s cabin. He could hardly take his eyes off Debbie. And it was an uncomfortable feeling when you feel like somebody is openly and in public undressing you.
That’s not a comfortable feeling for a woman. And it wasn’t me he was doing that to. I didn’t like that feeling.
So I think she was in trouble for a long time. Patricia was so disturbed by Stavinord. She felt compelled to warn her brother and his wife.
And I said, “I don’t know what’s going on with that man, but he’s not a healthy person for you to have, and you shouldn’t have him in your house, and he shouldn’t know how to get in your house, and you shouldn’t have Debbie out there fishing by herself.” Because if he can walk in here on a moment’s notice, I bet you anything he knows where she’s fishing and what she does.
Today, the man who fancied himself a backwoodsman communing with nature is now living out his life in a concrete cell. He has no chance of parole. Stavinord was living the dream, the dream that he wanted to live.
He was in the middle of nowhere. He had a beautiful cabin. He had everything that he needed.
And apparently he also decided that as much as anything that perhaps other people had more than he had. He’ll never do this to nobody again unless he breaks out of prison. If he does, I hope he comes visits me.
