The Chulitna Charmer
A Brutal Double Murder in the Alaska Wilderness
People move to the Alaska wilderness because they enjoy solitude and crave a subsistence lifestyle or because they wish to escape society. People who fall into this second category are either misfits who don’t want to blend in with others, or they are criminals, seeking to avoid arrest and hoping to disappear into the vast wilderness. Some
individuals run to Alaska from a life of crime somewhere else, and while they might hope to turn their lives around in Alaska, they instead bring their problems and psychopathic tendencies with them.
Until Memorial Day weekend in 1997, Paul Stavenjord seemed to have succeeded at escaping his criminal past, but then something in him snapped, leaving two people dead and forever altering the course of Stavenjord’s life.
Paul Stavenjord
Paul Stavenjord endured a rough childhood, first at the hands of an alcoholic father and then from his mother’s two subsequent husbands. In 1965, Paul and his family moved to Seward, Alaska. Not long after arriving in Seward, the principal expelled Paul from school for hurling racially-charged insults at other students. Paul never returned to school and became an insolent, moody teenager. He was arrested five times in two years for breaking into cabins, stealing a…
