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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 skiff and a car, and for entering his girlfriend’s house and stealing a gun. While serving time in an Anchorage juvenile facility in 1966, Stavenjord escaped, stole a car, and led police on a high-speed chase through the streets of Anchorage. He was captured and incarcerated at the McLaughlin Youth Center until 1968.
Six-months after being released from the youth center, Stavenjord brandished a gun and robbed a downtown Anchorage liquor store. The robbery netted him $190, but he was soon arrested and sent back to jail. By this time, Stavenjord was addicted to heroin and used LSD.
Soon after he was released from prison, twenty-year-old Paul Stavenjord and two friends decided to rob the Seward branch of the First National Bank of Anchorage. The robbery was such a ridiculous crime, it’s laughable now to think about it. Only one road leads out of Seward, and it is a forty-mile spur road which runs south from an intersection on the Seward…
