The Last Run (49 page)

Fred Kalt, Lee Honnold, Chris Windnagle and Sean Witherspoon still work as flight mechanics.

Kalt is a chief in Elizabeth City; Windnagle is a chief in Kodiak. After a stint in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, Witherspoon was reassigned to Clearwater, Florida. Honnold is now a flight engineer on C-130 planes and based in Kodiak.

Rich Sansone went on to Officer Candidate School and recently was commissioned as an ensign in Cleveland, Ohio. A. J. Thompson continues as a rescue swimmer, now based at Air Station Elizabeth City in North Carolina. Mike Fish quit the Coast Guard shortly after the
La Conte
case and became a fireman. He lives in Anchorage now with his wife, Heidi, and two children.

David Hanson remains an investigator at the state crime lab in Anchorage, and lives in nearby Eagle River with his wife, Valery, and their six children. On February 1, 2004, he was appointed chief investigator of the state’s Missing Persons Bureau. The big map with all of the colored pins indicating where people have disappeared in Alaska is now his responsibility.

David Hanlon’s remains were shipped to his family in Hoonah, and on September 10, 1998, some two hundred people attended a memorial service for him at the Bethel Christian Center. Honoring an ancient Tlingit custom, his relatives later sailed out into the Icy Strait and sprinkled white wreaths, daisies and carnations across the water’s surface. He is buried at the Evergreen Cemetery in Juneau, where his mother and father were laid to rest.

Mark Morley’s body was flown back to Michigan, where a service was held at the Uhts Funeral Home in Westland. He was buried in nearby Plymouth on February 6, 1998—four days short of his thirty-sixth birthday.

That April, his fiancée, Tamara Westcott, had her last name legally changed to Morley. On August 13, 1998—at exactly the same hour that Jesse Evans and Doug Conner came upon David Hanlon’s remains on Shuyak Island—she gave birth to an eight-pound, eleven-ounce boy. Shenamed him Mark Morley Jr. She still lives in Sitka with her daughter, Kyla, and her son.

When he is not fishing or repairing boats, Gig Mork lives with his parents in a new Native housing development out near Indian River in Sitka. His reputation as a solid deckhand on boats—and a solid drinker in taverns—has not suffered as a result of the
La Conte
episode.

In the aftermath of the sinking, Mike DeCapua returned to longlining. After an account of the
La Conte
sinking appeared in
Reader’s Digest
in 1999, his youngest daughter, Melanie Thistle, contacted him. (As it turned out, she had been trying to locate her father for years.) Not long after, Mike DeCapua flew to Spokane and spent two weeks with his daughters—his first visit in two decades.

On his forty-sixth birthday, July 19, 2002, Mike DeCapua telephoned his older brother, Don, with news: he had met a wonderful woman named Wendy and had driven with her from Sitka to Michigan in her car. Two days later, Don DeCapua got another call—this time from Wendy. She and Mike had apparently gone out to have dinner and drinks, separated and planned to meet back at her car, but Mike never showed up. Since he had left all of his personal belongings at her house, Wendy called the police two days later to file a missing persons report. Six months passed with no word. Then, last January, Mike called his brother from Tampa, Florida, where he apparently had been fishing.

Soon after, Mike DeCapua returned to Sitka and his life of fishing on the high seas.

Bob Doyle’s ex-wife, Laurie, married Rick Koval on May 1, 1998, and the two moved with Brendan and Katie to Kodiak. In August 1999, she and Koval divorced. Laurie and the kids still live in Kodiak.

Bob Doyle traveled to Kodiak twice to visit his children, and then moved back to Bellows Falls. He began working odd jobs, including painting homes, working in a meatpacking house, catering, and bartending at Nick’s, the bar and pool hall where he tipped his first beer as a fifteen-year-old.

He is now dating a local nurse and lives with his younger sister, Sally, at their grandparents’ old home in North Walpole, across the Connecticut River from Bellows Falls, in New Hampshire. To this day he keeps a snapshot of Mark Morley in his wallet.