In the late evening of June 9, 1982, Lois’s friend Ruthie Davis showed up at the motel room asking if Lois wanted to go shoot a game of pool across town. “Eileen said, ‘Oh Mom, don’t go downtown with Ruthie.’ She didn’t want me to leave, but I said I’d be back pretty quick. So I went ahead and went.”
Lois left around midnight, leaving her daughter in charge of her two young siblings. When she returned two hours later, the motel room door was unlocked. Eileen was gone, and the boys were asleep.
Lois said the boys don’t remember anything because they were asleep the entire time, though Gene vaguely recalled hearing voices. “He felt like he woke up and heard somebody talking, like somebody was talking to Eileen,” she said. “He didn’t know if he was just dreaming or what.”
(...)
Family and local volunteers organized a town-wide search, with Eileen’s older brother Corey flying down from Anchorage to help. An hour after Corey arrived in Haines, he and Eileen’s boyfriend Sean Hannon discovered her partially unclothed body in some bushes on the beach, near where the Chilkat Cruises dock stands today.
An autopsy showed Eileen had been sexually assaulted and strangled with heavy twine commonly used in commercial fishing. It remains unclear whether she was killed on the beach or if her body was dumped there later. Investigators found no drag marks and noted that party-goers who had been using the beach during the days she was missing hadn’t seen her body there.
Photo from: Homicide Reward Fund - Facebook
Information from: Cold case unit cut could end work on Wafer killing - Chilkat Valley News
