Thomas Bunday

Five victims around North Pole and Fairbanks

Between 1979 and 1981, four young women and an eleven-year-old girl were killed in the area around Fairbanks and the small town of North Pole, close to Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska's interior. The first was Glinda Sodemann, 19, an airman's wife and the mother of a young daughter, who was last seen near her home on August 29, 1979. Her body was found that October in a remote area south of North Pole.

Doris Oehring, 11, vanished on June 13, 1980, while out on her bicycle. Marlene Peters went missing on January 31, 1981, and Wendy Wilson, 16, disappeared roughly five weeks later; both were found in early March 1981. Lori King disappeared in May 1981, and her body was later found near the air base. Published accounts differ slightly on two ages: Peters is described as 20 or 21, and King as 18 or 19.

A pattern investigators could not ignore

Detectives concluded that the four adult victims had been killed in a similar way and left in isolated spots, which pointed to a single offender. After King's body was found, a joint task force brought together the Alaska State Troopers, the base's Office of Special Investigations, Army investigators from nearby Fort Wainwright, and the Fairbanks and North Pole police departments, with the FBI also involved.

Early on, Sodemann's husband was questioned as a possible suspect, but he was cleared. A lead that would prove more important came from Doris Oehring's brother, who told police he had seen his sister talking to a man with a military-style haircut and uniform who drove a blue car.

A profile that pointed the wrong way

An FBI behavioral profile described the likely killer as a young, single man without a steady job who was not in the military. In a community built around military installations, that description sent investigators in the wrong direction, and Leland E. Hale, an author who has written about Alaska crime, has called it badly mistaken. The breakthrough came when investigators checked with the Air Force's own investigators instead.

By February 1982, three men connected to the base had drawn attention for their behavior toward women. One of them was Thomas Richard Bunday, an Air Force technical sergeant who taught electronics, was married with two children and owned a blue car. Oxygen reported that he was the only one of the three who refused to cooperate, and that Oehring's brother picked him out from photographs. By then, Bunday had been transferred to Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas.

Confession in Texas

Alaska State Troopers, including Jim McCann and Chris Stockard, traveled to Texas to question Bunday over several sessions. On FBI behavioral experts' advice they confronted him with photographs of the victims, and they recorded the sessions without his knowledge. At first he denied involvement. After a search warrant was obtained, investigators collected ammunition and hair from his vehicle, and Oxygen reported that the hair was matched to Wendy Wilson and that ballistic evidence tied bullets from the scenes to the victims.

According to the Associated Press, Bunday then told Alaska police that he was responsible for five deaths over a two-year span ending in 1981. Investigators said he also told them that Doris Oehring's body was on Eielson's grounds.

Death before an arrest

The Alaska officers had no power to arrest anyone in Texas, so they had to wait while an Alaska warrant was obtained. In the meantime Bunday was not in custody. The AP reported that about 75 minutes after a warrant for his arrest was issued in Fairbanks, on Tuesday, March 15, 1983, his motorcycle collided with a dump truck roughly 40 miles east of Wichita Falls, killing him.

At a news conference the next day, troopers would not say whether they believed the crash was deliberate. Years later McCann was blunter, telling Oxygen it was no accident. Because Bunday died before he could be charged, he was never tried or convicted, and in legal terms the killings remain his confessed but unproven crimes. Doris Oehring's remains were not found until August 1986, when her skull was located in a remote part of the base.

Why the case still matters

The Bunday case is a lesson in what happens when a crime crosses jurisdictions. Military and civilian agencies had to share information to identify a suspect on a federal installation, and once he was moved to another state, Alaska officers could question him but could not detain him. That gap left the families of five victims without a trial.

The case also shows how a behavioral profile can mislead as easily as it can help. Some recent popular accounts give the year of Bunday's confession as 1988; that conflicts with contemporary wire reports, which place his admissions and his death in March 1983. With no court record, those reports and investigators' later accounts remain the main record of one of interior Alaska's worst series of killings.