Read an exclusive excerpt from Bear Season
Bear Season tells the story of Jade Hunter, a PhD student from Manchester, who goes missing in the Alaskan wilderness. Suspicion immediately falls on the reclusive survivalist Ursula Smith, who is swiftly arrested and convicted of Jade’s murder – even though a body has not been found.
***
In this thesis, part academic inquiry, part fairy tale and vision quest, I document a journey to Bear, whose teeth and claws will tear away the skin of this life, whose jaws are a gateway to the next.
So commences the document entitled ‘Thesis’ emailed by twenty-five-year-old student Jade Hunter to her PhD supervisor five days before she was reported missing on April 15, 2016.
The day before this email with the attached ‘Thesis’ was sent, Jade began her seven-thousand-mile journey from Manchester, England, to attend the Global Symposium on Fairy Tales, Fables and Folklore, a biennial academic conference hosted in 2016 at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF). After four connecting flights and a cab ride from Fairbanks International Airport, she arrived in College, a suburb of Fairbanks – one of the very few blemishes of urbanisation upon Interior Alaska’s wild beauty. It was a far cry from the vibrant industrial city where Jade lived: Manchester, a place with a pulse, thronging with students and sound. During a trip to England, I’d spent a week in Manchester exactly one year before Jade’s disappearance; I might have passed her in the street. As for College, I lived there briefly in 1997 before moving back to my hometown of Portland, Oregon. I remember being struck by news coverage of the missing woman: both she and I had traversed two points on the world map that had very little to do with one other. That was the first of several coincidences that would arise in my relationship to this case.
Jade’s journey to Alaska was a significant undertaking for a five-day conference, her partner and father agreed (one of very few matters they saw eye to eye). What they hadn’t known was that Jade had bought a one-way ticket. She hadn’t planned on coming back.
Local authorities were first alerted to Jade’s disappearance by her partner, a thirty-nine-year-old activist named Otto Lock, who told police he had expected Jade to contact him on the night of her arrival to let him know she’d reached her hotel safely. Nor had she answered his dozens of calls and messages in the days that followed. Police investigations began at the UAF campus. Witness statements concerning the missing woman conflicted: one witness, a delegate at the conference, claimed to have seen the young British student on the first day of the programme, Monday, April 11. However, the conference organisers reported that Jade never showed up for registration and was noted absent. Several other witnesses on campus and at a nearby hotel, where Jade checked in on Sunday, April 10, and where several other delegates were staying, reported having seen Jade between April 10 and 11 but admitted that their recollections of the days and times of these sightings were hazy. College is one of very few places in Interior Alaska that may be described as liberal; furthermore, everyone who attends an arts and humanities academic conference almost anywhere in the world can expect a free wine reception. One can imagine the state troopers’ frustration as they tried to tease out specific details of their witnesses’ drink-addled memories.
The last known sighting of Jade was on the afternoon of April 11, reported by a gas station clerk who saw a woman of Jade’s description walking alone past the gas station on the outskirts of town, fifteen miles away from the UAF campus. Search and rescue operations began in College and moved through Fairbanks and the surrounding area, but no evidence of Jade’s whereabouts was found for the first two weeks. Criminology experts agree that the first seventy-two hours investigating a missing person case are the most critical; beyond that, leads wane, evidence gets lost in a series of dead ends, the case goes cold.
Then, on May 1, police were called to a remote area beyond the city limits – a woman had opened fire at two Alaska State Troopers as they drove up the road towards her home. The troopers had been investigating the missing person case and were patrolling the area. One bullet burst through the car windshield and hit Sergeant Paul Mathers between the eyes, killing him instantly. Covered in his supervisor’s blood and brains, Trooper Frank Sweeney, star graduate of the Alaska State Trooper Academy training programme, calmly called for backup, then got out of the vehicle and fired his weapon. Sweeney performed what was later described by his division as “a selfless act of mercy”[1] and earned him a Real Heroes Award from the American Red Cross of Alaska: rather than killing his assailant, he only disarmed her by shooting her in the leg. Sweeney survived the incident unscathed, while the woman was treated for minor injuries in hospital before being taken into custody.
At first, the shooting appeared to be a random act of violence and an all-too-familiar tragedy in the USA; Alaska has the highest rate of gun ownership of any state in the country. But as investigations into the killing of the trooper continued, so grew the complexity of the case.
The unkempt, jabbering woman taken into custody was hard to pin down. Eventually identified as sixty-two-year-old Ursula Smith by medical records from her childhood – she had no known birth certificate – she refused to talk to the police and offered no justification or defence of her actions. A psychiatric evaluation – quoted by Ursula’s defence attorney during the trial the following year – found that, rather than remorseless, Ursula was fearful of the police. The evaluation noted that she was “paranoid about stating anything on record that she believed might be used to incriminate her further.”[2]
Police conducted a search of Ursula’s property. Behind the log cabin, alongside a vegetable patch and a well – drilled without a permit, they soon ascertained – they observed solar panels and a shed housing a backup generator; the cabin had no mains electricity supply. One of the cabin windows was broken. Inside the cabin, among taxidermied animals and a rack with a formidable collection of firearms, was a tower of dusty boxes containing Ursula’s journals; excerpts from these would be read aloud in the trial months later. Police found no phone, computer, or TV – none of the apparatus of modern life. They confirmed that Ursula was a fur trapper by trade; in the workroom, lynx and fox furs were piled up, ready for sale. Here was the worktable – its wood grain bloodstained, officers noted – where she expertly extracted her wares, cleared and ready for its next use. On a rack above were knives of various shapes and sizes for all manner of cutting. Rotting in a pot on the stove were remnants of a meal of stewed meat. What Ursula didn’t eat from her hunts, she buried; later, police would dig up scores of graves – unearthing bone fragments as well as complete skeletons – surrounding the cabin in concentric circles, a pattern that would be described by Ursula’s prosecutors as “ritualistic.”[3]
Ursula captured the attention of the media and the public imagination. Local and even national TV news stations broadcasted long, in-depth reports on the shootout – interrupted occasionally by brief updates on the ongoing search for the missing young woman, Jade Hunter – speculating about the circumstances that had led Ursula to kill forty-four-year-old Sgt. Mathers. As more information about Ursula’s background came to light, various reporters described Ursula as a “crazed libertarian” and “reclusive survivalist,” quoting unnamed sources postulating that she was a “textbook paranoid schizophrenic” with a “lifelong fear of the police.” Perhaps because the story coincided with updates on the increasingly hopeless search for the missing woman, last seen twenty miles away from Ursula’s home, other suspicions gradually arose. Indicted for one murder already – the killing of Mathers – could Ursula have also had a hand in Jade’s disappearance?
On May 17, another search of Ursula’s cabin led to a turning point: in one of the bedrooms, a torn piece of paper was discovered under the bed. Written on in cramped, ink-blotted scrawl – later analysed and confirmed by a graphologist to resemble Jade’s handwriting – it read:
She’s locked me in. She won’t let me go.
***
[1] “Woman taken into custody following officer-involved shootout in Fairbanks.” Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, May 2, 2016. While the Alaska State Troopers’ official stance was outright praise for Sweeney’s actions, a more ambivalent view was offered a year later by former (and the only female) Fairbanks Police Department detective Kate Whittle, who briefly mentioned the incident when speaking to the press following her resignation: “I had real concerns about how [Mathers and Sweeney] handled that investigation, how they targeted [Ursula] in the first place. There’s a lot of sexism going on in law enforcement in Alaska, a lot of intimidation of female civilians and officers. I speak from personal experience.” See “Fairbanks detective alleges sexist culture in resignation.” AP News, November 29, 2017.
[2] See transcripts from court proceedings on the Alaska Trial Court Cases index, Ursula Smith v State of Alaska.
[3] Ibid.
