James Dale Ritchie was never charged with a crime in the deaths of five people in Anchorage, Alaska, in the summer of 2016. He did not live long enough. On November 12, 2016, police said, he turned and fired on an Anchorage officer who had pulled up beside him downtown, and two officers shot back and killed him. The revolver found with him had already been matched by the state crime laboratory to five unsolved killings from July and August. Five months later, on April 26, 2017, the Anchorage Police Department announced that homicide detectives had "sufficient probable cause" to conclude that Ritchie was responsible for all five deaths, that he had the gun before any of them, and that he had acted alone. The department closed the cases.
That conclusion was never tested in court. Probable cause is the standard police need to arrest or charge someone, not the proof beyond a reasonable doubt that a jury requires, and no prosecutor, judge or jury ever weighed the evidence. Police did not give a motive, did not say how Ritchie had chosen the people who died, and declined to describe much of the work that led to their finding.
Ritchie grew up in Anchorage. He graduated from East Anchorage High School in 1994, the Anchorage Daily News reported, and played on the school's state championship football and basketball teams. KTUU described him as a star athlete there. According to court testimony that KTUU later obtained, he scored 1200 on the SAT and was recruited by Division 2 college athletic programs, and he went on to college.
As a teenager he was close to a family in the Mountain View neighborhood. A boyhood friend from that family, who attended East High with his younger brother, told KTUU in 2016 that Ritchie often stayed at their home for days or weeks at a time, that the friend's mother treated him as one of her own sons, and that the friend thought of him as a stepbrother. Ritchie was especially close to the younger brother, who died in 1994. The friend remembered Ritchie as funny and spontaneous, "not the type" to shoot people. After high school the two lost touch; Ritchie went to college, and they had not seen each other in many years. Years later that friend's son would be one of the five people whose deaths police attributed to Ritchie.
A woman who knew Ritchie as a teenager told KTUU the accusation was hard for her to believe. He was not perfect, she said, but he had not seemed dangerous.
Ritchie's first recorded encounter with police came in 1998. According to court documents summarized by KTUU, officers went to his apartment after a report of drug sales, a handgun fell from his clothing when he stood up, and crack cocaine was found in the apartment. He received an 18-month sentence, all suspended, and three years of probation. In a letter to the judge in that case, KTUU reported, he expressed regret for his decisions and for the pain his case had caused his family, and his mother testified at a hearing in the case.
In 1999 he was stopped for erratic driving, admitted to drinking, and failed field sobriety tests; he took a plea agreement and was sentenced to 18 months in prison with none suspended, according to the same KTUU review of court files. In 2005 police answering a burglary call found him inside the home, carrying about the amount of cash the homeowner said had been hidden there. He was convicted of first-degree burglary, the Anchorage Daily News reported, and KTUU said he was sentenced to two years. The Daily News said he was released from custody in November 2007.
By about 2013, public records showed, Ritchie was living with his parents in Broadway, Virginia, a rural town of about 3,700 people. Court records there showed only traffic infractions in 2013 and 2014. The town manager wrote to KTUU that he had caused no problems in town, and local police said they had seen him in the evenings at a convenience store but had never dealt with him.
A next-door neighbor of at least two years described him to KTUU as "super intelligent," a man who wanted work as a chemical engineer and who helped the family with their computers. An old friend and former roommate in Anchorage told the station that he had a job and a girlfriend in Virginia, that the breakup of that relationship soured him on staying, and that he was homesick for Alaska.
He moved back to Anchorage in February 2016. Police said he was not homeless but may have lived in more than one place, and that his family was in contact with him. KTUU reported in May 2017 that he had sought mental health treatment, though police did not know whether he had received a diagnosis.
The revolver police later tied to the summer's killings had a long history in Anchorage. It was bought new in the city in 1971, the Daily News reported, and its original owner was still alive in 2016. In May 2017, Captain Bill Miller of the Anchorage police detective division told KTUU that Ritchie had acquired the gun before he moved to Virginia, left it with an acquaintance, and took it back when he returned to Anchorage in early 2016. Who held it while he was away was unclear.
Anchorage had a violent year in 2016. By December the city counted 34 homicide victims, the most in its recorded history, Alaska Public Media reported; the police chief, Chris Tolley, said the most consistent factor in those deaths was drugs and alcohol. Against that background, three outdoor shootings in July and August, with five people dead and no arrests, drew wide public concern.
Early on Sunday, July 3, 2016, a young woman and a man were found dead in Anchorage. The department named them two days later as Brianna Foisy, 20, and Jason Netter Sr., 41, both of Anchorage, and said it was investigating their deaths as homicides.
Brianna Foisy had been adopted out of foster care at five, together with her older sister, and grew up with four siblings, mostly in Anchorage. She loved Broadway musicals and singing, played sports as a child, and was spunky and outgoing; her mother said she was "always up a tree, but with a tutu on." At Service High School she was known for standing up for underdogs and for students who were bullied. Her brother said she made friends easily.
As a young adult she stayed close to her mother, who met her for sushi, her favorite food, and for shopping. About three weeks before she died, Brianna came by her mother's office, asked about her brothers, and left a message for them: "Tell the boys I love them." It was the last time her mother saw her. Her mother described her as compassionate, kind and sweet, someone everyone treated as a little sister.
That Christmas, her mother and a friend, both adoptive mothers, started Bri's Make-A-Call Project in her honor, KTUU reported. It began by collecting stockings and gift bags for young people at Covenant House, each with a card reading "Love Bri" and her picture, and its aim was to encourage people living on the streets to call the families who were worried about them. Brianna had known her mother's phone number by heart, and her occasional calls had been a comfort.
Jason Netter Sr. was 41. Public records showed a series of addresses at Anchorage-area apartments, and he was the father of two children, the Daily News reported. Few other details of his life have been reported.
Investigators found little evidence. A man walking his dog reported hearing six shots that morning. Detectives went through about a terabyte of surveillance video from nearby businesses, hundreds of hours of it, and released images of two people they wanted to identify; neither turned out to be a suspect. The most important early clue, police said later, came from ballistics: bullet fragments showed the weapon had been a revolver of an uncommon make. "We did not have a lot of clues as to what happened and why," Lieutenant John McKinnon, head of the homicide unit, said in November.
Just after 3 a.m. on July 29, 2016, several people in Anchorage called police to report gunshots, and a young man was found dead. He was identified that afternoon as Treyveonkindell Bobby Dwayne Thompson, 21, and the police said he had died of gunshot wounds.
Trey Thompson grew up in Anchorage. A police community alert said he was preparing to join the military, and his mother described him as easygoing and compassionate. His father called him honest and hardworking: he always had a job and helped his mother, and he preferred online video games to the streets, once trading his car for a laptop. A cousin remembered him as a gaming partner, a self-described "nerd" and a jokester with a big heart. He had been riding his bicycle home when he was shot, KTUU reported.
His father was the boyhood friend who had once thought of James Ritchie as a stepbrother. He learned of his son's death when his sister telephoned him in Fairbanks.
The state crime laboratory matched the bullets to the same revolver used on July 3, police said, within days of the shooting. Detectives could find no connection between Thompson and the first two victims. Surveillance video from the area had recorded the gunman. With help from the Alaska State Troopers, police estimated his height from the footage; the Daily News reported an estimate of about 6 feet 3 inches and KTUU one of 6 feet 4 inches, and the Daily News said the man wore a camouflage jacket. The video had no sound, and police said later there was no evidence the gunman spoke to Thompson. Thompson's bicycle, a yellow full-suspension model, was missing.
On September 11, 2016, police released a composite sketch of a "person of interest," drawn by the FBI from the descriptions of three witnesses, along with a description of the bicycle. Sergeant Slawomir Markiewicz said it was too early to call the man a suspect. The FBI offered a reward of $10,000 for information leading to a conviction, and more than 175 tips came in. At least one of them, KTUU later reported, named Ritchie.
Early on Sunday, August 28, 2016, two men were found dead in Anchorage. The department identified them as Bryant C. DeHusson, 25, and, after his family had been told, Kevin Turner, 34, both of Anchorage. Nothing suggested the two had known each other, and police found no link to the earlier victims.
DeHusson grew up in Anchorage, attended West Anchorage High School, and went by Brie. In 2011 DeHusson was one of the core members of Occupy Anchorage, turning a Midtown apartment into a kitchen that fed protesters and becoming known for peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies. For three summers DeHusson worked on an organic farm in Bethel run by a family friend, who called DeHusson a great worker. Later came a punk housing collective in the San Francisco Bay Area, and then a job as a cook on the North Slope, work a friend said fit DeHusson's values because it meant "feeding people." DeHusson studied permaculture, gathered wild food, traveled to Russia the year before to learn from a northern gardening expert, and hoped to turn family land in Homer into a permaculture farm. DeHusson stayed involved in climate action groups and rode the city's bike trails constantly; a friend said DeHusson "really wanted less violence and hate in the world."
Kevin Turner was 34 and lived in Anchorage. Little else about his life has been reported. When police told the families in November that the deaths were linked, his brother said the family had been asked not to dig into the case and felt hurt by how little they were told. "I want to know where was he shot, how long was he alive, did he suffer?" he told the Daily News.
Detectives recovered very little evidence. A neighborhood canvass produced nothing. A camera captured a silhouette at about the right time, but police could not tell whether it was a man or a woman. Bullet fragments again matched the same revolver. Two days after the killings, police urged residents to take care when out late at night, especially in isolated places.
By early August, police knew that the same revolver had been used on July 3 and July 29, and after August 28 they knew it had been used in all three shootings. They did not say so publicly. The FBI advised against it, the Daily News reported, and police feared that the person responsible would get rid of the gun and keep killing without detection. Communications director Jennifer Castro said later that the gun was the single piece of evidence police had that tied the cases together. Lieutenant McKinnon said police avoided the word "serial" partly for legal reasons and partly out of concern that it "would not have protected your safety" and might embolden the person they were looking for. FBI analysts described the unknown shooter as "someone kind of on the fringes."
The silence was hard on the city. Residents, reporters and officials kept asking whether one person was responsible. Assembly member Eric Croft said many constituents had asked him whether Anchorage had a serial killer, and that people were "naturally concerned." Some neighborhoods organized community patrols, and Alaska Public Media reported that many residents changed their routines. A woman who lived near one of the scenes wrote to the mayor that the city's response had been inadequate. She stopped using the trails alone after dark.
Shortly before 4:30 a.m. on Saturday, November 12, 2016, a cab driver in downtown Anchorage reported that a passenger had left without paying, and officers were told to look out for him. Officer Arn Salao, who had joined the department in October 2011 and worked patrol, saw a man walking alone and drove up to ask whether he had seen anything. Police said later that the man did not match the description of the passenger and that the meeting was pure chance.
Dashboard camera video released in May 2017 shows Salao following the man and calling out, "Sir, Anchorage police, can I get you to stop?" The man kept walking. According to the police account, when Salao spoke again over his patrol car's loudspeaker, the man turned and fired. Lieutenant McKinnon said Salao had done nothing to provoke him. Salao, wounded, returned fire, and Sergeant Marc Patzke, who supervised the K-9 unit, arrived and fired as well. The man was pronounced dead at the scene. Chief Tolley called the attack "an ambush."
On November 15 police identified the dead man as James Dale Ritchie, 40. He was 6 feet 4 inches tall and had been wearing a camouflage jacket. There were no immediate signs that he had been drinking or using drugs. The unpaid cab fare had nothing to do with him.
Salao was seriously wounded. He underwent two emergency surgeries that day and was moved out of intensive care within days; Tolley called him "a fighter" and said he "immediately returned gunfire and physically fought off his assailant." In a video posted by the department, Salao thanked the community, his colleagues and his family. On November 17 Senator Lisa Murkowski recognized his "bravery and heroism" on the floor of the U.S. Senate. A year later he was back at work, though not yet on patrol, and told KTUU he hoped to return to the street and credited the community's support for his recovery.
The department's first release said the state Office of Special Prosecutions would decide whether the officers' use of force was justified and that the department's internal inspections office would decide whether they had followed policy. Both officers were placed on routine administrative leave. Police declined to release video of the gunfight itself, citing the privacy of Salao, of the witnesses, and of Ritchie's estate.
Within days, the state crime laboratory confirmed that the revolver Ritchie carried that morning had been used in all five summer killings. Chief Tolley announced the link at a news conference on Tuesday, November 15. Detectives had met the victims' families that morning, and in some cases the night before, to tell them first. Mayor Ethan Berkowitz said police had briefed him only the day before, that he had deliberately stayed out of the investigation, and that he did not think the police had been wrong to keep the link quiet.
At first police were careful to say that the gun was not the same as proof that Ritchie had fired it each time. On November 16, McKinnon and Captain Miller took questions in a live video session on the department's Facebook page and laid out what they had. Ritchie's driver's license photograph closely resembled the FBI composite from July 29. A witness said Ritchie had been seen with Thompson's yellow bicycle and had taken it home, and McKinnon said interviews and data from Ritchie's phone showed he got rid of the bicycle after police published its description. Police also said Ritchie had been following news reports about the killings. On that evidence, police said, they had enough to name Ritchie as the gunman on July 29 and to close the Thompson case. They said they did not yet have evidence placing him at the two double killings, and those cases remained open.
Police said Salao had "saved lives," and that they believed more people might have died if the encounter had not happened.
Investigators also looked beyond Anchorage. They examined Ritchie's movements in Alaska and elsewhere over several years, including Virginia and Nevada, and the FBI compared his history with unsolved killings in places he had lived or visited, using its national Violent Criminal Apprehension Program database. Further ballistic analysis was carried out at the FBI's facilities in Quantico, Virginia. No connection to any other case was announced.
For Trey Thompson's father, the November announcement brought a second shock. Six weeks after his son's death he had looked at the police sketch and seen no one the family knew. Then he learned that the man police said had killed his son was the boy who had once lived on and off in his mother's house. He told KTUU he did not know whether Ritchie would have recognized Trey, or whether it would have mattered. Police said there was no sign that Ritchie knew who Thompson was.
After five more months of work with the FBI's Safe Streets task force and its Behavioral Analysis Unit, the Anchorage Police Department issued a brief statement on April 26, 2017. Spokeswoman Renee Oistad said homicide detectives had established "sufficient probable cause" that Ritchie was responsible for the five homicides of summer 2016, that he had possessed the revolver before any of the killings, and that he had acted alone. All investigations related to Ritchie were closed. She thanked the public, the Alaska State Troopers and the FBI.
Neither the police nor the FBI would say more. They declined to describe a motive, any relationship between Ritchie and the victims, what he had been doing in Anchorage before, during and after the killings, how they had reached their conclusion, or whether he was suspected in other deaths. Oistad said the agencies did not want to discuss or compromise their investigative techniques, and each agency referred questions to the other. Alaska Public Media reported that the victims appeared to have been chosen largely at random.
In May 2017 the Daily News set the case beside that of Joshua Wade, who admitted to killing five people between 1994 and 2007; Ritchie, it wrote, was the city's most prolific suspect in multiple killings since Wade.
Every statement tying Ritchie to the five deaths comes from police. He was never charged, never had a lawyer answer the evidence, and never stood trial, so the killings are attributed to him, not proven against him in court.
Police were open about some of the evidence: the ballistic match between the gun he carried and all five deaths, his possession of that gun before July, his resemblance to the composite sketch, the witness account and phone data about Thompson's bicycle, and his height and clothing as seen on surveillance video. For the two double killings they said little beyond the gun, and in November 2016 they said plainly that they did not yet have evidence placing him at those scenes. The April 2017 statement did not say what had changed.
No motive was ever given. Police found no link between Ritchie and any of the five people who died, and none among the victims themselves. Whether he knew that the young man who died on July 29 was the son of his boyhood friend is not known; police said there was no indication that he did. Questions about other possible cases, in Alaska or in the states where he had lived, were never publicly answered.
The record also contains small discrepancies. Police estimates of the gunman's height on the July 29 video were reported as 6 feet 3 inches by one outlet and 6 feet 4 inches by another. Updates added to the department's own homicide releases in November 2016 gave Ritchie's age as 30, while every other police statement and news report gave it as 40.
1994: Ritchie graduates from East Anchorage High School, where he played on state championship football and basketball teams.
1998: Convicted in a drug case after police find a handgun and crack cocaine; suspended sentence and probation.
1999: Sentenced to 18 months after a driving case.
2005: First-degree burglary; sentenced to two years.
November 2007: Released from custody.
About 2013: Living with his parents in Broadway, Virginia.
February 2016: Returns to Anchorage.
July 3, 2016: Brianna Foisy, 20, and Jason Netter Sr., 41, are found shot dead in Anchorage.
July 29, 2016: Treyveonkindell Thompson, 21, is shot dead in Anchorage; the crime lab soon matches the bullets to the July 3 weapon.
August 28, 2016: Bryant "Brie" DeHusson, 25, and Kevin Turner, 34, are found shot dead in Anchorage; the same revolver is matched.
August 30, 2016: Police urge caution in isolated places late at night.
September 11, 2016: Police release an FBI composite sketch of a person of interest in the Thompson case; the FBI offers a $10,000 reward.
November 12, 2016: Police say Ritchie fires on Officer Arn Salao downtown; Salao and Sergeant Marc Patzke return fire, and Ritchie is killed.
November 15, 2016: Police name Ritchie and announce that his revolver was used in all five killings.
November 16, 2016: Police say they have enough evidence to close the Thompson case; the other cases stay open.
November 17, 2016: Senator Lisa Murkowski honors Salao on the Senate floor.
December 2016: Anchorage ends the year with a record number of homicides; Brianna Foisy's mother starts a project in her name.
April 26, 2017: Police say they have probable cause that Ritchie was responsible for all five deaths and acted alone, and close the investigations.
May 2017: Dashboard camera video of the moments before the shooting is released.
November 2017: Salao is back at work, hoping to return to patrol.