On a Monday in March 1983, in Wichita Falls, Texas, Alaska state troopers sat across from an Air Force technical sergeant named Thomas Richard Bunday, thirty-four, and after a long interview he told them he had killed five women and girls around Fairbanks between 1979 and 1981. He described each killing in detail. The troopers were more than three thousand miles outside their jurisdiction and had no warrant, so they could not hold him. They asked Fairbanks for one. It was issued the next afternoon, Tuesday, March 15. Seventy-five minutes later, riding his motorcycle on a highway about forty miles from Wichita Falls, Bunday turned into the oncoming lane and hit a dump truck head on. He died almost at once. The death was ruled a suicide.
He was born in Nashville, Tennessee, on September 28, 1948, the younger of two sons; his brother, Ralph, was fifteen years older. His father, a World War II veteran with mental illness, was violent toward his wife and his younger son, and when he died in 1963 Thomas refused to go to the funeral and ran away for several days. He did well in school and had friends. After graduating in 1966 he married his high school girlfriend, and in 1967 he joined the Air Force, where he rose to technical sergeant. He served in Southeast Asia in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and in that time his wife had a son by another man. They stayed together and had a daughter, but the marriage was strained. In the mid-1970s he was posted to Eielson Air Force Base, southeast of Fairbanks, and began seeing a therapist.
On August 29, 1979, Glinda Sodemann, nineteen, of Fairbanks, went missing. Two months later a boy out hunting found her body in a gravel pit off the highway twenty-three miles south of town, lying on her back, fully clothed. She had been strangled and shot in the face. On June 13, 1980, Doris Oehring, eleven, vanished from the town of North Pole. Her bicycle was found in a ditch. Her brother told police that a few days before, he had seen her talking to a man in a blue car who wore an Air Force uniform, and he helped them build a composite. Her skull was not found until August 1986, three years after Bunday's death, in a remote part of the base.
On January 31, 1981, Marlene Peters, of Tanana, set out to hitchhike from Fairbanks to Anchorage and disappeared. Five weeks later Wendy Wilson, sixteen, vanished on her way to see her boyfriend; she, too, had been strangled and shot in the head. In May, Lori King disappeared, last seen walking in Fairbanks and possibly hitchhiking; accounts give her age as sixteen, eighteen or nineteen. Peters's body was found shortly before King vanished. In October 1981 King's remains were found near Eielson, close to where Wilson had been left. All five were within about ten miles of the base.
After King was found, the FBI joined a task force of the Alaska State Troopers, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, the Army's criminal investigators at Fort Wainwright, and the Fairbanks and North Pole police. The FBI's profile described the likely killer as single, living alone, unable to hold a job, and a civilian. Bunday was none of those things: a married father of two with a steady military career. What found him was a sweep of everyone who had served at Eielson and been transferred after the disappearances stopped. He had moved in September 1981 to Sheppard Air Force Base at Wichita Falls. By February 1982 he was one of three names left on the list, all men with a record of violence toward women, and he owned a blue car.
In March 1983 investigators searched his house and the trunk of his car and found evidence tying him to the Fairbanks killings, and he confessed. He named psychological problems and sexual complexes as his reasons. Texas investigators also questioned him about the murder of Cassandra Goodwin, a woman from the Wichita Falls area, and he denied it angrily. Alaska investigators said afterward that they were convinced he had killed the five and that he had refused the Texas killing because Texas could have put him to death. With his death the case closed without a charge, a trial or a verdict; the five killings rest on his confession and on the evidence found in his house.