S1: E28 – The Mountain Man Murders, Part 1

Most people who live in the wilderness are prepared to run into wild animals, so they're watchful, but nobody expects a human predator to be hiding behind a tree and start shooting at you.

When a man was found dead and his wife was missing, the Alaskan wilderness turned into a dangerous game of catch me if you can.

There are helicopters buzzing overhead every day for a.

Month, and the man hunt led investigators to a tent right next to the victim's dead body.

For a guy who chose to camp right near the corpse. He looked very suspicious.

But did the police have the wrong suspect?

This just seemed like two big coincidence for the troopers to swallow.

And by the time the police made an arrest, no one knew who or what to believe.

Everywhere you look, this story had a strange but fascinating aspects.

Today, we're North of the Border and Julitna, Alaska for part one of the Mountain Man Murders. I'm Sloan Glass and this is American homicide. And just to note that this episode contains some graphic content. Please take care while listening. Rick Berry and de b Reehoer were newlyweds who lived and worked just outside of Anchorage, Alaska, but on weekends the two spent a lot of time at their cabin in the remote woods of Chulitna.

Chulitna is not a town. It's a designated wilderness area about one hundred and fifteen miles north of Anchorage or forty miles north of the town of Talkitna.

True crime author Robin Bearfield wrote Murder and Mystery in the Last Frontier.

The Chulitna River runs through it, the Talkeitna Mountains are near there, and it is just a very wild area. There are no roads that run through Chulitna.

Living there is literally and figuratively off the grid.

Coming off the grid in Alaska means you are responsible for your electricity. You're responsible for your sewer. You're responsible for getting wood to keep warm, and for getting fuel if you need fuel for a ATV or to run a generator.

Toltna is so far removed from the rest of Alaska that there are only two ways to get there. One is the more traditional route, the Parks Highway.

The Parks Highway is the highway that connects Anchorage to Fairbanks, and you can drive along the highway and pull off the road and then either hike or take an ATV into your cabin. The other way to get into Chiulitna is by the Alaska Railroad.

The Alaska Railroad not only runs freight trains but also operates passenger trains.

The railroad runs a train on a particular schedule, it varies from season to season, but it goes into this area and it does what is known as a whistle stop or a flag stop, which means that either the train knows they have a passenger on board that wants to get off at a certain stop, or the engineer sees people standing beside the tracks and he stops there.

That train line not only is important for getting from point A to point B, but it's also how locals get their food and supplies. So that gives you an idea of just how far remote Huletna is and how different life is for people who live there.

The people who live there live off the grid. They like their peace and quiet, and they're very self sufficient.

And that summed up brick Berry and Debbie Reehor.

He had lived in Alaska his entire life, except for two stints in the military in Vietnam, but he had no desire to leave. He loved it here. Debbie was good in the wilderness. She liked to hunt, she liked to fish, she loved to get outdoors. So they made a good pair, and their personalities offset each other.

Rick was type AI and Debbie was reserved and quiet. After years of dating, Rick finally popped the question to Debbie and the two forty somethings got married in nineteen ninety five.

Rick was a confirmed lifelong bachelor, but friends and families say they fell hard for each other.

The two loved spending long weekends at their cabin in Chulitna, and just before Memorial Day weekend in nineteen ninety seven, that's what they did. Their plan was always the same. Rick would drive up on Thursday to get the cabin ready, and then after work on Friday, Debbie would drive up a meeting and listen to this inventor from their home and anchorage. The drive was a few hours normal. Then they would park their cars at a lot along the

Rick and Debbie's CA happened was eight miles from the road, so you know, it's quite a waste to travel after you get out of your car.

Door to door. It was about a four hour track for a long weekend of relaxation in the woods. But something happened in Cheltna that Memorial Day weekend because Rick and Debbie made it up there and then vanished.

When Debbie didn't show up for work on the Tuesday after Memorial Day, her boss became very concerned because that was unlike Debbie. She was very dependable and if she was going to be late for work or have to miss work for some reason, she always called.

Rick also was a no show at work that Tuesday, and nobody could get in touch with either of them, so Debbie's boss called Debbie's brother.

Debbie's brother was a little worried about them running into bears because they went missing right when the bears are coming out of hibernation, so he was concerned about that. But Rick and Debbie were smart and knew how to handle the outdoors, so it was unlikely that they were going to do something to get themselves in trouble, so

Rick and Debbie's border colleagues appeared to be scared and hungry, as if they'd been left alone for an extended period of time, and there were some other things inside the cabin that stood out to Debbie's brother.

He found a plate of cheese on the table, cheese and crackers, and an open beer, and he said that was not like Rick or Debbie either, because they were very good housekeepers, so he felt certain something was wrong. As soon as he arrived at the cabin.

Rick and Debbie's ATVs were also missing, so he waited around the cabin hoping the two would return, but they didn't.

And the next morning he decided he'd go out look around a little bit, so about two miles from the cabin, he found Rick's ATV on the edge of a creek, but there was no sign of Rick, and then he was really worried, so he called the Alaska State Troopers and said, I know it hasn't been forty eight hours, but there's something wrong here, and the troopers responded immediately.

Rick Bery served two tours in Vietnam, so this wasn't someone the troopers expected to get lost in the woods or attacked by wildlife. A search crew including fifteen Alaska State troopers and multiple tracking dogs fanned out around Chulitna, but finding Rick and Debbie was a challenge. It was summertime in Alaska, meaning the forest was thick, the ground

The troopers found Rick fairly quickly as soon as they began looking. He wasn't far from his ATV. He was in the creek in a deep hole.

On the Thursday after Memorial Day, troopers found Rick Fury's body in a creek some two hundred yards away from his ATV and two miles from his cabin.

And he had been shot once in the head, execution style.

It was a gruesome and puzzling discovery for troopers. Murders rarely happened in the Alaska wilderness, especially an execution style murder, and that's when the focus shifted to Rick's wife, Debbie.

They didn't find Debbie's body or her ATV, so she immediately became a suspect in the case. To the troopers, that looked like this could have been a love spat that went off the rails and she shot him and then took off.

But no one wanted to believe that Debbie Rehort, the person her coworkers called sweetheart, would do any harm towards Rick. If anything, it might have been the other way around.

Rick was a big guy who could have a hot temper. He lost his temper fairly easily, and he didn't hold back from telling people what he thought.

People described Rick as stubborn and gruff and said he sometimes questioned authority. In fact, that's how he got in trouble with the Feds back in the eighties.

He tried the butt heads with the irs and it didn't work out so well for him, so he did about eleven months in jail, not too long after he and Debbie were beginning to date. But she hung in there with him and waited for him to get out of jail, and they moved on with their lives.

The mystery over what happened to Rick and Debbie that memorial. They weekend baffle troopers and people who lived in the area.

I think this is a big story in Alaska and elsewhere because this is an unusual way to die in the wilderness. You don't expect somebody in the Alaska wilderness to be shot by another human execution style.

As search crews continued to comb through the miles of forest in the area looking for Debbie, investigators searched for clues. They focused heavily on the railroad tracks that cut through Chulitna. The railroad has their own police force who patrol those tracks. There were no reports of anything suspicious.

There were electrical workers working along the railroad tracks in the area. They were installing fiber optic cable, and the troopers questioned them and they said there was a campsite in the area near where they found Rick's body.

And those workers reported hearing gunshots coming from that area.

The campsite was kind of a mess that looked like it had been used fairly recently, and whoever was staying there had made a makeshift flag flying a pair of women's underwear.

So we have a mysterious campsite near the creek where Rick's dead body turned up. And not only that, but there is also the bizarre detail of a pair of women's underwear hanging on a tree branch. What's that about? Alaska State troopers also had a lot of questions. The seasons in Alaska are extreme. After a harsh winter, things quickly change during the months of May. That's when Alaska

There's ice on the lake. The next week the ice is gone, and the following week the leaves are out.

Bill Astell was the assistant District attorney in Palmer, Alaska.

Spring comes in May end. By Memorial Day, it's eighteen hours of daylight and summer is underway. Most people around Memorial Day will take an extra day off and have a three or four day weekend and get things ready for summer.

And that's what husband and wife Rick Berry and Debbie Rehort did over Memorial Day weekend in nineteen ninety seven. They headed to their cabin in the rural Alaskan area of Chulitna, but they never returned.

Their four wheelers were gone and they had just seemingly disappeared.

An exhaustive search through the remote area by foot was followed by an aerial search, and that's when a helicopter pilot noticed something.

When the troopers are out there with the helicopter, the helicopter pilot is getting ready to leave and does one more circle and out of the corner of his eye, he catches a glint of sunlight off something a beaver pond, and that's where Rickberry's body was found. He was killed with a shot to the head from a twenty two rifle, and it appears that his body would have floated down stream, settled to the bottom, and probably would not have been found but for the coincidental sighting.

The forty eight year old had taken a single bullet to the head, execution style. Meanwhile, Rick's wife, Debbie was nowhere to be found.

He's dead, she's missing. She becomes another suspect because it could be some sort of a domestic dispute situation, and they're pulling out all the stops at this point to bring more investigative resources to search about for her or for any clue as to where she might have gone.

Since Chulitna didn't have a police force of their own, the Alaska State Troopers handled the investigation, but getting statements wasn't easy because there were only a dozen or so cabins in the area.

There was very sparsely populated, and the people that had cabins there tended to be recreational cabins or there were retirees, but very few full time residents.

With so few people in the area, investigators then turned to local railroad employees for help, because those railroad tracks were how most people made their way in and out of Chulitna.

They learned in interviewing the railroad personnel that somebody had seen somebody walking in the area carrying a rifle and it turned out to be a person that was going fishing, and they found traces of his campsite and his use of a twenty two firearm.

And here's the crazy part. This person had set up camp right where they found Rick's body. Enter twenty one year old Gavin Saha. He came forward to investigators and told them how over Memorial Day weekend he was backpacking along the railroad tracks through Tulitna.

Gavin Saha had been walking in the area carrying a rifle and had been shooting his twenty two twenty two rifle was the murder weapon.

This was a huge lead. Gavin Saha owned the same type of gun as the murder weapon, not to mention, he had camped virtually right next to Rick's dead body. The troopers felt like they were making progress, but Gavin denied having any idea he set up his tent near a murder scene. The troopers pushed back because at that time of the year in Alaska, the sun merely dips below the horizon and then comes back up. That means

It was just inconceivable, and so he became sort of the prime suspect as they were sorting out what actually happened.

One thing to remember is Gavin was the one who went to the police.

There is a young man who came forward to us and said, you know, I was out in that area. I was camping and fishing and so forth.

Captain Don Savage was part of the team of Alaskan State troopers who investigated.

He was camped right along the railroad tracks. I think it was within a couple of hundred yards of where Rick was found. And it's four wheeler is.

How keep in mind, Chulitna is not easily accessible unless you came by train or ATV, neither of which this suspected.

His mom aparently dropped him off somewhere so he could hike up in the railroad tracks, and that's where he was camping, and he had a twenty two rifle with him, and we knew that a murder weapon had been twenty two.

Gavin explained that during his hiking excursion, he quickly found himself in over his head. He mistakenly left his map at home and got lost. A day and a half into his track, Gavin said he stumbled upon a four wheeler. Troopers believe it belonged to Debbie. It was partially submerged in a creek and looked to be stuck in the mud. Off the back of it, he noticed a backpack. After fishing the bag off the four wheeler, Gavin found a purse, some clothes, and some other things. Inside the bag.

He had found the pepsi and some chewing gum.

I believe Gavin told troopers he took that two liter bottle of pepsi and.

Gum, but he denied taking anything else, and he denied seeing Rick's body.

For every question to troopers asked, Gavin had a reasonable answer, and that's when they zeroed in on Gavitt's campsite.

His campsite was, I guess, notoriously messy, and for whatever reason, he had a pair of red underwear along with him.

Flying on a tree branch above Gavin's campsite was a pair of women's underwear. The underwear waved in the wind, kind of like a flag. But Gavin told investigators he had an explanation for that as well.

He had gone out there to hike and fish, and he had brought this pair of his girlfriends or ex girlfriend's panties along with him.

For whatever reason, they thought it would be humorous to put that out there so that passengers on the train could see the red.

Underwear as they went by.

So we have a young man who set up camp near a dead body he claimed he didn't know was there, and a pair of women's underwear that he u as a flag at the campsite. Keep in mind the victim's wife, Debbie was still missing.

It's almost too cwfered at this point in time.

But Gavin Saha told investigators he didn't know Rick Berry or Debbie Reehort, and more importantly, he had nothing to do with Rick's murder. He was all circumstantial.

He said, it was the wrong place at the wrong time.

That's assistant Da Billi Stell.

And that didn't add up and didn't make sense with the other things he had said.

So what would have been Gavin's motive to kill the troopers didn't know and we're still questioning him. When a disturbing update rolled in, investigators had finally located Debbie and the news wasn't good.

She was shot and her body just dragged off into the woods and with grass and sticks. When they found her body, it was clear that they had both been killed by shots to the head and appeared that they were both likely killed at the same time in the same place.

Nearly a week after Rick's body turned up in a creek, troopers found Debbie's body along that same creek, and just like her husband, Debbie had taken a fatal gunshot to the head, and that's where the similarities ended. Here's Captain Don Savage. Again.

She was found in the brush. She was naked from the waist down, which is not normal for it if you're traveling or any of those circumstances in a remote area like that, So that raised some concerns about sexual assault.

Debbie's body was turned over to the medical examiner, who confirmed the trooper's worst fears. Debbie had been sexually assaulted.

Determination as I recall us, it was quite likely that it was postmortem that she had that sexual contact.

On the same weekend Rick Berry and Debbie Reehor were murdered, a young Higer named Gavin Saha set up his campsite a few yards away from Rick's body.

He was in the place at the time and could easily have been the perpetrator.

That's Assistant District Attorney Bill Stell.

Gavin Saha had some things in his past that made the troopers pay attention to him.

Twenty one year old Gavin Saha was the trooper's main suspect, and then investigators were still processing the discovery of Debbie Rehor. Troopers found her body along the same creek that they had found her husband. Debbie had contusions and abrasions on her legs and was naked from the waist down.

There were bullet wounds and signs of sexual assault, and it was a very tragic situation.

Gavin's fingerprints were also all over a backpack that contained Debbie's wallet and clothing, but Gavin denied killing Rick and Debbie.

She was raped, shot, and her body just dragged off into the woods and she was left there, partially undressed, covered with grass and sticks. They found the DNA.

Did that DNA belong to Gavin Saha?

They went and asked him for a DNA sample and got his DNA. It didn't match.

Even with all that circumstantial evidence, Gavin was cleared. It was a major blow to the investigation that was about to get some help from a national TV program.

Now from our Washington Crime Center, John woolfsh.

Good evening, Our first case tonight is outrageous.

It's about a man who worked.

Hard with a killer and a rapist on the loose in the Alaskan wilderness, and the original suspect cleared. The television show America's Most Wanted got involved. The show sent a team to start filming near to Litna. By then, the Alaska State Troopers had turned their attention towards someone else.

Rick and Debby's nearest neighbor, about a mile away from their cabin, was Paul Stavinard.

Author Robin Bearfield wrote about the case, and I will mention that you'll hear Paul's last name pronounced a couple different ways. For the sake of simplicity, we'll call him Stavinyard.

Paul Stavinord was just kind of a backwoods man who had a big bushy beard, long hair, wire rim glasses.

Unlike Rickendebbie, Paul Stavinard lived in his true Litna cabin year round. He had spent twenty years working for the Alaska Railroad, but hurt his back. That's when he quit his job and focused on his artwork.

He liked to make little pewter animals, and he carved intracut flutes. And he not only carved these flutes, but he played the flute very well, and he wrote flute music. And he had done three albums of flute music as a matter of fact. And he seemed like a peaceful, easy going type.

So why were the troopers focusing on this peace loving and flute plane guy.

When the troopers began talking to Rick and Debbie's other neighbors in the area. They told them that Rick Anddebbie got along with everyone except for Paul Stavinord. Paul and Rick, in particular, had a very contentious relationship.

The troopers learned that Paul and Rick were not friends now. Their relationship soured when Rick accused Paul Savignyard of stealing things from his cabin.

And we know that Rick wasn't the kind of person to back away from a fight, so he had a reputation for being a bit of a hothead.

So the troopers questioned Paul, but Paul said that Memorial Day weekend, when Rick and Debbie were murdered, he wasn't even in town. He said he had left his cabin in Chulitna and traveled some four hours north.

He said he'd gone to Fairbanks for the weekend, and he even gave them the names of restaurants where he stopped, places where he stopped to get guessed or stopped to get snacks.

But here's where Paul had trouble backing up his alibi.

He didn't have any receipts from the restaurants where he said he visited on his way to Fairbanks or the gas stations, but that's because he claims he paid for everything in cash.

And this is where it's important to learn some backstory on Paul Savignyard.

We all lived the life is close to the mountain man as anybody we have in Alaska.

That's Paul's friend Keith Baja.

He was comfortable in a wilderness setting, built his cabin and lived off the grid if you will. No electricity, no television, none of the things that most of US Americans.

Are used to as part of Paul's mountain man lifestyle. He didn't wear a watch, he told investigators. He also didn't use credit cards, which is why none of those businesses Paul visited over a Memorial Day weekend had a record of him. But the more the troopers looked into Paul's story, the more holes they found. For example, he claimed to have had a steak for lunch at a restaurant.

I don't believe Paul would do something like that.

Then an eyewitness came forward. A railroad employee claimed he saw Paul driving a four wheeler in Chewlitna on the Saturday before Memorial Day. And remember Paul claimed he was in Fairbanks that day.

He said he was out of town. And the more they investigated, the less that panned out.

That's assistant da Billi Stell so get.

The end to look as if he was fabricating his whole absence.

By that time, the troopers were focused squarely on Paul Stavinyord. And if you remember, Debbie Reehor had been sexually assaulted and there was DNA evidence on her, so they asked Paul to provide a DNA sample.

He refused, which heightened their suspicion, so they got a warrant.

That's when the investigation switched gears.

Paul disappeared.

His friend Keith Beja was concerned.

They were looking for Paul, it couldn't find him. I think panic may have kicked in and he he went to where he was comfortable, the woods. That doesn't surprise me. He's a quality woodsman.

And for the next few weeks Paul managed to hide from the authorities.

I don't know what he.

Did during that period of time other than just survive out there.

Wanted Signs with Paul's picture went up all over the area, but Alaska State troopers said the person they're looking for didn't match that photo. They believed Paul had cut his long hair, shaved off his big bushy beard, and hopped a freight train out of town.

He also worked for the railroad, so he was very familiar with how to hop a freak train, how to get on, get off, how to avoid detection. So we got a search warrant to search his cabin.

Inside Paul Stavinjord's cabin, troopers first came across a handful of twenty two rifles. Then they found a journal in the most unlikely of spots.

It had hidden this somewhere in the rafters of his house. It was one of the troopers climbing around up there that found it, hidden in a crack between a couple of boards.

What Paul rode inside? That journal contained some graphic information about his relationship with his neighbor, Debbie Rehort.

They were having consensual sex.

Paul's journal spelled out details of his affair with Debbie.

Everything about it became inconsistent with what people knew about Rick and Debbie and what they knew about the relationship with Stavingord himself.

Were Debbie and Paul having an affair? Or was it Pau's a tent to create an alibi? And if it was his attempt to create an alibi, why hide the journal? By then, the Alaska State Troopers feared that Paul was long gone and had possibly entered Canada. But then, nearly a month after Paul disappeared, he got in touch with the troopers.

I believe America's most wanted was getting ready to run a special on him when he turned himself in.

Paul had hired a high profile defense lawyer and said he was ready to talk with investigators. Here's his friend, Keith Beja.

He did apparently get to a telephone after several weeks and talked to a friend who was responsible for getting him connected with the attorney, and the attorney convinced him he needed to turn himself in.

Paul Stavignord was booked and charged with the murders of Rick Berry and his wife, Debbie Reehor.

You know, I just didn't really accept it. Paul's not the kind of guy that ambusious people or shoots people, or or that he's very safe with firearms. Paul was special in that he was likable, not just to me, but to everybody.

Paul Stabannord claimed he was an innocent man, and he said there was a reason he hopped a freight train and left town.

He had had unfortunate experience with law enforcement prior to this event, so trusting policeman was probably not his first reaction.

So what was this unfortunate experience with law enforcement that caused Paul to go on the run and who killed Rick and Debbie. I never could quite make a decision as to whether he was a dangerous man or whether something snapped. It ultimately led to one of the most hotly contested trials Alaska has ever seen.

How can somebody go from being a neighbor to being a double murderer at the flip of a switch.

And when it was all over, the lawyers would switch sides.

This is a travesty of justice.

I'm slow glass join me for the bizarre conclusion of the Mountain Man murderers. That's next time on American Homicide. You can contact the American Homicide Team by emailing us at American Homicide Pod at gmail dot com. That's American Homicide Pod at gmail dot com. American Homicide is hosted and written by me Sloane Glass and is a production of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group, in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The show is executive produced by