i m doing everything i can to keep this gentleman on the phone because at that point he still hadn t given me his name. the caller was using an untraceable calling card and on the phone he seemed nervous. he said if i told you what i know the shooter s going to know that i told you. that first call lasted more than an hour, but the cops learned neither the name of the caller nor the killer. he was still afraid to give us any more information so i m doing everything i can to gain his trust, just to keep talking to him. the informant agreed to call again the next day and this time he was more forthcoming. he started telling me that i needed to look for a girlfriend of the shooter that was from las vegas. he kept saying the shooter s where i am. the caller told beach that he was a retired air force serviceman and played in a band with the shooter. the shooter, he said, was his best friend. i asked him again to call the next day and he said i have to work, but i can call
for nine months the mystery of who killed russel douglas and why weighed on his family. then as it often does in this story a ringing phone brought momentous news. i got the call from the prosecutor who said i m telling you first that they thought they knew who it was. jim huden s name meant nothing to russel s family, but the name of huden s girlfriend peggy thomas did. peggy thomas is the owner of the home that russel and brenna rented that they had had a verbal agreement that they were going to buy if they could come up with the capital. given that brenna was the named beneficiary on russel s life insurance policies, russel s family wondered if his death was in some way part of a real estate deal.
beach said are says he didn t know if the caller was the killer or someone related to the killer, but he knew he didn t want to lose it. i m doing everything i can to keep this gentleman on the phone because at that point he still hadn t given me his name. the caller was using an untraceable calling card and on the phone he seemed nervous. he said if i told you what i know the shooter s going to know that i told you. that first call lasted more than an hour, but the cops learned neither the name of the caller nor the killer. he was still afraid to give us any more information so i m doing everything i can to gain his trust, just to keep talking to him. the informant agreed to call again the next day and this time he was more forthcoming. he started telling me that i needed to look for a girlfriend of the shooter that was from las vegas. he kept saying the shooter s where i am. the caller told beach that he was a retired air force
probably committed suicide so i was in shock and realized i needed to get over to the island for brenna and the kids. an alaskan bush pilot deliver the ared the news to russel s father jim who was in the wilderness hunting and unreachable by phone. he said your son s dead sxhi to say, of course, which one? and russel and i mean, he didn t know a whole lot about anything other than he knew it was important to get me out of there. russel s brother matt was the last to know. he, too, had been out of cell phone range for several days while vacationing in british columbia. we drove across the border and my phone had a seizure and it started buzzing for every voice mail message and text message that had been sent and it was matt, call me. matt, call me. matt, call me. within days of his death,
recruited russel s killers? the family couldn t know for sure, but that question now complicated their relationships with brenna and the grandchildren. and we tried to be as supportive as we could for the kids, but i know she listens to all of their conversations. so it s a very controlled conversation. when it comes to awkward telephone conversations none could have been more strained than the ones that took place between jim huden s lover and jim huden s wife after he fled to mexico. you call her first or she called you? no. she called me. what did she want to talk about? well, she wanted to know how much the cops had been bugging me and what they knew and if i had heard from jim or anything like that. and you, what? told her? i told her what the cops had said. i didn t tell her anything about jim. why did you not hang up the phone?