BONUS: Gustafsons (Killer Siblings)

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Speaker 3 We're bringing you a special bonus episode today from Oxygen's hit series, Killer Siblings, returning with all new episodes tomorrow, Friday, December 3rd at 8-7 Central.

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Speaker 8 Enjoy.

Speaker 9 The explosion itself had almost completely destroyed the home.

Speaker 10 One of the neighbors said it felt like an earthquake.

Speaker 9 Who would want to mail a bomb to a 19-year-old kid named George Kerr?

Speaker 11 George started to hang out with Raymond Shealy and Doug Gutson.

Speaker 12 Their interesting guns brought them together.

Speaker 13 Just disaffected and wild, feral teenagers.

Speaker 11 They can't be surprised that someone died as a result of that gunshot.

Speaker 13 I usually wouldn't ride out my friend.

Speaker 9 Doug's older sister, Peggy, was firmly convinced that Doug was innocent.

Speaker 15 The people with the best motive also had the best alibi.

Speaker 16 How can he even think that he could talk his sister into doing this?

Speaker 15 And she did it.

Speaker 15 Trugiak is a rural community

Speaker 15 It's located approximately 15 miles out of Anchorage, a relatively safe area.

Speaker 15 No one was prepared for what happened that day.

Speaker 9 A neighbor hears the explosion, calls the Chugiak Volunteer Fire Department. They don't know what's happened.
Initially, they thought it was a natural gas explosion.

Speaker 17 I just heard a loud explosion and it rocked her house. And then a couple minutes later, my five-year-old had looked out the window and saw some smoke.

Speaker 9 The explosion itself had almost completely destroyed the home. There's debris everywhere.

Speaker 11 When first responders arrived, neighbors quickly pointed them to the home of 44-year-old David Kerr and his 34-year-old wife, Michelle.

Speaker 11 They were both pillars of the community, and neighbors feared they were in that house when it blew up.

Speaker 9 The emergency responders are calling out, is there anybody home? Is there anybody here?

Speaker 9 Unfortunately, David Kerr was killed by the explosion.

Speaker 9 Michelle Kerr, amazingly, never lost consciousness. So she hears them yelling.
She manages to physically sit up out of all this rubble that she's covered with.

Speaker 9 She has a piece of the door jamb sticking out of her body cavity. She's got all this.
blown-in insulation stuck to her. She tells the emergency responders it was a package that had exploded.

Speaker 14 When they realized that this was a murder by a mail bomb, it was a federal case.

Speaker 14 And that's when the postal inspectors got involved.

Speaker 15 I arrive on scene. There was considerable damage exterior to the house.
The front window had been blown out.

Speaker 15 One of the neighbors described the blast as it felt like an earthquake. The male victim, David Kerr, was blown.
back across the kitchen away from the counter where he had opened the device. He was

Speaker 15 pretty well mangled from the blast.

Speaker 20 The explosive fire had changed the shape of his face, so he looked like he'd been windswept or sandblasted.

Speaker 20 I assigned one of my team members to go with the body to the coroners for an autopsy and collect evidence from the body.

Speaker 15 We started setting up for major recovery of evidence on the scene.

Speaker 9 They bring Michelle to Alaska Regional Hospital here in Anchorage and immediately start working on her.

Speaker 9 She has between 2,000 and 3,000 individual projectiles, pieces of metal, glass, ceramics, wood, driven into her body and into her face at supersonic speed.

Speaker 9 They're working on her frantically, trying to save her life. The Anchorage Police Department responds to the hospital, and an officer put a little cassette recorder next to her head.

Speaker 9 to ask Michelle questions, which everybody expected to be a dying declaration.

Speaker 21 Michelle, there's some police officers here.

Speaker 21 Just repeat what you think happened. Well, we got a

Speaker 21 package

Speaker 21 for George of the state of Alaska.

Speaker 15 The female victim revealed that the parcel was addressed to her stepson, George Kerr.

Speaker 9 Who would want to mail a bomb? to an 18-19 year old kid named George Kerr.

Speaker 11 George Kerr was born March 2nd, 1972. He grew up in the rural town of Sugiak, small suburb of Anchorage, Alaska.

Speaker 16 In Alaska at that time, you have this pipeline boom.

Speaker 22 Suddenly, all this new money starts coming into Anchorage.

Speaker 22 Sort of Peters out in the 90s, and you get this generation of what I call them bad seeds, just disaffected and wild, just lost kids.

Speaker 12 I've known George Kerr since elementary school. George lived right up the road from me.
We were good friends growing up. We worked at JD's barbecue pit together.

Speaker 23 How I come to meet George. He worked for my big brother.
We owned barbecue restaurants in the state. We would hire high school kids to help us run them during the summertimes and stuff.

Speaker 23 George seemed to be, you know, just a regular kid there. You know, he done well in school as far as I know.

Speaker 23 His dad was a real good guy, but somewhere along the line there, George got to thinking he wanted to be a tough guy.

Speaker 11 About that time, George started to hang out with Chukiak's resident bad boy, Raymond Cheely.

Speaker 15 Raymond Cheely, a social person. Most of his friends called him R.D.

Speaker 12 I've known R.D. Cheely since

Speaker 12 Eighth grade. We started wrestling together in the same wrestling team.
Then he started driving us to junior high because he had a license before, you know, most kids can get licenses.

Speaker 14 Raymond Cheely was well known in the community as being kind of a feral teenager. His parents got him his own apartment because getting to and from his house was pretty iffy in the winter sometimes.

Speaker 11 Raymond Cheely had quite the entourage at Shugiak High School, including Douglas Gustafson.

Speaker 12 Doug was very awkward. He had no self-esteem, I don't think, at all.
He was called the lizard by a lot of people. So that in itself is, that says a lot, I think.

Speaker 12 He was R.D.'s friend, and a lot of people would be like, why did you bring him? You know, why is he here?

Speaker 12 Their interesting guns brought them together. Doug was smart.
But Doug also had some weird quirks. Like, his reading was the anarchist cookbook.
I mean, who reads that?

Speaker 9 He was fascinated with firearms, fascinated with explosives, would make statements like his goal was to become an assassin.

Speaker 9 He was really sort of an oddball and was viewed that way, even by these other kids that were part of this group of miscreants.

Speaker 11 Doug's parents were devout Jehovah's Witnesses, but they weren't devout parents.

Speaker 9 Peggy Gusteson, she's eight or nine years older than him. Their parents both worked full-time.
And so Doug's older sister, in effect, became the caregiver for Douglas after school.

Speaker 24 Peggy Gusteson was like so many Alaska women.

Speaker 24 She was a caring woman and cared about her family. Peggy was kind of the older sister that never got in trouble and was trying to keep her younger brother, Doug, out of trouble.

Speaker 9 So they were particularly close. They had a very close connection as siblings.

Speaker 9 Their other sibling, Craig Gusteson, who was the middle child between Peggy and Doug, not so much. Craig was a hardworking guy.
He was a mechanic, but he had other jobs.

Speaker 9 He kind of went on his own path.

Speaker 11 Doug and Craig were not very close. Aside from Peggy, Doug was pretty much a loner.

Speaker 11 1990, the year that Doug, Raymond, and George graduated high school with absolutely no plans for the future.

Speaker 11 The three teens post-graduation spent most of the time hanging out at J.D.'s barbecue pit where George Kerr was employed.

Speaker 23 They got to talking to some of the hell's angels and different guys that hung around our barbecue restaurant. They seen some things

Speaker 23 right that might have appealed to them.

Speaker 23 Hey, I want to be like that too.

Speaker 9 With this little group, They started committing acts of mayhem out in the Eagle River and Chugiak area. Acts of vandalism, burglaries, for lack of a better term, they were bad kids.

Speaker 12 You get those three together, and they're thinking, okay, how can we steal? How can we make money? How can we do this, this? They were bad news together, those three.

Speaker 23 Raymond, he was the brains behind all of it.

Speaker 15 They were out burglarizing stuff. The most noteworthy of the unlawful activities was they burgled rib Mike's meats.

Speaker 11 George Kerr, Gustafson and Cheely,

Speaker 11 thought it'll be a swell idea. Let's rob the joint.

Speaker 11 In the middle of the night, they break into Mike's meet through the back door and make off with the entire safe.

Speaker 15 There was a substantial amount of funds in the safe. They obtained approximately $20,000 from Mike's Meets.

Speaker 9 They immediately took that cash and they went out and purchased some high-end firearms the day after the burglary. An AR-15, a semi-automatic Uzi, and a HK-91.

Speaker 11 Doug Gustafson bought an HK-91. That's a sniper rifle.
Doug always wanted to be a sniper.

Speaker 9 The next day, on October 19th, 1990, all three of them had been out. firing these weapons out of the gravel pit.
They had just finished up doing that and got into their car.

Speaker 9 Raymond Shealy, who's the driver, Douglas Gustafson, who's the front seat passenger, and George Kerr, who's a passenger in the rear seat.

Speaker 9 They're driving to Anchorage, and the intention was that they were going to party. They were going to have a good time.
Again, using the proceeds of this meat market burglary.

Speaker 9 Douglas Gustafson has in his lap a HK-91.

Speaker 12 Doug is shooting at signs on the sides of the road.

Speaker 15 And this little red sports car came around them.

Speaker 9 The other vehicle crossed in front of the Cheely, Gusteson, and Kerr vehicle and is exiting on an off-ramp.

Speaker 15 R.D. accused him of cutting him off.
Doug decided he ought to teach him a lesson.

Speaker 9 Raymond Cheely accelerates the car

Speaker 9 and lines up Doug Gusteson to fire a shot.

Speaker 11 Doug Gusteson takes that sniper rifle, leans out the passenger side window, aims it at the rear window of the car in front of him, and fires.

Speaker 9 He comes back in the vehicle and says, I missed him.

Speaker 9 He didn't miss him.

Speaker 13 Sibling love that's gone just totally awry.

Speaker 9 His sister Peggy was convinced that that George Kerr was the one who fired the shot.

Speaker 24 They want revenge.

Speaker 11 September 17th, 1991, 44-year-old David Kerr opens the package addressed to his son George

Speaker 11 and is killed instantly.

Speaker 9 So the question is, who would have a motive to want to harm or kill George Kerr?

Speaker 15 George had a reputation of being involved in some unlawful activities with some of his friends, Doug Gustafson and R.D.

Speaker 12 Cheeley.

Speaker 9 One night, Doug Gustafson leans out the window, aims at the other vehicle, and fires one round.

Speaker 9 He comes back in the vehicle and says, I missed him.

Speaker 9 He didn't miss him.

Speaker 9 That round that he fired went right through the back window, and it hits the front seat passenger, Jeffrey Kane, right in the head and kills him instantly.

Speaker 14 Driver pulled off, stopped, looked over at his buddy, and his buddy was dead.

Speaker 28 We pull into the parking lot,

Speaker 28 and there's Robbie's car with a blanket or something over

Speaker 10 the window.

Speaker 20 Of course, they wouldn't let me

Speaker 29 get within 50 yards of it. They had all cornered off, but I could see Jeffrey still sitting in it.

Speaker 12 Jeffrey Kane went to Tugak High School like we did. Seemed to be a nice kid, man.
He didn't deserve what he got, that's for sure.

Speaker 28 He was just full of life and joy. In fact, the night that he died, he came upstairs and he was going to go out with Robbie.

Speaker 28 And I said, you need some money? Nah, I got $5.

Speaker 28 And he looked at me and he said, Mom, I really love you. And I'm going, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Everybody loves me. You want some more money? And he said, no, but I really love you.

Speaker 28 And off he went that night. And that was the last thing she told me.

Speaker 9 Chili and Doug Gustason and George Kerr continued on into Anchorage.

Speaker 9 They go to a local motel.

Speaker 9 They call some young women and

Speaker 9 they have a party.

Speaker 9 They drink, they smoke some weed.

Speaker 9 And then they finally go to sleep. At that point, they didn't know that Doug Gustison killed Jeffrey Kane.

Speaker 9 The next morning, George Kirb's walking into his house, he sees on the doorstep the Anchorage Daily News.

Speaker 9 He realizes instantly that, holy smokes, that was us.

Speaker 12 I don't believe Doug aimed that gun to kill anybody.

Speaker 12 I don't believe our demon.

Speaker 12 He might have said shoot. But I do not believe that that bullet was meant to kill Jeffrey Kaine.

Speaker 11 Is it an accident that Jeffrey Kane is killed instantly by the shot from that sniper rifle?

Speaker 11 Why have a sniper rifle if you don't intend to be a sniper? They can't be surprised that someone died as a result of that gunshot.

Speaker 23 It's on all the TVs about this kid getting killed that night. R.D.
and Doug are trying to get rid of all the evidence. They're trying to do whatever they can.

Speaker 11 to cover up.

Speaker 23 So that's the time the gun disappeared. But George is starting to get the cold feet.

Speaker 9 He agonizes for much of the day about what to do.

Speaker 12 George, he even went to those guys and he said, we got to turn ourselves in. They were the ones that said, no, no, no.

Speaker 23 It was just one of them clean crimes that nobody would ever figure it out.

Speaker 9 George Kerr, he thinks about it. He thinks about it.
He finally talks to his boss who owned the restaurant he worked for.

Speaker 23 And George was real close to him. Tells my big brother what happened.

Speaker 9 Phelps tells him, you have to do the right thing here.

Speaker 9 You got to go to the police, George. So he does.
They arrange for him to go down to the Anchorage Police Department. He meets with homicide detectives, and George agrees to cooperate at that point.

Speaker 30 These guys are friends, okay friends, I would say. I mean,

Speaker 30 and I usually wouldn't rat out my friends, but this is just so severe, I got to do it.

Speaker 9 Ultimately, George recognized that this was a very, very serious matter. Obviously, very much more serious than anything these kids had ever done before.

Speaker 9 George tells the police, Doug Gusteson leans out the window, aims, and fires one round. Did he actually aim it like a rifle?

Speaker 30 It was really quick. I don't know.
I was sitting in the back and I was telling him, you don't want to do that. I still didn't think you'd do it.

Speaker 14 In any case in which you

Speaker 14 somebody coming in and telling you a story about somebody else committed a crime, you have to get some kind of corroborating evidence, some reason to believe this person is credible.

Speaker 11 What George has to do is get Raymond Cheely and Doug Gusteson to talk about this shooting directly to him to get it on tape. And there is your evidence.

Speaker 14 That's when they wired Kerr up

Speaker 14 and had him talk to Gusteson and Cheely.

Speaker 11 Doug Gustason cleaned out the window with that sniper rifle and he killed Jeffrey Kane.

Speaker 11 And George Kerr, who's in the back seat, saw it all. If George Kerr keeps his mouth shut, he's an accessory to this crime.

Speaker 9 And I think that was probably most of the motivation for George to go and report this to the police.

Speaker 14 So the police, based on what George Kerr told them, went and and obtained a warrant. That's when they wired Kerr up and had him talk to Gustafson in Chile.

Speaker 14 I've worked a lot of cases where you have cooperating witnesses wired up, and that's always

Speaker 14 pretty intense.

Speaker 9 George goes out and meets with Doug Gustafson, and they talk about the shooting that had occurred the night before.

Speaker 9 And George says to Doug on that recording, he says, Doug, why did you have to kill that guy? And Doug responds, I didn't mean to, George.

Speaker 9 That's all they needed.

Speaker 9 It was an admission from Doug Gusteson that he had pulled the trigger and fired the shot that murdered Jeffrey Kane.

Speaker 9 George also is wired up and has conversations with Cheely. Cheely is much more circumspect in his responses to George Kerr's prompting questions.

Speaker 9 So they don't obtain a smoking gun admission like they did from Doug Gusteson, but ultimately they obtained enough that they felt that they were ready to charge Raymond Cheely.

Speaker 12 Doug got arrested first and then R.D. got arrested.

Speaker 9 Gusteson and Cheely, they're charged with murder for killing Jeffrey Cain.

Speaker 9 George's decision to cooperate leads to a decision for him not to be charged by the state of Alaska for any exposure he might have had for the Jeffrey Kaine murder.

Speaker 9 That greatly upset Doug's older sister, Peggy. As siblings, they're very close.
Peggy was firmly convinced that Doug was innocent of the Jeffrey Kaine homicide.

Speaker 29 It was two or three days after my son was killed that the district attorney called the house and he said, I believe we've got the people that

Speaker 29 killed your son

Speaker 29 and I said that's good news but you better get a conviction because if they get on the street I'll take care of the problem myself

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Speaker 14 The turnaround from the arrest to the trial is remarkable. Today, you'd be lucky to get a case like that to trial in a year and a half, much less four or five months.

Speaker 9 The Jeffrey Kaine murder trials had been high profile. Everybody in town, you know, was aware of what had happened and were following the media coverage.

Speaker 14 Gustason and Chile's trials were severed, so they had two trials.

Speaker 14 Gustason went first.

Speaker 9 His trial was in early March of 1991. George Kerr, of course, is the main witness for the state of Alaska.
Obviously, his testimony is the key component. It wasn't like an aim thing.

Speaker 32 It was just pointed in the general direction of the car.

Speaker 11 Prosecutors sought the conviction of both Cheeley and Gustason. The reasoning was that Cheely purposely positioned that car so Gustason could take that shot.

Speaker 11 If Cheeley hadn't cooperated fully by positioning the car that way, the murder never would have happened. So Cheeley is just as guilty of the murder of Jeffrey Kane as Doug Gustafson.

Speaker 18 19-year-old Douglas Gustafson and 20-year-old Raymond Cheely were tried and convicted for killing Eagle River resident Jeffrey Kane in a drive-by shooting on the Glen Highway.

Speaker 27 Cheely and Gustafson were sentenced to 60 and 65 years in prison, respectively.

Speaker 24 Peggy Gustafson genuinely believed her brother, Doug Gustafson, wasn't the shooter. I think she really believed he was innocent, innocent and that George Kerr was lying.

Speaker 9 In fact, she was convinced for whatever reason that George Kerr was probably the one who fired the shot at Jeffrey Kane.

Speaker 11 Peggy was in total denial that her baby brother, the one she'd raised all of his life, could be guilty of such a heinous crime. She was sure someone else must have pulled the trigger.

Speaker 9 Following the trials in March of 1991, George is still here in the community. He ceases to be part of the chili crowd because those kids don't want to have anything to do with him.

Speaker 9 He decides at some point that he's going to join the Navy.

Speaker 9 So in September of 1991, early September, George departs the state to join the Navy.

Speaker 12 Dave Kerr picks up a package from the post office, and it's for George, and he takes it home.

Speaker 11 His wife, Michelle, is in the kitchen just down the hall.

Speaker 11 David Kerr opens the package.

Speaker 11 He's killed instantly.

Speaker 9 They're processing the remains of David Kerr in an autopsy at the state crime lab.

Speaker 15 A number of things were collected from the body.

Speaker 9 One of the key things we found was the forensics were able to recover chemical traces of MMAN. And the reason that was important is because MMAN is added to an explosive called Tovex.

Speaker 9 It's a high explosive that is frequently used in things like mining and logging.

Speaker 13 But the single most important piece of physical evidence was a piece of the micro switch that was used to set off the explosive.

Speaker 9 This little piece that's recovered from David Kerr's body cavity is part of a roller switch. And this is typically something that is used to complete an electrical circuit.

Speaker 9 So as long as the switch is closed, the circuit isn't complete with the wiring that goes between that switch so that when David cut the tape on the box and lifted the flap, it completed the circuit into the Tovex and detonated the explosives.

Speaker 14 It was only by a miracle that Michelle Kerr survived. Later, investigators were able to talk to her.

Speaker 21 Well, we got a

Speaker 21 package

Speaker 21 for George from the state of Alaska.

Speaker 21 I know it was from George.

Speaker 21 How do you know that it was from Doug, Michelle?

Speaker 30 Because George put him in jail.

Speaker 9 So you start connecting those dots. It became pretty clear that Doug that she was referring to was Doug Gusteson.

Speaker 15 But the people with the best motive also had the best alibi.

Speaker 15 They were incarcerated.

Speaker 21 I know it was from Doug.

Speaker 21 How do you know that it was from Doug, Michelle? Doug's drugs, put him in jail.

Speaker 9 The problem the investigators have with the theory that Doug Gustison and Raymond Cheely are involved is how could they do this from prison?

Speaker 9 How would they have the technical know-how to design an explosive device? Where would they get the components from?

Speaker 14 They didn't have access to a post office in prison, so that presented a big challenge to the investigators. But then they finally got a break.

Speaker 9 On the heels of the explosion, there are prisoners over at the prison where Raymond Cheeley is housed and where Douglas Gusteson had earlier been housed.

Speaker 9 They have a couple of prisoners tell us that they actually saw a written hit list that Raymond Cheely had prepared of people that he wanted to kill.

Speaker 11 He primarily centered on those involved in his conviction. On that list was the judge, the prosecutors, and the witnesses.
And at the top of the list, George Kerr.

Speaker 24 Cheely and Doug Gusteson are really angry with Kerr.

Speaker 24 Angry with him because he was in on the initial horrible event. Angry with him because he then turned state's evidence.
And maybe angry because he might have been lying. Who knows?

Speaker 24 And so they want revenge.

Speaker 9 They were able to pass notes in jailhouse lingo. They call them kites.
They would utilize the assistance of other prisoners like, hey, can you give this to Doug over in the other jail cell?

Speaker 9 They were also able to coordinate a specific time and day to call the Chili house.

Speaker 9 They have two separate phone lines that come into that home and that someone out there was taking the phones and literally turning mouthpiece to earpiece and they were able to talk to each other over the telephone that way.

Speaker 9 So these hurdles like how could these guys do this from prison, it's becoming increasingly clear that it's really not that difficult.

Speaker 9 Now investigators have to deal with the issue of these guys are in custody.

Speaker 9 It's probably next to impossible that they constructed this bomb themselves in a correctional facility and mailed it to George Kerr. So someone had to help them.

Speaker 14 The investigators start looking at all the people that were close to Gustafson and Chile.

Speaker 14 They'd find out about who these people had been talking talking to and what they'd been talking to them about, their family, friends.

Speaker 15 Doug Gusteson has an older sister and an older brother, Peggy and Craig, who are living in the area. So we determined that we need to know a little more about those people.

Speaker 15 So we decide to review the prison tapes, trying to find anything of evidentiary value.

Speaker 25 How are you doing? Oh, God, I'm so glad you called.

Speaker 15 Doug has many conversations with his sister, Peggy, before the bomb went off.

Speaker 32 Ted, all these phones are monitored here big time.

Speaker 25 Yeah, and if these phones are monitored. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 20 By Thanksgiving, we're all in the Anchorage Police Department listening to tapes.

Speaker 20 It seemed like it was endless. There was some bleak times for sure.

Speaker 15 One of the prison tapes that we listened to, Peggy relates to Doug that she has a dream.

Speaker 25 I dream I saw gorgeous pitch hiking.

Speaker 25 And I looked around, I didn't see anybody, and I didn't get him.

Speaker 25 I sent that puppy flying up to my car, and I looked, he was still alive.

Speaker 25 And then I broke his neck.

Speaker 32 I hope he took the car to the car wash afterwards.

Speaker 15 Peggy's involved in the hatred of George. She's of the same mind he is in getting even with George.

Speaker 20 We all have headphones on, and we're all listening to recordings of these things.

Speaker 20 And Glenn Porter says, boys, I think I found something.

Speaker 33 Yeah, now this is to fix your car, remember?

Speaker 20 Doug Gustafson speaking with Peggy in a code. The more we listened to it, the more plain it became that they weren't talking about a car.

Speaker 20 They were talking about a mailbox.

Speaker 33 As soon as you find out which way is on, which way is off on the sliding one, glue it in place,

Speaker 33 like I described right below the surface

Speaker 33 so that when it's pushed towards the side it's on. And when it's pushed towards the center it's off.
Right. Okay.

Speaker 15 What it sounds to me like is

Speaker 19 a

Speaker 15 triggering device for a bomb. She burns up some switches and batteries trying to make the device work.
He tells her in one conversation that, you know, to get certain switches from Radio Shack.

Speaker 20 This piece of metal that came from the body that was part of a switch was examined back

Speaker 20 in the lab, was identified as being sold by Radio Shack.

Speaker 25 Well, I first did it positive, separate, and negative, separate.

Speaker 25 That's how I tried this. Yesterday, I saw ready to pull my hair out.
You wouldn't believe how stupid I am when it comes to

Speaker 25 my car dominant. Is there a book I could buy? A book?

Speaker 32 I don't think it'd be smart to go out and buy a book on that type of thing.

Speaker 9 Douglas is becoming frustrated with Peggy about her inability to wire up whatever she's wiring up.

Speaker 32 See, the problem is I like to get things worked out, but I can't over here, you know. Anyhow, did ⁇ for brains have any help?

Speaker 25 Yep.

Speaker 32 Okay, did he get everything straightened out with you?

Speaker 25 Yeah.

Speaker 25 Good.

Speaker 9 We determined through interviews and contacts that ⁇ for Brains is their brother Craig, the middle child, who happens to be a mechanic and understands electrical wiring.

Speaker 15 It was a eureka moment.

Speaker 9 Peggy Gustafson had talked to Douglas Gustafson about assembling what the investigators believed to be an explosive device and strongly suspected their brother Craig Gustafson assembled that device.

Speaker 15 It was a eureka moment.

Speaker 14 That caused them to focus even more on the Gustafson siblings.

Speaker 20 Craig was perceived to be the black sheep of the family.

Speaker 9 He wasn't necessarily estranged from them, but Craig was not necessarily close to Peggy or Doug.

Speaker 9 So we start focusing on Craig, who appears to be sort of a weak link here.

Speaker 15 Really what we needed was evidence. We had an idea of how the events occurred.
and what transpired. But without evidence, you don't have anything that you can go to trial on.

Speaker 15 And one of our inspectors inspectors on the team had built a little rapport with Craig and we gained some trust with him.

Speaker 9 Craig is contacted. Initially he's not cooperative with the investigators.

Speaker 9 Craig wasn't necessarily hostile to the investigators, but he certainly wasn't, you know, forthcoming.

Speaker 9 So they had had this continuing contact with him, which was increasingly becoming more frequent, a little more friendly.

Speaker 9 It increasingly becomes clear that Craig was very troubled by the fact that David Kerr had been murdered as a result of this explosive device.

Speaker 9 And then finally, Craig decides to pick up the phone. He wants to talk.

Speaker 20 On March 12, 1992, to the surprise of many, Craig Gustafson calls postal inspectors so that he could confess to the crime.

Speaker 14 Craig Gustafson told the investigators that he was involved in making the bomb and his sister Peggy was involved in making and mailing the bomb and they did so at the direction of their brother Doug

Speaker 15 from prison.

Speaker 9 Doug Gusteson and Raymond Cheeley had been involved in this bombing plot.

Speaker 9 Doug had asked Peggy to build this explosive device, that she was able to get the components, that she's having difficulty assembling the device.

Speaker 15 Craig had been over at Peggy's, observed her attempting to put the device together, and was concerned for her safety because Peggy's about nine months pregnant.

Speaker 15 So Craig tells her, I will put that device together for you. I don't want you to blow yourself and the children up.

Speaker 15 Craig takes all the components, assembles the device, and gives it to Peggy.

Speaker 11 Peggy, in one of the great lapses of judgment in human history, drives to the post office with her daughter in the car over a bumpy road and a bomb in the back seat.

Speaker 11 And for less than $3,

Speaker 11 Peggy mails the bomb to the home of George Kerr.

Speaker 14 And think of all of the postal workers, the truck drivers, everybody else that came in contact with that package could have been killed in a heartbeat.

Speaker 9 When Craig decides to give them this information, it's huge because it corroborates exactly what they thought had happened. We decided to not take him into custody right away.

Speaker 14 Without Craig Gustafson, the case goes away. We needed him to testify.
We needed to ask him more questions, to get more things to corroborate. We need him to make our our case.

Speaker 14 And if we arrest him and lock him up, our ability to talk to him is over, except through his lawyer.

Speaker 20 Because of Craig's cooperation, we had the

Speaker 9 probable cause for search warrants.

Speaker 15 We did search Peggy's residence, her parents. We found nothing distinctive.
Artie Cheley, his parents live out by Lake Oklutona, which is a rather remote area. They have a considerable acreage.

Speaker 9 And so they've got a number of law enforcement officers that had to cover that entire property to try and find if there is some location where these bomb components have been stored.

Speaker 9 One of the outbuildings on the property was indeed where these things have been housed.

Speaker 15 We also find a lot of abandoned cars on the premises, which had evidence of explosive damage.

Speaker 23 Doug was a bookworm, so he learned it out of Soldier of Fortune magazines about building pipe bombs. And so we'd build build these bombs, man, and go out and blow trees up.

Speaker 23 You know, we'd go to the creeks, man, and throw pipe bombs down and blow up salmon.

Speaker 9 Clearly, this is something they had been interested in, and that it wasn't something like they were starting from scratch on this.

Speaker 9 They had the technical know-how, the understanding of how to build an explosive device.

Speaker 14 The investigator had enough evidence that they could be satisfied that they had the right people and put it together for a case.

Speaker 9 The investigators know that indeed they have a conspiracy involving four people, Raymond Cheeley and Douglas Gustafson, who are able to form this bomb plot.

Speaker 9 They know that Peggy Gusteson is involved in assembling and ultimately nailing the device. They know that Craig Gustafson in fact built this device.

Speaker 20 Craig Gustafson's confession was the turning point that pretty much set in motion getting charges filed against the whole family.

Speaker 27 Cheely was arrested this morning at Cook Inlet pretrial. Gustafson was arrested at Spring Creek in Seward.
Peggy Gustafson Barnett was arrested at her Anchorage home this morning.

Speaker 27 Count one of the complaint charges each of these defendants with mailing explosives with the intent to kill.

Speaker 27 Count two charges each defendant with the use of a destructive device during and in relation to a crime of violence.

Speaker 9 Craig Gustafson has also been charged in the federal complaint, but he has disappeared.

Speaker 20 On March 29th, a couple weeks after his confession, Craig Gustafson surprises us again by disappearing.

Speaker 14 The investigators try and get a hold of Craig Gustafson, and they can't find him. His girlfriend says he left.
She doesn't know where he is.

Speaker 27 Craig Gustafson is still at large. We do have a warrant for his arrest.
We are looking for him.

Speaker 14 One of the best pieces of evidence in a conspiracy is getting one of the conspirators to talk to you and fess up. Without Craig Gustafson, the case goes away.
We needed him to testify.

Speaker 27 Officials are offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Craig Gustafson.

Speaker 9 He's maintaining contact with his girlfriend.

Speaker 14 He would call her from time to time from a payphone, but it was several weeks.

Speaker 15 We did obtain a tap on his girlfriend's telephone, and she agreed to cooperate with us in order to keep him from getting injured or hurt.

Speaker 9 He makes a call from a payphone on April the 18th. His girlfriend is able to keep him on the line during that particular phone call long enough that they're able to trace the call.

Speaker 9 They determine it's coming from this payphone at the Roosevelt Hotel in the Los Angeles area.

Speaker 15 On the phone call, Craig tells his girlfriend, they will never catch me.

Speaker 16 At which time we hear you're under arrest, freeze.

Speaker 16 And he drops the phone.

Speaker 9 So now by April 18th, all of these folks, Raymond Cheely, Douglas Gustafson, Peggy Gustafson, and Craig Gustafson are in federal custody.

Speaker 9 All these individuals were ultimately indicted by the federal grand jury here in Anchorage for their involvement in the mail bombing murder of David Kerr. Craig Gustafson

Speaker 9 decided to plead guilty relatively early on.

Speaker 14 As we say in the U.S.

Speaker 14 Attorney's Office, he joined America's team, entered a plea agreement under which he agreed to plead to certain crimes, and part of his deal was he would cooperate with the government and testify.

Speaker 9 Peggy made a number of admissions at that point. Peggy said, we didn't intend to kill anybody.

Speaker 9 This whole thing was just meant to scare George Kerr into telling the truth because she's got a very strong belief that Doug has been wrongfully convicted for murdering Jeffrey Cain.

Speaker 24 Peggy was desperate to help her brother.

Speaker 24 To a large extent, she was a victim to, you know, she was a victim of the quicksand she got drawn into, you know, because of her brother.

Speaker 9 Peggy ultimately pled guilty to her participation in the bombing and agreed to cooperate.

Speaker 15 However, there is a twist. Doug agrees to plead guilty.
It's conditional upon Peggy receiving leniency in her sentencing.

Speaker 13 This is sibling love, sibling love that's gone just totally awry.

Speaker 16 How could he even think that he could talk his sister into doing this?

Speaker 15 And she did it.

Speaker 9 Peggy wound up getting roughly 28 years. Craig, he was sentenced to about 22 years.

Speaker 9 Raymond Cheely was convicted of conspiracy, of mailing an explosive device causing death, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole.

Speaker 9 Doug Gustavson gets the same sentence as Cheely, Life without possibility of parole. These guys are, in fact, they're going to die in custody.

Speaker 9 Unfortunately for the Augustin parents, all three of their children are convicted murderers. Unusual case, to say the least.

Speaker 14 People reached out from prison and used their own family to kill

Speaker 14 innocent people. It's astonishing.

Speaker 9 You know, the most memorable thing for me is Michelle Kerr, quite frankly. Michelle testified at trial.
She was a strong witness.

Speaker 9 And so just having to go through and tell the story, you know, it's extremely tough because it brings all of those emotions and all those feelings back.

Speaker 9 That's about as strong of an individual as you're ever going to encounter.

Speaker 2 Surviving mailbox victim Michelle Kerr sued the Alaska Department of Corrections for negligence.

Speaker 7 She was awarded an $11.8 million judgment.

Speaker 12 Dave Kerr was a salt of the earth.

Speaker 15 Great guy.

Speaker 12 Should have never happened to him. Me and George are still friends to this day, so, you know, he's got to live with a lot of things in his life that are pretty rough to deal with.

Speaker 12 I think it weighs on him. It took a toll on a lot of families, you know.

Speaker 28 We think of Jeffrey all the time. He still has the bedroom.
I have his coat still hanging in in the closet with his name tag on it. So,

Speaker 28 you know, even the grandkids tell us Jeffrey's room. And they're all old now, but they know it's Jeffrey's room.
You know, he was alive once, you know, so let's keep him in our hearts.

Speaker 11 For more information, go to oxygen.com.

Speaker 7 It's all a light-hearted nightmare on our podcast, Morbid.

Speaker 34 We're your hosts, I'm Alina Urquhart, and I'm Ash Kelly.

Speaker 35 And our show is part true crime, part spooky, and part comedy. The stories we cover are well researched.

Speaker 36 Of the 880 men who survived the attack, around 400 would eventually find their way to one another and merge into one larger group.

Speaker 35 With a touch of humor, shout out to her.

Speaker 37 Shout out to all my therapists out there. There's been like eight of them.

Speaker 35 A dash of sarcasm and just garnished a bit with a little bit of cursing.

Speaker 6 That motherf is not real!

Speaker 35 And if you're a weirdo like us and love to cozy up to a creepy tale of the paranormal, or you love to hop in the Wayback Machine and dissect the details of some of history's most notorious crimes, you should tune in to our podcast, Morbid.

Speaker 37 Follow Morbid on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to episodes early and ad-free by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.