Decatur : 1997 death of Arkansan now gets trial in Alaska
Posted on Friday, May 18, 2007
GLENNALLEN, Alaska — A Gakona, Alaska, man accused of killing his Arkansas-born wife nearly 10 years ago is on trial here.
In his opening statement Wednesday, Prosecutor Pat Gullufsen told jurors that the defense will claim the death of Gretchen Sawyer, a Decatur native, was a suicide. The only credible, believable conclusion jurors will be able to make, Gullufsen said, is that she was shot to death by her husband, Derek Sawyer, on July 13, 1997.
Sawyer’s attorney, Cynthia Strout, denied her client killed his wife and said the investigation was mishandled.
“Derek Sawyer did not shoot his wife,” she said.
The case was one of the first to be brought after Alaska State Troopers in 2003 formed a cold-case unit using veteran investigators to review unsolved homicides.
Sawyer, 34, was indicted by a Palmer, Alaska, grand jury in February 2006 on one count of first-degree murder.
Derek Sawyer claimed at the time of the shooting that his 1 2 / 2-year-old son had awakened, picked up a. 357-caliber revolver off the kitchen table, walked into his mother’s bedroom and fired the fatal shot that killed Gretchen, who was 20 when she died.
Derek Sawyer claimed he was sitting in his bathtub with the shower running when his toddler son fired the gun.
Gakona is a community of 234 people 15 miles northeast of Glennallen at the confluence of the Gakona and Copper rivers. Glennallen is 180 miles northeast of Anchorage, the state’s largest city.
According to an affidavit by trooper investigator Timothy Hunyor, troopers took a 911 call from Derek Sawyer at 12: 43 a.m. on July 13, 1997. Sawyer reported his wife had been shot and his son had fired the gun.
At 1: 02 a. m., Glennallen troopers reached the Sawyers’ home, a one-story duplex, at. 5 Mile Tok Cutoff, the highway that connects the Richardson and Alaska highways.
The other half of the duplex was unoccupied. Derek Sawyer’s parents owned the building.
Troopers found Gretchen Sawyer in her bed, dead of a gunshot wound to the face. A handgun was found next to the bed.
Sawyer told troopers his son had fallen asleep on a living room couch while watching a videotape.
Hunyor said in his affidavit that investigators found flaws in Sawyer’s version of what happened.
Acquaintances said the Sawyers had marital problems and that the paternity of their second child was in question. A DNA test after the shooting indicated that Derek Sawyer was not the younger child’s father.
Gretchen Sawyer wanted to move back home to Arkansas, and the couple had agreed to do so, friends said. She was to leave for Arkansas in August 1997 and Derek Sawyer was to leave in October, after hunting season, despite a desire to stay in Alaska.
Sawyer told troopers he had borrowed the handgun from his father to use on a camping trip and placed it on the kitchen table so he would remember to return it. His parents, however, were not due back from a trip for two weeks.
Troopers, arriving 19 minutes after the 911 call, found no water on the bathroom floor, something that would have been expected if a man had jumped out of the tub in response to a gunshot.
“This is evidence of the staging of the scene,” Hunyor said in the affidavit.
Sawyer told troopers he had bathed following intercourse with his wife. An autopsy showed no indication of intercourse, Hunyor said.
Blood spatters at the scene, including blood inside the gun, indicated that blood also would have spattered on the shooter. Troopers found no blood on the boy and said only one person in the home had recently bathed — Derek Sawyer.
They questioned whether a 29-month-old boy would have the hand strength to hold a 2-pound, 13-ounce gun and pull a trigger that had a single-action pull of 4 pounds to 4. 5 pounds and a double action pull of 12. 5 pounds to 13 pounds.
At the trial Wednesday, defense attorney Strout held up a portrait of Sawyer and his young family and said the idyllic scene was what he wanted and worked for.
A suicide or an accident was a possibility in Gretchen Sawyer’s death, she said.
In either case, law-enforcement officers botched the investigation, she said. Evidence was not collected properly, the homicide scene was contaminated with many people coming and going, and proper documentation did not take place, she said.
The trial is expected to last three weeks. Anchorage Superior Court Judge John Suddock is presiding.
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