Alleged shooter paints picture of conspiracy

WASILLA — A man accused of shooting his neighbor in the head over a week ago allegedly told police he thought the man was plotting against him.

Phillip Bailey, 37, of Wasilla, remained jailed as of press time at the Mat-Su Pre-Trial Facility, charged with a single count of murder in the death of Dale E. Prater, 45, of Wasilla.

Prater’s fiancée, Dawn Syers, told the Frontiersman last week that Prater and Bailey were friends and that Prater had been helping Bailey out since he split up with his wife.

The only thing she could point to as a possible motive, she said, was a suspicion — mistaken, she insists — on Bailey’s part that Prater had been seeing his wife.

But that’s not what Bailey told Wasilla Police Officer Bobby Rader the night of the shooting.

“According to Bailey, Prater had expressed interest in Bailey’s personal property as well as his family’s Permanent Fund Dividends,” Rader wrote.

Bailey allegedly told police that Prater had pulled a knife on him and said he could “kill him very easily” and get to his family.

Bailey described the pack of cigarettes Prater picked up for him as an attempt at a “peace offering” and said Prater’s mother had asked him to sign a form allowing him to pick up his daughter from school.

“Bailey believed this was a conspiracy and that something might happen to him. At the time he decided he needed to kill Prater,” according to Rader.

So, when Prater got back with the cigarettes, Bailey told him to just add them to the list of things he owed Prater money for, and turned to leave, Bailey pulled a Desert Eagle pistol out of his front waistband and shot Prater in the back of the head.

Witnesses in the room described the shooting to Rader as “without provocation.”

Bailey allegedly described the shooting to Rader as well. Rader wrote that as soon as he showed up at the apartment building on Fanciful Place Bailey, “spontaneously stated that Dale was inside and that he had shot him.”

For her part, Syers said she wonders if maybe Bailey had set up her fiancé for a killing, sending him out for cigarettes and then shooting him when his back was turned.

Still, speaking last week, she mostly seemed stunned by the shooting and said that they’d already paid for a wedding in Las Vegas scheduled for Halloween.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.