No murder reported in 2009

MAT-SU — Depending on how you want to slice the numbers, you could say that 2009 was a year without a murder in the Valley.

If you’re looking at cases filed at the Palmer Courthouse, there was one defendant charged with second-degree murder — Clayton Allison, who stands accused of slapping his infant daughter to death.

But Allison’s baby died in 2008.

If you’re looking at human-caused deaths, there may yet have been a murder here, depending on what an investigation finds.

“There probably is at least one investigation still ongoing into a death that occurred this year,” said Palmer District Attorney Roman Kalytiak.

He declined to discuss the details of that case. The district attorney’s office usually remains quiet until charges are filed.

That lull in murder cases has allowed Kalytiak’s office to spend about five months with no murder cases in the hopper. In June, Frank Adams, 48, was sent away for what will likely amount to the rest of his life for the murder of his girlfriend, Stacey Johnston, who was found dead in the trunk of his car during a traffic stop in 2007. The lack of murder cases in the system continued until November, when Allison was charged.

Kalytiak said he’d be hard pressed to remember a year among the 13 he’s worked in the Valley where someone wasn’t charged with the murder of an adult victim. But it’s not as if the Valley was once rampant with murders and now is not. Murder cases at the Palmer Courthouse tend to be a once- or twice-a-year type of phenomenon.

“If you watch the news, Anchorage has had its share of murders in the past year,” Kalytiak said. “Luckily we don’t have that type of problem currently.”

But it’s not as if the absence of the most serious type of cases has made much of a difference in the workload at his office. Overall, if Kalytiak were to sum up the year in crime in the Valley in one word he would choose to describe it as, “steady.”

“There’s still a steady stream of felony cases and certainly there’s no shortage of misdemeanors,” he said.

One bright spot, he said, is that the crackdown on meth labs Valley law enforcement began a few years back seems to have borne fruit.

Meth is still in the Valley, but it’s mostly manufactured elsewhere. Kalytiak could remember only one meth manufacturing case filed in 2009. On Dec. 23, Alaska State Troopers arrested two Talkeetna residents and charged them with cooking meth.

“I think it’s good that our methamphetamine manufacturing for whatever reason is very low,” he said.

He said he’s not sure if this year’s lack of a murder case is significant for any statistical reason. But it is of a piece, he noted, with FBI crime statistics showing that crime nationwide seems to be ebbing lately.

“I think it’s good that we haven’t seen a lot of murderers in the Valley,” he said.

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