Content warning: This article includes details of sexual assault. Resources are available at the bottom of this story.
A Saxman man was sentenced last week to 25 years in prison for a crime that has haunted the Ketchikan community for decades.
Michael J. Williams was convicted over a year ago by a Ketchikan jury for first-degree sexual assault and second-degree sexual abuse of a minor. Judge Daniel Doty handed down the sentence on Feb. 24.
“This case does have that kind of exceptional community impact,” Doty told the courtroom. “The seriousness of the offense, the effect on the victim, deterrence, community condemnation, reaffirmation of societal norms, all of those things counsel the imposition of a very substantial period of imprisonment.”
Solving a cold case
The case stems back to 1993. A 14-year-old girl was crossing the baseball diamond at Dudley Field near Ketchikan High School on a rainy night in January.
A man in green fishing-style rain gear and a black scarf wrapped around his face appeared from the darkness, state prosecutor Erin McCarthy said during the sentencing hearing. He told the girl he had a knife and would use it on her if she called for help. He raped the girl behind the baseball dugout and then fled, McCarthy told the courtroom.
“This was a random act of violence,” she said. “This is a very rare circumstance of sexual assault. This is something that we in the legal profession or in the criminal justice profession often say never happens; the stranger who appears out of the darkness and sexually assaults a child.”
McCarthy said the incident struck Ketchikan residents with fear during the decades the case went unsolved.
“This is a crime that has lived in the cultural fabric of this community for 30 years,” she said.
Former Ketchikan police officer Jerry Siefert agreed. He investigated the case in the 1990s.
“It’s one of those cases that has followed me over the decades that has been unsolved. It comes to mind probably two to three times a year even,” Siefert testified during the 2024 trial.
Siefert said that samples were collected from the 14-year-old girl at the time and sent to the Alaska Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory in Anchorage. They were retested in 2004 but remained in the evidence vault for decades without a match.
In 2018, the state was pushing to clear its backlog of untested sexual assault kits. They retested the 1993 sample and entered the DNA profile into the state’s database. Three years later, they got a hit. DNA evidence taken during a different investigation by a different Alaska law enforcement agency years later matched the genetic profile of the 1993 assailant. It belonged to a Saxman man named Michael J. Williams. The Anchorage crime lab’s forensic DNA analyst Cheryl Duda testified during the trial that it was a smoking gun.
“The estimated frequency of the genetic profile was rarer than one in 330 billion. In other words, it’s a very rare profile,” she told the jury.
“The maximum sentence”
Williams sat across from McCarthy in the courtroom during sentencing last week as the prosecutor asked Doty, the judge, to consider the victim.
“Consider what this was like for her. The terror of that night, seeing that crime scene every day as she went to school for the next two years, knowing that this person had threatened her life if she told and that he was never caught,” McCarthy said, rapping on the table for emphasis. “And living her whole life in this small community, being the girl this happened to.”
McCarthy argued that in many ways, Williams has already gotten away with this crime. He’d walked free for 30 years — gotten married, had kids, lived a full life. Williams was 24 at the time of the crime. He’s now 55.
The state prosecutor urged Doty to deliver the maximum 30-year sentence. Per constitutional law, Williams can only face the legal consequences that were in place at the time of the crime. In other words, he was being sentenced under the laws that applied in 1993, not today. The maximum sentence for first-degree sexual assault back then was 30 years. Today it is 99 years. According to McCarthy, a lot has changed for sexual assault victims since 1993.
“What I am asking the court to consider is the mentality toward these crimes that has changed over the past 30 years because of our understanding of the victim impact, the community impact, and how these crimes resonate outward,” she said. “And all I am saying is while we are using 1993 sentencing laws, we do not have to use a 1993 mentality when it comes to sexual assault.”
Williams was represented by well-known, longtime Anchorage defense attorney Phillip Weidner. Weidner spoke for over an hour, urging Doty not to be tempted by what he called “the community’s desire for vengeance or outrage.”
“The case law is clear, the facts are clear. This person is clear. He’s not a danger,” Weidner said. “As a 24-year-old, he made a stupid, outrageous mistake.”
Weidner argued that the eight-year minimum sentence was more than enough.
“No one here in this courtroom – but, I, actually, myself excluded – has ever had the jail cell bars slammed on you. But I can tell you a few hours in jail is an eternity and eight years, my God,” he said.
Then, he turned his attention to William’s race.
“It’s kind of hard to make this comment,” Weidner told the judge, “but Mr. Williams is half Tlingit and a quarter Inuit, and he faced an all-white jury. They could have determined that the most serious conduct of rape is a Native rape of a white girl.”
When Weidner finished, Williams stood. It was the first time in the proceedings that Williams had spoken freely.
He spoke about being a commercial fisherman since he was a teenager, as well as a member of the longshoremen’s union. He told the judge he had four children and seven stepchildren. His wife sat behind him in the courtroom.
“I was only 24 at the time of the offense for which the jury found me guilty. I am not a danger to the community, and there is no need to isolate me or insist I stay in jail for rehabilitation,” Williams said.
Doty took exception to the argument that Williams was only 24.
“Sexually assaulting someone – sexually assaulting a 14-year-old while they’re walking to the high school is not a youthful mistake,” Doty said. “And the effort to minimize it as a youthful mistake is something that I also find very, very, very concerning.”
Doty also said Weidner’s “all-white jury” comment was incorrect. The judge pointed out that Weidner wasn’t Williams’ trial attorney, so he never actually saw the jury in person.
“The record does not reflect their races. They weren’t questioned about that,” Doty said. “I have met Native people all over the state, and I can tell you that I would never hazard a guess based on what somebody looked like as to whether or not they were a member of a Native tribe or not.”
In his final ruling, Doty said this was an exceptionally serious, complex case with a wide range of potential consequences.
“You’re taking all of these things – this complex, richly textured, very intense collection of things – and you’re trying to figure out how to best reflect that in terms of years of somebody’s life. I mean, in some sense, it’s almost impossible to do that in any way that really makes sense,” he said.
But one thing that was immensely clear, the judge said, was that Williams committed this crime.
“Mr. Williams sexually assaulted [the victim] and I want that to be abundantly clear to every single person who wrote a letter of recommendation saying they didn’t believe that he did it,” Doty said, adding that the crime cast a wave of fear across Ketchikan that settled like a scar.
Doty sentenced Williams to 25 years without probation. Williams is not required by law to register as a sex offender. The 1993 crime happened a year before Alaska passed the law that created the sex offender registry.
If you have experienced sexual violence or assault and would like to explore options available to you, you can contact WISH at 907-225-9474. You can also call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800-656-HOPE (4673) for 24/7 support.
