When an Alaskan fishing vessel is found abandoned and aflame the morning after a storm,

it quickly becomes apparent that its crew encountered something much darker than the wrath of the sea.

Investigators sift through ash in search of fragments of the murdered crew,

uncovering pieces of Alaska's worst unsolved mass murder in this episode of Last Seen Alive.

Thanks for listening to Last Seen Alive.

I'm your host, Leah, crime analyst by day and true crime storyteller by night.

And as always, I'm your co-host, Scott.

This is the revisited and enhanced edition of one of our early episodes,

which features the Unsolved Case of the Colthurst family and their fishing crew.

The original edition was recorded in 2020, and we've revisited and re-recorded an episode on their case in 2025. As I'm sure those of you who've been listening since the early days of

Last Seen Alive have noticed, our production and audio quality have improved significantly

over the years. Lately, we've been working on remaking our

earlier episodes. When we originally recorded them, we were doing the best we knew how at the time.

However, our best wasn't the best, and we've learned a lot since then. We want to honor those victims

by telling their stories with the production quality they deserve. So we've been completely

remaking all of our early episodes, including this one.

So with that, let's get into today's story.

The Colthurst family and their four deck hands were last seen alive on September 5, 1982.

Mark Colthurst was the 28-year-old owner and skipper of The Investor, a salmon fishing boat.

He and his wife Irene had two small children, a five-year-old owner and skipper of The Investor, a salmon fishing boat. He and his wife, Irene,

had two small children, a five-year-old daughter named Kimberly, and a four-year-old son named John.

Mark, Irene, Kimberly, and John were all aboard the investor on September 5th. At the time, Irene was pregnant with their third child, having just completed the first trimester of the pregnancy.

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