Anchorage Daily News

For years, Dana Wease rode the rough cycles of addiction: getting drunk, getting sober, relapsing, slipping in and out of relationships with the wrong kind of men, spending nights in jail, starting over.

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Dana Wease

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But in the spring of 2007, she seemed to have finally found her way. She testified against an abusive boyfriend, putting him in prison. She stayed sober, held down a job and started attending church.

In June, she got married. Her new husband, James Wease, 64, said he loved her and seemed to promise stability. No more bouncing between jail and rehab, no more halfway houses, no more 40-ouncers of beer. She moved into his condo in Spenard. She celebrated her 43rd birthday in October.

Then one day in mid-November, she didn't show up for her job at a beauty supply wholesaler on International Airport Road. She'd never missed a day before. Her family called police.

Two weeks later, her body was found in Turnagain Pass along a creek near the Seward Highway. No one has been charged with her death, but Anchorage Police Lt. Dave Koch said investigators consider her husband a "person of interest" in the case.

Dana Wease's family won't talk publicly about her life. James Wease hired an attorney and will say little about the woman he was married to for only five months. This story of James and Dana Wease comes mostly from official records, beginning with his conviction for murder in 1978.

He shot a man in 1977, court files say, and dumped his body in a creek bed along the Seward Highway.

COMPULSION FOR CRIME

According to court documents and news accounts at the time, a Seward jury convicted James Wease of second-degree murder in April 1978 for shooting a New Jersey man, Peter Evans, four times and dragging his body to a spot along the Resurrection River outside Seward. The motive for the shooting was never clear, but Evans had come to Alaska to deliver 100 pounds of marijuana to Wease, according to investigators. Wease was working as a cook in Anchorage at a restaurant called McVey's.

After serving time for that murder, Wease wasn't out of prison long before he was convicted for two robberies in the mid- '80s on the Kenai Peninsula. Out of prison again in the '90s, he robbed a Zack's Frozen Yogurt in Anchorage, using a chain saw to hack through a wall and steal a safe. There was only $243 inside.

A clinical psychologist testified at his sentencing that he might have bipolar disorder. Wease told the judge he would fixate on crimes and be unable to sleep until he did them. Superior Court Judge Elaine Andrews called his record of burglaries, all of them of small businesses without much cash on hand, "kooky" and "bizarre."

"He compulsively commits crimes and when the compulsion starts he doesn't seek help," Andrews said.

"Maybe there's a chemical imbalance, maybe there isn't, maybe he's simply someone who's going to continue to remain a danger to society and every time he commits a crime, we're going to put him in jail. ..."

She ordered him to continue taking medication; of his prospects for rehabilitation, she said, "I'm not overly optimistic."

Wease was in jail for that burglary until 1999, according to the Department of Corrections. The murder is his only record of violent crime.

Reached by phone several weeks ago, Wease wouldn't say how he met his wife or when he saw her last.

"She had a very loving side," he said. "I really loved her and this is a very hard time."

In a written statement his lawyer, Phillip Weidner, said, "We are now working to investigate her contacts with certain associates to attempt to provide the police input in their investigation."

JUST STARTING HER LIFE

Mike Shaffer, a municipal prosecutor, understands why some people might want to tie Dana Wease's death to her past. She could have relapsed, hooked up with old associates, put herself at risk.

He doesn't buy that. He's seen hundreds of women like her, women who've made bad choices, who have struggled with alcohol and drugs. She was someone who successfully broke the cycle, he said.

He knows because he watched her change her life in 2006, starting with her decision to testify in a domestic violence trial he prosecuted.

"She had a very interesting metamorphosis to me during the trial," he said. "It's like she kind of found a good part of herself."

Wease's ex-boyfriend, Robert D. Johnson, is a serial abuser, with a half-dozen domestic violence convictions on his record. She met him while visiting a friend in a halfway house, Shaffer said.

Like a lot of relationships that turn violent, things began romantically, she told the jury. But then Johnson started beating her, giving her five black eyes over six months. She had been working as a waitress. The black eyes caught the attention of her employer, who urged her to go to police, Shaffer said. She quit her job instead.

Wease stayed with Johnson through the abuse because she didn't want to be alone, she said in court.

On a January night in 2006, she and Johnson were with another couple, drinking in an apartment on 13th Avenue in Fairview. The day before, she had been arrested for prostitution nearby. Shaffer couldn't say for certain whether Johnson forced her onto the street, but, he said, "It's not uncommon for women in abusive relationships to be committing those acts not of their own volition."

After a night of drinking, the other couple started to fight. The man kicked the woman in the head and Wease intervened. Neighbors called 911 and police showed up. A few hours later, neighbors called the police again, this time because they could hear Johnson hitting her. When officers arrived for the second time, she had a bloody nose, marks on her neck, and a lump on her head, Shaffer told the jury.

Dana Wease's story was enough to convict Johnson. He was still in jail when she disappeared, awaiting two more trials, both domestic-violence related, Shaffer said.

"For us (Dana) seemed like a victim success story, someone who'd been a DV victim, had gone though some of the hard things, substance and otherwise, that go with that, but was seeming to come out the other side," Shaffer said.

He stayed in touch with her after the trial. She brought James Wease to the office in the summer after they were married. She called Shaffer when she was working on getting her driver's license back. The last time he heard from her was in November. She left a message but vanished before he had a chance to return the call.

And then he read that she'd been killed. No one else seems willing to talk about Dana Wease, but Shaffer mourns her.

"For her to have her life taken away from her at a time when she was just starting it was unspeakably horrible," he said last week.

Koch, who is head of homicide for the Anchorage Police Department, said detectives believe they are close to understanding how Dana Wease died. They are waiting for the results of forensic tests.

Find Julia O'Malley online at adn.com/contact/jomalley or call 257-4591.

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