NO CONTEST: According to his story, lover Liz Skowran died during a Russian roulette game.
Her short, turbulent life ended violently in her lover's arms 15 years ago, but the ghost of Elizabeth Skowran was finally laid to rest Friday with the man who killed her bound for life in prison.
In a deal with the state, Richard Wilkins returned to Alaska from a South Carolina prison and pleaded no contest to second-degree murder for shooting Skowran to death in Anchorage in 1989.
Skowran's mother, Elizabeth Reed, reported her daughter missing that year, after she stopped getting letters and phone calls. But Skowran's body wasn't found until 1991, unearthed by hikers on a hill at the foot of Turnagain Pass, hidden in a hollow left by a fallen tree.
From the beginning, Wilkins, her boyfriend, was the prime suspect, but investigators for the Alaska State Troopers weren't able to gather enough evidence for a charge.
Known as Liz to her friends and Beth to her family, Skowran, 31 when she died, was a nude dancer, primarily at P.J.'s, a Spenard strip club. The only child of a well-educated, middle-class California family, Skowran was described by family and friends as kind-hearted and easy to get along with. She loved animals and wrote poetry. She did a stretch in the U.S. Army and had a child being raised by his father Outside.
She was also addicted to drugs and alcohol, and to the dangerous edge of life. She had bad luck and little common sense, colleagues at P.J.'s said after her body was found. She partied hard and trusted the wrong people.
One of them was Wilkins, now a 59-year-old graybeard who sat quietly in court Friday, saying only "yes, sir" and "no, sir" to questions from the judge about whether he understood his rights.
Back in 1989, Wilkins was a flashy, good-looking biker who had published a book on home VCR repair and worked as an electronics repairman. He was also heavily into drugs.
Wilkins and Skowran had a tempestuous relationship, full of dramatic breakups and passionate makeups. In 1989, they were living in separate trailers, doing a "back-and-forth thing," Wilkins told police. "It was making love one day one moment and arguing the next."
According to Bill Gifford, a cold case investigator for the troopers, Skowran was killed by a shot in the head, fired through her mouth. Not an unheard-of wound, but odd. All we have is Wilkins' story about how it happened, as told to Gifford in a confession taped last year in a South Carolina prison, where Wilkins is serving time for rape and murder unrelated to the Skowran case.
According to Wilkins, he and Skowran were into sex games, including costumes and role playing. Sometimes she pretended to be a hooker and he picked her up on a street corner, he said. Some fantasies involved tying her to the bed.
Eventually, they started playing Russian roulette: He would put one bullet in a gun, then fire it in her mouth during sex. Until the last time he pulled the trigger, it always clicked on an empty chamber, he said.
But he also told Gifford he was mad at Skowran that night and pulled the trigger twice. The second pull fired the bullet that killed her, he said.
Was Wilkins saying her death was mostly an accident?
Gifford asked Wilkins if he would have kept pulling the trigger that night until the gun fired. "I don't know," Wilkins said.
It's Wilkins' story that Skowran was a willing participant in all this, but she's not here to say yes or no.
Having killed the woman he loved, Wilkins said, he drove around town for hours with her body in his Blazer and eventually headed down the Seward Highway. He scouted a deserted parking area near Turnagain Pass and found a hole left by a tree blown over in some forgotten wind storm. He carried her up the cliff, put her in the makeshift grave, then sat with her, unwilling to leave until it got so cold he had to.
If not examined too closely, the story has the makings of a soap opera, a heartbreaking tale of unintentional death in the throes of mutual passion. That version might have played if Wilkins, who fled Alaska after killing Skowran, had vanished into a righteous, atoning life.
But he did not.
In 2000, Wilkins turned up in rural South Carolina, some 123 miles east of Atlanta, married to a woman named Victoria, living in a camper with his 58-year-old wife and her 12-year-old granddaughter. On June 11, officers from the Anderson County Sheriff's office took Wilkins into custody after an armed standoff and charged him with raping the 12-year-old and killing Victoria with a single gunshot through the mouth.
Wilkins is serving 40 years for those crimes. Under South Carolina rules, he is not eligible for parole until he is 87 years old, Anchorage assistant district attorney John Novak said.
On Friday, Wilkins was sentenced to 30 years for Skowran's death. Under the terms of the Alaska plea bargain, 25 of those years can be served at the same time as the South Carolina sentence. If he is still alive at age 87, he will be returned to Alaska to do an additional five years.
Should Carolina release him before he does at least 25 years, he will be returned to Alaska to serve whatever time is left of the full 30 years, said Novak, who called it a "fail-safe" arrangement.
"This means Mr. Wilkins is going to die in prison," Novak said.
And it closes the circle of Liz Skowran's life for her family, said Capt. Matt Leveque, head of the troopers' Bureau of Investigation, letting her mother "put this to bed" 15 years after her only child went missing.
Daily News reporter Sheila Toomey can be reached at stoomey@adn.com or 257-4341.
