On January 31, 1981, 20-year-old Alaskan Native Marlene Jean Peters left Fairbanks attempting to hitchhike to Anchorage to visit her ailing father and disappeared along the route. In May 1981 her body was recovered off Johnson Road, about 32 miles south of Fairbanks near the Trans-Alaska Pipeline corridor, when spring exposed what winter had hidden. Investigators linked her death to a series of disappearances and killings affecting young women around Fairbanks between 1979 and 1981, with attention centering on activity near Eielson Air Force Base.

In March 1983 investigators focused on Technical Sergeant Thomas Richard Bunday, an active-duty airman stationed near Fairbanks. Following a search of his property Bunday confessed to killing five victims in the Fairbanks area and identified Marlene Peters among them. A procedural lapse left him free after the confession because there was no arrest warrant, and eight days later, on March 15, 1983, Bunday died by suicide in a motorcycle crash in Texas. No one else was arrested in Peters’s homicide and no additional suspects have been publicly identified. If anyone knew Marlene or saw her along the Fairbanks–Anchorage route in early 1981, please share what might help clarify her final movements.