By Hank Nuwer
The nation’s newspapers carried a two-paragraph story after President Warren G. Harding issued a pardon to an Alaskan murderer on Thanksgiving Day, 1921.
The details were scarce. The San Francisco Bulletin said the newly free man was George Pestriakoff, “an Alaskan of Russian and Indian blood, confined at MacNeil’s Island (Washington) Penitentiary since 1908.”
I came across the clip and did some backtracking, finding scraps of information in ancestry records and Alaska news clippings.
Pestriakoff was a dark-haired illiterate man with hazel-brown eyes in his late teens when he made the blunder of his life.
He began an affair with another teen, the recent bride of a much older Russian man named Peter Skavorzoff. The older husband lived with an 11-year-old son named Likandra from a former marriage.
The three lived in the village of Ouzinkie on Spruce Island in the Kodiak Archipelago of the Gulf of Alaska.
In newspaper accounts, Mrs. Macrena Skavorzoff was called a “child-woman” of low intelligence.
“The woman speaks English as a child just learning to walk would speak it, her understanding and her vocabulary limited to words of one syllable.” noted the Valdez Weekly Prospector.
Still, she testified that she had married her far older husband under duress from her father.
Skavorzoff threatened and frightened her in a fit of suspicion that she had been unfaithful, she said under oath. She admitted her adultery.
On more than one occasion, Mrs. Skavorzoff met with Pestriakoff for a tryst and pleaded with him to kill her husband to enjoy an unimpeded romance.
At last, Pestriakoff agreed.
Mrs. Pestriakoff left home late one evening or early morning without telling her husband her planned whereabouts.
Whereupon, Pestriakoff went to the home of Skavorzoff and offered, on a ruse, to take him to the hiding place of the child-bride.
Once outside, Pestriakoff dispatched his victim in a village house while the wife cowered in the cellar. It was a premeditated murder in cold blood.
Pestriakoff, with the aid of his paramour and the 11-year-old boy, hid the body in a nearby woods until they thought it was safe to take him out in a rowboat and drop the corpse into the sea.
But the lovers had not been discreet. Authorities arrested Pestriakoff while he worked aboard a survey ship called the Patterson.
He readily confessed and Mrs. Skavorzoff was arrested.
While in jail, she boasted to two female prisoners that Pestriakoff killed her husband out of love. She was charged as being an accessory to murder and they testified against her.
Pestriakoff’s trial was held in Judge Reid’s court in Valdez. District Attorney Crossley conducted the prosecution. Attorney Ray defended his client.
Pestriakoff spoke no English and communicated through a court-appointed translator.
Pestriakoff’s guilt was never in doubt.
Judge Reid, perhaps noting the youth’s age and gullibility, sentenced the youth to life in prison at MacNeil’s Island. Newspaper editors had expected the guilty party to hang.
The court next put Pestriakoff’s lover on trial.
In a surprise twist, the court committed the apparently feeble-minded Mrs. Skavorzoff to an insane asylum. After a time, she was released and lived a quiet life on Afognok Island.
After his presidential pardon, Pestriakoff moved into the home of his brother-in-law on Kodiak Island.
As of the 1930 U.S. Census, Pestriakoff still could not read nor write and remained unmarried.
Three months after Pestriakoff’s pardon, the Douglas (Alaska) Island News wrote about him in a commentary.
“For fourteen long years, the best years of his life, Pestriakoff was an inmate of the prison. He was a model prisoner, who won the good will of everyone connected with the institution and many attempts were made to secure a pardon for him, and at last successfully, but what a terrible price to pay for an unhallowed love affair.”
Article first published in the Cordova Times. Cordova columnist Hank Nuwer is playing the role of the father in “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time” for the Fairbanks Drama Association and rehearsing for the part of the union boss in the University of Alaska, Fairbanks production of the musical “Strike!”