Book review: A manual for the investigative process, ‘The Fairbanks Four’ documents the case and ensuing movement
Booksology “The Fairbanks Four: Murder, Injustice, and the Birth of a Movement”
By Brian O’Donoghue; Sourcebooks, 2025; 350 pages; $27.99
Like most people in Fairbanks, I suspect, I initially believed the Fairbanks Four were guilty in the beating death of 15-year-old Johnathan Hartman. On Oct. 11, 1997, at 2:15 a.m., Hartman was found unconscious on the street by passersby who quickly alerted the police. His head had been repeatedly kicked and stomped on. He was taken to Fairbanks Memorial Hospital, where he remained in a coma until his death the next evening.
Fairbanks police quickly arrested four young men ranging in ages from 17 to 20, three of them Alaska Natives. Two of them, Eugene Vent and George Freese, offered confessions during interrogation. Kevin Pease and Marvin Roberts were fingered. A witness claimed he’d seen and identified all four committing a similarly brutal assault earlier in the evening of Hartman’s killing. Across three subsequent trials, all were convicted and given lengthy sentences.
How could they not be guilty?
Shortly after the convictions, a few people began claiming the four had been wrongfully found so. Their list of objections was lengthy. They maintained the Fairbanks Police Department had mishandled or suppressed evidence. That the state’s star witness could not have been able to clearly identify the four individuals from the earlier assault given that it was dark and he was 500 feet away and intoxicated. That there had been jury misconduct. That the confessions had been extracted using tactics proven to frighten young detainees into falsely claiming responsibility for crimes they didn’t commit. That there was absolutely no physical evidence tying any of the four to the crime. And, they insisted, there were other indications of legal malpractice by police and prosecutors. Allegations of racism were also made.
Slowly, over the coming decade, those few voices turned into a chorus. The late Shirley Demientieff, a widely respected Athabascan leader and civil rights activist, became a vocal advocate for the men. Native organizations also embraced what became a movement to free them. They became known as the Fairbanks Four.
Though aware of these developments, my view on the case didn’t fully shift until the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner published an exhaustive seven-part series exploring the multitude of holes in the case against the Fairbanks Four. Feeling it my responsibility as a longtime resident to gain a better understanding of the numerous questions about what had become arguably the most heavily publicized crime in the town’s history, I read every word.
Before the final installment had run, my what had already been an increasingly tenuous belief about their involvement in the murder had been reversed. The standard for a criminal conviction is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The state’s case against the quartet consisted of nothing but reasonable doubts.
The series was authored by former reporter, and by then, University of Alaska Fairbanks journalism professor Brian O’Donoghue and a group of his students. In O’Donoghue’s new book, “The Fairbanks Four,” he tells the story of the investigation that led to the series, as well as the years that followed when their work was central to a 2015 agreement by the state and signed by the four men that their convictions would be vacated and they would be set free.
O’Donoghue’s book is a memoir of his own involvement in the case, as well as a primer on how investigative journalism is carried out. It’s a detailed account of how he and a group of mostly young people, several of them Alaska Natives, doggedly chased every lead, pored over a staggering number of documents, picked apart every word of each trial, and assembled a mountain of information that more than persuasively argued against the guilt of the four men who ultimately spent their 20s and much of their 30s behind bars.
As students cycled through O’Donoghue’s investigative journalism class over the next decade and beyond, each new group built on the work of those before them. O’Donoghue and his charges fought bureaucratic inertia and resistance, compiled evidence, some of which proved misleading and had to be discarded, pondered possible connections of others to Hartman, faced fierce criticism from many in the community, had their hopes dashed watching repeated losses or denials of the four’s appeals, and suffered other setbacks. Yet they persisted. That’s how investigative journalism succeeds.
O’Donoghue tells the story chronologically, beginning with the killing itself, which occurred on a particularly wild night in downtown Fairbanks shortly after Alaskans had cashed their PFD checks. This was followed by early questions from others, his own growing doubts about the judgments, and his decision upon launching his class in 2002 to devote the bulk of its energies toward finding the truth. “I assured them of this,” he writes, “We’d likely cast a wide net as we learned more.”
That they did. Their findings, coupled with jailhouse confessions, painted a picture of the crime far different from what the state had claimed transpired. Every significant assertion by supporters of the men proved valid. O’Donoghue extensively recounts conversations and arguments from the lengthy 2015 postconviction relief hearing that ran for more than a month, consuming three chapters and 50 pages in so doing. It’s hard to dispute his conclusion, although some still do.
O’Donoghue closes the book with the quartet’s release from prison, the point when his part in their story effectively ended. Plenty more has occurred since, and the men are slowly clawing their way toward compensation for the loss of their young adulthoods. Subsequent civil suits have been found in their favor. Partial justice, at least, has been delivered.
There is far more to this story, and hopefully the experiences of the Fairbanks Four before, upon, and after that fateful night will be told as well. Until then we have O’Donoghue’s narrative of his own significant role in their ultimate redemption. He believed them, he fought for them, and he helped free them.
Meanwhile, those who admitted taking part in the murder have never been charged. Nearly three decades after his savage killing, justice for Johnathan Hartman has never been meted out.
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Full disclosure. As noted above, I approached this book with my mind thoroughly made up. Additionally, after 30 years in Fairbanks, 25 of those spent writing for various publications including the News-Miner, there is no possible way I could not know several of the people involved in this story. My interactions with O’Donoghue have been minimal however, and we’ve only had two lengthy conversations. One about the case itself when he delivered the book to my doorstep, the other concerning an entirely unrelated matter. That said, the sheer weight of the evidence demonstrating the innocence of the Fairbanks Four relative to the murder, as well court judgments supporting this claim, is in my mind indisputable. Readers can decide for themselves whether or not my review is impartial.
