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UAF photo by Eric Engman.
Brian O’Donoghue, professor emeritus of journalism, stands in his UAF office in February 2025. O'Donoghue's book about the imprisonment of the Fairbanks Four will be published in April.

By Sam Bishop

For many years on the anniversary of John Hartman’s 1997 murder, UAF journalism professor Brian O’Donoghue would take a group of his students to downtown Fairbanks to run a test.

They’d gather near the Eagles Hall on the night of Oct. 11. They would then reenact a scene described by the state of Alaska’s main witness in its successful prosecution of four young Fairbanks men for murdering 15-year-old Hartman.

O’Donoghue, now a professor emeritus, said the exercise always had the same effect.

“Students were fired up because it just was completely ludicrous, you know, that you could make out a face at that distance,” O’Donoghue said, referring to the witness’ claim that he saw the four accused men assault another man in an alleged prelude to killing Hartman. “Of all the teaching things that I ever did, that was one of the very best.”

O’Donoghue recently completed a 352-page book chronicling his and his journalism students’ efforts to raise such questions about the arrests and convictions of George Frese, Kevin Pease, Marvin Roberts and Eugene Vent.

In “The Fairbanks Four: Murder, Injustice and the Birth of a Movement,” O’Donoghue describes looking into the case first as an editor at the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and then as a journalism professor at UAF. The book, scheduled for release in April, concludes with the release of the four men after 18 years in prison.

Some give O’Donoghue and his team a large part of the credit for the eventual exoneration of the Fairbanks Four. The News-Miner published many of their articles.

“Anything that takes place in the world happens in some kind of social-political climate,” said April Monroe, who also publicized the case for many years through social media posts and her blog, Free the Fairbanks Four. “Brian’s work, which put into the public discourse the possibility that these people were innocent and wrongfully committed — and then the social movement that followed, the work on the blog — it created a social and political climate where it was possible for people to come forward with information about this crime.”

Those people coming forward eventually led lawyers with the nonprofit Alaska Innocence Project to file a court motion for post-conviction relief that featured a confession letter naming a different group of young men as Hartman’s killers. That in turn led to the release of Frese, Pease and Vent in 2015. Roberts, who had received the shortest sentence, had been paroled earlier that year.

“I feel good about being part of a fight that was worth the effort,” O’Donoghue said in an interview at his home in February 2025. “As a reporter, you can cover a lot of different things and, in the end, the actual truth maybe is not so rewarding. In this case, I feel pretty gratified to see this kind of injustice addressed.”

The first big scoop

While the annual Oct. 11 visit to the Eagles Hall always proved illuminating to O’Donoghue’s students, a similar experiment by jurors in 1999 turned out to be grounds for an appeal.

One of O’Donoghue’s students — Sharice Walker ’04 — uncovered the jury’s experiment, which in early 2003 became the first big scoop for the journalism project when the News-Miner published the story.

Walker had enrolled in O’Donoghue’s investigative reporting class, which he had turned into a project to dig into the Fairbanks Four case.

“Brian kind of laid out the information that he had gathered to that point,” Walker recalled during a phone interview from her current home in Utah. “There wasn’t really compelling physical evidence.”

Students called jurors to ask what persuaded them to convict all four men.

“One of the jurors told me in a phone call ‘Well, hey, has anyone told you about the experiment we did?’” Walker recalled. “I was like, ‘No, I haven’t heard about that. Tell me more.’”

It turned out the jurors had tried to recreate, on an Anchorage street in broad daylight, the scene by the Eagles Hall in Fairbanks the night of the murder.

That’s because the state’s main witness had asserted that he saw, from more than 500 feet, Frese, Pease, Roberts and Vent jump out of a car and assault a man — not John Hartman but Frank Dayton. But the Fairbanks Four denied attacking Dayton and offered alibis.

The jurors, trying to sort it out, wanted to know if it was possible to recognize people with certainty from that distance. So they had the bailiff take them down to the street, where they role-played the scene.

O’Donoghue, reporting for a News-Miner article in early 2003, quoted two former state attorneys general questioning the experiment. Charlie Cole said, “It’s totally improper.” Bruce Botelho explained, “You’ve got jurors that on their own tried to reconstruct a situation that clearly could not approximate the situation.”

The revelation eventually led to a petition before the Alaska Supreme Court for a hearing on the issue.

On Aug. 14, 2009, the court denied the petition in a 3-2 decision. However, dissenting Justice Robert Eastaugh wrote, “The experiment was flawed. And there was at least a ‘reasonable possibility’ it affected the outcome” of the murder case. Justice Dan Winfree of Fairbanks agreed.

Shifting the climate

While the jury experiment story was a startling scoop, O’Donoghue’s greatest journalistic effort came in 2008 with the News-Miner’s publication of a seven-part series titled “Decade of Doubt.”

The series outlined Hartman’s murder and the case against the Fairbanks Four in detail. It even pointed the finger at alternative suspects, though not those eventually identified as the likely perpetrators.

Monroe, founder of the Free the Fairbanks Four blog, believes O’Donoghue’s persistence in reporting on the case created the environment necessary for the eventual release of the Fairbanks Four.

Evidence later revealed that “it was no secret within the broader legal community of Fairbanks that these men were innocent,” she said in an interview in February. “It was just a social climate where it couldn’t be said.”

Three of the four men — Frese, Roberts and Vent — were Alaska Native, a factor that Monroe said drew institutional and individual bias against them.

The media coverage of the arrests and trials was superficial and relied mostly upon police and prosecutor statements, Monroe said. O’Donoghue’s work was the first to take a skeptical, journalistic approach, she said.

“Brian’s work opened this space where it was acceptable for people to say ‘I also know something which contradicts their guilt,’” she said.

By 2013, it had become clear that alternative suspects existed. Monroe’s blog and social media work amplified support for the Fairbanks Four in the Alaska Native community, O’Donoghue said.

“I mean, folks were ashamed for a lot of years to be associated with these ‘murderous kids,’” he said. “And then when it became apparent that others had confessed, it almost seemed like the whole system was rigged. That’s when it became a cause célèbre among Natives.”

Casey Grove ’06, one of O’Donoghue’s early students, was working for the Anchorage Daily News in June 2013 when those circumstances brought him back to the story.

“The movement to free four men whose supporters say were wrongfully convicted of killing a Fairbanks teenager in 1997 took to Anchorage’s streets Saturday,” Grove wrote in a front page story. “Fifteen years later and 360 miles from the scene of the crime, those attending the Free the Fairbanks Four rally were convinced more than ever that Roberts, Frese, Pease and Vent are innocent.”

Not just a pet project

Grove, who today hosts Alaska Public Media’s “Alaska News Nightly” on public radio stations across the state, downplayed his role on O’Donoghue’s student team. He remembers trying to create a website that would cleverly display their work.

“I spent probably way too much time trying to make an animation of a file cabinet opening up,” he said. 

But he also remembers well the journalistic lessons he learned from O’Donoghue.

“Knowing what we know now, you might think that there was this radical journalism professor saying that we should be freeing innocent people, but it wasn’t like that,” Grove said. “It just wasn’t investigated properly, and that’s what we were exposing…That’s the kind of thing that sticks with you for other stories.”

Working with the students, O’Donoghue passed on a tip he picked up from other journalists at a national investigative reporters conference to which UAF sent him. 

“Every single time they interviewed someone, they had to write up a little memo summarizing where it was, what they learned, who else should I talk to,” O’Donoghue said. “They were the troops.”

Tom Hewitt ’10, who joined O’Donoghue’s team after Grove graduated, had also grown up in Fairbanks. He and Hartman were freshmen at Lathrop High School the year Hartman died.

So when Hewitt joined the team, he brought something that provided key insights into the group of young men eventually identified as the likely killers.

“I had a bunch of yearbooks from those days that Brian had me bring in. He wanted to check on potential connections,” Hewitt said.

In fact, as O’Donoghue detailed in his book, they discovered numerous connections among the former Lathrop students who, years later, became the Alaska Innocence Project’s main alternative suspects in Hartman’s murder.

After graduating from UAF, Hewitt went to work in local television, spent some time as opinion page editor at the News-Miner and then moved to a similar position at the Anchorage Daily News. He returned to Fairbanks in 2024 and today works as a special assistant to the borough mayor.

He recalled that much of the investigative work he and others did as students was “clerical.”

“I don’t know how much belief we had that this would actually result in the Fairbanks Four going free,” he said.

But as a local television reporter, he covered the Alaska Innocence Project’s filing of a petition for post-conviction relief for the Fairbanks Four in 2013.

“That was the point where it was becoming real, that this wasn’t just a pet project that he (O’Donoghue) couldn’t let go of,” Hewitt recalled. “It was something that was having a real impact.”

‘Actual innocence’ asserted

On Sept. 25, 2013, the Alaska Innocence Project’s attorney, Bill Oberly, stepped outside the Fairbanks courthouse with Jerry Isaac, president of the Tanana Chiefs Conference, and Shirley Lee, TCC’s justice task force leader. They spoke to a crowd of more than 100 cheering people.

“What we filed,” Oberly announced, “was a document claiming newly discovered evidence that established the actual innocence of our clients.”

O’Donoghue reported the story in the Daily News-Miner:

“A 33-year-old Fairbanks man serving a double-life sentence in California claims he and a carload of Lathrop High School friends got away with killing John Hartman 16 years ago. In a sworn statement filed Wednesday in Fairbanks Superior Court by the Alaska Innocence Project, William Z. Holmes, in Lathrop’s class of 1998, names convicted murderer Jason Wallace and three other school friends as accomplices in the killing…”

After two more years of legal wrangling, the state offered the Fairbanks Four a deal, vacating the convictions and dismissing charges if they agreed not to sue. The four took the deal but in 2017 sued the city and several police officers, saying they were effectively coerced into agreeing.

In late 2023, Frese, Pease and Vent settled their lawsuits for $1.6 million each from the city’s insurer. Roberts continued the fight in federal court. That trial is pending.

Fitting the circumstances

O’Donoghue’s book ends with the release of the Fairbanks Four almost a decade ago. After he had tried for years to get it published, he said, the 2023 settlements with three of the four men seemed to give his book agent what she needed.

“When that financial judgment came down, then she was able to take this out and say ‘Look, this is proof that the state was wrong,’” he said.

Today, O’Donoghue has no doubt the state convicted the wrong men. Holmes’ account in his 2013 sworn statement, and other supporting testimony and evidence, matched the facts, he said.

“It fit,” O’Donoghue said. “Holmes’ story fit the circumstances of that night.”

But it took another two years before the Fairbanks Four were free.

“We could publish stories till the cows came home,” O’Donoghue said. “And that had no traction in terms of overturning verdicts. You can't write a newspaper story saying, ‘Here's the truth,’ and expect the verdicts to be overturned.”

Sam Bishop is a writer and editor for UAF’s University Advancement office. He worked as a reporter and editor at the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner off and on from 1984 to 2013.