By Tom Kizzia
Homer Independent Press

Kirby Calderwood was sentenced to 87 years in prison Wednesday for the abduction and murder of Duffy Murnane, a crime the judge described as “shockingly violent and difficult to fathom.”

The sentence is exceptionally long for a second-degree murder conviction, Superior Court Judge Kelly Lawson said in the Homer courtroom. But the agreed-upon plea deal was justified, she said, by the brutality of the 2019 crime and its impact on Murnane’s family and the community of Homer.

“The idea that a woman can be grabbed off the street in the middle of the day and be dropped into oblivion is something that is not, and cannot, be tolerated,” Lawson said.

Calderwood, 36, agreed to a sentence of  99 years in prison, with 12 years suspended, rather than face a trial for first-degree murder. He will have no appeal,and not be eligible for discretionary parole until he is almost 90.

It had been four years since Calderwood’s arrest and nearly seven since the disappearance of Anesha “Duffy” Murnane, 38, a fragile, quiet young woman whose passion was caring for infants and orphans. Her remains were never recovered.

Her confessed killer, a Homer resident since 2017, had meanwhile insinuated himself into the community, even performing twice in the town’s Nutcracker Ballet.

On the day she was abducted, Calderwood drove around Homer looking for a victim to sexually abuse and torture, according to the original police charges against him. He had prepared a site, in the crawlspace of an unoccupied local home. And he was feeling pressed for time, because he only had a few days before his girlfriend got back to town.

He happened to see Murnane, whom he knew from his job at a local assisted living home. Murnane had lived in the home since suffering a mental breakdown five years earlier.

Calderwood picked a victim with mental illness, thinking that would make his task easy, said Murnane’s uncle, Mike Huelsman. That was his mistake, Huelsman said Wednesday. 

“Predatory sexual offenders pick communities where people are not going to complain,” he said. “Fortunately, this was a cohesive, intelligent community that supported the family and was not going to let go of her disappearance.”

A BRIEF APOLOGY

Calderwood’s defense lawyer, Michael Moberly, tried to cast shade over parts of the state’s case on Wednesday, saying his client denied some of the “salacious accusations” in the record. He said Calderwood and Murnane had a “relationship” from their time at the assisted living home.

“Relationships are messy. Emotions can get out of hand. That’s what happened here,” said Moberly.

Calderwood, handcuffed and dressed in yellow prison garb, made a brief statement, apologizing “to Duffy’s family and my own family.” Two relatives, their faces stricken, sat alone behind him, while the other side of the courtroom was packed with Murnane’s family and friends. Community members were also invited to live-stream the hearing from the Homer United Methodist Church or to tune in directly via Zoom. 

“I understand now how precious Anesha was to everybody,” Calderwood said. “She was one of my best friends. I never intended for this to go so far. Sorry.”

Huelsman later scoffed at the idea that Duffy and Calderwood were close friends. This was more manipulation from a man with the profile of a serial killer, he said.

Murnane’s cousin, Heather Huelsman Byrnes, was the only one to speak for the family at the sentencing. She said she could barely bring herself to be in the same room as Duffy’s murderer.

 Huelsman Byrnes, a career diplomat, was forced to maintain her poise during Wednesday’s hearing when her emotional speech was interrupted by Zoom-triggered chaos, with chattering, laughing callers unable to mute their computers. Court personnel, equally challenged, finally cut off the audio so Huelsman Byrnes could continue. 

Huelsman Byrnes read a letter from Duffy’s mother, Sara Berg, who died in January, 2024. Berg had described the difficulty of coming back to Homer to enter hospice care: “In Homer, I see sorrow in everyone’s eyes and I see my daughter in every house and store, remembering where every banner was placed and every vigil held.”

Berg had written the letter to be read on the day Duffy’s killer was sentenced — if the day ever came.

On Wednesday, that day arrived, as Judge Lawson delivered her verdict: 

“The suffering that Miss Murnane must have gone through, the trauma her family has experienced, and the cruelties exhibited by the defendant show this court that Kirby Calderwood is tremendously dangerous to those around him, in particular women, and therefore his sentence requires he be isolated by a lengthy period of incarceration.”

And yet Kirby Calderwood almost got away with it ….

Warning: The remainder of this story contains mentions of sexual assault and violence that may be disturbing to some readers.

“IT HAD TO BE SOMEONE SHE KNEW”

Duffy Murnane vanished on Oct. 17, 2019, while walking to a medical appointment on East End Road from her residence at Main Tree Assisted Housing on Main Street. Her cell phone signal died soon after she left home.

Her disappearance galvanized helicopter searches and door-to-door canvassing by family and friends as far north as Happy Valley. Search dogs traced her walking route to Pioneer Avenue near the Kachemak Bay college campus, where they lost the scent. Police speculated she had gotten into a car.

“We all knew Duffy’s shy and cautious nature would never allow her to trust a stranger, so it had to be someone she knew,” one Homer resident wrote in a letter to the sentencing judge. “Which, chillingly, meant that many of us likely knew that person, too.”

Another impact statement, from Ken Castner, Homer’s mayor at the time, recalled “the overwhelming outrage and fear that swept through our small, peaceful community as the searches and clues continued without resolution.”

Huelsman Byrnes, Duffy’s cousin, said at the sentencing the family knew from the start something terrible had happened because Duffy would not wander off — “she was utterly reliable and risk-averse.”

Murnane, born and raised in Homer, was a gentle, diffident young woman with a special interest in babies and young children. While earning a teaching degree from Western Oregon University and a master’s degree in early childhood education, she accompanied her mother, Sara Berg, to an orphanage in Honduras, returning on her own to work for a year with the orphans. 

In her early 30s and living in Seattle, she suffered a mental break, was diagnosed as bipolar, and returned to Homer, where she lived quietly in the assisted housing complex run by South Peninsula Behavioral Health Services. Lately she had been getting better and was talking about moving out and getting a job, her mother said after she vanished.

“I think someone took her. And I don’t know why they took her,” Berg said as posters of Duffy went up around town that said “Somebody Somewhere Knows Something.”

Huelsman Byrnes described Wednesday how the family followed clues even when they seemed unlikely. “As one example, a psychic told us Duffy was being held in an abandoned school bus, so my aunt and I visited every stationary school bus in this part of Alaska.”

After five months of deepening mystery, the city hired Matt Haney, a cold case expert who had once worked for Homer police, to take over the missing-person case. Haney had become well-known for his success investigating the Green River Killer case, a years-long search in the Pacific Northwest for the man eventually convicted of 49 murders.

One of Haney’s first steps in Homer was to do a deep background check on all the male employees who had connections to Murnane at her housing unit. But he never received Kirby Calderwood’s name from the behavioral health agency because, he was told later, Calderwood had only been a part-time employee.

A SUSPECT EMERGES

Calderwood’s name did not surface until May, 2021 — a year and a half after Murnane’s disappearance — in an otherwise irrelevant tip to police. Haney learned Calderwood had once worked at Duffy’s housing unit and started probing his background.

What he found was alarming.

Calderwood, 31 at the time, had grown up in Virginia and served in the U.S. Army. A Homer resident since 2017, the bearded, stocky young man struck some who knew him here as sociable and ingratiating, involving himself in the bar social scene, sports and local theatricals such as “Jesus Christ Superstar.” He even appeared twice in the town’s Nutcracker Ballet, once as a Giant Puppet Rat and once as a party parent.

At Christmas in 2018, as part of a holiday interview series on KBBI, Calderwood said he first came to Homer after his brother, a charter boat deckhand, died here of a fentanyl overdose. He attended a memorial at Alice’s Champagne Palace, feeling resentment toward Alaska, and was surprised to find a town he could call home.

“I like the person I am when I’m here,” he told KBBI.

But there were occasional flashes of another side. Former mayor Castner recalled working with Calderwood on the community theater production of “Star Truck.” 

“Following a rehearsal, I caught up to him in the hallway and said ‘Kirby,’” Castner wrote to the judge. “When he didn’t stop, I touched him on the shoulder and repeated his name. He spun around and said: ‘DON’T YOU EVER F—ING TOUCH ME!’ While the words were shocking, it was the look on his face, and aggressive body language, that caused me to turn and walk away.”

Castner said he warned others in the production to watch out.

Calderwood had undergone a routine background check of public records when applying for his job at the Main Tree housing facility. But Haney, working with Homer police officer Jessica Poling, dug deeper. 

The investigators reached out to three women in the Lower 48, including two former wives, who described repeated rapes and other disturbing violent conduct during their relationships with Calderwood. According to an affidavit filed by Haney, the women said Calderwood insisted on tying up his sexual partners, enjoyed torturing animals and exploded in furious furniture-breaking rages.

One former wife had filed a rape report with the Army. Haney tracked down the Army investigative file, which had not been available to the routine background check system. The other women told Haney they had never reported Calderwood’s rapes and abuse because they were afraid of him, so there was no police record.

Haney also got in touch with an ex-girlfriend who had been living with Calderwood in Homer at the time of Duffy’s disappearance. She said Calderwood had grown rougher and more demanding before they broke up. On the week Duffy vanished, she told Haney, she had been vacationing out of town. She returned to find Calderwood had ruined her new set of bath towels with bleach.

Haney invited Calderwood to the police station in May, 2021 for what he deemed a “soft” interview. Calderwood was relaxed and jovial until Haney brought up the Army rape investigation. Suddenly he sat up straight, Haney said, and before long walked out of the interview. 

Summoned for a follow-up, Calderwood told police to talk to his attorney. Days later, he left Homer and moved to Ogden, Utah, with his new wife.

A Homer jury declared Duffy Murnane dead that June, ruling her death was most likely a homicide. Police had a suspect now, but all their evidence was circumstantial. They said nothing about it at the presumptive death hearing or to Duffy’s parents.

THE BREAK IN THE CASE

One year after Calderwood left Homer, in May, 2022, the case finally broke open. An anonymous caller to the Kenai Crimestoppers tip line provided a long and detailed account of Duffy’s kidnapping and murder. Haney rushed to the reported crime scene in Homer, and it checked out. 

The tipster proved to be Calderwood’s wife, Sharon Stewart. Haney flew to Utah to talk to her. 

Ogden police served a search warrant on Calderwood, stopping his car as he drove through a school zone. When they found a rifle in his car — illegal in a school zone there — they arrested him. In Calderwood’s dresser drawer, police found a black Timex watch identified as Murnane’s and a flyer in which Duffy’s mother begged for her release.

Charges of first-degree murder and kidnapping followed, and Calderwood has been locked up ever since.

According to the police account filed with the charges, Calderwood had planned to murder a woman that October day but did not have a particular victim in mind. He drove around Homer in his blue Subaru Forester looking for somebody and spotted Murnane.

He had already prepared the crawlspace of his then-girlfriend’s parents’ home, police said. Both the girlfriend and her parents were out of town. After Murnane accepted his offer of a ride, Calderwood stopped by the house, saying he needed to get a phone charger, and invited her to come in. Once inside, the charging documents said, he pushed her down into the crawlspace, where he tortured, abused and killed her. 

Stewart told police that Calderwood disposed of her body wrapped in heavy-duty trash bags inside a fish box. He chose a Dumpster he could keep an eye on, close by a house in town where he worked as caregiver for an elderly woman.

An FBI forensics team subsequently found DNA evidence linking both Calderwood and Murnane to the crawlspace, Haney said.

Calderwood had confessed all this to Stewart after returning to their Beluga Lake cabin, shaken by his 2021 “soft” interview with Homer police, according to the charging document. “Calderwood … said, ‘what if I did it’ and then said he was in big trouble and she asked him if he did it and he said yes,” the document said.

Haney said Stewart waited a year to report Calderwood’s confession because she was afraid of him. He said he believes she finally talked because she saw signs that he might kill again.

There is no evidence that Calderwood ever murdered anyone else before or after Duffy, Haney said here in May at a community gathering to discuss the legacy of the case.

LONG WAIT FOR JUSTICE

News of the 2022 arrest, however long awaited in Homer, hit hard. “The whole town is reeling,” local filmmaker Brian Smith wrote on Facebook as he organized a tribute. “Finally the news, horrible beyond comprehension.”

More delays would follow. It took almost four years before Calderwood agreed this February to plead guilty to second-degree murder. At the community gathering in May, Huelsman, Murnane’s uncle, said the family was tormented by the opportunities for delay built into Alaska’s criminal justice system.

Community pressure in Homer had helped keep the case alive  — from the posters around town asking “Where is Duffy?”, to the new Loved & Lost memorial bench at the library, to the “Bring Duffy Home” Facebook page, with its years of increasingly forlorn prayers and birthday wishes.

And now community pressure helped bring the case to a conclusion. As one hearing delay gave way to another, volunteer court watchers started attending the Kenai court sessions, sometimes numbering as many as 20.

“You came to show that you cared and you had a kind of watchful presence,” Huelsman said at the community gathering in May. “And when we started doing that, the process started moving.”

Ed Berg, Duffy’s step-father, said the family supported the state’s decision to make a plea deal with a lifelong sentence and avoid a trial. He said a jury trial might introduce uncertain testimony, possibilities of legal error and years of appeals. It would have been grueling for the family and community to endure.

The wait had been too long for Duffy’s mother. Before her death in 2024, Sara Berg embraced her daughter in the letter addressed to a future moment of justice. “She is within me constantly,” she wrote.

And several weeks before she died, Berg managed to write her own obituary. “Cancer or heart disease will be on the death certificate,” she wrote, “but we all know that the real cause was the loss of my dear Duffy.”