Murder of Anesha Murnane

On October 17, 2019, Anesha "Duffy" Murnane disappeared from Pioneer Avenue, the main thoroughfare of Homer, Alaska, while walking to a medical appointment in the middle of the day. Murnane resided at a small supportive housing facility in Homer and left the building on foot shortly after noon, headed for a local clinic, but never arrived. She was not officially reported missing until October 19, 2019. Search dogs used to track her movements determined she apparently got into a vehicle on Pioneer Avenue. An air search was conducted, and volunteers carried out searches and went door-to-door over the following months.

When initial efforts to locate Murnane were unsuccessful, the Homer Police Department hired a special investigator solely to continue determining what happened to her, and the FBI assisted with aspects of the investigation. Several persons of interest were interviewed over the following two years, including the person eventually charged with abducting and murdering Murnane, but investigators lacked sufficient cause to make an arrest at that time. Dateline NBC profiled the case in February 2020 as part of its "Missing in America" series.

In April 2022, an anonymous call to a tip line identified Kirby Calderwood, a Utah man who had formerly lived in Homer, as the person who abducted, raped, and murdered Murnane, providing numerous details about the crime. Calderwood had known Murnane through his employment with a local behavioral health service, having worked at the building where she lived. He was arrested in Utah in May 2022. Subsequent interviews revealed the anonymous tip had come from Calderwood's wife, whom he had told about the killing in 2021. Executing search warrants, police recovered what appeared to be Murnane's Timex watch, found near a missing person flyer.

In September 2022, a Kenai grand jury indicted Calderwood on multiple felony charges, including murder, kidnapping, and sexual assault. He remained in Utah, where he was also facing separate charges, before being extradited to Alaska and incarcerated at the Wildwood Correctional Complex in November 2022. In February 2026, Calderwood admitted to killing Murnane and pleaded guilty to one count of second-degree murder, signing a plea agreement recommending an 87-year prison sentence; he was sentenced to that term in July 2026. Friends, family, and investigators who worked on the case expressed frustration at the long period it took to arrest and convict Calderwood.