One of Alaska’s most prolific murderers is buried in a place of honor, in a cemetery for veterans in Sitka.
Michael Silka’s grave is just a stone’s throw from the Alaska Public Safety Academy, which is especially galling to law enforcement officers like Grant Cooper, because the final person Silka killed was a state trooper.
Cooper has worked in law enforcement at all levels, from Village Public Safety Officer to federal agencies. He remembers the first time he trained at the academy in Sitka, in 2003.
“There's a memorial plaque to Trooper Troy Lynn Duncan, the state trooper that was killed in the shootout with Silka,” Cooper said. “And they also had the rifle on display in the trooper museum, still with the evidence tag on it.”
Cooper’s instructor told the story of Silka’s 1984 killing spree.
Silka, a drifter and self-described mountain man, is believed to have killed nine Alaskans. The first was his neighbor in the Chena Ridge area of Fairbanks. A few weeks later, in the course of an afternoon, seven residents of the Interior town of Manley Hot Springs were killed or disappeared.
The Alaska State Troopers mounted a search for Silka. Trooper Duncan was in a helicopter that spotted him. Both the officer and the suspect were killed in the ground-to-air shootout.
Nearly 20 years had passed by the time Cooper learned the history.
His instructor “mentioned that Silka was buried in the National Cemetery adjacent to the trooper Academy, about 100 yards away,” Cooper recalled.
He was stunned. He walked through the burial site to find Silka’s grave.
“It's a fairly small cemetery, quite beautiful,” he said. “But just to see his white headstone next to all these other veterans that served honorably, and the fact that he was able to be buried there under some kind of legal loophole just really didn't seem right.”
This grave injustice has stood for more than 40 years. Like a number of veterans and police officers before him and since, Cooper thought it was time to address it. He learned it would probably take an act of Congress to force Silka’s removal. A law already bans burying serious criminals in national cemeteries, but it doesn’t apply retroactively as far back as Silka’s case.
Cooper started writing his congressional delegation, mostly to no avail. He let it rest for years but restarted his campaign in 2023. He was surprised to get a response from Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s office.
“I was pretty impressed. I got probably a call back from her aide within five days,” Cooper said. “And he sounded, you know, very passionate and like, ‘Hey, we can do this.’”
Fellow officers and academy alumni who had raised the issue over the years thought he should not get his hopes up. Their skepticism seemed warranted as months and years passed.
And then, last fall, Cooper heard that a Vietnam War veteran had been buried with honors in San Antonio in 1984, despite being the prime suspect in several rapes and murders.
“I happened to be reading the news and I’m like, ‘Wait a sec. This exact same thing is happening in Texas,'" Cooper recalled.
U.S. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas got a provision added to a Defense bill last year to remove Fernando Cota’s remains from Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery.
Murkowski noticed. She’s offered previous measures to have Silka removed, and she said she isn’t giving up now.
“Yes, he was a service member very early on in his life, but he went on to murder a law enforcement officer,” she said.
She, Cornyn and senators from four other states have a bill that would allow the Department of Veterans Affairs to disinter the remains of people like Silka, who’d be ineligible for burials honors under current law, due to serious crimes. The bill has had one committee hearing. Murkowski thinks it’s likely it could pass as an attachment to other legislation.
Silka served a stint in the Army at Fort Wainwright a few years before his 1984 killing spree. His father, according to a Associated Press story, requested that his cremated remains go to the Sitka National Cemetery. Frank Silka died in 2007. An effort to reach other relatives for this story was unsuccessful.
The VA says Silka is one of at least seven deceased veterans across the country whose remains could be removed from their place of honor if the law allows it.
