Shelia Toomey rests her case

In her day, Sheila Toomey was Alaska's real-life Erle Stanley Gardner. She took the courtroom dramas of the 49th state and wrote them into homegrown episodes of "Perry Mason." For those too young to remember that hugely popular TV show sprung from the pages of Gardner's books, think "Law and Order" with a twist; there's a crafty defense attorney who shows how prosecutors aren't always right.

As a writer, Toomey dreamed of getting to cover Perry Mason-esque cases full of dramatic revelations. That rarely happened, but it didn't matter. Toomey had an uncanny knack for making trials come alive anyway. Over the course of about two decades as a courts reporter for the Anchorage Daily News, she painted sometimes-graphic, always-gripping portraits of human failure and intrigue.

Gardner became internationally famous in his day by writing 80 novels and short stories about Perry Mason. Toomey never reached such public heights, but you'd be hard pressed to find a judge or attorney in Anchorage who doesn't know her name. Everyone in journalism and politics knows it as well, along with a goodly number of average Alaskans. Most -- if not all -- of the people reading this have read her. There's no telling how many stories Toomey wrote in a 30-year run at the local newspaper. They easily number in the hundreds, if not thousands.

Most of them were human because Toomey always favored people over process. Many were captivating. Some simply gave you the creeps. Toomey was one of the reporters who helped set in motion the hunt for a serial killer named Robert Hansen, and then chronicled his bizarre, deadly and disgusting life. An Anchorage baker and big-game hunter, married with two children, Hansen took to kidnapping prostitutes and strippers in the '80s, flying them off into remote corners of Southcentral Alaska, raping them, and then turning them loose so he could hunt and kill them.

"Anchorage baker Robert Hansen didn't rape every woman he courted, and he didn't kill every woman he raped,'' Toomey wrote in 1993. "Not at first anyway. He had rules, he later told investigators. A woman got hurt only if she broke the rules by asking him to pay for sex.''

Between 17 and 21 innocent women are believed to have broken Hansen's bizarre rules. The majority of them emerged from unmarked graves virtually unknown. Toomey's writing brought some of them temporarily back to life. She had a knack for doing that, as well as for capturing the suffering of loved ones left behind.

"Dee Hawks picked her daughter up at the post office in four plastic-lined cardboard boxes mixed with dirt, rocks and bits of the coffin she had been buried in for five years before they dug her up. For Hawks, it was the final blow,'' Toomey wrote in 1990. "'All we wanted to do was have a funeral, have a decent burial.'"

Covering the court beat, Toomey thrived on the harsh, emotional side of life where character is formed. Like most good writers, she was all about character. She's a legitimate Alaska character in her own right, too: loud, outspoken and aggressive to greater or lesser degrees; constantly humming when at work; and a lot bigger than her size even after health issues scared her into losing a significant amount of weight. She can't stand more than 5 feet 4 inches, but she can seem about 6-foot 9.

She was once sent home from work, and later reprimanded, for throwing a book at a fellow editor, a ball player who towered over her.