A massive bear climbed a tree, broke into a holiday cottage and savagely attacked a woman, mauling her to death and eating her remains for "no apparent reason." A fish and wildlife game biologist was left bewildered by the 15-year-old bear's behaviour, saying it displayed no signs of starvation or rabies, according to the Spokane Chronicle. Decades on, experts remain unable to explain what drove the killer bear to commit such a horrifying act.
Attack on a Holiday in Rural Alaska
On 8 July 1992, Darcy Staver and her husband Michael, an army captain, travelled to rural Alaska for a peaceful break. The couple had a cottage outside Glen Allen, seeking respite from the hustle and bustle of Fort William, Washington.
They were still asleep in bed when a thunderous rustling gave way to a splintering crash, and they spotted a 150-pound black bear bursting through their window, according to the Anchorage Daily News. The couple fled through the front door, slammed it shut and scrambled onto the roof, yet the relentless bear refused to quit and smashed straight through the door, reports the Daily Star.
Desperate Fight for Survival
In desperation, Michael fired several warning shots at the bear using his .22 calibre pistol — but to no avail. Realising his weapon lacked the firepower to bring the enormous creature down, the pair accepted the animal would not be frightened off — prompting Michael to climb down from the roof and head to his motorboat to seek help from neighbours. It proved to be a fatal error.
When Michael returned with his neighbour, Darcy was nowhere to be found. The two men searched frantically. What they eventually discovered left them both utterly horrified. The 33-year-old was lying motionless behind the cabin with her entire stomach torn open, drenched in blood.
Investigation and Aftermath
To his horror, Michael saw the bear devouring his wife with bloodied jaws. Michael shot it dead with his rifle. When state troopers arrived, an investigation suggested the bear had scaled a tree onto the neighbouring cabin to reach Darcy. Darcy's defensive wounds indicated she had fought fiercely. Horrifically, bears frequently do not trouble themselves with killing their prey, instead simply beginning to eat it while still alive without snapping its neck.
Tragically, just two days following Darcy's death, a bear killed a six-year-old boy, and Alaskans began shooting bears on sight. State wildlife biologists have since tried to contextualise bear attacks, with Alaska's Fish and Game department's Cathy Harms, an Interior spokeswoman stating black bear maulings are "unusual" but "not unprecedented."
Canadian scientist Stephen Herrero, a specialist in bear attacks, theorised that Alaskan black bears may indeed regard humans as potential prey, unlike other bears. He said: "Together these incidents confirm the somewhat controversial conclusion reached in 1985 that black bears can on rare occasions attempt to or even successfully prey on people," "This type of incident continues to cluster geographically in . . . rural and remote areas, suggesting that many potentially predacious black bears have had little exposure to human beings, hence little opportunity for bears showing this tendency to have been killed by man."
