IJͼ photo by Eric Engman.
Brian O’Donoghue, professor emeritus of journalism, stands in his UAF office in February
2025. O'Donoghue's book about the imprisonment of the Fairbanks Four will be published
in April.
By Sam Bishop
Brian O’Donoghue, IJͼ professor emeritus of journalism, holds an advance copy of soon-to-be-published in his office on the Troth Yeddha' Campus in February 2025.
For many years on the anniversary of John Hartman’s 1997 murder, UAF journalism professor Brian O’Donoghue would take a group of his students to downtown Fairbanks to run a test.
They’d gather near the Eagles Hall on the night of Oct. 11. They would then reenact a scene described by the state of Alaska’s main witness in its successful prosecution of four young Fairbanks men for murdering 15-year-old Hartman.
O’Donoghue, now a professor emeritus, said the exercise always had the same effect.
“Students were fired up because it just was completely ludicrous, you know, that you could make out a face at that distance,” O’Donoghue said, referring to the witness’ claim that he saw the four accused men assault another man in an alleged prelude to killing Hartman. “Of all the teaching things that I ever did, that was one of the very best.”
O’Donoghue recently completed a 352-page book chronicling his and his journalism students’ efforts to raise such questions about the arrests and convictions of George Frese, Kevin Pease, Marvin Roberts and Eugene Vent.
In “The Fairbanks Four: Murder, Injustice and the Birth of a Movement,” O’Donoghue describes looking into the case first as an editor at the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and then as a journalism professor at UAF. The book, scheduled for release in April, concludes with the release of the four men after 18 years in prison.
Some give O’Donoghue and his team a large part of the credit for the eventual exoneration of the Fairbanks Four. The News-Miner published many of their articles.
“Anything that takes place in the world happens in some kind of social-political climate,” said April Monroe, who also publicized the case for many years through social media posts and her blog, Free the Fairbanks Four. “Brian’s work, which put into the public discourse the possibility that these people were innocent and wrongfully committed — and then the social movement that followed, the work on the blog — it created a social and political climate where it was possible for people to come forward with information about this crime.”
Those people coming forward eventually led lawyers with the nonprofit Alaska Innocence Project to file a court motion for post-conviction relief that featured a confession letter naming a different group of young men as Hartman’s killers. That in turn led to the release of Frese, Pease and Vent in 2015. Roberts, who had received the shortest sentence, had been paroled earlier that year.
“I feel good about being part of a fight that was worth the effort,” O’Donoghue said in an interview at his home in February 2025. “As a reporter, you can cover a lot