On January 9, 2018, Brian Hawkins sat down in a small television studio in Redding, California. He asked for a cigarette and a soda first. When they were brought to him, he set the cup down, stared at the floor, and began to speak. He said he had been through hell.
He said every minute of every day had been a nightmare. Then he said he planned to walk out of the building, cross to the Sheriff’s Department next door, and confess to a murder committed 25 years earlier. The victim was Frank Wesley McAlister, born September 20, 1973, in Linwood, California. His parents separated when he was eight, and his father Doug brought him north to Redding.
The two spent long summers together at a swimming hole they considered their own, fishing and jumping from the banks. Frank was the kind of child who made friends effortlessly. What he loved most was fishing, not just the catching but the whole ritual of it. As a small boy, he would sneak into his father’s garage, take out a rod, and practice his cast in the backyard, reeling in nothing, content with the motion.
By 19, Frank was a cook at a local restaurant and engaged to a young woman named Danelle Tadic. They planned to marry in Reno. In March 1993, Frank survived a car accident. Two months later, his insurance settlement arrived, $4,500.
On May 6, 1993, he cashed the check. That same day, he died. Frank told Danelle he wanted to buy a bulk quantity of methamphetamine, sell it at a markup, and use the profit to build their future. He had no history in the drug world.
He was simply a young man who had come into more money than he had ever held and wanted to turn it into more. He drove to a part of Redding where he knew three people: Brian Hawkins, 19; his on-and-off girlfriend Shawna Colver, 17; and her brother Curtis, 21. Frank knew them casually, enough to trust them with a transaction. What Frank did not know was that before he picked them up, Shawna had already decided what would happen.
She knew Frank had the cash on him. She had told Hawkins they were not going to sell him anything. They were going to take everything. All four got into Danelle’s car.
Frank drove. Hawkins sat directly behind him. Curtis took the front passenger seat. Shawna sat behind her brother.
During the drive, Hawkins told Frank he knew a supplier in the hills near Shingletown. Frank turned the car east on Highway 44 and headed into the mountains. Allward Lane runs east of Shingletown through pine forest and granite country, past two mountain lakes, Grace Lake and Nora Lake. In May 1993, it was remote enough that four people could sit in a parked car at a dirt turnout for two hours without seeing another soul.
That is what they did. Two hours is a long time to sit with someone you have already decided to rob. None of them changed course. At some point, Shawna reached into her purse, removed a knife, and handed it to Hawkins.
But Curtis moved first with a knife of his own. Frank opened the car door and fell to the ground. All three got out after him. Hawkins straddled Frank and stabbed him in the throat and chest, multiple times.
He later told investigators he stabbed him a lot of times, and that Frank did not appear to be alive when he stopped. Curtis then picked up a rock, roughly the size of a basketball by his own account, and dropped it on Frank’s head. He would later say he did it out of mercy, to end something already beyond stopping. Frank McAlister was 19 years old.
The two siblings dragged his body 20 to 30 yards into the tree line and left him in the dark beside those lakes. Then all three got back into Danelle’s car. Hawkins drove. Along the way, he grabbed a newspaper and tried to wipe the blood from the interior.
He left the car in a Costco parking lot, window down, keys in, unlocked. Inside, the siblings called a taxi. When they came back out, they counted the cash and handed Hawkins several hundred dollars. He kept it, though he knew where it had come from.
Danelle woke the next morning to find Frank still missing. She had paged him through the night. He had not called back. She filed a missing person report.
That same evening, Costco employees reported an abandoned vehicle. A service officer found blood on the driver’s door, blood on the armrest, blood down the interior panel, a blood-soaked t-shirt behind the driver’s seat, and mud on the wheel wells. The plate traced to Danelle. Investigators treated it as a homicide from that moment forward.
The three suspects were identified as the last people known to be with Frank. All three came in and told identical stories: Frank had picked them up, driven around, gotten a page, and dropped them at Waterworks Park. Then they went silent. Investigators had blood and a missing man, but no body.
Three separate tips surfaced naming a local drug dealer, Brian Bennett. Investigators pulled him in, examined his truck, and verified his alibi. The lead collapsed. By 1995, the case went cold.
In April 1994, eleven months after Frank disappeared, two people walking in the forest near Shingletown found human remains: scattered bones, a skull, vertebrae, dark jeans, tennis shoes, a single sock, and an ID card. Dental records confirmed the identification. Frank McAlister had been found. The autopsy found two knife wounds, one on the jawbone and one on an upper vertebra, consistent with a throat wound delivered from behind.
Additional marks on the spine indicated downward stab wounds through the chest. Without physical evidence linking anyone to the scene, the case could not move forward. The years passed. Frank’s mother counted his birthdays every September 20, alone.
His father Doug grew older with the same unanswered question. At some point before 2018, Hawkins drove to the McAllister family home, intending to confess and ask forgiveness from the people who had loved Frank. When he arrived, Doug had already died. He never got to hear the truth.
Hawkins drove home and sat with it longer. On a Sunday morning before January 2018, Hawkins walked into a Redding church and approached a man he knew, Tony Preposo, whose granddaughter worked in local news. Tony called his granddaughter Courtney, a reporter six months into her first job at KRCR. She almost didn’t take the call.
She heard him out. On January 9, 2018, Hawkins arrived at the KRCR studio. Frank McAlister would have been 44. Hawkins was 45.
Before they rolled, he asked for a cigarette and a soda. Then he started talking. He said God had pressed him to do this. He said 25 years of living with what happened had become unbearable.
He named the Culvers. He described Shawna’s plan, decided before Frank ever arrived to pick them up. He described the road, the lakes, the turnout. He said Frank never got to have a life.
He said he hadn’t really had one either, not after that day. The news director called the Redding Police Department while Hawkins was still in the building. Investigators confirmed two others were involved and asked the station to hold the interview for 24 hours, enough time to find the Culvers before the broadcast warned them. Detectives Rusty Bishop and Eric Garnero had one day.
Within hours, both siblings were tracked to Red Bluff. Curtis agreed to come in. Shawna refused and was arrested. Bishop sat across from Shawna.
She gave the 1993 story word for word. Then Bishop turned a laptop toward her and played the KRCR footage. She watched Brian Hawkins confess on camera. Down the hall, Curtis held his story until the polygraph.
He failed it. Then he started talking. The accounts diverged on one central point. Curtis said Hawkins did the stabbing and that Curtis only held a knife out of fear.
Hawkins said Curtis used his own knife on the throat first. Both men were present. Neither disputed that Frank McAlister was stabbed to death on that road, and that all three of them walked away. All three suspects were arrested within 24 hours of Hawkins sitting down in that studio.
The Shasta County District Attorney’s office noted that law enforcement did not crack this case. Twenty-five years of investigative work could not do what one man’s guilt eventually did. Hawkins received no deal for coming forward. In November 2019, he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, robbery, and special allegations.
He was sentenced to 25 years to life. On January 14, 2022, Shawna and Curtis Colver entered pleas in Shasta County Superior Court: voluntary manslaughter, robbery in concert, and multiple assault charges. Shawna received 20 years. Curtis received 35.
Frank McAlister’s mother waited 29 years for a courtroom. She got one. She said she wanted justice, then said what justice felt like from where she was standing. It could not bring him back.
Frank cashed a check for $4,500 on May 6, 1993. He believed it was a starting point. Three other people decided it was a target. What they took from him was everything that would have come after 19.
He never taught anyone to fish. He never showed a child how to read the water. He never got to be old. The distance between 19 and 51 is the weight of silence.
That is what silence costs.