Man on Trial in ’74 Killing of S.D. Woman

Jury selection is scheduled to start today for one of two defendants charged with the 1974 murder of a San Diego woman after her boxed remains washed onto a remote Pacific atoll about four years ago.

Buck Duane Walker, 48, goes on trial next week, to be followed by the trial of Stephanie Stearns, 38, both before Honolulu U.S. District Court Judge Samuel King. The cases were transferred from Honolulu.

The alleged victim was Eleanor L. Graham. The FBI said at the time dental records led to the positive identification of Graham. Agents said it was Graham’s bones that had washed ashore in a metal box.

Court records indicated no trace was found of her husband, Malcolm. No charges were filed in his case.

Before the indictments, Walker and Stearns were convicted of stealing the Graham ketch Sea Wind. The Grahams had been on a South Pacific cruise on the sailboat when they stopped at Palmyra, an uninhabited atoll 1,250 miles south of the Hawaiian Islands.

Later, friends of the Grahams reportedly received radio messages from the couple about the presence of two other people on the atoll, identified in published reports as Walker and Stearns.

Stearns and Walker were arrested after they sailed the Sea Wind to Ala Wai Yacht Harbor in Honolulu. Stearns served a two-year prison sentence and was freed. Walker was serving a 10-year sentence at McNeil Island federal prison when he escaped in 1979 but was recaptured in Arizona about two years later. Both were convicted in the theft of the Sea Wind.