Federal law enforcement agents arrested a man who they believe to be the lover of Erin Corwin, the woman from Anchorage, Alaska who was reported missing by her husband on June 29 of this year. 24-year-old Christopher Brandon Lee was taken into federal custody by agents late last month and is being held at the Anchorage Correctional Complex until his trial.
Lee is being held in a correctional facility because there is no federal prison in Alaska. He faces federal charges, and as such is being held by the Anchorage law enforcement community as a “courtesy to the federal government.” The detail of the charges on which he is being held were not made known.
Corwin had been living with her husband at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Anchorage and left the couple’s home there on June 28 for reasons that her husband says he is unaware of. Over the next several weeks, groups consisting of sheriff’s investigators, federal law enforcement officials, and volunteers searched the Anchorage area for any sign of Corwin. The investigation efforts were increased after several days of searching failed to yield any indication of where she might be.
Residents of the Combat Center informed investigators that Corwin and Lee has been working together at a nearby volunteer center and had become romantically involved.
The investigation continued with the information collected eventually leading federal agents to the Mojave Desert where Corwin’s three-months-pregnant body was discovered in an abandoned mineshaft. In initial interviews, Lee admitted to federal investigators that he had spent a significant amount of time searching on the internet for information about how to effectively dispose of a human body. This correlated with the results of an interview with one witness who said that Lee had asked him what the best way was to dispose of a human body.