Around 10 A.M. on July 20, 2009, a slight breeze started to pick up on Matinicus Island, Maine, the most remote inhabited island on the eastern seaboard. Alan Miller eased his sleek lobster boat, Hustler, past the rock breakwater and into the sheltered harbor. Although Miller had a permit to lobster the crustacean-rich seafloor surrounding Matinicus, islanders had made it known that the mainlander wasn't welcome.

About a month earlier, Miller, a wealthy 60-year-old lobsterman with a second home on the island, had chosen to ignore the islanders' unofficial decree and boldly set 400 traps, valued at $20,000, in Matinicus waters. Two weeks after, he discovered that about half of his wire-mesh pots had been cut free from their buoys and heard rumor that Weston Ames and Chris Young, two forty-something stepbrothers and Matinicus residents, hidden by fog, had snipped his lines. Reportedly, Ames and Young soon found some 400 of their traps knifed—and suspected Miller, of course.

Earlier on the morning of July 20, Young had tried to force a confession out of Miller's 69-year-old father-in-law, a longtime Matinicus lobsterman named Vance Bunker. According to court documents, Young had illegally boarded Bunker's boat and accused him and Miller of molesting his gear. The argument escalated. They ended up wrestling, then Bunker pepper-sprayed Young in the face.

A couple of hours after the fracas, the stepbrothers sought out Miller while he was hauling traps off Matinicus. According to Miller, they intercepted his boat and, supposedly just inches from bumping rails at 30 miles per hour, tried to run it aground on the shallow rock ledges. Miller managed to escape, but he suspected that the stepbrothers might be waiting for him back on Matinicus. As a precaution, he decided to radio the Marine Patrol and inform them of the situation. Ultimately, one of their officers decided to board Miller's boat and accompany him to the island, where, hiding belowdecks, the officer might overhear Ames or Young make threatening remarks or confess to vandalizing Miller's traps.

All seemed to be going according to plan when Miller approached Matinicus's cement wharf around ten. The stepbrothers, as predicted, were waiting for him at the edge of the dock. As soon as Miller tied off, Ames and Young began spouting accusations, calling him names, and pounding on the canopy of his pilothouse.

Unbeknownst to Miller, however, his wife, Janan, and father-in-law were about to screw things up. From the window of the home that the Millers own on Matinicus, Janan had seen the men waiting for her husband and decided to take matters into her own hands. She had grabbed a shotgun from the bedroom and run down to the wharf. Bunker was also enraged. Still smarting from his earlier altercation with the stepbrothers, he and his deckhand (or sternman, as they're called on lobster boats) were bouncing toward the showdown in a blue pickup with a heavy arsenal: a .22-caliber revolver, a .45-caliber handgun, and an AK-47 assault rifle with nine loaded clips.

As the shouting between Miller and the men grew louder, Janan arrived with her 12-gauge and leveled the barrel at the stepbrothers.

"Hey," she barked.