← Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings and Mysteries
Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings and Mysteries
176. Backwoods Horror: Why Do People Keep Disappearing in Nome, Alaska?
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This episode is brought to you by Solace Health. I have been booking lots of doctor's appointments lately and it can be such a headache. You can spend hours on hold with insurance. You can be bounced between doctors who clearly aren't talking to each other. I mean, I see it in my life now and I have a grandmother with Alzheimer's and it's hard for her to go to the doctor and advocate for herself. Having a Solace Advocate would be such a game changer. Solace connects you with dedicated healthcare advocates, registered nurses and healthcare pros averaging 16 years of experience who do the work that usually falls on you. A Solace Advocate can find the right doctors and schedule your appointments, fight denied insurance claims and get your care approved. And they can also make sure your doctors are actually in sync so nothing falls through the cracks. Studies show that 98% of patients feel more in control of their care after working with an advocate. You can go to Solish Health.com to see if you qualify. It takes about two minutes and it's covered by insurance. That's Solace Health. Insurance.com must be 18 or older. Advocates do not provide medical or legal advice.
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Welcome back to another episode of Heart Starts Pounding. As always, I'm your host Kaylin Moore. Today I want to tell you about a town in Alaska where more people go missing per capita than anywhere else in the us And I want to tell you about the COVID up that might be causing this. But first I Just want to say thank you to everyone who reached out to me with Urban Legends that you were raised with. Last week I did an episode on Urban Legends and the true stories behind them and I heard some some wild tales from you all. Theo commented that he was raised in the Czech Republic with an urban legend called the Black Ambulance. Legend says that there was an ambulance in the 80s that would prowl the streets of Prague and snap up children and harvest their organs. It was such a common legend that the government actually had to debunk it on national television. That's definitely something that I want to look more into because what is the story there? Also, a few of you reached out to let me know that the episode was glitching. On the third time I said pinky during the pinky Pinky legend. We looked into it and there wasn't any issue on our end. And also people listened on the same platform and didn't have any problem. So I have no idea what's going on there. But to the handful of you who heard that glitch, you might want to check your bathrooms tonight. That is terrifying. Seriously though, keep those stories coming. I love when you guys send me messages to the RDS headquarters. It makes my day that much brighter. All right, let's get into today's episode about the mysterious disappearances happening in Nome, Alaska. It was a Sunday night, August 10, 2003. 18 year old Timari Tawarek and her roommate, 19 year old Sonia Ivanov, went to a friend's house for a fun packed night of beer and board games. The arctic summer sun had finally set just before midnight, but Timoree and Sonja still had enough energy to burn, so they continued hanging out. At around 1am Timoree looked at the clock and realized that she had to be up for work in just six hours. Neither Tim nor Sonja had cars. They got around Nome, their small Alaskan town, entirely on foot, and Tim, realizing that she wouldn't be getting more than five hours of sleep, decided that she was just going to stay at her friend's place and crash there that night. But Sonya had Mondays off from work, so she wasn't really in any hurry, she decided she was just going to amble home on her own. So Timoree walked Sonja outside into the misty night rain and after the two girls told each other peace out, Sonja continued on her way down the street in the direction of their home. At around 5am that morning, Tim returned to her apartment to get ready for work and she noticed that Sonya's bed was Empty. Now, Tim racked her brain for why that might be, and she figured Sonya must have stopped at her friend's house and spent the night there. So. So she just got dressed and headed out to work. She figured that she would hear from Sonya later because she often called her during the day on her workline just to check in and chat. But Timoree didn't hear from Sonja at all that day, and this was not normal. These girls always checked in with each other, even without cell phones. They just always knew where the other one was so that they could call the landline and just chat. Tim did not feel good about this, so she began making calls to mutual friends to find out if anyone had seen her. And no one had. That same morning, Timory called the hospital where Sonia worked and learned that she never showed up for her shift there. She then phoned the Gnome police to ask if maybe Sonia had been arrested for some reason and was being held. But no one named Sonia Ivanov or fitting her description was in custody. Where did Sonya go? Did she somehow make a wrong turn on the short walk back to her apartment, a walk that she had made many, many times before? Well, the truth is, Sanja had become part of a disturbing trend in Nome, a trend where people just vanish into thin air. And locals have been warning each other for a long time about this very thing. Now, Nome is a city at the edge of the world. It's etched into the Arctic coastline along the southern rim of Alaska's Seward Peninsula. It juts out into the icing bearing sea. Nome is actually closer to Russia than to Anchorage, Alaska's largest city. And it's not for nothing that Nome's very name forms the first syllables of no man's land. Nome is a place isolated from the world beyond it. No roads connect to it from anywhere else. And if you open Google Maps and try to find driving directions to Nome, Google can't offer them. Nome can only be reached by plane or by boat or by dog sled. Everything about this place is harsh and unforgiving. Temperatures average just 5.6 degrees Fahrenheit in January, its coldest month. But they can drop as low as minus 50, which is a level of cold that most of us can't even understand in summer. Daylight in nome lasts for 20 hours, while at the peak of winter, it's the total inverse. 20 hours of total darkness and what's known as polar night. The harsh environment is reflected in the city's architectural character. Too many of the Buildings are these stilted clapboard structures with a prefabricated look. They're just designed for maximum warmth and durability. And Alaskan locals have been warning each other about Nome for a very long time. They say you shouldn't go there, and not just because of the ruthless environment, but because there is a darkness that's hiding in plain sight. See, since 1960, at least 25 people have gone missing or died under suspicious circumstances in and around the city. And. And for a population of just a few thousand, that's a lot. It's more missing persons and unexplained deaths per capita than just about any other American city. But for a place where people just vanish, there doesn't really seem to be a lot of urgency. Authorities say they have looked into the cases and decided that there's no connection. There's nothing weird going on, they say, no larger threat to the community. But residents and the people that have lived there the longest all know that that's not true. And honestly, after researching for this episode, I tend to agree with them. Now, by the time Timoree's workday was over, she knew that it was time to take action. She couldn't just sit idly by. At five o', clock, she walked straight over to the Nome police department to report her friend missing. And right away, Timmerrie was struck by the officer's apparent lack of concern or urgency. The officer, whose name was Stan Pascola, asked Timoree questions that suggested Sonja might have left of her own accord. He asked about her mental state and about how the two girls got along. He didn't really seem to take this report all that seriously. Now, Temery was not confident the police would do much to help. The department had a reputation for not diligently investigating cases involving native Alaskans. Now, Nome's police force was also a very small one. At the time, the city employed only seven officers. So the police at the time, as they often did, had to turn to volunteer firefighters. And those firefighters went out into the city and started doing a sweep, and they spread out to the opposite corners of town. So those volunteers went out and began doing a sweep of the surrounding area, looking for Sonya. At around 8:30pm one of the volunteers began searching the tundra near this gold dredge, because Nome used to be an old gold mining town. It's on the outskirts of town. And as the searcher went down into a gravel pit, something in the willows caught his attention. It was a woman's body, completely nude, except for one single sock. The woman was identified as Sonia Ivanov. Authorities processed this crime scene and then sent Sonia's body off to the medical examiner who found that she had sustained a single gunshot wound to the back of her head, delivered at point blank range, execution style. But maybe strangest of all, he found no trace of forensic evidence of any kind on her body. It was as if the killer had intentionally removed evidence and maybe had knowledge on how to do that. This episode is brought to you by Kachava. Every morning I take my dog Fitzgerald on a walk around the neighborhood before I do anything else. It's kind of a non negotiable that I have no phone, no emails. It's just me, Fitz and whatever podcast I'm listening to or also I take a little cachava to go. It's this little piece of Zen that I have in my day when I'm traveling this summer. The hardest part is losing that little window of my routine. I can't always bring my dog Fitzgerald with me, but I can bring my cachava. Which is why I'm so glad they have travel packs now. You already know how I drink it at home. Banana, coconut water, sometimes a little peanut butter, even a little cold brew when I need it. Now I can throw a couple packs in my bag and have my all in one nutrition on me. But with their six flavors, I'm definitely going to bring coffee this time. Each packet has plant based protein, fiber, vitamins, minerals, greens, probiotics and more clean nutrition, no fillers, no artificial anything. Take your daily ritual with you. Go to kachava.com and use code HSP for 15% off your first order. That's Kachava K-A C-H-A-V A.com code HSP this episode is brought to you by Rula. May is Mental Health Awareness month and for a lot of us that's the nudge to actually do the thing that we keep putting off. For me, therapy was something I had to stop thinking of as a nice idea and start treating like a priority. But finding the right therapist, one who takes your insurance, who's actually available, who fits what you need, that can feel like its own barrier. And there is nothing worse than wanting help and feeling overwhelmed by the process of getting it. Usually by the time you're thinking of seeing a therapist, it's because you have a lot on your plate and you want help now. Well, that's what Rula is here for. Rula partners with over 120 insurance plans. So the average copay is just $15 a session, over 23,000 therapists and psychiatrists nationwide and you can get appointments as soon as tomorrow. No wait lists, no back and forth. This is Mental Health Awareness Month. Don't just think about your mental health, actually take the step to take care of it. Visit rula.com hsppod to get started. That's R U L A.com hsppod you deserve mental health care that works with you, not against your budget. Sonia was born on April 13, 1984, and Unilocle Alaska, a city of about 700 people located 100 miles east of Nome. She attended a local high school where she played basketball. She was involved in school activities, and there she became best friends with Timmery. She graduated in 2002 and then moved to Nome, where she landed a job behind the Norton Sound Regional Hospital's admission desk. Sonya was determined to save up every dime she earned so she could eventually start attending college. Now Sonya adapted quickly to Nome, which offered so much more excitement and opportunity than her small little hometown. In June 2003, Sonya competed in the Miss Arctic Native Brotherhood pageant, which is not a traditional beauty pageant, but instead it's a showcase for native Alaskan women that's meant to test character and cultural awareness, and the grand prize for winning is scholarship money for college. And that same summer, Sonja's best friend, Timoree, who was a year younger than her, moved to Nome and began living with her. That's to say that this was supposed to be an exciting time for Sonya, but now it had been cut tragically short by an unknown killer. Back at the crime scene, Gnome police uncovered their first clue with a set of fresh tire tracks that led away from the gravel pit where Sonya was found. Whoever was driving that car probably knew what had happened to her. That's really all that they had to work off of. And it wasn't much. So for the next few weeks, there wasn't much movement on the case, and it started running the risk of going cold. But then, in early September, their phone rang. Someone had seen something the night Sonia disappeared, and they were ready to come forward. A woman named Florence said she had witnessed something that she felt was important. On the night Sonya disappeared, Florence had been outside of her house smoking a cigarette when she spotted Sonya walking down the street alone. She looked okay. There wasn't anything obviously strange about her behavior. But then an SUV suddenly appeared and started trailing her. Florence observed as this SUV watched Sonya for a bit and then seemed to drive off. But it soon reappeared at the next corner, right in the way of Sonya's path, in between her and her apartment. It was as if it was laying in wait for her. The driver then rolled down their window and briefly talked to Sonya. Florence couldn't hear everything that was being said, but she heard Sonya say something like, what's going on? The two chatted just a little bit longer, and then Sonja willingly got into the vehicle and rode off, heading in the direction of that gold dredge where her body would later be found. Now, Florence remembered that the time was about 1:30 in the morning, just a half an hour after Sonja and Timmer parted ways. The officer asked Florence to provide a description of the vehicle and its driver. Now, she didn't see the driver's face, she said, but she remembered one thing about the vehicle very distinctly. And then her voice got real quiet. On the side of the suv, she said, were the words Nome Police Department. It was a marked police cruiser. Now, this shocking revelation narrowed down the suspect pool from thousands of people in the town to just two Gnome police officers, Matt Owens and Stan Pascola, the only two officers who were on duty at the time of Sonia's disappearance and death. Officer Pascola was the one who first talked to Tim Marie when she came into the station to report her friend missing. He was the officer who seemed like he couldn't have cared less about the missing woman. Was it because he knew what had happened and didn't want an investigation to get started? But then some of the women in town began coming forward with stories of their own. And not about Stan, but about the other cop, Officer Matt Owens. Stories of Officer Owens picking up women at night and giving them rides. Sometimes they said Owens would follow women in his patrol cruiser and then drive ahead of them, only to cut them off further down their path. Just like what the witness had described happening with Sonya. Three witnesses claimed that they had been stalked and assaulted by Owens. One even said that she had come forward and told the police chief, Ralph Taylor, after it happened that but nothing was ever done. Another said that Owens had held her at gunpoint and threatened to kill her if she ever told anyone about the assault. Remember, this was a small town. Less than 4,000 people lived here. There's liberal arts colleges that are bigger than Nome. It's been said that Owen's behavior was this open secret that the whole department probably knew about. And maybe that's why he felt so emboldened to commit these crimes that on the clock and in uniform. But what happens when the only people you can Go to are the ones who have been shielding the very predator you seek to report. Well, not much, as was obvious from the other women's experiences. But now this was a murder investigation and one that potentially involved an officer. It was no longer up to the known police department to investigate. The Alaska State Troopers took over the investigation shortly after this, though they wouldn't have to do much digging into Owens because his very, very bizarre choices started speaking for themselves. In late September, around six weeks after Sonya was murdered, there was another strange development in the case. Owens reported that his police cruiser was missing. It turns out Owen's sergeant asked the officer about its whereabouts and the officer claims that he just didn't know what had happened to it. The department soon launched a full scale search for this cruiser. They were not going to look into the accusations against one of their own officers, but one SUV goes missing and they were going to throw everything at it. Officers searched all over town for this cruiser and the officer who ended up finding it was Owens himself. He said that he located his abandoned vehicle right near the gravel pit where Sonia's body was recovered. But then two minutes after Owens called in the discovery to the station, he radioed again, totally breathless and claimed that someone was shooting at him. The other officers booked it over to the scene and searched the area, but they could not find anyone. It was just Owens there by himself, but he had a whole story about what had happened. He claimed that a perpetrator had approached him, grabbed his Remington 870 shotgun from the back of his cruiser and then opened fire. The police issued shotgun was nowhere to be found, so they couldn't corroborate the story, though the SUV did look like it had been through hell. The front window had been shattered, but upon closer inspection, it wasn't actually a bullet that had gone through it. The culprit appeared to be a large rock that was on the ground right beside the cruiser. Owen's fellow officers examined the glass inside of the vehicle and then they made a bizarre discovery on the front seat. It was an envelope made out to the Nome police and inside was a typed letter addressed to the pigs. Quote, it read, quote, you leave me alone and I will leave you alone. I will also shoot you in the head if you get close. As you can see, it was easy for me to take your pig car keys right there. It was not her fault. She thought I was a pig and just happened. I'm sorry, can I just interject here for one second because this makes me pretty angry. Who talks like this? You really Expect us to believe that this assailant took the time to handwrite out a letter explaining their crime and then left it on the front seat of the car they stole. This quote, killer suggested that he had stolen the cruiser and then used it in his crime against Sonya. He included one of Sonia's picture ID cards and proof of his deed, as if he was a serial killer. The ABI investigation immediately felt like this whole thing had been staged and the prime suspect was Matt Owens. His story about an unknown assailant stopping his vehicle and managing to steal the his police issued firearm just made no sense. And it came suspiciously on the heels of Owens being summoned by the ABI to Anchorage for a polygraph test. But one problem they had was that the gun used to kill Sonia, believed to be a Jennings, 22, was not in Owen's possession. His home was searched and they could not find any such weapon. However, one officer did note that he knew of one Jennings, 22 in nomenclature and it was in evidence storage at the precinct where Owens worked. And not only that, but officers didn't have a great track record of keeping the evidence storage locked. The ABI investigator then contacted Owens estranged wife who remembered speaking to Owens on his birthday. And Owens said something like he needed to drop off his son with her because the department was busy searching for a missing girl. They asked her what time this call had taken place and she said she remembered the call being at around 4:30 in the afternoon. And this was the closest thing that they had to a smoking gun. Matt owens birthday was August 12, the day that Sonya was reported missing. But Sonya wasn't first reported missing until after 5pm and logically there was only one way that Matt Owens would have known about Sonia's disappearance before anyone else at the department did. On October 25, 2003, Nome police arrested Matt Owens and charged him with first degree murder. Some of Sonia's friends showed up to the arraignment hearing where they were confronted by a hostile group of Owen's friends from his church congregation. They were outraged that a dutiful and brave public servant would be accused of such a crime. But almost immediately following his arrest, even more women started coming forward with stories about being picked up by Owens and then sexually assaulted by him. One of those women claimed that Owens warned her if she tried to report him, it would be his word against hers and no one would believe, quote, a native with a drinking problem over a police officer. Some of these women still went to the Nome police after their ordeals to report these assaults and found, tragically, that Owens was right. The department did not do anything to investigate. And, you know, this didn't really come as a surprise to them because everyone knew that the police didn't take the harassment and assault of the local native women seriously. I mean, this is a department that in 2017, got in trouble for trying to weed out sexual assault cases by pressuring women to redact their accusations. And evidence against Owens just kept mounting, as I'm sure you can imagine. And then authorities came forward and said that they believed Owens had stole the gun used to kill Sonja from an evidence locker and then put it back afterwards. They also found proof that he had burned a pair of gloves and some of Sonya's clothing in a fire pit 70 miles north of Nome. And more than two years after Owen's arrest, a jury convicted him of first degree murder as well as evidence tampering, and of course, for staging the purported theft of his police cruiser. Because God forbid we forget about this car. A judge then sentenced him to 101 years in prison. He used his badge, his marked police car, and his police training to commit what he thought was going to be a perfect crime. The leading theory is that he took Sonya thinking that she was going to be easy to assault, but she was able to fight him off. And because she wasn't drunk, he most likely thought that her statement against him wouldn't just be brushed off by police like usual. So he killed her so she could never come forward about what he did. And this was a rare kind of win in the area where not only a case was solved, but the person responsible was actually punished for the crime, even though this crime probably wouldn't have happened in the first place if he had ever been punished for any of the other crimes against women he had committed. But like I said, Nome is a really harsh place. And not everyone there is fortunate enough to have their crime investigated, let alone closed. And sometimes the trail goes cold in very, very unsettling ways. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. I've talked about this before, but when I was starting Heartstarts pounding, I had a long list of what ifs? What if nobody listens? What if I say too many unflattering things about P.T. barnum and his estate gets mad at me? Well, I'm still here. And so is this podcast. Pushing past that is easier when you have the right tools on your side. 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This episode is brought to you by Alma May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and I think most of us are past the point of wondering whether therapy helps. We know that it does, but the hard part is usually the finding. First you have to search up new therapists. Then you have to contact them. You have to see if they're accepting new patients. Then you go through the scheduling and insurance process. This is all time that you could be spending getting the help you need, and instead it's just adding more stress to your plate. Well, ALMA gets that, which is why they've made it genuinely simple. They have a network of over 26,000 therapists nationwide, and you can browse the directory without even making an account filter. By insurance, specialty, background, whatever matters to you, 98% of Alma therapists accept insurance, and clients with insurance pay $20 on average. Most people find their match on the first try, and over 80% report feeling better within six months. If you've been putting it off because a search felt like its own barrier, ALMA took that barrier down. Get started now@hello Alma.com heart starts. That's hello Alma.com h e a R T S T A R T S Joseph Balderas grew up in Lubbock, Texas, with a taste for adventure and a thirst for knowledge. The middle child of five, Joseph was both an avid outdoorsman and the first in his family to finish college. When he moved to Alaska for work in 2011, it was like life as Joseph knew it had been flipped upside down, trading in the arid heat of West Texas for the arctic chill of America's so called final frontier. For Joseph, it was an exciting and even exotic change. Kind of. He never thought he'd actually be living in a place where the northern lights were visible for most of the year. But there he was. Joseph loved Alaska's imposing terrain. He loved, loved, loved to hike. He often called home to tell his mother of his latest adventures and his upcoming plans. If there was one thing she repeatedly would tell him, it was to not go hiking alone. You know, Mom's worry. Still, he did plan to go hiking alone on the last weekend of June in 2016. Over beers with his co workers that Friday afternoon, Joseph explained that his fiance was flying into town for the 4th of July and he wanted to surprise her with the perfect hiking spot. So he was going to head up north a ways to scope out some potential trails. Don't go by yourself though, his co workers told him. Wait for your fiance, Megan. But Joseph had already made up his mind. He was going to go that weekend and he was going to be fine. Joseph's fiance was Megan Ryder. They had first met in 2013 down in Juneau, and that's where he lived until moving to Nome the following year to work for the city's second District Court. Megan stayed behind in Juneau, which, although is in the same state, is over a thousand miles away from Nome. But Joseph had plans to move back to Juneau that summer to start his own law practice and to marry Megan. In the meantime, the couple saw each other as often as their schedules would allow, and they talked on the phone and texted nearly every day. On Friday night, June 24, 2016, Joseph called Megan to brag about the salmon he'd caught fishing that evening. After the call, he sent her a picture of the filets and he told her that he was heading back out to camp beneath the midnight sun. Early the next morning, Joseph was back home where he lived with his roommate. And he sent Megan some texts saying that he was going to venture back out to another river where he suspected he could catch some king salmon. And Megan eagerly awaited an update from him. But she never got one. By Monday morning, Megan still hadn't heard from Joseph. Her calls were going straight to his voicemail and her texts were all undelivered. So she called up the second District Court in Nome and she Got Joseph's co worker Tracy Bluey on the line. And what Tracy had to say made Megan's hair stand on end because Joseph hadn't come into work that morning and it was totally unlike him not to call or show. Tracy sounded a bit worried, and before she hung up, she told Megan that she would call the state troopers and report him missing. Now, the Nome council highway is 72 miles of unpaved gravel that's unplowed during the winter and ends in the town of Council, which has a population of 0. The highway is largely just a scenic route. When Alaska State Trooper Timothy Smith received the call that morning, he remembered that one of his fellow troopers spotted Joseph's pickup truck over the weekend parked on on the highway out by mile marker 44. So Smith drove out to that stretch of highway and lo and behold, there was Joseph's truck still parked on the shoulder. Trooper Smith parked behind the truck and tried the doors. They were all unlocked. So he reached his hand into the vehicle and removed a backpack from the passenger seat. He unzipped it and found fishing gear, a pair of waders and boots. Smith looked around the area, the miles of barren land and low brush in every direction, yelling into his megaphone along the way. But there was no sign of Joseph anywhere and not a single other human in sight. This really eerie feeling came over the trooper in the total silence of the surroundings. He knew that he needed to get search crews out there immediately, so he used a satellite phone to contact the Gnome Search and Rescue and the Volunteer Fire Department. Over the next week, for 20 hours a day, from sunrise to sunset, ATVs and aircraft scoured the area looking for clues. Community volunteers, family members and search dogs joined in the operation. And the dogs picked up a scent on the road near where Joseph's pickup was, and it led directly to the river. But then the trail was lost and the dog's handlers just took them home. Searchers in the area also saw nothing except bears. I mean, there were a lot of bears out there. Could that be a clue to Joseph's fate? And Trooper Smith wondered that if Joseph or his remains were out there somewhere, Smith believed that no one would be able to see him from any angle. It seemed pretty hopeless. After nearly a week, the search was called off and Joseph's whereabouts remained a mystery. On July 3, state troopers went back to Joseph's house and they talked to his roommate, Jake Stetten Benz. And Jake told the troopers that he wasn't home most of the Saturday that Joseph disappeared. He had been out bridge jumping with his friends Emory and Tyler that afternoon. And after the trio drove out to Solomon, an area east of Nome, and didn't return to town until one in the morning. And the troopers noticed that while talking to Jake, Jake had scrapes on his face and his arms. And they asked him where he'd gotten those, and he said that he got banged up playing catch football with a friend. The troopers then asked when this had happened, and Jake recalled that this was around June 30, which would have happened three days after Joseph's disappearance. Now, troopers felt kind of weird about this whole interaction, so after the interview, they put in a request for Jake's cell phone data. And once that request was approved, they took a look at Jake's text message exchanges. And as they were reading through them, they discovered that Jake had been lying. On July 4, a day after they first talked to Jake at the house, he had texted his friends Emory and Tyler, asking them to cover for him, saying that he had to use them in a story that he told the state trooper about driving out to Solomon after they'd gone bridge jumping. For some reason, Jake felt the need to create an alibi for his whereabouts from 8pm to 1am that Saturday, troopers recontacted Jake and confronted him about this lie. And Jake apologized for not being truthful. And he explained that he had never been questioned by troopers before and he was just simply nervous. The investigators proceeded to thoroughly search the home Jake and Joseph shared, but they didn't find anything that would indicate foul play. And around the same time, troopers were contacted by a witness who reported driving on the Gnome Council highway on Saturday, June 25, and seeing Joseph Baldera standing next to his pickup truck right where it was later found at mile marker 44. Now, this seemed to confirm that Joseph had driven his own car out to that stretch of highway and parked it at the east fork of the Solomon River. But what happened after was a question that continued to haunt investigators and Joseph's loved ones. Months passed without any sign of Joseph, whose family back in Texas grew impatient and dissatisfied with the state troopers investigation. So the family hired their own investigator, an Alaska based PI named Andy Clamser, who flew out to Nome to see if he could uncover something that the local investigators couldn't. And by this time, local officials were feeling the pressure. That October, with much of the dense foliage now cleared by the autumn weather, the city donated $10,000 to a volunteer search that returned to the area near mile marker 44 on the nome Council highway with helicopters Spraying prop wash to flatten the willow branches for the best possible view of the ground. Searchers on ATVs and also on foot fanned out throughout the area. But the end result was the exact same as before. Nothing. The PI Andy Clamser was meanwhile busy with his own investigation. He didn't believe that something had happened to Joseph while hiking. Joseph was an experienced outdoorsman in good physical shape and besides, if he'd perished out there in the wild near his truck, he surely would have been found by now. If he had been attacked by a bear, then searchers would have found evidence of a bear attack. But they didn't. Clamser talked to dozens of Joseph's friends, his co workers and acquaintances and found no indication that Joseph was suicidal or had any reason that he would want to disappear. He was upbeat, he was happy. He had plans for the future, both short term and long term. Clamser ultimately concluded that Joseph was a victim of foul play. Joseph's family did agree, but that didn't bring them any closer to learning what actually happened to him or who was responsible. Did he walk out into the woods and meet someone he shouldn't have? Or did he get picked up by a car and taken somewhere? No one ever got any answer on this. And so Joseph's death got placed into an ever expanding file of strange disappearances in Nome with unsatisfying answers from police. When Donald Adams disappeared From Nome in 1976 at just 18 years old, his family was left to search for him while the police didn't step up and their search returned to nothing. When Nathan Anangazik vanished just a few years after graduating from the local high school, barely anything was written about him in his police file. When Justina Beatriz Kanaia, a mother of eight, disappeared in Nome on her way to a doctor's appointment, her daughters had to show pictures of her around to the locals because the police refused to help. And when Admik Carl Henry Jr. Vanished after being last seen at a relative's home, it was his sister in law that put together a suspect list, not the police. And she did the same thing when Amtik's cousin Ernest went missing in the area as well. But although Joseph's case didn't get solved, it did get something that most of the missing persons cases in the area didn't get, including the ones that I just mentioned. And that's media coverage which helped shine a brighter light on the disturbing pattern of disappearances and suspicious deaths in Nome. A pattern that had become so concerning to the community that in 2006, a whole decade before Joseph's disappearance, the FBI was brought in to analyze these cases because some residents of Nome feared that a serial killer was at work, and the FBI concluded that there was no serial killer and that there was no larger pattern. But if you pull back and look at the cases of missing and murdered Alaskans and suspicious deaths in Nome, you may not walk away convinced that there's a serial killer or some murderous cabal at work. But a very clear pattern does emerge, and that's the Nome Police Department's pattern of indifference, neglect and hostility towards the local community, especially the local Indigenous community. But the problem of missing and murdered Indigenous people is much broader, and Alaska claims the greatest share of those. So to find out how you can get involved and provide advocacy and support, you can visit the website for the Data for Indigenous justice organization at www.dataforindigenousjustice.org and you can click on Resources in the top left menu. But that is all I have for you today. If you want to learn more about GNOME over on Footnotes on the High Council tier at Patreon, I'm going to kind of go through some of the cases that didn't make it into this week's episode. There's a lot, lot, lot more from GNOME that I'd love to talk about, so you can join me there. Otherwise, I will be back here next week with another episode for you all. And until then, stay curious. Arthur's Pounding is written and produced by me, Kayla Moore. Heartstrush Pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Our associate producer is Juno Hobbs. Additional research and writing by Paul Haynes Sound design and mix by Redrum Creative Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Jernigan and the team at WME have a heart pounding story or a case request? Check out heartstartspounding.com
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