Backwoods Horror: Why Do People Keep Disappearing in Nome, Alaska?
In 2003, 19-year-old Sonya Ivanoff was walking home from a friend's house in Nome, Alaska when a witness saw her get into a vehicle marked 'Nome Police Department.' Her body was found the next day. But Sonya's murder is just one piece of a much larger pattern. Since 1960, at least 25 people have gone missing or died under suspicious circumstances in this isolated town of fewer than 4,000 people, and the community has been fighting for answers that local authorities seem determined not to give.
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SOURCES
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chukchi_Peninsula
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elim,_Alaska
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iditarod_Trail_Sled_Dog_Race
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NBC: A Walk in the Rain (Aired Oct. 14, 2022)
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TRANSCRIPT
There’s a town in Alaska where more people go missing per capita, than anywhere else in the US.
And the stories coming from Nome, Alaska, are as disturbing as they are mysterious. But what is going on there? Why do so many people go missing under strange circumstances?
Well, today, I want to share with you some of those stories, and one of them has a shocking twist that youre going to want to stick around for.
And if you’re interested in mysterious disappearances, true crime that keeps you up at night, and more; you’re just like me and you have a dark curiosity. Make sure you subscribe and meet me here at the Rogue Detecting society headquarters each week.
Audio Intro
Welcome back to another episode of Heart Starts Pounding. As always, I’m your host Kaelyn 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 coverup that might be causing this.
But first, I just want to say thank you to everyone who reached out to me with urban legends you were raised with. Last week we did an episode on urban legends and the true stories behind them, and I heard some wild Tales from you all.
Theo commented that he was raised in the check republic with the urban legend of 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 had to debunk it on check TV. That is definitely something I want to look into more because what’s 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 but there are a handful of you that might want to check your bathrooms tonight, but that is terrifying.
Seriously though, keep the stories coming, I love when you send messages to the RDS headquarters for me to read. It makes my day that much brighter.
Alright, let’s get into today’s episode, about the mysterious disappearances happening in Nome, Alaska
It was a Sunday night—August 10th, 2003. 18 year old Timayre Towarakand her roommate, 19 year old Sonya Ivanoff (sawn-yuh), went to a friend’s house for a fun-packed night of beer and board games.
The arctic summer sun finally set just before midnight, but Timayre and Sonya still had energy to burn and they continued hanging out. But At around 1am, Timayre looked at the clock and realized she had to be up for work in just six hours.
Neither Timayre nor Sonya had cars. They got around Nome, their small town in Alaska, entirely on foot. And Timayre—realizing that she wouldn’t be getting more than five hours of sleep—decided to stay and crash at her friend’s place. But Sonya had Mondays off from work and wasn’t in any hurry, so she was going to amble home on her own.
Timayre walked Sonya outside into the misty night rain, and after the two girls told each other “Peace out,” Sonya continued on her way down the street, in the direction of their home.
Around 5am that morning, Timayre returned to her apartment to get ready for work and noticed that Sonya’s bed was empty.
Timayre wracked her brain for why that might be, and she figured Sonya must have stopped at a friend’s house and spent the night. so she got dressed and went to work, she figured she’d hear from Sonya later, because she often called her during the day on her work line just to check in and chat.
But Timayre didn’t hear from Sonya at all that day. And this was not normal, the girls always checked in with each other. Even without cell phones, they just always knew where the other one was so they could call the land line and just chat. Timayre didn’t feel good about this, so she began making calls to mutual friends to find out if anyone had seen her. No one had.
Late next morning, Timayre called the hospital where Sonya worked and learned that Sonya never showed for her shift. She then phoned the Nome Police to ask if perhaps Sonya had been arrested for some reason and was being held. But no one named Sonya Ivanoff, or fitting her description, was in custody.
Where did Sonya go, did she somehow take a wrong turn on the short walk back to her apartment? A walk she had made many, many times before?
Well, the truth is, Sonya 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.
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, which juts out into the icy Bering Sea. Nome is closer to Russia than Anchorage, Alaska’s largest cityl.
It’s not for nothing that Nome’s very name forms the first syllable of “No Man’s Land.” Nome is a place isolated from the world beyond it. No roads connect to it from anywhere else. 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 dogsled.
Everything about the place is harsh and unforgiving.
Temperatures average just 5.6 degrees Fahrenheit in January, its coldest month, but can drop as low as minus fifty—which is a level of cold most of us can’t even grasp.
In summer, daylight in Nome lasts for twenty hours, while at the peak of winter, it’s the inverse, with twenty hours of darkness in what’s known as polar night. The harsh environment is reflected in the city’s architectural character. Many of its buildings are stilted, clapboard structures with a prefabricated look, designed for maximum warmth and durability.
Alaskan locals have warned g each other about Nome for a long time. They say you shouldn’t go there. And not just because of the ruthless environment. But because there’s a darkness that’s hiding in plain sight.
See, since 1960, at least twenty-five people have gone missing or died under suspicious circumstances in and around the city. 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 seem to be a ton of urgency. Authorities say they have looked at the cases and decided there’s no connection. There’s nothing weird going on, they say. No larger threat to the community. But residents , and the people who have lived there the longest know that’s not true. And honestly, after researching for this episode…I tend to agree with them
By the time Timayre’s work day was over, she knew it was time to take action. At 5 o’clock she walked straight over to the Nome Police Department to report her friend missing. And right away, Timayre was struck by the officer’s apparent lack of concern or urgency.
, the officer—whose name was Stan Pescola, —asked Timayre questions that suggested Sonya might have left of her own accord. He asked about her mental state, and about how the two girls got along. He didn’t seem to take the report seriously.
Timayre was not confident the police would do much to help. The department had a reputation for not diligently investigating cases involving Native Alaskans.
Nome’s police force was also a small one. At the time, the City employed only seven officers. So the police, as they often did, turned to volunteer firefighters—who began a sweep of the city, spreading out to opposite corners of town.
Around 8:30pm that night, one of the volunteers began searching the tundra near the gold dredge, on the outskirts of town, and as the searcher went down into the gravel pit, something in some willows caught his attention.
It was a woman’s dead body—completely nude, except for a single sock.
The woman was Sonya Ivanoff.
Authorities processed the crime scene and then sent Sonya’s body to the medical examiner, who found that Sonya 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 or forensic evidence of any kind on her body. It was as if the killer had intentionally removed evidence, and had the knowledge on how to do it….
Sonya was born on April 13, 1984, in Unalakleet, Alaska—a city of about 700 people, located a hundred miles east of Nome.
She attended a local High School, where she played basketball, was involved in school activities, and became best friends with Timayre. She graduated in 2002 and then moved to Nome, where she landed a job behind the Norton Sound Regional Hospital’s admissions desk. Sonya was determined to save up every dime she earned so she could eventually start attending college.
Sonya adapted quickly to Nome, which offered so much more excitement and opportunity than her little hometown of Unalakleet.
In June 2003, Sonya competed in the Miss Arctic Native Brotherhood pageant, which is not a traditional beauty pageant—but 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.
That same summer, Sonya’s bestie Timayre—who was a year younger—moved to Nome and began rooming with her.
It was an exciting time for Sonya and now it had been cut tragically short by an unknown killer.
Nome Police uncovered their first clue with a set of fresh tire tracks leading to and away from the gravel pit where Sonya was found. Whoever was driving that car probably knew what had happened to her.
But that’s all police had to work off of, and it wasn’t much. So for the next few weeks there wasn’t much movement on her case, and it started running the risk of going cold.
But then, in early September, their phone rang, someone had seen something and they were ready to come forward.
A woman named Florence Habros said she had witnessed something that she felt was important. On the night Sonya disappeared, Florence had been outside her house, smoking a cigarette, when she spotted Sonya walking down the street— alone. She looked ok, there wasn’t anything obviously strange about her behavior.
But then, an SUV suddenly appeared and started trailing her. Florence watched as the SUV watched Sonya for a bit, and then seemed to drive off. but then 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 for a bit longer, and then she willingly got into the vehicle and rode off—heading in the direction of the gold dredge where Sonya’s body would later be found.
Florence remembered that the time was about 1:30am—just half an hour after Sonya and Timayre parted ways.
The officer asked Florence to provide a description of the vehicle and its driver. 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.
This shocking revelation narrowed down the suspect pool from thousands of people to just two: Nome Police officers Matt Owens and Stan Pescola, the only two officers who were on duty at the time of Sonya’s disappearance and death.
Officer Pescola was the one who first talked to Timayre 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?
But then some of the women in town began coming forward with stories of their own. 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, Owens would follow women in his patrol cruiser, 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, but nothing was ever done.
And another said 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 Owens behavior was an open secret that the whole department probably knew about. Maybe that’s why he felt emboldened to commit these crimes 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 that potentially involved an officer, it was no longer up to the Nome Police Department to investigate. The Alaska State Troopers took over the investigation shortly after.
Though, they wouldn’t have to do much digging into Owens, because his very, very bizarre choices started speaking for themselves…
In late September, almost two months after Sonya was murdered, there was another strange development. Owens’ reported that his police cruiser was missing. It turns out, Owens’ sergeant asked the officer about its whereabouts, and the officer claimed he didn’t know what had happened to it.
The department soon launched a full-scale search for the cruiser. They weren’t going to look into any of the accusations against one of their officers, but one SUV goes missing and they throw everything at it.
Officers searched all over the 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 Sonya’s body was recovered.
But then, two minutes after Owens called in the discovery, 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 couldn’t find anyone. It was just Owens there by himself. But he had a whole story about what had happened. he claimed the 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. And the SUV looked like it had been through hell. The front window had indeed been shattered, but upon closer inspection, it wasn’t a bullet that had gone through it. the culprit appeared to be a large rock that was on the ground right beside the cruiser.
Owens’ fellow officers examined the glass inside the vehicle and then made a bizarre discovery on the front seat—it was an envelope made out to the Nome Police. Inside was a typed letter addressed to the “pigs.”
It read: “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 shit just happened.”
I’m sorry, if I can just interject here because this part makes me so angry- but 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 leaving it in the car they stole?
The “killer” suggested he had stolen the cruiser and used it to lure Sonya. He included one of Sonya’s picture ID cards as proof of his deed—in typical serial killer fashion.
The ABI investigators immediately felt that 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 his police-issued firearm 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 Sonya, believed to be a Jennings 22, was not in Owens’ possession. His home was searched and they couldn’t find any such weapon.
However, one officer did note that he knew of one Jennings 22 in Nome, 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 evidence storage locked.
The ABI investigator then contacted Owens’ estranged wife, who remembered speaking to Owens on his birthday, and Owens saying he needed to drop off his son with her because the department was busy searching for a missing girl.
They asked what time that call had taken place. She said he had called her at around 4:30 in the afternoon.
This was the closest thing yet to a smoking gun. Matt Owens’ birthday was August 12th—the day that Sonya was reported missing. But Sonya wasn’t first reported missing until after 5pm. Logically, there was only one way Matt Owens would have known about Sonya’s disappearance before anyone else at the department did.
On October 25th, 2003, Nome police arrested Matt Owens and charged him with first-degree murder.
Some of Sonya’s friends showed up to the arraignment hearing, where they were confronted by a hostile group of Owens’ friends from his church congregation—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 Owens warned that if she tried to report him, it would be his word against hers—and no one would believe 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 the assaults—and found that Owens was right. The department did absolutely nothing.
Which didn’t come as a surprise to them, everyone knew that the police didn’t take the harassment and assault of the local 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 kept mounting. Authorities believed that he stole the gun used to kill Sonya from the evidence locker, and then put it back afterwards.
They also found proof that Matt had burned a pair of gloves and some of Sonya’s clothing in a fire pit 70 miles north of Nome.
More than two years after Owens’ 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 the car. A judge then sentenced him to 101 years in prison
He used his badge, his marked police car, and police training to commit what he thought would be the perfect crime, against an indigenous Alaskan woman. The leading theory is that he took Sonya thinking she would be easy to assault, but she was able to fight him off. Because she wasn’t drunk, he most likely thought that her statement against him wouldn’t be brushed off by police like usual, so he killed her so she could never come forward about what he did.
It was a rare win in the area, where not only was a case SOLVED, but the person responsible was actually punished for the crime. Even though the 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 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 unsettling ways…
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 desert heat of west Texas for the arctic chill of America’s so-called “Final Frontier.” But for Joseph, it was an exciting and even exotic change. He never thought he’d be actually living in a place where the Northern Lights were visible most nof the year, but there he was.
Joseph loved Alaska’s imposing terrain—and he loved to hike it. He often called home to tell his mother of his latest adventures and his upcoming plans. If there’s one thing she repeatedly would tell him, it was not to go hiking alone. Mothers worry.
Still, he he did plan to go hiking alone on the last weekend in June of 2016. Over beers with his coworker that Friday afternoon, Joseph explained that his fiancée was flying into town for the Fourth of July, and he wanted to surprise her with the perfect hiking spot. So he was heading up north a ways to scope out potential trails.
Don’t go by yourself, his coworker told him. Wait for Megan.
But Joseph had already made up his mind. He was going that weekend, and he’d be just fine.
Joseph’s fiancée was Megan Rider. They first met in 2013, down in Juneau. 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 it’s in the same state—is over a thousand miles from Nome. Remember: Alaska is the biggest state in the U.S. So for the time being, Joseph and Megan were in a long-distance relationship.
But Joseph had plans to move back to Juneau that summer, start his own law practice and marry Megan. In the meantime, he and Megan saw each other as often as their schedules would allow, and they talked by phone and text nearly every day.
On Friday night, June 24th, 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 fillets and told her 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 sent Megan some texts, saying he was going to venture back out to another river where he suspected he could catch some king salmon.
Megan eagerly awaited an update—but she never got one.
By Monday morning, Megan still hadn’t heard from Joseph. Her calls were going straight to voicemail, and her texts remained undelivered.
So she called up the Second District Court in Nome and got Joseph’s coworker Tracey Bluie on the line. And what Tracey had to say made Megan’s hair stand on end.
Joseph hadn’t come into work that morning—and it was totally unlike him not to call or show. Tracey sounded worried. And before she hung up, she told Megan she would call the State Troopers and report him missing.
The Nome-Council Highway is seventy-two miles of unpaved gravel that’s unplowed during the winter and ends in the town of Council, which has a population of exactly zero. The highway is largely a scenic route.
When Alaska State Trooper Timothy Smith received the call that morning, he remembered one of his fellow troopers spotting Joseph’s pickup over the weekend, parked on the highway out by mile marker 44. So Smith drove out to that stretch of highway, and there was Joseph’s truck still parked on the shoulder.
Trooper Smith parked behind the truck and tried the doors. They were unlocked. 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. An eerie feeling came over the trooper as he stood in the total silence of his surroundings. He knew he needed to get search crews out there immediately—so he used his satellite phone to contact the Nome Search and Rescue and the volunteer fire department.
Over the next week, for twenty hours a day—from sunrise to sunset—ATVs and aircraft scoured the area looking for clues. Community volunteers, family members, and search dogs joined the operation.
The dogs picked up a scent on the road, near where Joseph’s pickup was found. It led directly to the river. But then the trail was lost, and the dogs’ handlers took them home.
Searchers in the air also saw nothing, except bears. Plenty of bears. Could that be a clue to Joseph’s fate? Trooper Smith wondered, as he looked out into the dense forest of willows that lay beyond the road. If Joseph, or his remains, were out there somewhere, Smith believed no one would be able to see him from any angle. It seemed hopeless.
After nearly a week, the search was called off. Joseph’s whereabouts remained a mystery.
On July 3rd, state troopers went to Joseph’s house and talked to his roommate, Jake Stettenbenz.
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 Emery and Tyler that afternoon, and afterward the trio drove out to Solomon, an area east of Nome, and didn’t return to town till around one in the morning.
The troopers noticed, while talking to Jake, that Jake had scrapes on his face and arms. They asked where he’d gotten them.
Jake said he’d gotten banged up playing catch football with a friend.
The troopers asked when this had happened, and Jake recalled that this occurred on June 30th. Which would have been three days after Joseph’s disappearance.
After the interview, troopers put in a request for Jake’s cell phone data. Once the 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 lied to them.
On July 4th, a day after they first talked to Jake at the house, Jake texted his friends Emery and Tyler—asking them to cover for him, saying he had to use them in a story he’d 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 his lie. Jake apologized for not being truthful and explained that he’d never been questioned by troopers before and was 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.
Around the same time, troopers were contacted by a witness who reported driving on the Nome-Council Highway on Saturday, June 25th, and seeing Joseph Balderas standing next to his pickup truck, right where it was later found—at mile marker 44.
This seemed to confirm that Joseph had driven his own car out to that stretch of the highway and parked it near 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 P.I. named Andy Klamser, who flew out to Nome to see if he could uncover something that the local investigators couldn’t.
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 group 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 through the area. But the end result was the same as before: nothing.
The P.I., Andy Klamser, was meanwhile busy with his own investigation. He didn’t believe 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’d surely have been found by now.
If he’d been attacked by a bear, then searchers would have found evidence of a bear attack. But they didn’t.
Klamser talked to dozens of Joseph’s friends, co-workers, and acquaintances, and found no indication Joseph was suicidal or had reason to want to disappear. He was upbeat, happy, and had plans for the future, both short-term and long-term.
Klamser ultimately concluded that Joseph was a victim of foul play. Joseph’s family agreed. But that didn’t bring them any closer to learning what actually happened to him, or who was responsible.
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 when the police wouldn’t step up. Their search returned nothing
When Nathan Anungazuk vanished just a few years after graduating from the local high school, barely anything was written in his police file
When Justina Beatrice Kunaya, a mother of 8, disappeared in Nome on her way to a doctors appointment, her daughters had to show her picture around town to the locals, the police refused to help
And when Atmik Carl Henry Junior vanished after being last seen at a relatives home, it was his sister-in-law that put together a suspect list, not the police. She did the same when Amtik’s cousin, Ernest, went missing as well.
And so, 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 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 in the community that, in 2006—a whole decade before Joseph’s disappearance—the FBI was brought in to analyze the cases, as some residents of Nome feared that a serial killer was at work. The FBI concluded that there was no serial killer and there was no larger pattern.
If you pull back and look at all the cases of missing and murdered Alaskans and suspicious deaths in Nome, you may not walk away convinced 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 toward the local indigenous community.
But the problem of missing and murdered indigenous people is much broader, and Alaska claims the greatest share of those.
To find out how you can get involved and provide advocacy and support, visit the website for the Data for Indigenous Justice organization, at www.dataforindigenousjustice.org and click on “Resources” in the top left menu.