Cold Blooded: Lost and Found

This is Deborah Roberts here with another weekly episode of our latest series from 2020 and ABC Audio, Cold-Blooded Mystery in Alaska.

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On March 27th, 2017, the day police found the the body of Dr.

Eric Garcia, a handful of people were standing in the driveway outside his house.

There was Dawn Hink, Dr.

Garcia's friend and colleague at the hospital, who some called his work wife.

Jordan Joplin was there, too.

He was a friend from Washington State who'd flown to town that morning for the welfare check on the doctor.

Jordan...

was there with a woman he identified as his girlfriend.

And last was Bob Jackson.

Bob Jackson had met Eric Garcia several years earlier in his capacity as a realtor.

The hospital calls us and says, we've got a physician coming to town and we need you to give them a real estate tour.

Bob gives a lot of these tours.

He's been a realtor in Ketchikan for the last 30 years.

Being a realtor, Bob knows it's all about location.

And he's very good at making you want to move here.

You can walk right out underneath the tree line and you could walk for hours and, you know, pine cones and trails and probably going to see a black bear at certain times of year eating the fish in the creek.

A good realtor knows how to sell a place, but it's rare to hear a sell that sounds so much like a nature documentary.

If you're on the waterfront, you'll see seals.

You'll see humpback whales, you know, and everyone says, you know, it's Alaska and it's beautiful, the the last frontier.

This is Alaska and it's wonderful living here.

So Bob went and met his new client, a surgeon from the lower 48.

There was only one other working surgeon in Ketchikan at the time.

So this guy showing up, it potentially doubled the amount of life-saving that could happen in town, which is the kind of thing.

that might make someone a local celebrity.

But Bob wanted to make sure that wasn't going to his new client's head.

I teased him.

I don't know why, but I met him and I said, Dr.

Schmachter, doesn't mean nothing to me.

And he was, oh, and that was our first conversation.

That bit of gentle ribbing began a friendship between the wise-cracking realtor and the soft-spoken surgeon.

Our whole relationship was that way.

I was always silly with him and I had fun with him and he seemed to appreciate it.

Bob Jackson's new friend was Dr.

Eric Garcia.

He was a long way from home.

He'd grown up in Puerto Rico and his previous job had been in South Texas along the Rio Grande.

But however distant this island in Alaska might have seemed, Dr.

Garcia had a vision for his new life.

He knew what he wanted and what he wanted there wasn't a lot of.

He wanted big.

And we have a lot of more moderate size homes.

Dr.

Garcia was an unmarried man living on a surgeon's salary and the local hospital had recruited him in part by offering him more than he was making in Texas.

So, if he wanted big, he could have big.

One of the first houses Bob Jackson showed Dr.

Garcia was on Summit Terrace, nestled in the hills above downtown Ketchikan.

Big high ceilings in the garage and had a mezzanine in the garage,

lots of bedrooms, and big house, nice nice house.

The listing boasted four bedrooms, including a quote, expansive master suite with beautiful bath fixtures, large, well-equipped kitchen, pantry, laundry room with sink, and a heated two-car garage with 10-foot doors.

On top of that, Dr.

Garcia had plans to add a bar and a walk-in sauna.

There was also lots of storage space, including a sort of walk-in closet/slash nook underneath the first floor stairs.

And then

there was the view.

If you looked out off his balcony, you could see kind of for infinity.

You'd be looking at Pinnock Island, Gravina Island, and out right out into the Pacific Ocean.

I mean, the view from the home is spectacular.

I mean, he locked onto it and said, this is it, I'm buying it.

Dr.

Garcia would live in that house.

for the rest of his life.

It was a big house for just one man.

But Dr.

Garcia kept busy, working long hours at the hospital.

He'd travel, sometimes taking his parents on lavish cruises.

At home, he surrounded himself with beautiful objects, expensive vases from faraway lands, designer watches and colognes, bottles of rare liquor, state-of-the-art appliances and electronics.

But, at the end of most days, it was just him, with 3,000 square feet all to himself.

After Dr.

Garcia died, his brother Saul came to Ketchikam.

He stayed in the big house on the hill.

I was by myself there cleaning.

And

it was so lonely there.

There's no lights outside.

It's so quiet.

And inside that house, I just felt the loneliness that,

you know,

even though I'm married and everything,

I just could not imagine him living in there

being so lonely.

Even being there for 20, 30 minutes, it was horrible.

Was Dr.

Eric Garcia lonely?

And if so, did this loneliness drive him to find connections outside of Ketchikan?

Hi, this is Jordan Joplin.

Jordan Joplin, the friend from Washington State, had called police asking for a welfare check.

He said he was worried and hadn't heard from Dr.

Garcia in days.

He was contemplating suicide.

Nobody's heard from him, his parents.

Yeah, 10 days since then.

We as the police department here had thought that it could have been some type of a suicide.

Police Sergeant Eric Mattson.

The officer had found some evidence of a pill bottle that was by Dr.

Garcia.

It was a bottle for a prescription sedative.

It seemed possible Dr.

Garcia had taken too many and overdosed.

And like we said in episode one, police found other things near his body.

An open package of bacon.

A piece of charcoal partially burned.

A barbecue grill placed in the doorway to the second floor deck.

and on Dr.

Garcia's shirt, stains left by charcoal dust and some mysterious purple residue.

Police say they found the scene odd.

But the idea that Dr.

Garcia wanted to hurt himself, some of his loved ones found this very unlikely.

It was not where their minds went when they got the news of his death.

They had figured it was some sort of medical event.

Here's Dr.

Garcia's friend Don Hink speaking to officers at the scene.

He's had a couple things with his heart.

His heart surgery, like

a triple bypass.

Okay.

Dr.

Garcia's brother Saul had the same thought.

He remembered a few years earlier when his brother had taken a trip and experienced shortness of breath.

When he got back to Ketchikan, doctors were so alarmed that they medevaced him to Washington State for surgery.

So, my

first impression is like, oh, maybe, you know, there was an event with his heart to the point that now he passed away.

But shortly after police found Dr.

Garcia's body, they made another discovery, one that opened the door

to theories more sinister in nature.

In my gut, this death didn't appear as to what it looked like.

From ABC Audio in 2020, I'm Chris Connolly, and this is Cold Blooded, Mystery in Alaska.

Episode 2, Lost and Found.

When I heard that Dr.

Garcia had passed away,

I went from disbelief to suspicious to angry.

Bob Jackson, the realtor, had known Eric Garcia for years.

And over that time, Bob says he became Dr.

Garcia's unofficial maintenance guy.

Loved ones say, Dr.

Garcia was pretty much clueless when it came to home improvement projects.

He was more interested in stuff like organizing his coin collection.

That made Eric Garcia a little unusual in Ketchikan.

This is a small frontier town where rugged self-reliance is the norm.

But to Eric Garcia's loved ones, that kind of quirk was part of his charm.

Sure, he might not know a Phillips from a flathead, but there was something refreshing about that.

It was almost endearing.

Besides, whatever Eric Garcia lacked in Fix-It-Up Know-How, he made up for with his passion for his favorite hobby, collecting.

This is one of the things I teased him about.

He bought lots of stuff for himself.

He had many, many watches.

Well, I don't know the exact number, probably about 20 high-end watches.

And he'd show off his new watch.

I got a new watch, take a look at this one.

Then every time he'd show me one, he would tell me how much it cost.

This one was $1,600.

This was $2,400.

I bought two of these, and they were this much money.

He bragged about it and I ate it up.

I loved it that he would brag about his stuff.

And it wasn't just watches.

Eric Garcia collected all sorts of valuables.

He was very open about it.

And he did it with a kind of obsessive zeal.

This collecting began when he was a kid.

Here's his brother Saul.

Coin collecting, my dad also used to coin collect.

You know, it could be gold coins or silver coins, gold ingots and stuff like that.

Eric Garcia's coin collection was vast.

Bob Jackson says, when Dr.

Garcia was buying his house, they went to the bank together to figure out the mortgage.

Dr.

Garcia asked the teller whether he could borrow against the value of his coin collection, which made Bob wonder, how many coins does this guy have?

He soon found out.

When I moved him from his rental to Dr.

Garcia's new house that he purchased.

I had a Lincoln aviator and it sagged the back of my car down.

He had so much gold and silver in there.

With the packaging and all, it was hundreds of pounds.

I moved every one of those coins.

And you know, during the court proceedings, he asked if I helped Dr.

Garcia do it.

I said, no, I didn't help him.

I did it.

He didn't lift a finger.

Dr.

Garcia was drawn to beautiful things, the finer things.

He had an appreciation for that stuff, and he had the money.

But also, all that money he spent on collectibles, he saw it as an investment, and it was an investment he took seriously.

All those watches, the coins, the hundreds of bottles of rare liquor, all of it, Dr.

Garcia meticulously tracked how their value was rising or falling.

He made spreadsheets, and he would go line by line, item by item.

spending hours pouring over how much his assets were appreciating.

But there was something else about Dr.

Eric Garcia's collecting.

His loved ones say, yes, Eric always seemed to be unboxing some shiny new object.

But he also delighted in giving things away.

If it was a new coin that came out, he would order a set, so seven or eight of them.

And then what he would do is he would keep one or two for himself.

And then whenever he would meet somebody, he'd say, oh, you know, I got this one coin.

So he would give them this coin.

And, you know, people were, oh, great.

I mean, this is, this is awesome.

He thought of me.

The same thing with the liquor.

He had this huge liquor collection and he would give you a bottle.

Bottle, you know, cost 200 bucks or whatever it was.

That was his way to connect with people.

I mean, he had no bounds.

He just, you know, hey, you like that?

Is that cool?

Have it.

Dawn Hink, Eric's friend and de facto assistant at the hospital.

And it's a gold nugget.

It's an expensive piece of jewelry.

It's something that you don't, normal people don't just give to whoever.

A lot of times that just, it struck me as an odd thing.

It was like, ooh, that could be bad.

Giving gifts to friends and family is one thing.

But Don Hink says Dr.

Garcia's gift giving was often pretty indiscriminate.

Like, you'd give a near perfect stranger some valuable item.

And there were other things that friends found worrying.

Here's Don's husband, Will.

We came over to dinner there one time, and directly in front of his front door, he has a small table, and there in the middle of it was a two troy ounce block of gold.

I'm like, Eric, why is this here?

And you know, kind of, Will, it is a rock.

Like, it is not a rock.

The pizza delivery guy can see this.

The price of gold fluctuates, but during the time the Hinks knew Dr.

Garcia, two ounces of gold was worth at least $2,000.

Today, it would be worth about $6,000.

It just throws red flags, you know, it just,

you can collect some unsavory people that way.

And

that, I think, was the scariest part for me.

He had a kind of a nook

under his stairs.

Bob Jackson, Dr.

Garcia's realtor who became his friend.

We put some shelves in and we put a Schlag deadbolt, a lock on it, so that no one could open it, but no one would know what was in there unless he told them.

The problem is, is I believe Dr.

Garcia told everyone what was in there.

He was pretty proud of that stuff.

And so on March 27th, 2017, when Bob Jackson was standing in Dr.

Garcia's driveway, and learned that his friend had died, the contents of that locked closet were at the top of his mind.

When I walked up towards Dr.

Garcia's house, I saw that there was the police officer, Devin Miller.

Bob Jackson came up to me and he said he needed to talk to me.

Bob approached Officer Miller in the driveway outside the house shortly after police had found the body.

I tried to tell the police that I knew that there was a lot of stuff in the house, valuable stuff.

This house needs to be secured.

Yeah, we'll take care of it.

I mean, what I'm saying is there's stuff in there that needs to be locked up.

Yeah.

And they said, don't worry about it.

You don't need to worry about it.

Mr.

Jackson, he's a very passionate person.

I said, well, we do need to worry about it.

I said plenty, and I said some stuff that I can't say on television, but I was very foul.

Remember, this was just minutes after police found Dr.

Garcia's body.

They were a little busy.

Some valuables.

In a closet?

It seemed like this could wait.

But after some not-so-gentle prodding from Bob Jackson, Officer Devin Miller agreed to check the closet under the stairs.

I went to a friend of Dr.

Garcia's by the name of Jordan Joplin.

Jordan Joplin, the friend from Washington State.

He was there outside the house with Bob Jackson and Don Hink.

And I said, do you have a key to this

locked storage unit?

And he said that he had a key to everything.

And so we had him open up the storage unit.

Jordan and the officers walked inside while Bob Jackson waited in the driveway.

A few minutes later, Officer Miller, he came out and gestured me with his finger to come on, come this way, come on in.

Bob Jackson stepped inside and made his way across the hardwood floors.

I walked in the house and went right to the room and as soon as I opened that door,

I knew he had been robbed.

I said, everything's gone.

It's all gone.

There was nothing, nothing left.

There were racks and racks that were empty.

Sergeant Eric Mattson.

The amount of alcohol that would have filled that space was enormous.

There was no gold.

There was no silver found.

First, a mysterious death.

Now, gold, silver, alcohol, watches, and more gone.

And not just hundreds or thousands of dollars worth.

We believe that more than a half a million dollars worth of items was stolen from Dr.

Garcia's residence.

To police, this no longer seemed like a typical death investigation.

And as they looked closer at the walls and ceiling of Eric Garcia's palatial home, the case became even stranger.

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Hundreds of thousands of dollars in valuables were missing from Dr.

Eric Garcia's house.

It was a bombshell discovery.

But it was not clear what the connection was between Dr.

Garcia's death and his missing valuables.

Police did not know whether the valuables were stolen from Dr.

Garcia or given away by him.

Or maybe it was something else entirely.

No one was sure.

What was clear was that this mysterious death had just gotten even stranger.

There were a lot of question marks that surrounded the doctor's death in this moment.

I was asked to come in and to start to try to answer some of those questions.

Back in 2017, Eric Mattson was a sergeant in the Ketchiken Police Department working in the investigations unit.

On March 28th, a day after police found Dr.

Garcia's body and his valuables missing, Matson went to the house to see if he could make sense of the evidence.

When the officers observed Dr.

Garcia deceased, there's a few theories that you come up with.

Was it natural?

You know, did the doctor have a heart attack?

That theory that Dr.

Garcia died from a heart attack was quickly ruled out by an autopsy.

That left other theories.

I mentioned earlier that police found a pill bottle next to Dr.

Garcia's body.

It was for a prescription made out to him, a sedative called diazepam, better known as valium.

Police took note of that, but a full toxicology report would take weeks to come back.

In the meantime, police had to theorize based on what was found in the house.

And like we talked about in the last episode, what police found was confusing.

There were some other things that seemed a little bit odd and out of place.

For starters, the door to the second floor deck, it was open.

propped open with a pillow, and just outside the doorway was a charcoal grill.

Across the room, Dr.

Garcia had been found dead on a couch with a coffee table alongside it.

On that coffee table was a partially burned charcoal briquette.

Dr.

Garcia's white t-shirt had a charcoal smudge on it.

The shirt also had some mysterious purple staining.

The grill and charcoal explained the smell.

There was a strong, distinct odor to me, and it really smelled like lighter fluid.

To Sergeant Mattson, the whole setup made no sense.

Police had found the grill, charcoal, and an open pack of bacon, but no barbecue tools.

And grilling there on that deck, that made even less sense.

Like I said, the deck was on the second floor with a view that was basically unobstructed.

An unobstructed view looking out means unobstructed wind coming in.

And it was March, which in southeast Alaska is a rainy, windy season with highs in the low 40s.

Not exactly grilling weather.

All this was not necessarily suspicious.

After all, loved ones say no one took Eric Garcia to be a seasoned grill master.

Was all this just evidence of rookie grilling mistakes?

Still, the whole scene struck Sergeant Eric Mattson as weird.

And as he was poking around the house on the second day of the investigation, something occurred to him.

If you

started a charcoal briquette inside your house, I would wonder why maybe some smoke detectors didn't go off.

Matson looked up at those high ceilings, and that's when he saw them.

Well, the lack of them.

Every single place that a smoke detector was located or should have been was just the base with a piece of with the wiring harness essentially sticking out of that.

There was not one smoke detector inside that house.

They were all missing.

Police counted six missing smoke detectors.

Where they had gone was anybody's guess.

Having the smoke detectors missing

was very, very odd.

Had Eric Garcia taken them down?

If he did, why?

And where were they?

Police would spend weeks puzzling over these questions.

When the toxicology report came back, they found a clue.

The toxicology report revealed a few things.

Most significantly, it identified Dr.

Garcia's cause of death.

A lethal dose of morphine.

That was odd because no morphine was found in the house.

So, where was it?

How did it get into Dr.

Garcia's system?

The autopsy had found no injection site on Dr.

Garcia's body.

That meant the morphine had to have been swallowed.

But that was about all that police could say for sure.

Everything else about the morphine was just one more mystery in a case that was full of them.

But that wasn't the only significant finding in the toxicology report.

It also showed trace amounts of of diazepam in Dr.

Garcia's blood, which tracked with that pill bottle found at the scene.

And the report found something else that was troubling.

Officer Miller.

The toxicology report revealed a 9%

value of carbon monoxide.

A 9% value of carbon monoxide.

That's more than four times the normal limit.

That finding, combined with the charcoal briquette, the oddly placed grill, the smell of lighter fluid, and those missing smoke detectors, it seemed to point towards something ominous.

But to Dr.

Garcia's loved ones, it also sounded totally out of character.

My brother getting on a ladder to take it down a smoke detector, that doesn't sound like him.

That just did not help.

I mentioned earlier that Dr.

Garcia's friends knew him to be less than handy around the house.

But it went further than that.

I would spend a fair amount of time trying to help him organize small things, just little things in his house.

That's Dawn Hink, Dr.

Garcia's friend and co-worker.

Dawn says colleagues often called her Dr.

Garcia's work wife because of the many household tasks he would delegate to her.

Go set up his artificial Christmas tree, get out the Christmas lights,

you know, picking up dry cleaning, you know, making and bringing his lunch.

Dr.

Garcia's loved ones remember a generous man and skilled surgeon who, they also say, seemed helpless to do basic things for himself.

Again, his brother Saul.

I think he just focused on his career so much that, you know, he's not doing anything else.

So his house could be on fire.

He has to call somebody else to go, hey, can you check on that fire and maybe see if you can call the police or something?

Shortly after police found his brother's body, Saul Garcia traveled to Ketchikan.

He stayed in that lonely house and he thought about his brother.

Throughout this whole time,

I always feel like Eric is very close to me.

I always talk to him.

I said, Eric, you need to help us.

We need to get this thing to a resolution.

Are we missing something?

One day, Saul took a walk.

He headed down the road into a typical Ketchikan day.

Gray skies, wind rustling in the trees.

Off in the distance, through a veil of mist, Saul could see mountains.

He came to an overpass with a view down into a leafy ravine.

As I'm walking, you know, over this bridge, my phone rang.

So I pulled out my phone, and when I did that, for some reason, it caught my eye that I saw these white specks down there.

And, you know, with the zoom on my phone, I took some pictures and creased it, and I said, These look like the smoke detectors.

Saul called Ketchiken police.

Officers descended into the ravine, and strewn among the brush, they found six smoke detectors.

We collected the smoke detectors.

We brought those back to the police department.

Sergeant Matson took the smoke detectors to Dr.

Garcia's house.

He re-examined the plastic harnesses on the ceiling, noting their serial numbers.

Sure enough.

We found every smoke detector that was removed from that house

and matched them all perfectly with what was missing.

It certainly looked like someone was trying to get rid of evidence.

Saul's chance discovery was a huge step toward uncovering the truth.

I would say Saul probably felt he was led that day.

So, you know, whether people believe in some type of divine intervention or just stray dumb luck, Saul certainly got it that day.

Police now believed that Dr.

Eric Garcia's death involved foul play.

And so the search began for a suspect.

But as that search unfolded, the private became public, and the Ketchikin police unearthed a relationship that was totally unexpected.

Who is this Joker?

He was very secretive.

He was intoxicating.

His physique was very well built, and he had a shirt that looked like it was painted on.

He started making some movies in the adult industry.

Cold-Blooded, Mystery in Alaska, is a production of ABC Audio and 2020.

Hosted by me, Chris Connolly.

Produced by Camille Peterson, Shane McKeon, and Kiara Powell.

Edited by Gianna Palmer.

Our supervising producer is Susie Liu.

Music and Mixing by Evan Viola.

Special thanks to Liz Alesi, Katie Dendas, Janice Johnston, Joseph Reed, Gary Wynne, Xander Samaris, Chris Donovan, Michelle Margulis, Tom Berman, Sandy Evans, and Pat Lalam.

Josh Cohan is our director of podcast programming.

Laura Mayer is our executive producer.

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