Cold Blooded: A Little Unusual

This is Deborah Roberts.

You're about to hear the first episode of our newest podcast series from 2020 and ABC Audio, Cold-Blooded Mystery in Alaska.

In this series, my colleague Chris Connolly tells you the story of Dr.

Eric Garcia, who was a beloved surgeon, found dead in Ketchikent, Alaska.

You're going to hear about a secret romance, a theft of nearly half a million dollars worth of property, and a deep betrayal.

It's a shocking and heartbreaking story that you will not forget.

We'll be sharing the entire series right here on the 2020 feed over the next six weeks.

Or you can get new episodes by following Cold Blood at Mystery in Alaska, wherever you listen to podcasts.

Now, here's episode 1.

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On March 27, 2017, Officer Devin Miller was driving through Ketchikan, Alaska, on his way to conduct a welfare check.

In town, we get welfare checks quite often.

The person who called dispatch and was put through to Officer Miller was not calling from nearby.

He was calling from out of town, out of state, actually,

which was very rare for the small, remote community of Ketchikan.

Also unusual, the person the caller was worried about was sort of a local celebrity.

He has been missing

and he was contemplating suicide.

Nobody's heard from him, his parents.

Yeah, 10 days since then.

The missing person in question was a prominent beloved surgeon, one of just two in the town, named Eric Garcia.

Officer Miller had even been his patient a couple of times.

And I felt like if I felt pain, this man was going to feel the same pain.

Dr.

Garcia's house was secluded at the top of a hill, nestled among dark green mountains and tall evergreens.

The house was on a half acre of land, and it had a stunning view of the bay and the cruise ships passing in and out of Ketchikin.

Dr.

Garcia lived here alone.

When Officer Miller arrived at the house around 9 a.m., it was surrounded by fog, and there was snow on the ground.

His colleague joined him, and the two checked around the property.

Everything seemed normal at first.

No signs of forced entry or trouble.

Short time after that, I see two vehicles drive up the driveway.

One car was driven by a woman.

The other was driven by a man accompanied by a woman in the passenger seat.

The man was driving a Red Ford pickup, which Officer Miller recognized as Dr.

Garcia's car.

So I asked him, I said, is that Dr.

Garcia's vehicle?

And

replied, yes.

Where did you find that?

And it was parked at the airport.

Miller found that a little unusual too, that this man had just happened upon Dr.

Garcia's car.

and had keys to it.

But in the moment, he didn't think much of it.

He wanted to get inside the home home as soon as possible the man said he had keys to dr garcia's house officer miller asked him to unlock the front door sergeant cheatham and i had them all wait outside while we cleared the building miller's body camera captured everything that happened next

dr garcia police department can't sweep

Can you make yourself known, sir?

They checked the main floor first.

Dr.

Garcia's bedroom, his bathroom, his walk-in closet, his office.

They noted a locked closet door.

With no sign of Dr.

Garcia, they went upstairs.

Okay.

Dr.

Garcia!

Officer Miller.

Police department.

Once the officers reached the top of the stairs, They entered a large open room with white wall-to-wall carpet and nearly floor-to-ceiling windows that looked onto a deck, foggy evergreen trees, and the glistening bay.

The body camera footage gets much quieter from here.

The officers stop shifting around.

They stop calling out for Dr.

Garcia.

In the middle of the room, there was a sectional sofa, and on that sofa was Dr.

Garcia.

The officers could tell, without approaching him, that he was dead.

It was silent in the house.

No noise from distant cars, no chatter from neighbors.

Just the breath and stillness of the two police officers, and a cold March wind blowing into the room through an open door on the deck.

This moment, finding Dr.

Garcia dead and alone in his four-bedroom house, would stick with Officer Miller.

When he got home much later that day, he took off his bulletproof vest and his body camera, and he says the full weight of it hit him.

I think

was finally able to let down enough to realize the situation and how horribly sad it was.

And I just felt

I felt lonely for Dr.

Garcia.

Officer Miller and other investigators, they felt there was something so cold and striking about Dr.

Garcia's death.

A man who had cared for so many people alone on a couch with a biting Alaskan wind surrounding him.

To find out what happened to the beloved surgeon, investigators would have to go far beyond Ketchikan, far beyond Alaska.

They'd have to untangle a crime fueled by years of lies and manipulation, a crime propelled by the vulnerability of isolation.

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

Episode 1.

A Little Unusual.

Ketchikan is at the southern tip of Alaska, and it's known as Alaska's first city because it's the first stop for many ships coming from Washington and other states from the lower 48.

Once you land in the Ketchikan airport, you have to take a ferry.

to actually get to town.

Dr.

Eric Garcia was not born or raised in Ketchikan.

He grew up thousands of miles away in the complete opposite corner of North America in Puerto Rico.

Eric Garcia was the oldest of four.

His brother Saul says he was always interested in medicine.

He'd read books about surgery as a kid.

Saul said his older brother was also really good.

at making people feel special.

The feeling that people get is that you're his only friend that he has has at this moment.

And that's it.

I mean, he's not worried about somebody else or calling somebody else back.

He's just with you.

Saul and Eric's grandmother had a genetic heart defect.

And even as a teenager, Eric would advocate for her with doctors.

As an adult, he took care of their grandmother for years.

So he always had her under his wing.

And

many years later, too, when she got ill, he would come and visit her and put IVs in her and things like that and treat her and all that.

And then when she passed away, he was also there with her.

Eric Garcia left Puerto Rico to do his medical residency in Chicago.

After that, he was a surgeon in Eagle Pass, Texas for many years.

Eagle Pass is right on the border between the U.S.

and Mexico.

And Saul says his brother liked being able to serve people in need of quality medical care.

To this day, Saul is not sure why his brother wanted to leave Eagle Pass and come to Alaska.

A lot of people, when they leave and go to Alaska, is because they're running away from something.

But

when I see his life, and from what I know of his life, I didn't know, I wouldn't know of anything that he would be leaving behind.

But his friends say something about Ketchikan called to him.

Dr.

Garcia, he loved traveling, especially taking cruises.

His best friend of 30 years standing, Carlos Gonzalez, often traveled with him.

Carlos says Dr.

Garcia even had a special shirt he wore for the first day of trips.

It had bright colors and patterns.

With different color patches.

And all the pictures that I have that he's wearing that type of shirt, I know that was the first day of the trip because he would use them for taking planes.

One year, Carlos and Dr.

Garcia went on an Alaskan cruise that passed through Ketchikan.

Dr.

Garcia thought the town was beautiful.

He was interested in its indigenous history.

Ketchikan is the home of three native tribes and has the world's largest collection of totem poles.

Dr.

Garcia also loved that Ketchikan had a vibrant arts and culture scene.

When Dr.

Garcia got back from the trip, a recruiter from a hospital in Quechikan reached out to him.

A recruiter who has my name, Carlos Gonzalez,

invited him to go as a general surgeon to Quechikan.

He took it as a sign because it was my name.

And that's how he moved from Eagle Pass to Quechikan.

Eric Garcia was introduced to Ketchikan by an Alaskan cruise and that's how most people come across the town today.

But it has had many lives.

The fishing industry is what first made Ketchikan into a thriving town and Quechikan is still known as the salmon capital of the world.

Dave Kiffer is a fourth-generation Quechikan resident and he's served on the town's city council and as the city's mayor.

Between two and three million salmon come up every year.

Yeah, one of the interesting things is when you're at the airport in the summer you'll see all these boxes, big fish boxes, and people come here basically they catch their limit of salmon and they take them with them.

He says the Klinkett tribe had a fish camp along Ketchiken Creek for hundreds of years.

Eventually Europeans and people from Washington, Oregon and California, They started coming to fish as well and to mine for gold.

During the 1898 Alaska Gold Rush, thousands of people passed through the town.

They saw lots of quartz.

And quartz almost always means gold.

Unfortunately, around Ketchikan, it did not mean gold.

But the gold rush did turn it into a frontier town with saloons and a red light district, where as the town's tourism website puts it, Ladies of negotiable affection entertained the miners, fishermen, handlagers, and other frisky frontiersmen.

In 1926, Ketchikin was called the worst pest hole in America by a Los Angeles newspaper because of its so-called vice, which the article described as gamblers, liquor dealers, and red light women.

Ketchikin kept reinventing itself.

When the gold rush ended, canning salmon became the town's next big industry.

And as my mother used to say, the whole place reeked in the smell of canned canned salmon all summer long.

Of course she called it the smell of money.

Like mining, the canning industry also went through a boom and bust cycle.

Catch Cat's interesting because it's probably the only city that I've ever heard of that has gone through three different boom and busts and it's still here.

We were a mining boom town, that crashed.

Then we became a salmon canning boom town.

That crashed.

Then we were a timber boom town and that crashed.

Usually when that happens,

at some point in that process, the town goes away.

But I guess we're just stubborn because we're still here.

Now, tourism is at the heart of Ketchikin's economy.

The town is a southern entryway to Alaska's Inside Passage.

And that's a route of waterways along the state's coast with gorgeous views of nature and wildlife, including bears, eagles, and whales.

From April to October, enormous cruise ships dock in downtown Ketchikin.

Millions of passengers flock to town.

On any given day during peak season, the town's population can more than double.

Dr.

Eric Garcia was one of those passengers.

Thousands of miles from where he grew up, Quechikan captivated him, just like it had captivated generations of people before him.

looking for new opportunities and adventure, often on their own.

Quechua is a beautiful place, but it's also very remote.

Residents of the town knew it could be a lonely, challenging place to live, and that it was not easy to convince doctors to move there and stay there.

So this town needed Dr.

Garcia.

He would be one of just two surgeons in a place where many people still do dangerous work.

We have to have a very serious trauma hospital because people, whether it's timber industry, fishing industry, whatever, have those injuries all the time and they just wouldn't make it to Seattle or Anchorage.

It might seem like Eric Garcia would be a fish out of water in a place like Quechique, a Puerto Rican surgeon who got his training in a big Midwest city and had worked in a town along the U.S.-Mexico border, living in a town of 8,000 in cold, rainy Alaska.

But his co-workers, neighbors, and friends say he fit in quickly.

By the time he died, he had lived in Ketchikin for nearly a decade.

His brother Saul remembers going to the grocery store with Dr.

Garcia during one of his visits.

He'd be stopped and asked, oh, Dr.

Garcia, you're here.

And he would move on to the next aisle, and then somebody else would pop up.

And it would take forever to get out of the store.

It took forever to get in and out, out of any place.

Ketchikin may have been a surprising home for Eric Garcia to choose, but the town itself is a place of contradictions.

A boom town that never fully went bust.

A pest hole that's become a town where people raised their families for generations.

A remote place that brings the world together through the cruise industry.

And it turned out Eric Garcia was a man of contradictions too.

Beloved, well-connected, social,

but also

very private.

Was he happy in his big house overlooking Ketchikan?

Or was he lonely and maybe

dangerously isolated?

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March 27th, the day Dr.

Garcia's body was found, was not the first time Officer Miller was asked to do a welfare check on the surgeon.

The out-of-state caller, whose name was Jordan Joplin, had also called Dispatch about a week earlier.

During that call, Jordan said it had been a couple of days since he'd heard from Eric Garcia.

He was told me that he wanted to commit suicide, and I haven't heard from him, so I'm getting worried.

Officer Miller went to check on Dr.

Garcia's house for the first time.

It was snowy on the ground, fresh snow, and there were no prints at all going up to the house, going away from the house, at the side of the house.

Doors were locked, windows were closed.

There were some lights on in the house, as if

someone someone was going on vacation and they put sporadic lights on.

I looked in the garage.

There was no vehicle in the garage.

So I certainly did not anticipate that there would be anyone home.

I walked around to the side of the house and everything seemed to be secure back there.

And so I left to contact his office.

Dr.

Garcia's office told Miller they believed he was out of town.

I did not think that there was any issue because it all made sense.

But Jordan Joplin called again, five and then six days later.

Dispatch explained that an officer had checked things out and did not find a reason to be concerned.

And they couldn't just knock down the front door and go in.

We contacted the hospital and they stated that he's out of town.

And then also, right,

there's nothing else to believe that he's injured in any way.

So

at this point, they can't.

They went to his house it looks like.

Yeah.

And nobody knows there.

So Jordan said he was going to fly into town to check on Dr.

Garcia.

He gave me a house key.

I know a security key, everything,

because I have permission.

And I'm going up there on Monday because I haven't heard anything and I am very worried.

A few days later, on March 27th, More than a week after his first call, Jordan arrived in Ketchikamp.

He made the call we heard earlier, the one that was patched through to Officer Miller.

But Jordan Joplin was not the only one who said he was worried about Eric Garcia.

A lot of times they called me his work wife or his assistant.

His coworker, Dawn Hink, a patient access representative at the hospital, had become one of Dr.

Garcia's closest friends.

I had a numerous amount of people calling me his daughter, which I always wore as a badge of honor because he was, you know, such a fatherly figure in so many aspects to me.

Dawn remembers the day she met Dr.

Garcia.

And everyone had told me how intimidating he was because he was, you know, had been the chief of surgery in all these places and everything.

And I walked up to him and he was the most gentle, kind, wonderful soul you could imagine.

And it was just odd to me that people were intimidated by someone like that.

Dawn says Eric Garcia had a warm voice and the kind of smile so bright you could hear it through the phone.

But when Dawn really thinks about what made Dr.

Garcia stand out in a room, she remembers his love of nice colognes and how he always smelled incredible.

He had one for each day of the week.

And those little idiosyncrasies I used to take for granted are some of the true most core memories I have with him.

Dawn last saw Dr.

Garcia at work on March 16th.

He was about to go to Las Vegas for a medical conference.

He showed up to to the clinic wearing his vacation shirt.

That day, Dr.

Garcia had to give bad news to a patient, and Dawn sensed something else might have been going on.

His mood changed, and he still had the shirt on, he still had the smile on, but he had kind of a like a solemnness to him that was hard to pinpoint.

If he, you know, at this point in time, you can always go back and look back at things and think of hindsight.

But to me, he he was almost nervous to go on the trip.

Dawn and Dr.

Garcia texted each other regularly, but after March 16th, she stopped getting responses from him.

She had sent Dr.

Garcia a photo of her son in the local parade.

Just kind of, you know, trying to keep up with what was going on with him and how come he hadn't sent me pictures of the different martini he was excited to try.

And

didn't receive anything back at all.

So it definitely struck me as odd.

odd.

Day one, day two, something is really weird.

And day three, uh-oh, we need to figure out what's going on.

She got a call from Dr.

Garcia's mother, who was also worried.

So Dawn went to his house multiple times.

And

everything seems okay, except on the back side of the house, the window upstairs,

which I thought was a window, was actually a door,

upstairs, was wide open.

And this is March in Alaska.

It was less than 32 degrees, and it had snowed about three feet during the duration of him being gone.

It just, the hair on the back of your neck stands up, and you just don't know really what to do.

But Dawn saw tracks in the snow, which seemed to her like they were from a police officer.

She figured, if a police officer thought everything was okay, then it probably was.

She didn't know that when Officer Miller had done his check, he hadn't seen an open door.

Dawn wasn't totally satisfied after her visit to the house.

It still seemed odd to her that Dr.

Garcia was not replying to texts.

So Dawn called one of the hotels she knew he stayed in in Las Vegas.

And they had said, no, his reservation has been canceled.

And then whoever I was speaking with at that time realized they were not supposed to say that to me and hung up the phone really quickly.

On March 26th, Dawn heard from someone else who said he was worried about Dr.

Garcia, Jordan Joplin.

She had met Jordan once before.

He called her to say he was coming to town from Washington State to check on Dr.

Garcia.

Don and Jordan met at the Ketchikin Airport on March 27th and made their way to Dr.

Garcia's house.

They drove the two cars that Officer Miller watched arrive at the house.

When Don and Jordan arrived, Officer Miller and his colleague, Sergeant Cheatham, went into the house to do the final welfare check.

Don was still waiting outside with Jordan when the sergeant re-emerged.

It felt like it had been about 20 minutes, when in actuality it was probably less than two.

He came back down the stairs, opened the door, his face gray, he was pale, and he looked at me and said,

Eric has passed away and he is in the house.

And I wouldn't say I lost it.

I had a fair amount of shock behind me,

knowing that I had visited the house so many times and I could have, you know,

what could I have done?

I walked to the opposite side of the house as far away as I could get,

physically sick with emotion and sadness and, you know, just despair at that point,

and looking for answers.

Dawn knew she didn't know everything about Dr.

Garcia.

He was a warm, friendly person, but he was also very private.

Dr.

Garcia definitely had secrets, and I think a lot of people may have known that.

No one ever pushed the envelope.

Everyone had a very firm line of respect for him.

While Dawn was hearing the news from Sergeant Cheetah, Officer Miller started documenting the room they discovered Dr.

Garcia's body in.

Just Just like everything else that day, many things in the room seemed unusual.

For instance, the TV.

It was still on, but it was stuck on a blue screen.

And then there was the open door leading out to the deck.

And it wasn't just open.

It was propped open by a pillow.

There was a barbecue right at the door.

I also looked at the barbecue.

There was no barbecue tools around.

Officer Miller walked closer to Dr.

Garcia.

There was a coffee table in front of him, which he had his elbow on.

There were some items there that didn't really make sense to me.

There was an open package of bacon.

There was a partially burned charcoal briquette.

And I didn't really understand how a person could barbecue bacon on a barbecue grill.

Miller began taking detailed photos of Dr.

Garcia himself.

Then he lifted up Dr.

Garcia's hand.

Meaning, full rigor mortise, a sign Dr.

Garcia had been dead for at least a few hours.

Officer Miller lifted a green sheet that was covering Dr.

Garcia's body up to his chest.

He was looking for signs of trauma, like a gunshot or a knife wound.

He didn't see anything like that, but he did notice a few other things.

His thumb and two fingertips, I think, had

charcoal, dark charcoal on them, which had transferred to his white t-shirt, which I'm guessing came from the partially burnt charcoal that was on the table.

Also, I noticed that on his right shoulder, there was a purple stain, and the stain wasn't consistent.

It was more like a dribble stain, and it looked like it was dribbled from his shoulder towards

his head and to his mouth.

Officer Miller took more photos and then turned his body camera off as Sergeant Cheatham returned.

He said his first impression of the scene was that Dr.

Garcia's death could have been a medical event, like a heart attack, or it could have been a suicide.

But the whole thing didn't make much sense to him.

The setup was just a little unusual.

And he had a lot of questions about what they had learned so far.

How is he here and his truck is at the airport?

Why did his work think he was out of town also?

It just didn't make sense.

When Officer Miller came out of the house after documenting the room, his body camera was back on.

facing the handful of people standing in the fog and snow outside the house.

Don

Jordan Joplin, and the woman who was with him among them.

And another friend of Dr.

Garcia's who had shown up while the officers went through the house.

The next step was to start doing interviews with everyone at the scene to see what they knew.

They learned a lot from those interviews.

But maybe the most surprising thing they learned came from that friend who had shown up after Dawn and Jordan.

He knew a lot about Dr.

Garcia's house and what should be inside.

He pulled me aside and he informed me that there was at least a half a million dollars worth of

valuables in a locked storage unit underneath the stairs, which included wine, gold, and coins.

Next time on Cold Blooded Mystery in Alaska, investigators searched Dr.

Garcia's Garcia's house again, looking for those valuables, only to find more unusual clues.

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 Alessi, Katie Dendas, Janice Johnston, Joseph Reed, Gary Wynn, Xander Samaris, Chris Donovan, Michelle Margulis, Tom Berman, Sandy Evans, and Pat Lalam.

Josh Cohen is our director of podcast programming.

Laura Mayer is our executive producer.

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