7 | Let's Talk About This

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Speaker 8 It's one of Britain's most notorious crimes, the killing of a wealthy family at Whitehouse Farm. But I got a tip that the story of this famous case might be all wrong.

Speaker 10 I know there's going to be a twist, won't they? A massive twist. At every level of the criminal justice system, there's been a cover-up in this case.

Speaker 8 I'm Heidi Blake. Blood Relatives is a new series from In the Dark and the New Yorker.
Find it now in the In the Dark podcast feed.

Speaker 10 Up and Vanished in the Midnight Sun is released every Friday and brought to you absolutely free.

Speaker 11 But for ad-free listening, exclusive bonuses, and early access starting next week, subscribe to Tenderfoot Plus at tenderfootplus.com or on Apple Podcasts.

Speaker 1 From Tenderfoot TV in Atlanta, I'm your host, Payne Lindsay, and this is Up and Vanished in the Midnight Sun.

Speaker 1 Hey, it's Payne here. Today we're doing an episode that's a little bit different than we've done this season.

Speaker 1 It felt like it was a good time to sit back and sort of analyze what we've recently heard pertaining to Oregon John and break down in the studio with some of the producers on this show what our takeaways were from my conversation with him.

Speaker 1 Since the very beginning, we've heard Oregon John's name, and slowly but surely, we learned more and more information about this person.

Speaker 1 And when I was finally able to see this person face to face and ask him some of these questions, in a lot of ways, his answers spawned even more questions.

Speaker 1 I'm in the studio today with Mike Rooney, Dylan Harrington, and Cooper Skinner, who are all all producers here at Tinderfoot, and they were there in the bar when we had this conversation with them.

Speaker 1 And today we're going to do something a little out of the box, out of the ordinary in terms of a traditional up and vanished episode.

Speaker 1 But I feel like it's very important to break this kind of stuff down before we get even deeper into the story.

Speaker 1 And I kind of want to hear the perspectives of even our own producers here on what their takeaways were. We were all four there

Speaker 1 when we were tracking John down,

Speaker 1 which was a journey of its own. And I remember vividly landing in Anchorage that one night.
And at that point in time, the plan was to fly the next morning to Kodiak, Alaska.

Speaker 1 But that quickly changed whenever I was messaging him from my fake Facebook and learned that, hey, he's not going to be there.

Speaker 1 And so we kind of had to think on our feet and decide if we were going to pivot and go try to talk to him right now. And two, who was going to do it? Me or my fake Facebook guy.

Speaker 1 What was your guys' take on just sort of when the plan started changing and us having to

Speaker 1 create something new out of seemingly nothing?

Speaker 14 Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 14 this one was tough. I think it was tougher than anything else we've done because I've been working with you since Up and Vanished Season 2.

Speaker 14 And we've had times where we're like, hey, let's try and corner this guy or let's try and talk to this guy or meet up with this guy.

Speaker 14 And this one was like, we couldn't get close enough where we were like kind of there and then we just go and we get there in an hour or something like this.

Speaker 14 Like this was a long trek to get to where he was. Kodiak, how long of a flight was that? And then how long of a flight we ended up taking? And it could have gone disastrously.
if we went to Kodiak.

Speaker 14 I know you talk about that, but like if we went there and he's not there. So we really had to make sure on this.

Speaker 14 And it was, there was no way to really make sure until you got to a point where you were talking to him about that.

Speaker 1 My biggest fear the whole time was whether or not he was going to be on that boat because everything else lined up perfectly. We could see his exact schedule that was posted publicly online.

Speaker 1 It almost just felt too easy or something.

Speaker 1 All was going to work out perfectly unless for whatever reason he was not going to be on that boat.

Speaker 1 And just out of my own paranoia, I had messaged him again that night and we learned that he wasn't going to be.

Speaker 1 But then it kind of changed the dynamics of what we were doing in the first place because the plan originally was for me to find out where he was going to be and he was going to hopefully step off the ship and walk down that dock.

Speaker 1 And I would just be there waiting for him and just say, hey, I'm Payne Lindsey. I want to talk to you about Florence Akpialik's disappearance.

Speaker 1 But that changed rapidly as we had more and more conversations about it.

Speaker 1 And we ultimately decided that if we want to figure out what happened, if we want to actually get closer to that, then we're going to have to do something out of the ordinary here.

Speaker 1 And leaning into what was already happening and kind of organically evolving and growing with John talking to this fake person on Facebook, it was a risk that I felt like.

Speaker 1 could maybe yield more information. And I remember

Speaker 1 just walking into the living room of the Airbnb and looking at you, Cooper. And that clip is in there in the podcast.
I go, I'm not from here. You, you're from Alaska.

Speaker 1 And you're looking at me like, oh, God. But at the same time, you're like, hey, actually, what was going on in your head when I said that?

Speaker 15 Yeah, I mean, I was right there with you.

Speaker 14 Like, it took a while to get to the location.

Speaker 15 You know, flights are really bumpy. Everyone's tired.
And then

Speaker 15 we all throw our bags down, you know, and then we looked at each other and like, all right, like the journey's over and now the next one's about to begin.

Speaker 1 I mean, I said something along the lines of,

Speaker 1 you know, talk about a big favor, like

Speaker 1 me asking you to pretend to be this other person was,

Speaker 1 I put it, I think, a big favor to ask you. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But you were on board pretty immediately. So I just kind of want to talk about why,

Speaker 1 for those of you who don't know, Cooper is our sound engineer and does all the sound design, does all the mixing and mastering of the episodes. And he's also been

Speaker 1 on the ground as part of Up and Vanished since season three, traveling with us and doing a lot of investigative work with us when we're in Alaska.

Speaker 1 I would imagine this was the first time you'd done something quite like this.

Speaker 1 Why'd you decide to just jump on board like that?

Speaker 15 Well, I mean, of course, I had the edge because because I grew up in Alaska. So I had the power of just like general casual conversation if it came up.
I wasn't just like a fish out of the water.

Speaker 15 You know, I could just kind of like fiddle my way through the conversation if things got weird or I can bring up, you know, this and that about the culture.

Speaker 15 So that's why I thought, you know, it was a good idea.

Speaker 15 It was your idea that we kind of both collaborated where one of us was kind of leading the ship and then the other one could throw in a fact here and there just to, you know, calm things down if it got weird.

Speaker 1 And you're, you're from Alaska. yeah and also from a tiny town in alaska even smaller than gnome tell us about that actually because that's pretty unique in itself

Speaker 15 yeah i mean that's probably another reason why i was just comfortable talking to someone like john is just because you know the place i grew up in is very similar to gnome it's called mcgrath alaska you know they're like a alaska native village it's got a couple hundred people who live there you know most of the population there is native alaskan but you got all sorts of characters that live there.

Speaker 15 You know, it has a lot of similarities to Gnome. You know, it has a lot of the same culture and a lot of the same architecture.

Speaker 15 Places like Nome and McGrath are preserved, you know, in a very special way since it's so remote.

Speaker 15 You know, people who live in these kind of locations, they learn very quickly how to keep things running and, you know, use the land to their benefit.

Speaker 15 I felt very confident that I would pick up on some of his mannerisms or storytelling aspects of the town or other small towns around Nome.

Speaker 14 So I just had a lot of backup.

Speaker 15 So that's why I felt like a little confident going in. But of course, you know, it was crazy at the same time.

Speaker 1 So we quickly conjure up plan B

Speaker 1 and we immediately hop on another flight. And we've already been on three flights at this point.

Speaker 13 And

Speaker 1 this day was gloomy to say the least. It was windy, it was cold, it was raining, and it was just completely uncomfortable moving around.

Speaker 1 And we're touching down in Ketchikan, and I've been communicating with Oregon John pretty much every 15, 30 minutes that day.

Speaker 1 And I decided to tell him that I was going to be landing a little bit later than we really were.

Speaker 1 One, because he had offered to pick me up from the airport, and we weren't going to do that. And I didn't want him to be around there or see when I landed if I gave him the honest answer.

Speaker 1 And I also wanted to go find a place that we could be at and potentially talk to him that we've already scouted out, that is quiet enough, that isn't doesn't have some DJ karaoke night going on, and that we felt was a safe place to talk to him.

Speaker 1 And so when we touched down, we immediately checked into the Airbnb. And within that hour, we were suiting up and pulling out our equipment.

Speaker 14 And I guess Dylan and Mike kind of talked to me about next steps after we landed it was a long way to get to even catch kin itself from the airport right like it was a long flight but then you had to get on a ferry go across the water to actually get to the town we didn't know anything there was no uber we had to call taxis one taxi wasn't enough for both of us in all of our cases so we had to call a sec second taxi and it ended up being the same taxi that took you guys to the place we were going.

Speaker 14 And then, yeah, it was a bit of a scramble to get everything together. But I think, you know, we've done this enough that it wasn't terrible to get it together.

Speaker 14 I will say that I'm not super jealous of Cooper being from Alaska. I'm pretty thankful he's from Alaska.
So he was the one who was right next to you talking to him.

Speaker 14 And I got to kind of stand back a little bit with Dylan. And I know Cooper's also had his...

Speaker 14 his moments like in season three when he was talking to or when he was in the car while you were talking to um V-Dog.

Speaker 1 Yeah, if you remember season three, when I met his nickname was V-Dog, it was Cooper and I that flew out there to Great Falls, Montana, and then drove about another hour outside of that town and just popped up on him, knocked on his door.

Speaker 1 And that was a spooky moment because when we finally got to the property, You know, we had like a general address, but we didn't know what the house looked like. There's no Google Maps.

Speaker 1 There's no, you know, street view. And it was literally up this big, huge hill that was bumpy.

Speaker 1 Thank God we're in an SUV.

Speaker 13 And

Speaker 1 the first thing that comes through our minds is that there's no quick escaping of this place. You're going to have to go six miles an hour down this hill to leave.

Speaker 1 But if you remember season three, when I talked to this guy named V-Dog, it was a very brief conversation. He didn't have much to say, but I don't think he made himself look very good either.

Speaker 1 And actually, since then, he's been arrested by the FBI on other charges, but clearly they've been keeping an eye on him.

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Speaker 1 But yeah, so Cooper's been in situations like that before, where

Speaker 1 it's nerve-wracking. And I think that my main goal was to sort of pad my existence there, one-on-one, face-to-face with John as much as I possibly could.

Speaker 13 And

Speaker 1 even down to just the subtleties of two people talking and us looking back and forth. So I can even get a chance to look at him at all and reset and think of a a question.

Speaker 1 Because you have to remember, when we went into this, we were going under the guise of being interested in this job that he has.

Speaker 1 And we couldn't just jump right to Nome Alaska and dig into

Speaker 1 the details of a missing person's case without looking super suspicious. unless we really slowly worked our way there.
And fortunate enough for us, he was pretty open.

Speaker 1 And he just started talking about his past. And it wasn't very long before No Malaska came up on its own organically.

Speaker 1 And Cooper and I had talked beforehand that if he brings it up, we need to say we've been there before and create a conversation about that.

Speaker 1 And once we started talking about No Malaska and we got into Flo's disappearance and why he left there.

Speaker 1 That's really when he said some of the biggest and most important things I think he said in that conversation. And I kind of want to just unpack some of those.

Speaker 1 When we were all there in the moment, it's kind of hard to completely digest it as you're hearing it because I'm simultaneously focused on making sure I don't blow this somehow.

Speaker 1 And when he said stuff like, there's a podcast, you know, about this case and there's a podcaster.

Speaker 1 In that moment, I legitimately thought, Well, jigs up, right?

Speaker 1 And I either show that on my face or we double down right now.

Speaker 1 And I just doubled down and tried to ask more questions about it and played stupid. But to me, personally, he offered up a lot of information and detail that I'd never heard of before.

Speaker 1 And if anything,

Speaker 1 it makes him in a more solid way the last person to be with her and not only just with her, but in his own words, with her all night. And we can play a clip of that.

Speaker 11 And yeah, yeah, she passed out. And in the morning, I woke up and she was gone, but I left her shoes and her phone.

Speaker 1 He mentions that they went to sleep. And when he woke up in the morning, she was gone.

Speaker 1 He also mentioned that she wanted a place to sleep it off, which based on your interpretation of that, you know, either she was really tired or one could speculate that she was inebriated, right?

Speaker 1 We've all been through this tape. We were all there when we heard it the first time.

Speaker 1 But from you guys, what are your biggest takeaways from some of the statements that Oregon John made in that bar?

Speaker 14 Well, I think for one, him basically stating exactly what was left in his tent the morning after, when she supposedly left his tent.

Speaker 14 I think that's important because that whole thing was a little sketchy for me, how we even learned about, or how the family even learned about how he had the items, how he returned the items to Blair, Florence's sister.

Speaker 14 And just that whole story seemed very strange to me. Like, why was there not much follow-up here?

Speaker 14 He just gave these items over to somebody when they came and questioned him because somebody saw her or there was rumor that she went back to his tent, went to West Beach, and he's just handing over her items in the morning.

Speaker 14 And it's like, I would love to just see that, that exchange and see him hand over these belongings of somebody who is never going to show up again. Maybe nobody knew that at the time.

Speaker 14 Obviously, no one expected that at the time. But like, what, what was he like in that moment?

Speaker 14 And I've always, you know, we've always heard, we've heard the tape of people saying that he handed over these items, but now we have him saying it specifically and what the items are.

Speaker 14 And that's unprompted. He just said that out of nowhere.

Speaker 14 Like, yeah, we were talking about Noam or you guys were talking about Noam or Florence and the missing girl or however it was phrased, but he brought this up.

Speaker 14 He brought up what was handed over to whoever. And I just thought that was very interesting.

Speaker 14 I mean, that's like hard evidence of, okay, he also has said in the tape because people think I'm I'm the last one to see her, right?

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 14 And then you're also handing over her belongings, the last belongings we can find that were on her that night.

Speaker 1 Well, he actually,

Speaker 1 he literally says, because I was the last person to see her alive, besides the person who killed her. Right.

Speaker 14 And I thought he said it twice.

Speaker 1 He does say it twice.

Speaker 14 He says it another time where he says, like, they think. Or maybe he's talking about they think I did it.
They think I'm the one who did it when he said he couldn't return to the town.

Speaker 14 I might be mixing those up. But yeah, that's super interesting that he's saying he was the last one to see her, but then, like, I don't know.

Speaker 14 She just left in the middle of the night when I was sleeping. It's like, then maybe you weren't the last one to see her.
What are you talking about? How do you know that for sure?

Speaker 14 That you were the last one to see her. That's a strange thing to say.

Speaker 1 He apparently also knows that the last person she was with is the person who killed her, and she was put in this barrel under a meth dealer's house.

Speaker 1 But the way that he describes who this person may be, who she was last with, who who killed her, kind of changes and shifts a little bit throughout our conversation.

Speaker 1 And we can play some clips of that too.

Speaker 11 They found her buried under the dude's house, the met dealer, who's also the search and rescue diver for the police.

Speaker 11 I was the last person seen her alive, besides the guy that killed her. And a girl come and hung out in my tent one night, and she walked off somewhere, and somebody kidnapped her and murdered her.

Speaker 10 So the guy who fucking really did it, he had caught her

Speaker 11 fucking

Speaker 1 Good.

Speaker 11 But I still got family members calling me. They actually were doing a podcast and tried to get a hold of me.

Speaker 1 He mentions something about a search and rescue guy. And then he mentions something about this meth dealer.

Speaker 10 Did you know that dude who did it?

Speaker 11 No, I never met him.

Speaker 11 He was friends with her meth dealer. They conspired together.

Speaker 11 That's the thing is up there. Why would you need to kill a girl they put out like this?

Speaker 1 Then he brings up at one point that the gnome police are corrupt and they're the ones who are also in on it.

Speaker 1 And he starts describing for a second about how a gnome police officer raped and killed somebody before.

Speaker 11 Gnome is corrupt. You have no idea.
Three times in the last 12 years, the law enforcement department has been shut down and taken over by the Pets. They are so corrupt up there, dude.
It's crazy.

Speaker 11 One of the police officers was raping and murdering all the girls.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I heard that. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 And he was basically loosely describing the murder of Sonia Ivanov from two decades ago that we had briefly touched on earlier in the season.

Speaker 14 Yeah, which is super weird to me because it's like it didn't seem like he was unclear or hazy about what happened that night.

Speaker 14 It kind of seemed like he had a really good memory of what was going on that night and what, you know, that whole time period he seems to remember pretty well.

Speaker 14 And then certain things like that, where he's like tricking in Matthew Owens, the police officer who, the known police officer who did murder someone like 17 or 20 years ago before that, you can almost take that as he's possibly muddying the waters there.

Speaker 14 Like, what is he doing? Why is he suddenly not remembering these facts?

Speaker 14 And I know you might not remember every fact of everything, but like who did it and where they found the body is like a very important thing you wouldn't remember wrong.

Speaker 14 That's a strange thing to remember wrong, but you remember handing what items you handed over to the people looking for her.

Speaker 14 And you remember her leaving and you remember the night before, but you vaguely remember how it ended.

Speaker 14 Like, that doesn't seem you're going to remember if there was a whole search and they found a barrel under somebody's house. That's that's going to stick him.

Speaker 14 But he seemed very non-committal to those details, but he was saying them openly again.

Speaker 1 He's also the only person who's saying anything remotely similar to that besides Kelly, which is the pseudonym we gave her, who is also the person that he presents in our conversation as somebody who would vouch for him, who even told the FBI that, hey, it wasn't me who did it.

Speaker 1 It was this guy over here.

Speaker 1 And if you look at her text messages that we read, they kind of,

Speaker 1 you could draw connections in her super vague theory. But the big difference is that John's claiming that her body was found and that

Speaker 1 Kelly took this to the FBI, meaning that it's a wrap. It's all over.
You know, this is a solved case. And I even mentioned that towards the end of our conversation, kind of like, you know, why

Speaker 1 he was talking about going back to Nome. And if he went back to Nome, everyone would know who he was.
And people were still reaching out to him. And I was like, why?

Speaker 1 And they're because they think I'm involved. And I said, but they caught the guy, didn't they?

Speaker 1 And he just responded that, well, they still think that I'm involved. And so to me, it was just a very specific

Speaker 1 statement. It was very detailed.
I mean, it's not like, like, where did he pull that from?

Speaker 1 In a barrel under someone's house. That's,

Speaker 1 that's just, that isn't true. Right.

Speaker 11 A friend of mine, she actually called the FBI in because she was working for the guy that killed her. And she found the barrel under the house and called the FBI in.
The FBI had to rescue me.

Speaker 11 Under the dude's house, buried in a 50-gallon drum.

Speaker 17 That girl was telling you about.

Speaker 1 I mean, and if it is true, then then they never found her, right? And we haven't found her yet.

Speaker 1 You have to remember, too, that in this conversation, he doesn't know that we know anything at all about this case. So he's saying stuff as if it's the first time we've heard anything.

Speaker 1 He wouldn't know that we could quickly disprove or know for a fact that Flo has in fact not been found, right? And we just kind of played along with that.

Speaker 1 To me, that's a key thing to remember when listening to John's conversation. And also that he offered all this stuff up on his own accord, right?

Speaker 1 I thought going into it that there was a chance maybe that we got absolutely nothing. And this lasted 15 minutes.
And he's like, you know, send your resume to this website.

Speaker 1 And that's how you get this job and the end, right?

Speaker 1 But I never had to bring up any sort of missing person. for him to start talking about it, which I thought was just, I mean, super coincidental.
Clearly, it's on his mind.

Speaker 1 And when he thinks about leaving Gnome, this is a part of that. Right.

Speaker 14 Yeah, it's strange because, like I was saying before, with the stuff he's being muddy on, it seems deliberate. It doesn't seem like he's just accidentally missing some facts.

Speaker 14 Also, again, he's bringing these facts to the table. But if you were to...

Speaker 14 Believe and I'm not saying he did anything or was involved or anything like that. We have no idea.

Speaker 14 But if you were to believe him and what he's saying, his story is that they found the body in a barrel and the FBI didn't tell the family about this at all. And they haven't told anyone about it.

Speaker 14 And they also,

Speaker 14 we haven't got to this tape, but he gets a cover-up story from the FBI, kind of a witness protection type thing where they fly him out of there and protect him. That's a lot to believe.

Speaker 14 Like, he's not...

Speaker 14 There's nothing he's mixing mixing that up with, right? Like, this is all

Speaker 14 like some delusion he believes or a story he's told people or is telling himself.

Speaker 20 Yeah, to expand on that, I mean, I think the way you have to look at what Oregon John is saying is through the lens of delusion.

Speaker 20 You know, like this story he's telling, he's telling to complete strangers that he thinks know nothing about what he's talking about. So everything he says isn't the truth.

Speaker 20 It's just whatever he's rehearsed in his head and maybe convinced himself is his truth.

Speaker 20 But it's him saying whatever he has to say really to shut the conversation down, to get you off his back and to make you look away, make you think, oh, he actually wasn't involved.

Speaker 20 Maybe he is a good guy. He doesn't want to tell

Speaker 20 the truth if the truth damns him, if it puts him in prison for the rest of his life. He'll never tell you and he'll definitely never tell a stranger.

Speaker 20 But he will tell you a rehearsed story that he probably believes really deeply.

Speaker 1 Yeah, for Oregon John has very little details when it comes to the most important things.

Speaker 1 The main one being, where'd she go after she left his tent? What was she doing there in the first place?

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 Those are arguably the most important things if you're John, especially if you're innocent. Right.

Speaker 1 But he has seemingly endless stories and details about other elements of this case that go beyond him and point other directions. And they're not even really cohesive.

Speaker 1 And many of them are just completely bold-faced lies because we can prove that they're not true. It makes you kind of dig into the psychology of this kind of person.

Speaker 13 And

Speaker 1 why would John be compelled to

Speaker 1 say stuff like this?

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Speaker 1 At all. Especially to a stranger who...

Speaker 1 In his eyes in the moment, knows little to nothing at all about this.

Speaker 14 Yeah, and we've, I mean, we've all ran into people who

Speaker 14 can't help but lie all the time. It does seem like he tends to lie a lot, and that's just kind of maybe part of his personality.
Maybe that's just how he is with strangers.

Speaker 14 Maybe he just doesn't know you guys. So he's like, hey, I got to show off a little bit.
But some of them were very strange lies.

Speaker 14 Like you said, there's a lot of things we know for a fact he was lying about, and a lot of things that I suspect he's lying about. But

Speaker 14 it's strange behavior all the way around for me. And I don't know, I would be, even the way he talks about her and the whole thing, just how I would handle it.

Speaker 14 I would, if somebody was hanging out with me the night before and they disappeared and then I have some of their items in my tent and I'm handing them over, I'd be asking people like in tents near me, like, hey, did anyone see where she went or who she went with or what's going on?

Speaker 14 Like, or did they just really not know each other at all and it was like passing in the night? Like, we don't know the details of it.

Speaker 14 So I just feel like I would ask around or maybe get involved in a search. But it seems like he kind of felt the need to get out of town when it all went down.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 One comment that he made really struck me. He said something along the lines I'm paraphrasing here, but we'll play you the quote.
He essentially says that the girls knew me.

Speaker 1 The girls in town trusted me. My tent was a safe place.

Speaker 11 My camp was known as a safe place for people to come when they were drinking without any.

Speaker 11 I swore I was never coming back to Alaska and then I got this fucking job.

Speaker 11 But

Speaker 11 I stay out of trouble. I don't go into town.
I don't mess around with girls. I got me a beautiful wife.
I don't,

Speaker 11 you know, I don't get in trouble.

Speaker 11 I used to ride around on my wheeler with a half gallon of vodka just to get late.

Speaker 11 But all my female friends that knew me were standing up for me, including my girlfriend that had rape charges. I don't get a

Speaker 11 don't knew me, you know, because I was really chilled with the girls, you know?

Speaker 11 There's no reason why I do this.

Speaker 1 That just really stood out to me because it seemed like an overqualification of himself when it wasn't really necessary in the moment.

Speaker 1 And I wasn't really questioning whether or not he may have been involved. I was just nodding my head and believing him in the moment, right?

Speaker 1 But just pretending for a second that I think that's true.

Speaker 1 I'll pretend for a second that, sure, all the girls knew him. All the girls trusted him.
His tent was a safe place.

Speaker 1 If that is true, then wouldn't this be the biggest fuck-up ever for someone who outwardly publicly states that people were safe around him?

Speaker 1 Well, up until this moment then, because based on your story, Florence was not safe that night. Because as soon as she left your tent, she was kidnapped and murdered.

Speaker 1 And these are his words, not mine. So you'd think that coupled with that,

Speaker 1 if you're qualifying yourself in that way and you're genuinely that person, you're a good guy and people trust you and your tent is a safe place. If those things are true, then

Speaker 1 I feel like simultaneously you also would be saying, I just feel so bad, right?

Speaker 1 I can't believe that. After she left my tent, which is a safe place for people to be, she was kidnapped and murdered.
You know, I feel awful about that. He doesn't.

Speaker 1 Or at least he didn't tell me he did.

Speaker 14 Yeah, also, I mean, his, we kind of know that his tent, well, I don't know if it took place in his tent, but we know that he wasn't the safe place, and there are charges against him that prove that he was unsafe for certain women to be around.

Speaker 14 We've read the accounts. We've seen the police reports on these.
It's not, I wouldn't consider him a safe guy if you're a woman.

Speaker 14 So claiming that is very strange to me, especially if it's 100% provable that that's not true.

Speaker 20 It felt like everything he was saying was really to throw you off the scent of a trail, right?

Speaker 20 Like it was always something that would just shut you down and immediately make you say, okay, he has a good answer for that. Let's just move on, you know?

Speaker 20 But when you start to add up everything that he was saying, being a friend of all the women, saying, oh, some other guy did it. They found her body.
I mean, that's a huge red flag for anybody.

Speaker 20 And that's just, why would you do that? If you're innocent, why would you do that? There's no good answer for that.

Speaker 1 And it was also clearly top of mind to him still.

Speaker 1 When he thought of Gnome, it's the first thing he thought of.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 14 What's crazy is you guys, one thing you were talking about before, like the logistics and preparation for it. And maybe Cooper, you can talk about this too.

Speaker 14 But you guys, I remember in the Airbnb and Anchorage, you guys were like rehearsing for hours on hours, talking to each other, trying to get your stories right. Yeah.

Speaker 14 And you should talk about that a little bit, but it didn't seem like it took much to, you didn't really have to stay in that much of character to get this out of her.

Speaker 1 But yeah, you guys were really preparing, right, Cooper?

Speaker 15 Yeah, so in the beginning, it was just going to be pain confronting John and Ketchikan somewhere around the docks. But it slowly started to become a team effort with me included.

Speaker 15 Just because I knew so much about Alaska that I could jump in the conversation if I needed to.

Speaker 15 If things got weird, I could, you know, know, ask a question real quick about something about, you know, a common Alaska cultural event or something that, you know, people talk about, you know, like the weather, but it's like regarding Alaska.

Speaker 15 So, you know, we got some cred going again if the conversation got a little too spicy. And I also think, you know, just having the extra person there definitely extended the conversation with John.

Speaker 15 So we got a lot more material in the end.

Speaker 15 I remember sitting down at the bar and just, you know, being super excited about the audio quality because the music, there was music playing in the background, but it was super low.

Speaker 15 And then, I'm not even joking, like right when John walked in, you know, the music went back up real loud, and a whole bunch of people came in all at once.

Speaker 15 So it was the nice, quiet dive bar with just the four of us. And John, the bartender, maybe like two other old people.

Speaker 15 And then, you know, just a few minutes after when John walked in, a whole bunch of people came in. The music turned up.
Everyone took all the pool pool tables.

Speaker 14 It was chaos.

Speaker 15 So it got a little sketchy with, you know, the recording aspect of things in the end, but we definitely got what we came for.

Speaker 1 He slipped in in the middle of the conversation, he mentioned the podcast for a second, and I quickly did a pivot to try to get out of that.

Speaker 1 And then towards the end, right before he left, he brought it up again.

Speaker 1 And I firmly believe that in this moment, by that point, he truly believed us that we were who we said we were, or that we have, or at the very least, we have nothing to do with investigative journalism and this podcast he may be referring to.

Speaker 1 And if you listen to how he said it to me, it seemed like he was saying that with confidence that, hey, I thought that this, you might be hooked up with those guys.

Speaker 1 And it bothered me that he knew about the podcast. And as a listener, it's different right now hearing this for the first time because a lot of this stuff happened months ago.

Speaker 1 This particular conversation with Oregon John happened well before there was any public information that I or Tinderfoot up and vanished was investigating Florence's disappearance at all in any way, shape, or form.

Speaker 1 Any of the family we had talked to and friends, we had kind of instructed them to

Speaker 1 not say too much to people that they don't know and trust just to kind of keep it within the circle.

Speaker 1 So it bothered me as to why he knew that information so specifically, that it was a podcaster reaching out to people.

Speaker 1 And the only thing I could think of, because it was a finite number of places I think he could have learned that from, was that the day before,

Speaker 1 one of the times, actually the first time I tried to call Kelly, was 24 hours before we met with him. And so I'm just guessing and

Speaker 1 trying to stick things together here, but it would make sense that maybe she mentioned something about that to him

Speaker 13 and

Speaker 1 he just didn't really look too much into it, but it was on his mind when he met with me.

Speaker 14 Yeah. And some of the things he disclosed to you guys, you should talk about where, like, we've heard other stories from other people about this guy.

Speaker 14 This guy who was named Sir with a J and he was a cab driver, right? And then what does he do? When you're in the bar talking to him, he brings up that he was,

Speaker 14 that was one of the first things I think he says when you talk about Noah. He's like, yeah, I was a cab driver.

Speaker 14 And it's like, wow, this is really kind of lining up with all these stories we've heard about you and this kind of legend that goes with you or this lore that goes with you.

Speaker 14 And it's, you're definitely the guy everyone's been talking about, right? And we heard those stories, right? I'm pretty sure we put that story in that he was a cab driver, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, oh, yeah. I mean, we knew that he was a cab driver.
That that was learned early on.

Speaker 1 I think that that to me, the biggest statement he made to us that was offered entirely on his own and in no way, shape, or form was prompted by myself or Cooper was the story about the rental car.

Speaker 1 And he mentions this story after I asked him if he was ever interrogated by the police. And he simply says, no, they never talked to me, which I believe him on that one.

Speaker 1 But he brings up after that, just to sort of, I guess, talk about why the police may or may not have been interested in him, even though they didn't interrogate him, according to John.

Speaker 1 And he brings up that rental car story.

Speaker 1 I had heard this story before from several people, but I had never been able to fully, you know, down to the papers of the rental car receipt and everything, prove it out definitively.

Speaker 1 So I hadn't brought it up publicly in the podcast yet. But if you listen back to to it, it kind of doesn't even make sense as to why he'd bring it up.
Like

Speaker 1 us hearing that, knowing no other information, I would not quickly know the association to Florence's disappearance with that story he's talking about.

Speaker 1 So much so that I had to break it down to the listeners, I felt like.

Speaker 1 Mike, Dylan Cooper, like in your eyes, what does that story tell you?

Speaker 14 The biggest thing for me is, again, it's like the cab thing.

Speaker 14 It's like we heard stories of him driving a cab and then he talks about driving a cab and tells us another terrible story he did while being a cab driver.

Speaker 14 And then this one, he volunteers it on his own. We heard from the family that he rented a car the day after she went missing and it was suspicious.
And why did he rent a car when he has a car?

Speaker 14 And they, we were like, well, was this, you've talked to Andy about this, the private investigator. And you were like talking about this car.

Speaker 14 And they're like, well, did they ever do anything with the car? Did the police check the car?

Speaker 14 and we're like we don't know right we're not sure and then he yeah like you said unprompted just kind of volunteers this when you bring up the police if they ever talk to him he's like oh yeah let me talk about this car i rented the day after but it wasn't for me it was for my friends who were underage couldn't rent a car they wanted to go fishing so i let him use it and then i just rode my four-wheeler around And then I pulled up and it's like, what is again, very good memory about this one part of this, this timeline, this series of events that happened here.

Speaker 14 Very vivid memory of what happened with this, unless he's just making all this up on the spot with the rented car, but we've heard from other people who were in Nome that he rented a car the day after.

Speaker 14 So now he's bringing it up. Is this some kind of important thing that needs to be followed up on? Like, where is this car now? Has anyone checked it? Have the police looked at this car? Have they not?

Speaker 14 Do they know about it? Did they actually question him or interrogate him?

Speaker 1 I don't know. Yeah, did that car disappear? Is it still there?

Speaker 1 I mean, unless unless that car went missing too, it would have had to have been destroyed somewhere or went missing somewhere in or around Nome,

Speaker 1 shipped off somewhere on a boat, or it's still there, right?

Speaker 1 And if Florence's body was ever in a rental car like that, in theory, like Andy was saying, there would likely still be some sort of physical DNA evidence in there to be investigated.

Speaker 1 And, you know, I don't know the answer to that question, whether or not they've done investigative work like that.

Speaker 1 But based on the people that I've talked to and some of the latest information I'm hearing out of the GNOME Police Department, is that it's strongly possible that there isn't even a case file in existence in that building, which I think that would answer that question.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 14 I think we really need to put money towards getting that car processed by professionals.

Speaker 14 Even if it's GNOME PD. Somebody needs to process that.
Or they need to tell us that they have already processed it and nothing was found in the trunk or whatever.

Speaker 14 But somebody needs to process that, and we need some type of paper trail along with that, right? Some confirmation.

Speaker 1 You could also glean from John's statement there about the rental car that there are friends of his in Gnome that he's close enough with

Speaker 1 that within 12 hours of Florence going missing, he's using his identification and his insurance or whatever it takes to run a car a gnome, right, from that particular place for these people.

Speaker 1 And so it makes you wonder, okay, well, where were these people the night before, right? You know, do, did they also hang out on the beach with him as well?

Speaker 1 I've seen videos and pictures of some parts of the tent camps. there on West Beach from Flo's friends.
And this is within days of her disappearance.

Speaker 1 And I've been pointed out, I've been pointed out by several people which one was John's tent. And there are tents pretty close together in a row.

Speaker 1 And so if anyone was hanging out outside, unless you were inside your tent, you'd see them. And so to me, it kind of just painted a different picture a little bit.
It wasn't like there was...

Speaker 1 every 50 yards just a solo tent and it's just all you hear is wind.

Speaker 1 If people like were hanging out, they'd all be hanging out unless it got super late and everyone was asleep or they went somewhere else besides that. And so if something happened to her there, someone

Speaker 1 could have seen something quite easily, I feel like.

Speaker 1 You know, it makes me wonder, did something happen there? Did they go somewhere else afterwards?

Speaker 1 Or these friends that John is mentioning, do they know something that they should be telling the police?

Speaker 1 Well, I say police, but that they should be telling,

Speaker 1 period.

Speaker 14 If he had friends over that he gave a rental car to the day after or sometime near the night she went missing, were they not around the night she went missing? Did they get there that day?

Speaker 1 Mm-hmm. Right.
And who were they?

Speaker 14 Yeah, who were they? And we would really like to talk to them. Just ask them some questions.

Speaker 1 So there's a lot of things happening in real time right now.

Speaker 13 And

Speaker 1 there are other pieces to the puzzle that we have that we've not entirely unveiled yet either. So having this conversation today is, I think, important for clarity for everybody.

Speaker 1 And it's also kind of one that we have to do pretty carefully. But moving forward in the rest of this season, we're going to chase down some of these new leads

Speaker 1 and challenge some of the statements that John has made and leave the door open for anyone who knows anything to come forward and say something.

Speaker 1 And I think that in the amount of time that we've been investigating this case, I feel in my gut that we've got to the point where we're at the center of it.

Speaker 1 Whatever happened to Florence, the answer is somewhere among us right now.

Speaker 1 And our plan is to stay on it, to keep the pressure going and

Speaker 1 press even harder.

Speaker 14 We didn't include it in there, but there was one point where I saw Payne

Speaker 14 went to the bathroom. So I ran in there too.

Speaker 1 And we had to go to the house. I was hoping when you guys would meet me, I'm like, now's your chance.

Speaker 1 I'm like, yo, what the fuck do you think of this shit? What is going on?

Speaker 14 That little mission, how were you feeling at that point, Payne, when I saw you in the bathroom? Do you remember that? Is it all a blur? Do you remember the night?

Speaker 1 No, I remember that. I definitely remember

Speaker 1 being in the bathroom briefly and having like a chat with you because it was the most relief I'd had in about an hour or so.

Speaker 1 But I just remember being so caught off guard at how quickly we were able to get into the discussion of Florence's disappearance, but then being anxious as hell about how I could keep bringing this back up without it seeming so weird and that I needed to pad every sort of deep question I had that was specific about her disappearance.

Speaker 1 I had to pad in between that some casual side conversation that had nothing remotely at all to do with that or else it would just seem like a literal interrogation.

Speaker 1 And so I was kind of doing that balancing act and seeing how far I could push it.

Speaker 1 Knowing and feeling that each time I did that, that

Speaker 1 maybe this is the one time that he goes, Why do you keep asking about that? I didn't have a good answer ready for that, other than just trying to play it off even more.

Speaker 1 But then, in that moment, really, it would be, it would kind of shut the conversation down, I feel like. So, if I ask it again after that, it's like, I just told you, like, I thought that's weird.

Speaker 1 Why are you still saying that? That's really why it was a two-hour conversation is because we spread out everything to make it feel more organic and normal.

Speaker 1 I don't know who is responsible for Florence Okpiolik's disappearance, but if you look at everything we've discovered thus far and everything that points back towards West Beach, back to Oregon John's tent, back to him having her things, all the other stories surrounding him and that scenario and that last night that she was there on the beach and never seen or heard from again.

Speaker 1 I think if you couple that with his behavior and how some of his stories don't add up and some of them are just bold-faced lies, it makes me personally wonder, you know, is this the one that's not a lie?

Speaker 1 Is the most important question, the most important answer we're all seeking, is this the one thing he's not lying about, but he's lying about 90 plus percent about everything else?

Speaker 1 That would be a little weird, I think.

Speaker 1 But, you know, there's no way to definitively know that. But I also think that, you know, we may be dealing with somebody who isn't going to come out and just say something like that.

Speaker 1 My perception of him is that even talking outside of Flo's disappearance and this analogy, I feel like he's the kind of person, just from my perspective, from talking to him, that would convince himself of something that wasn't true.

Speaker 10 Hey, it's Payne. If you haven't checked out Talking to Death yet, please go check it out.
It's my new new weekly show.

Speaker 10 If you like Up and Vanished, then there's a good chance you might like my weekly show called Talking to Death.

Speaker 10 During this season, right now, in the intro segment of every new episode of Talking to Death, we are unpacking the latest episode.

Speaker 6 Hey, Mike. Hey!

Speaker 1 Hey!

Speaker 10 If you want to hear myself and the producers of Up and Vanished unpack episode 6, go right now on your podcast app and look up Talking to Death and find the latest episode featuring Laura Norton.

Speaker 2 Up and Vanished in the Midnight Sun is a production of Tunderfoot TV in association with Odyssey. Your host is Payne Lindsay.

Speaker 2 The show is written by Payne Lindsay with additional assistance from Mike Rooney. Executive producers are Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay.

Speaker 2 Lead producer is Mike Rooney, along with producers Dylan Harrington and Cooper Skinner. Editing by Mike Rooney and Cooper Skinner with additional editing by Dylan Harrington.

Speaker 2 Supervising producer is Tracy Kaplan. Additional production by Victoria McKenzie, Alice Kanik Glenn, and Eric Quintana.
Artwork by Rob Sheridan. Original music by Makeup and Vanity Seth.

Speaker 2 Mixed and mastered by Cooper Skinner. Thank you to Oren Rosenbaum and the team at UTA, Beck Media and Marketing, and the Nord Group.

Speaker 2 Special thanks to all of the families and community members that spoke to the team. Additional information and resources can be found in our show notes.

Speaker 2 For more podcasts like Up and Vanished, search Tenderfoot TV on your favorite podcast app or visit us at tenderfoot.tv. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 22 Every story has layers, and sometimes the truth hides in plain sight. I'm Josh Dean, host of Chameleon.
the podcast about people who transform, deceive, and survive.

Speaker 22 From con artists to unbelievable yet true occurrences, we dive into stories where nothing is ever quite as it seems. Because to understand the world, you sometimes have to change the way you see it.

Speaker 22 Listen to Chameleon wherever you get your podcasts.