1 | No Place Like Nome

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Speaker 3 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 1 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 3 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 1 Up and Vanished in the Midnight Sun is released every Friday and brought to you absolutely free.

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Speaker 1 You're listening to Up and Vanished in the Midnight Sun,

Speaker 1 a production of Tenderfoot TV in association with Odyssey. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the individuals participating.

Speaker 1 This podcast also contains subject matter which may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised.

Speaker 1 I've been on four different flights in the last 18 hours.

Speaker 1 Small, rickety planes in the remote region of northern Alaska.

Speaker 1 After a while, you get used to the turbulence.

Speaker 1 The plane's engine starts to feel like white noise.

Speaker 1 When I get here, I'm going to have to face the music.

Speaker 1 For about a year now, I've been investigating an unsolved missing persons case, and it's all led me to this moment. To this place,

Speaker 1 a tiny town in remote Alaska.

Speaker 1 I'm minutes away from what is likely the most terrifying encounter of my entire life.

Speaker 1 And there's no escape plan. But I've mentally prepared for this moment.

Speaker 1 I know exactly why I'm here.

Speaker 1 I know why the victim's family wants me to come here.

Speaker 1 And I know why the police have never stepped foot here.

Speaker 1 I'm about to meet the number one suspect in a murder case.

Speaker 1 I know they're dangerous.

Speaker 1 I know that they're armed.

Speaker 1 There's no time for second thoughts now.

Speaker 1 But what if I'm walking into a trap?

Speaker 1 What if this confrontation goes way south?

Speaker 1 You need to snap out of it.

Speaker 1 Turn around.

Speaker 1 But we both know we can't do that.

Speaker 1 I didn't come this far for nothing.

Speaker 1 It's time to approach them.

Speaker 1 And even though the anxiety is crippling me,

Speaker 1 I took a breath and looked back on the wild journey that's led me here.

Speaker 4 It's safer to be in numbers,

Speaker 1 never alone.

Speaker 4 That's not safe.

Speaker 5 She was murdered, taken out on the tundra and dumped somewhere.

Speaker 1 There's no way they'd say something like that if they didn't know what happened.

Speaker 1 Somebody's being hurt or taken advantage of. You don't just look the other way.
Stay on the phone with you, please. Sure.

Speaker 1 If you want to light up the vehicle, there's a truck that's following you guys.

Speaker 1 We heard gunshots. Where were the gunshots at?

Speaker 7 If you think you're investigating a murder scene, things have to be documented.

Speaker 1 I hope we made the right decision here.

Speaker 9 And he says, you know what? I could have killed you, and nobody would have known about it.

Speaker 1 If I walk out this door with them, you have to follow them. Where else? This is way more dangerous than we thought it was.

Speaker 11 We don't know who to trust.

Speaker 1 We don't know who to trust.

Speaker 1 Welcome to season four of Up and Vanished, in the Midnight Sun.

Speaker 1 I'm your host, Payne Lindsay.

Speaker 1 About a year ago, one of my good friends Cooper, who also works as a producer on this show, sent me an article about a missing person.

Speaker 1 Her name is Florence Akpialik. She's 33 years old, an Alaska native, and was last seen on the evening of August 31st, 2020.

Speaker 1 She went missing from a small town in the subarctic region of Alaska, a town called Nome.

Speaker 1 What struck me immediately was how incredibly small this place was. Nome, Alaska has a population barely over 3,000 people, and the town area itself is geographically under one square mile.

Speaker 1 0.53 square miles to be exact.

Speaker 1 How does anyone at all go missing from a place like this?

Speaker 1 I spent a few weeks trying to read as much as I could about Florence Akpialik's disappearance.

Speaker 1 According to the official missing poster from the Alaska State Troopers, her last known clothing description and direction of travel remain unknown.

Speaker 1 And after four years, the case had gone completely cold.

Speaker 1 From Atlanta, Georgia, where I live, Nome, Alaska, is nearly 4,000 miles away. And that's if you drew a straight line on a map.
Driving there isn't even possible.

Speaker 1 That's because no road systems connect to this town. The only way in or out of Noam, Alaska is by boat or plane.

Speaker 1 Logistically speaking, this case would be very difficult to cover.

Speaker 1 I'd need to spend time on the ground there. and genuinely immerse myself in the environment.
I'm not interested in doing a quick gloss over of this case. I want to try and solve it.

Speaker 1 So I kept researching Florence Akpialik's disappearance. The coverage on her case was pretty limited, but I needed to find anything there was on the internet.
I found a Reddit post about it.

Speaker 1 It seemed to have a few more details about the case.

Speaker 1 She's the youngest of seven siblings. To friends and family, she went by Flo.

Speaker 1 She has a daughter. who was six years old at the time of her disappearance.

Speaker 1 She was born in Wales, Alaska, one of the oldest communities in the Bering Strait region, called Anupiat.

Speaker 1 Nome, where she went missing, has a very high population of Indigenous people, 53%.

Speaker 1 Having covered the disappearance of Ashley Loring Heavy Runner in season 3 of Up and Vanished, I learned firsthand about the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people.

Speaker 1 The statistics are just horrific. According to data collected from 1979 to 2020, the rate of violent crimes in Alaska has been on a steady increase since 1993.

Speaker 1 American Indians and Alaska Natives are two and a half times more likely to experience violent crimes.

Speaker 1 More than four in five women have experienced violence in their lifetime, and homicide is the fifth leading cause of death between the ages of 25 and 34.

Speaker 1 Florence Akpialik was 33 when she went missing.

Speaker 1 I eventually found another website. called the Charlie Project, an independent internet database of missing persons cases.

Speaker 1 Here, I discovered some more details about the night she vanished. According to the Charlie Project, Florence was last seen in Nome, Alaska, in an area called West Beach, at around 4 p.m.

Speaker 1 in the afternoon on August 31st, 2020.

Speaker 1 She was allegedly seen coming out of a tent on West Beach, and she's never been seen since then. But perhaps the most important detail is what the police found outside that tent.

Speaker 1 In the sand, they discovered her shoes and and her jacket. My first question is who the hell's tent is that?

Speaker 1 And trust me, if that fact existed somewhere on the internet, I would have already found it. I looked for days.
The owner of this tent that Florence was last seen leaving remains a complete mystery.

Speaker 1 Who was she with that night? And who was the witness who saw her leaving that tent? Why would she leave her shoes and jacket behind? Where was she going?

Speaker 1 If she wandered barefoot down the beach, how far could she have actually gone? And how could nobody find her if that was the case?

Speaker 1 Based on this information alone, finding the owner of that tent is my number one priority.

Speaker 1 Before I knew it, I was up late almost every night of the week, completely submerged in this case, trying to make sense of it all. It was driving me crazy.

Speaker 1 I kept searching her name, hoping I'd magically find some new information I hadn't already seen yet.

Speaker 1 It was becoming clear that I'd reached the end of the trail.

Speaker 1 If I wanted to know more, I was going to have to go and find it myself.

Speaker 1 Getting to Nome would take me roughly two days, accounting for connecting flights to Anchorage, 10 hours of airtime, and an overnight layover.

Speaker 1 If I was going to take on this case, I wouldn't have the freedom to quickly bounce back and forth, but if I planned it all out, meticulously, I know I could make it work.

Speaker 1 At this point, the case was becoming a bit of an obsession.

Speaker 1 But this was the exact energy I needed in order to take on this case. So I made it official.
Let's go. I booked a flight to Nome, Alaska, completely unsure of where I was going to even start.

Speaker 1 This case was going to be the focus of the newest season of Up and Vanished.

Speaker 1 Since 2016, when I first started the podcast, we've received tens of thousands of emails, many from other families in search of their loved ones.

Speaker 1 And the team and I do our best to read as many of them as possible, offering support whenever and however we can.

Speaker 1 One morning, about a year ago now, just a few days before my flight to Nome, I woke up with this strange feeling.

Speaker 1 I couldn't really pinpoint it.

Speaker 1 I logged into the Up and Vanished email account, typed in Alaska.

Speaker 1 14 different results. Different missing persons cases spanning all the way back to 1978.

Speaker 1 Then I typed in Gnome.

Speaker 1 And lo and behold, there was one email.

Speaker 1 It read, I love the podcast. I started listening a month ago and I'm all caught up on the latest episode in season three.

Speaker 1 I'd like to request that you look into the case of my friend who went missing. She's a young Native American.
Law enforcement has made zero progress.

Speaker 1 I want your help.

Speaker 1 Nobody trusts the police station in Nome.

Speaker 1 I'd like to find Florence Akpialik.

Speaker 1 Someone hurt her.

Speaker 1 An email from one of Florence Akpialik's friends, buried in the up-and-vanished inbox from over two years ago.

Speaker 1 I don't really believe in luck, but I do believe in serendipity.

Speaker 1 Discovering a lost email in my inbox about an unsolved case I've been obsessing over for the past month, you could call it fate or kismet,

Speaker 1 but I don't.

Speaker 1 The logical part of my brain yearns for a more grounded explanation of things. Even if my emotions want to override it.

Speaker 1 Having the right intentions and following your gut instincts is

Speaker 1 Leaning into life's mysteries instead of being fearful of the unexplained.

Speaker 1 I have that funny, familiar feeling inside me right now.

Speaker 1 So instead of looking at this email as if the world's conspired to bring it to my attention, I simply see it as a sign that I'm heading in the right direction.

Speaker 1 And if I can stay the course, maybe I can help find the truth that's been eluding this community.

Speaker 1 What really happened to Florence Akpialik?

Speaker 1 The email was from October 2021, signed Deila.

Speaker 1 But she left no number. And I'm not convinced she even uses that email address anymore.
So I tried to find her on social media.

Speaker 1 Okay, there's her Facebook, I think.

Speaker 1 I'm going to message her here, too.

Speaker 1 Days before my scheduled flight to Nome, we had a change of plans. My producer Mike and I took a detour to the coast of Oregon, where Florence Akpialik's friend, Diyla currently resides.
Hi, Diyla.

Speaker 1 Nice to finally meet you in person. I know, really.

Speaker 1 We agreed to meet at a hotel downtown.

Speaker 1 This is where my journey into the investigation of Florence Akpialik's disappearance truly began.

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Speaker 4 I really enjoyed the care you put into the investigation on the Tara Grinsted case.

Speaker 4 I was only crossing fingers and toes that you might look at Flo's case.

Speaker 1 Deila had known Florence for several years when she lived in Nome.

Speaker 1 To friends and family closest to her, she went by Flo.

Speaker 1 Florence was born August 26, 1987, and she's the youngest of seven siblings.

Speaker 1 She grew up in the native village of Wales, Alaska, one of the oldest communities in the Bering Strait region, called Inupiat.

Speaker 4 A lot of people in the lower 48 probably call it Indigenous. We don't say Eskimo or Indigenous.
We say Alaska Native or Inupiak.

Speaker 4 It feels like it's been so long.

Speaker 4 The last time I saw her was in 2020.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 And like, I remember everything I wore that day.

Speaker 1 Strange.

Speaker 1 In 2013, while Florence was pregnant, she moved to Nome in search of better health care and schooling opportunities for her daughter.

Speaker 4 I was becoming a mom and she was already a mom and she was embracing my pregnancy. She was just really sweet.

Speaker 4 She would touch my belly and made me feel like I don't have to be afraid.

Speaker 1 Just five days after her 33rd birthday, she disappeared.

Speaker 4 Day two, It was all over Facebook. No one could find her.
I didn't really think much of it at first. Maybe she got lost.
She didn't have cell service and she was stuck somewhere.

Speaker 4 I mean, that happens too.

Speaker 1 She was last seen coming out of a tent on West Beach in Nome. With consistently spotty cell service in the whole town, it wasn't entirely uncommon for someone to drop out of communication for a while.

Speaker 4 In my mind, they were going to find her.

Speaker 1 But after two days of radio silence, Flo's family knew that something was clearly wrong. And when they struggled to pinpoint her whereabouts, they band together in search parties to go look for her.

Speaker 4 Massive search parties.

Speaker 4 What the hell is going on? Where is she? Someone has to know something.

Speaker 1 The local newspaper began covering her disappearance. And with each day that passed, the tiny town of Nome was growing more on edge.
With little to no information at all, the rumor mill was ignited.

Speaker 4 You can't tell what's a rumor and what's a fact.

Speaker 1 Deila held a march for missing and murdered indigenous people in the downtown city of Nome.

Speaker 1 The people who marched wore red face paint and red shirts and cried out for justice. Florence's sister, Blair, spoke at the event too.

Speaker 4 She was hysterically crying.

Speaker 1 My life was forever changed. The bullet of injustice from my legal system struck me right through the heart.

Speaker 4 She wanted to express concern about what the police department isn't doing.

Speaker 1 Do you feel like the police, the local police, the known police, have done enough to solve her case? No.

Speaker 4 It feels and looks like they haven't done anything.

Speaker 1 Deila Johnson is one of the main organizers of the event. She told the crowd when any person goes missing or is murdered, it affects the whole community.

Speaker 4 Each of us is affected, whether or not they are related to us.

Speaker 1 According to Deila, the Gnome police chief made an appearance at the event too.

Speaker 4 The chief of police came in to work out. He wasn't on duty, but he was wearing his police jacket while we're having this event.

Speaker 1 The police chief of Nome showed up to the community gym where the MMIW event was being held to squeeze in a workout.

Speaker 1 Not a good look.

Speaker 4 We know who you are. We can all see your jacket too.
But he didn't care.

Speaker 1 On a Friday during business hours? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Is he just off on Fridays?

Speaker 4 I don't know.

Speaker 1 His bizarre appearance at this event left a lasting impression on those who attended.

Speaker 1 And his behavior only seemed to mirror how the police have handled Flo's case from the very beginning, in the eyes of her friends and family.

Speaker 4 I don't want to bash anyone, but it feels like the police police department priority of cases is not based on the protection of the actual people that live there. That is not safe.

Speaker 1 Period.

Speaker 1 The city of Nome runs along the Seward Peninsula coast on the edge of the Bering Sea.

Speaker 1 When Florence disappeared in August 2020, she was last seen by a witness coming out of a tent in the West Beach area.

Speaker 1 West Beach is primarily occupied by freelance gold miners living in tents along the coastline. But at nighttime in the summer, it can be a popular hangout spot.

Speaker 4 The beach itself is just maybe a quarter mile long of sand. There's tons of camping tents.

Speaker 4 And I have to be honest, I've gone to party at West Beach before.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 4 There's a lot of people that would migrate from the bars down to the beach.

Speaker 1 What happened?

Speaker 4 Did somebody hurt her? And if they did, then they need to be held accountable.

Speaker 1 In your gut, what do you think happened?

Speaker 4 I don't know.

Speaker 4 One possibility is that she was drunk and then just drowned.

Speaker 4 I feel like someone is responsible for getting rid of her.

Speaker 4 Whether it was an accident and they didn't want to get in trouble for how it looked, or if it was an intentional incident,

Speaker 4 she was harmed. Somebody knows something and covered it up.

Speaker 4 Where else could she have gone?

Speaker 1 If Flo's disappearance was the result of a tragic accident, common sense tells me there would at least be one shred of evidence out there to support that. Where is her body?

Speaker 1 Or all the clothes she was wearing that night? Why is it that in over four years, none of that has ever washed ashore? Unless something nefarious happened that night.

Speaker 1 These facts, combined with the overall lack of evidence in this case, can easily send your mind to strange places just to try to make sense of it all.

Speaker 4 Have you heard of the movie The Fourth Kind?

Speaker 4 These people in Nome, Alaska see an owl and then they just disappear into thin air.

Speaker 1 In 2009, Hollywood released a movie called The Fourth Kind. The movie takes place in Nome, Alaska, and claims to be based on true stories, a long history of unexplained disappearances in the town.

Speaker 1 Was there a serial killer on the loose?

Speaker 1 Not in this story. In the movie, it was alien abductions that were responsible.

Speaker 1 Right. The fourth kind was met with some pretty strong criticism.
Ranked at 18% on Rotten Tomatoes, the critic consensus reads, The Fourth Kind is hokey and clumsy.

Speaker 1 and makes its close encounters seem eerily mundane. I watched the movie myself, and it was just okay.
I'm no expert, and I myself am a believer of the existence of intelligent life beyond our planet.

Speaker 1 But let's be real here, I'm pretty confident aliens aren't the reason people are going missing here.

Speaker 1 The sheer remoteness of Nome Alaska tends to create a mystique of its own.

Speaker 1 But when you pair that with a Hollywood mockumentary about an FBI investigation into alien abductions, Now you're just sitting on the fringe of baseless conspiracy theories.

Speaker 1 What is interesting, and actually true, is that in 2005, the FBI did launch an investigation into the bizarre number of disappearances occurring in Nome.

Speaker 1 Going back to the 1960s, there's a list of over 20 unexplained disappearances in Nome.

Speaker 1 For a population around 3,000, those numbers just don't add up.

Speaker 1 So the FBI did in fact step in to investigate and ultimately concluded, quote, alcohol consumption and the town's harsh climate were the most likely factor.

Speaker 1 To satiate my own curiosity and to check this box off for good, I made a strange FOIA request with the Gnome Police Department, asking for any reports they have about UFO abductions.

Speaker 1 And to my own surprise, they sent me something back.

Speaker 1 In an official document from the Gnome Police Department, they reported a weird exchange they had on July 20th, 2020 with a man named Andrew, last name unknown.

Speaker 1 An excerpt from the transcript reads, I need to know if other people are experiencing extra-dimensional experiences. Aliens, you know.
Extra-dimensional creatures. They don't take physical form.

Speaker 1 They mess with your mind. You've heard about people disappearing in your area, right? This isn't about the movies.
There's a lot of bodies disappearing, and I need to investigate.

Speaker 1 There are literally people that disappear over there. They melt your brain and turn you into nothingness.

Speaker 1 I'll just stop there, because it goes a lot longer. It seems to me that Andrew Unknown may have been reading a little too much into Gnome's fictional portrayal in the movies.

Speaker 1 And the more I've looked into it all, it appears that the lore of alien abductions in this town was more or less created entirely by the film itself.

Speaker 1 And its influence on the internet over the years has perpetuated all kinds of wacky theories.

Speaker 4 It's safer to be in numbers.

Speaker 4 Never alone.

Speaker 4 That's not safe.

Speaker 1 After meeting with De Isla, we were still a good 2,000 miles away from Nome, and the fastest route to get there was to fly into Anchorage through Seattle. So we packed up and headed further northwest.

Speaker 1 And about a cool 10 hours later, we arrived in Anchorage a little after midnight.

Speaker 1 But if you didn't have a watch, you wouldn't know that. You'd probably think it was 1 p.m.
in the afternoon because it was broad daylight outside.

Speaker 1 Alaska is home to the shortest and longest day of the year. In the northernmost city of the Arctic Circle, there are 67 days of complete darkness in the winter.

Speaker 1 And in the summertime, there are 80 days of uninterrupted daylight. They call this the midnight sun.

Speaker 5 Life in Nome and in the region is focused on the seasons. The extreme summer with all the daylight.
In wintertime, the hardest season for a lot of folks.

Speaker 5 Three and a half, four hours of daylight when you get to the peak.

Speaker 1 This is Davis Hovey, a freelance journalist in Anchorage. For years, he worked at KNOM News Station in Nome, where Florence went missing back in 2020.

Speaker 1 He was covering her story on the ground in real time as the initial search for her was unfolding.

Speaker 5 It's very remote. No running water in some of our communities.
No road system.

Speaker 5 It takes a special kind of person to live out here, especially if you weren't born here. There's dangers everywhere, even when you walk outside your door.

Speaker 5 The threat of bears, extreme temperatures, and frostbite could ruin you in five minutes. It's a dangerous place.

Speaker 5 August 31st, 2020, Florence Akbialik is reported missing.

Speaker 5 My reporter and I were covering this non-stop because we've seen enough instances leading up to this to know that if there's not action taken within a certain time frame,

Speaker 5 if there's not some sort of accountability with the police department, this could easily get swept under the rug.

Speaker 5 Another Alaska Native person is missing, and that is what it is, and then nothing happens.

Speaker 5 We started reporting on it from day one after the Nome Police Department got the call.

Speaker 5 Real search and rescue efforts didn't start for Florence until maybe day two or day three.

Speaker 5 If you talk to some locals, I'm sure a lot of them will say they were disappointed at the very least. The Nome Police Department didn't actually do anything in the first 24 hours.

Speaker 1 Like a lot of missing person cases, the police are often slow to respond, operating under the assumption The individual is simply lost or missing on their own accord and will soon reappear.

Speaker 1 But this mentality can be detrimental to a case.

Speaker 5 She had reportedly last been seen on West Beach. That beach is very popular for gold miners because there have been some good deposits found out there offshore.

Speaker 5 A lot of miners will have small dredges with suction hoses. mining for gold just offshore at a West Beach.
Most of them are seasonal.

Speaker 5 When they come up during the summer, they'll set up tents, old beat-up trucks, temporary housing options that they can set up on the beach.

Speaker 5 That's where she was last seen.

Speaker 5 From that point on, we were doing updates on a daily basis as to what was happening with the search efforts.

Speaker 1 After known police began taking Flo's case seriously, searches were conducted up and down West Beach.

Speaker 5 Someone had found a piece of her clothing that she had with her at the time.

Speaker 5 As time moved on and it became apparent that there were no suspects, there were no breakthroughs in the case, Nome Police Department needed additional help. So the FBI got involved.

Speaker 1 On September 12th, 2020, nearly two weeks after Florence went missing, the search conducted by the Nome PD was at a standstill.

Speaker 1 And by request of the police chief, FBI agents from Anchorage flew in to assist.

Speaker 5 By early September, we had FBI on the ground in Nome.

Speaker 5 Canine units that had been paid for and donated through a series of organizations. The public out in numbers with local search and rescue teams every day.

Speaker 5 At some point, the FBI had to leave. Nome Police Department suspended daily search efforts.
And that was the last we heard.

Speaker 5 Three years later, I don't think I've heard anything else come out of the Nome Police Department that indicates that they're anywhere near solving that case.

Speaker 5 Give it enough time and things tend to just disappear, be swept under the rug in this town, unfortunately.

Speaker 5 Going missing without a trace and you never hear from them again. You're not quite sure what happened.

Speaker 1 To me, the strongest evidence of Florence Okpialik's disappearance were her personal belongings that were found on the beach where she was last seen.

Speaker 1 And they weren't just found off the beaten path or hidden in the brush somewhere.

Speaker 1 Her personal belongings were found next to a tent that allegedly belonged to one of the gold miners that camped out there.

Speaker 5 The gentleman who owned the tent, the miner?

Speaker 5 The Noam Police Department never mentioned they had suspects.

Speaker 5 This miner may have been involved.

Speaker 1 Do you have a personal theory on what happened to her or is there a local rumor that's pretty well held?

Speaker 5 Yeah, I mean, I guess I should share this.

Speaker 5 So I'll just be candid.

Speaker 5 For me, and I think for a lot of folks, she was murdered,

Speaker 5 was taken from that West Beach area,

Speaker 5 probably on a four-wheeler, four-wheel drive vehicle, taken out on the tundra and dumped somewhere.

Speaker 5 There's definitely areas where it would be relatively easy to hide a body.

Speaker 5 I think she was murdered. I think her body was dumped somewhere.

Speaker 5 I don't know if the gold miner theory is right or not,

Speaker 5 but I definitely think foul play was involved.

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Speaker 1 We had plans for an early flight to Nome the next morning. My first order of business was to try to talk to some of Flo's friends and family.

Speaker 1 Her cousin Deila, who we met a few days ago, connected me to her aunt Wendy, who played a major role in the initial search for Florence. So I called her.
The police department failed Flo.

Speaker 1 They failed her because she's not Caucasian. And I'm not trying to be racist.
So when a Caucasian person comes missing in Nome,

Speaker 1 they search day one full-fledged until they find the person. They don't stop.

Speaker 1 Gold miners come up here that want to find gold. For generations, Nome, Alaska has long been home to Inupiat Native people.

Speaker 1 But in 1898, gold was discovered along the beaches, and the town became flooded with outsiders. This is known as the Nome Gold Rush.

Speaker 1 And for the last hundred years, the town has continued to see large numbers of outside people migrating to Nome in search of gold.

Speaker 1 A lot of the miners, the druggies, and they brought their drugs with them.

Speaker 1 Wendy, along with other friends and family members, extensively combed the sands of West Beach, the area she was supposedly last seen.

Speaker 1 Every day they would do this. And according to Wendy, while they were searching, they were met with another terrifying obstacle.

Speaker 1 We were terrified the entire time we searched.

Speaker 1 Entire time.

Speaker 1 We were at West Beach. My niece called me.
She said, Auntie,

Speaker 1 there's a truck that's following you guys.

Speaker 1 It appeared that a particular group of people in town didn't like the fact that they were searching up and down this beach.

Speaker 1 Wendy said that on multiple occasions, she and her family were being followed by strangers in a black truck who, for whatever reason, wanted to make it a point that they weren't welcome here.

Speaker 1 Who would be doing that, other than somebody related to her disappearance? Wendy took video on her phone of all this, being followed by these men in a black truck.

Speaker 1 We've got videos, you've got pictures. And she went to the local police, claiming she was being followed, and recorded the police interaction, too.

Speaker 1 She sent me the videos in a text.

Speaker 9 Man, no license plate, huh?

Speaker 9 Who's this truck?

Speaker 1 We were terrified.

Speaker 1 It became a regular thing. Every time we'd go, no matter which direction, these trucks would show up while we're searching and follow us.
Stay on the phone with you, please. Sure.

Speaker 1 Just so we feel safe.

Speaker 1 Do you have a license plate for the vehicle no

Speaker 1 there's no license plates no license plate nothing what kind of vehicle what kind of truck is this two white guys in a black truck with tinted windows you can see the truck in the video but the camera's a bit zoomed in and shaky and she's right no license plate while being followed by this unknown black truck The occupants of the vehicle appeared to fire gunshots out their window.

Speaker 1 We all heard gunfire. We were mortified.

Speaker 1 I don't know who these individuals are, but from what I've seen, it appears their motive was to intimidate Flo's family.

Speaker 1 Wendy pled for help to one of the local known police officers, the male voice you can hear in the background. We heard gunshots.
Where were the gunshots at?

Speaker 9 We were looking where she might be, and there was a truck that followed us from the port.

Speaker 1 Were they shooting at you?

Speaker 9 No.

Speaker 1 Did you see anybody shooting?

Speaker 9 No, but I've got it recorded what it sounds like gunshot, and I just heard the same thing.

Speaker 1 Are they trying to scare us?

Speaker 1 And that same truck was also scanning up and down the streets of Nome watching kids.

Speaker 1 They watched my nephew's daughter and her sibling.

Speaker 18 Please, let us do our jobs.

Speaker 1 Keep hope.

Speaker 18 But just let us do jobs, please. Because I don't want anybody, I don't want this situation to get any worse.
Nobody wants this situation to get worse.

Speaker 1 Temp 4.

Speaker 1 You can hear the genuine sound of fear in their voices. I wasn't there in person, but I have some pretty clear video of their interactions with known PD.

Speaker 1 I mean, it looks like they weren't being taken seriously. Whoever was in that truck, I definitely have some questions for them.

Speaker 9 We don't feel safe in this town at all.

Speaker 8 I understand your concern.

Speaker 9 They've been following us on every road that we go on.

Speaker 1 They've been following you? We've got a lot of people.

Speaker 9 Yes, they've got with no license plates, and we don't know who they are.

Speaker 11 We've got all kinds of footage.

Speaker 1 Okay, please turn those videos into this department.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 17 Okay. We're scared.

Speaker 9 We're scared everywhere we go because somebody's usually following me.

Speaker 1 I understand that. We do.

Speaker 9 We're recording everything because we don't trust anybody.

Speaker 1 The police department, they neglected her.

Speaker 1 They neglected Flo in every way, shape, and form. And I'm really mad about it.
They judge natives.

Speaker 1 I think that there could be human trafficking, sex trafficking, and somebody's holding a secret

Speaker 1 and they're not telling.

Speaker 1 They're not going to tell anything.

Speaker 1 I think they killed her

Speaker 1 and they got away with it.

Speaker 1 If you know the history of Noam, there have been a lot of people missing.

Speaker 1 We all believe these

Speaker 1 people

Speaker 1 are going to do it again.

Speaker 1 Here in Anchorage, we're still a good 500 miles away from the shores of Nome.

Speaker 1 And before we embarked, I wanted to talk to anyone else I could find here in the city for some more insight on this place. I've learned over the years, the more people I talk to, the better.

Speaker 1 And with a place shrouded in mystery like Nome, Alaska, I want as much information as I can get before I touch down there.

Speaker 1 Through some internet searching, I stumbled upon an older gentleman named Bill Cox, who used to work at the hospital in Nome and now lives here in Anchorage.

Speaker 1 And he agreed to come meet us at our Airbnb before we took off the next morning.

Speaker 1 Nome is a hub. for 15 surrounding villages over an area the size of Ohio.

Speaker 1 People escaping come to Nome because it's so far removed. People running away from stuff.

Speaker 1 These are often bad people,

Speaker 1 people with bad intentions, they can come up into Nome and they can get away with stuff.

Speaker 1 I was the radiologist at the hospital in Nome.

Speaker 1 Florence worked at the hospital.

Speaker 1 She was always showing up to work with bruises and stuff.

Speaker 1 She would always show up with bruises.

Speaker 1 Somebody was abusing her.

Speaker 1 I shared all this with the DEA.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of good people up there, but there's a dark side.

Speaker 1 You get into power up there and you just can get away with so much.

Speaker 1 Because the people that you can control, people that grew up there, they lived there in Nome, their families are there, their job is there, their kids are there, they can't go anywhere.

Speaker 1 They can't speak up against these power structures.

Speaker 1 Too many people are aware of this stuff. If you hear that something's happening,

Speaker 1 somebody's being hurt or taken advantage of or abused or stolen from,

Speaker 1 You don't just look the other way.

Speaker 1 There's three categories that put these people in. There's people that commit a crime.
The next category is people that actively help.

Speaker 1 They didn't actually do the crime, but they actually participate in a cover-up.

Speaker 1 The third category,

Speaker 1 they're aware that this person's covering this up. They're aware that this person did this.
And they don't say anything.

Speaker 1 Eventually you're going to get to the dark click. that's going to be very tight-knit.

Speaker 1 It's like when you take down a serial killer, they give you information about all the other unsolved cases that they were involved in.

Speaker 1 There's some bad apples out there.

Speaker 1 Sitting here, I'm starting to become distracted by the weight of my own anticipation.

Speaker 1 What exactly is hiding in them?

Speaker 1 Who are these bad guys that seem to move in silence, leaving behind a trail of questions and grief?

Speaker 1 Or is this all just a web of rumors, spun by the fact that Florence Akpialik just disappeared without a trace.

Speaker 1 This is the puzzle I'm determined to piece together.

Speaker 1 People just don't want to speak.

Speaker 1 They're just afraid. But if everybody shares a little bit, you can solve crimes and put the bad guys behind bars.

Speaker 1 And I realize as a stranger to this town, gaining the trust of Nome's community is crucial. To get anywhere close to the truth, I'm going to need to approach this with patience.

Speaker 1 And if the time ever comes, I can't be too afraid to approach anyone I feel is suspicious. I'm going to need to gain their trust too.

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Speaker 1 On August 8th, 2016, I released the very first episode of Up and Vanished.

Speaker 1 A lot's changed since then. Back then, I was knowingly naive and inexperienced.
Clueless, but eager. And diving headfirst into the deep end of a cold case.

Speaker 1 I even expressed this in the very first episode. In that moment, not fully grasping the whirlwind of a journey I was about to embark on.
Then I got sucked in.

Speaker 1 Everything became tunnel vision, and I became consumed by an unsolved case. Deep down, I knew that I was building something special.
I could feel it in my core.

Speaker 1 But I didn't know that I was also constructing a labyrinth that I'd eventually find find myself lost in. The mental toll was real.

Speaker 1 And it's quite easy to begin questioning everything.

Speaker 1 Am I a journalist? Am I suited for this? Can I even handle it? Or does that even matter anymore in the grand scheme of things?

Speaker 1 When you're neck deep in an active cold case, sometimes your impulses can start to feel unbalanced. It's so easy to fall off course.

Speaker 1 And the next thing you know, you're simply fighting for your own composure again.

Speaker 1 If I wanted to continue down the path of independently investigating unsolved cases and producing podcast seasons about it, this is what comes with the territory.

Speaker 1 And it's made me recognize the true value and importance of the journalists and storytellers out there who are still willing to take a risk and actually investigate these cold cases themselves.

Speaker 1 And so here we are, embarking on a new season of Up and Vanished. And I'm willing to take risks that terrify me.

Speaker 1 All in hopes of solving this case.

Speaker 1 This season of the podcast has been methodically designed to shake the trees, apply pressure, and to expose the individuals responsible for a heinous crime.

Speaker 1 Throughout every season of this show, I'm still continually learning.

Speaker 1 I want you to connect with the story, the sadness, and the hope for resolution. And I want you to be angry about the injustice, motivated to support the cause.

Speaker 1 And if we can both do that, then maybe we can really make a difference.

Speaker 1 I woke up in the morning, packed my suitcase again, made some coffee at the Airbnb, and then we were off to the airport.

Speaker 1 But we had an option to mine this and we never got around to mining this gold design with the snowbase.

Speaker 1 Maybe it was serendipity.

Speaker 1 But during our two-hour flight to Nome, I struck up a conversation with the man next to me. He was an older white man, gray hair, shorter in height, and appeared to be in his mid-70s or so.

Speaker 1 He told me his name was Ray.

Speaker 1 In a friendly, casual conversation, I asked him, what brings you to Nome?

Speaker 1 He said, I'm a gold miner. I've been mining gold here for over 25 years.

Speaker 1 I don't know what the reaction was on my face, but whatever it was, I tried my best to hide it while my mind began racing in all different directions. And I felt compelled to push a little further.

Speaker 1 I told Ray I was working on a documentary about the disappearance of Florence Akpialik and asked if he would be a part of it. To my surprise, he said yes instantly.

Speaker 1 And before I knew it, we had touched down in Nome and he was on his way to our Airbnb for an interview. When someone says yes, it's best to seize the moment.

Speaker 1 At this point, it seemed like a whole lot was happening at once. I mean, we just got here.
Florence was last seen outside of a tent on West Beach, where the gold miners like to camp.

Speaker 1 And we just met this man like an hour ago, who's been a gold miner here for over two decades.

Speaker 1 Before I let my own panic set in, I just need to chill.

Speaker 1 This is when I got to step back, shut up, and just listen.

Speaker 8 As you come to Nome, you're not going to go very far.

Speaker 8 You can go about 90 miles that way, and 90 miles that way, and about 75 that way, and that's it.

Speaker 8 There's a lot of people that come up

Speaker 1 to hide,

Speaker 8 because you can disappear up here. if you wanted to.

Speaker 1 But I've been in Nome now for 25 years.

Speaker 8 There's a lot of people that show up here.

Speaker 8 All of them are chasing the yellow garden.

Speaker 8 I mean, you can go out here in this driveway here and dig a bunch of dirt up and you'll find gold in it. I'd be very surprised if you did a speck or two.
But it's gold everywhere.

Speaker 8 There's a lot of different people that come here. But most of the community, you know, we're close-knack.

Speaker 8 I mean, if you live here year-round, you know, they know who you are.

Speaker 8 Back in the day, everybody was camped out on that beach up there.

Speaker 8 Living in tents and squallowing,

Speaker 1 gold mining the beach.

Speaker 8 It got to be a problem with the city because fire hazards and stuff like that. So they came to us, just get everybody off that beach.

Speaker 8 All these miners who came to know watching the TV,

Speaker 8 they think, God, you know, they're coming from nowhere. Hey, maybe we're going to sell the house and that, that, that, and we'll go out there and we'll just mine.

Speaker 8 Well, they don't realize, you know, you can't just go here.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of rules and regulations.

Speaker 1 West Beach, there was a lot of people out there looking for her.

Speaker 8 All the way to the rivers and all the way up through that country.

Speaker 8 They haven't found a body, they haven't found anything. The evidence is gone.

Speaker 1 You sure about that?

Speaker 1 So what does that tell you?

Speaker 8 She's not there.

Speaker 1 As I'm sitting here talking to Ray, I'm slowly remembering how much of a stranger we are to each other. He barely knows anything about me.
So why did he even agree to come here?

Speaker 1 I mean, I appreciate his willingness, and I'm grateful for all of his input, because damn, we do need it.

Speaker 1 But why was he so willing to talk about this today?

Speaker 1 Now I'm getting in my own head again. I'm just going to keep listening.

Speaker 8 I don't know the parameters of who she was with or what, you know.

Speaker 8 But I do know that she was supposedly last seen with this guy.

Speaker 8 They found her things in his tent.

Speaker 1 Did you ever come in contact with the person?

Speaker 8 Not that I recall. I'm not saying I didn't see him or something, you know.

Speaker 8 I just heard she was with this guy. I don't know who the guy was on the beach or something.
I just heard.

Speaker 1 Do you know who that guy may have been?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 8 I don't know the guy's name. I don't even...

Speaker 1 I'm just an old man.

Speaker 8 Yes. And I think logically.
I'm a logical thinker.

Speaker 1 She could have wanted in the wrong tent.

Speaker 8 Some people don't like that.

Speaker 8 I mean, you're not going to drive down the damn beach and just see somebody walking along and jump out and kill them.

Speaker 8 That don't make any sense either. You must have had some interaction with her.

Speaker 8 And the people people on that beach is the ones that had interaction with her.

Speaker 8 Where the guy went, I don't know.

Speaker 1 But he's not here. No.
He's not known.

Speaker 1 He left?

Speaker 8 Well, yeah, he's not here at Noan, so he obviously left.

Speaker 8 I don't know where he went, but I do know that

Speaker 8 if I was an investigator,

Speaker 8 I'd be on his ass like stink on shit.

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.

Speaker 2 Additional production by Victoria McKenzie, Alice Kanik Glenn, and Eric Quintana. Artwork by Rob Sheridan.
Original music by Makeup and Vanity Set.

Speaker 2 Mixed and Mastered by Cooper Skinner. Thank you to Oren Rosenbaum and the team at UTA, Vec 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.

Speaker 2 Thanks for listening.

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Speaker 1 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 1 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 1 Listen to Chameleon wherever you get your podcasts.