So much of Alaska’s lure is its ability to humble. This is a place first inhabited by our ancestors more than eleven thousand years ago and hardly more developed when Russia sold it to America in 1867 for two cents an acre. Yet Alaska remains the “Great Land,” as James Michener called it: the closest we have to a time before man, unsullied terrain, nature so titanically overwhelming it’s impossible not to be awed and a little afraid. Adventurers and loners, romantics and desperadoes, eccentrics and slow suicides—the luxuriousness of the place, its seduction and savagery, calls to the wildest among us. Alaska, the land of black moons and midnight suns.
In summer, Alaska, and Anchorage in particular, becomes the brightest place on the planet, a theme park for vacationing families engaged in outdoor activities through twenty-two hours of pure sunlight. But when winter descends and tourists depart, the mask comes off. Anchorage’s true nature, her uncivilized self, is revealed. Darkness and depravity compete with a collective hunger for light and life. Never does this place feel so literally on the edge of the earth, seesawing between the temporal world and some black chasm of unknown phenomena, as the six months it sinks into near-total darkness. The isolation alone means anything goes.
It is a rough place to be a woman.
“Alaska must be viewed as having two characteristics: great beauty but also implacable hostility,” Michener wrote in his 1988 novel Alaska. Her survivors, he wrote, “would always be a somewhat special breed: adventurous, heroic, willing to contest the great winds, the endless nights, the freezing winters.”
This was Samantha: a special breed. She was tough, just like her dad. She had struggles with her mom and with drugs. She could easily have dropped out of high school, dead-ending to a life of low-paying jobs and dreams deferred, but she stuck it out and was now in her senior year at Anchorage West High School. She thought she might work with animals or become a nurse and join the navy. She was a nurturer who looked out for strays and misfits, who would see someone eating alone in the cafeteria or hunched off to the side at a pep rally and casually approach, make some small talk. She was kind.
Samantha had a niece she adored and two dogs she was obsessed with. For all their arguments she really loved Duane, who had moved in with her and James eight months ago. Duane too was saving up for better things, working as a dishwasher at the popular seafood restaurant Suite 100.
He had been due to pick Sam up the night she went missing. When he got there, he told police, she was gone.
* * *
—
Now, on Saturday, APD needed to play catch-up. Yes, to find Samantha, but also to calm the public. The story had gone national.
Lieutenant Dave Parker, out of naïveté or desperation, was far too open with the media. “They left on foot, we know that much,” he said. “But beyond that, her disappearance has become a complete mystery.” This only amplified the community’s worry. Samantha’s disappearance spoke to the specific fear of any parent of a young girl here who was working alone, in the dark, in a heavily populated place.
Samantha could have been anyone’s child.
Indeed, public pressure forced APD to show parts of the surveillance video to the press. Again, all police could say was that the suspect was wearing a dark hoodie, maybe a baseball cap, and was significantly taller than Samantha, who stood just five foot five.
“Anyone could be a suspect at this point,” one detective said.
That included James and Duane.
* * *
—
Detective Doll had interrogated both men separately at the station on Thursday morning, within hours of Samantha’s disappearance. Doll’s original assessment of James was of a straightforward man. In her police report, on the 1–10 HONESTY SCALE, she wrote, “10—brutally honest.”
Yet she was puzzled by what James and Duane told her.
Duane said he drove over to Common Grounds in the pickup truck he and Samantha shared at about 8:30 that night. He had been running a little behind at his own job, maybe by ten minutes.
As Duane pulled up, he said, he noticed the kiosk’s inside lights were off. The whole stand was covered in darkness. He got out of the truck and looked in one of the windows. Samantha wasn’t there.
“Everything was closed,” he told Detective Doll. He noticed napkins strewn on the floor and towels sitting on the countertop, which he found weird. Samantha was a neat freak.
So why didn’t Duane go inside?
“I didn’t want to trigger an alarm and be accused of breaking in,” he said. He figured Samantha got a ride with someone else. Doll asked Duane for proof of his timeline, but as he scrolled through text messages to prove his story, it became clear to Doll that he and Samantha were having significant problems.
No, Duane insisted. It was going well. Yes, things had been rocky, but they were way past that.
Doll didn’t think so. She told him to scroll farther back through his texts, and there it was. Okay, Duane said. Yes, he’d been flirting with other girls. Sam knew about that. She hated it. And since detectives could subpoena his phone, he may as well admit that he’d called Samantha the night she went missing, while she was working, and when she said she couldn’t talk he said, “Whatever,” and hung up. He had to admit that yes, he’d been angry with her.
Doll read the text Duane finally got from Samantha at 11:30 that night.
F.U. asshole. I know what u did I am going to spend a couple of days with friends need time to think plan acting weird let my dad know.
“Acting weird”? Who was acting weird here? Doll went on the offensive.
What had Duane done? How had he been acting weird? Was he cheating on Samantha? Had she confronted him when he came to pick her up? Had he lost his temper with her, gone further than he planned? Did something happen by accident?
No, Duane said. I didn’t do this.
Well, Doll asked, what happened next?
Duane said he went home to James and waited up, hoping Samantha would come home. At around three in the morning, he suddenly felt the need to open the front door and go outside.
Why? Doll asked.
Duane couldn’t explain. But he said he saw a man with a mask, about six feet away, going through his and Samantha’s pickup truck. They each stood there for a moment, staring at each other, and then the man closed the door and walked away.
What did Duane do next?
He went back inside and told James, he said. About an hour later, Duane searched the truck and realized Samantha’s driver’s license, which she always kept tucked in her visor pocket, was missing. Then he went back in the house and went to sleep. It was a pretty sound sleep. Duane didn’t wake up until about 9:30 A.M.
Doll was incredulous. By this point in Duane’s story, Samantha had been missing for seven hours. She had texted him and explained how upset she was. Conveniently, a few hours later a strange masked man shows up at their house. He somehow knows where Samantha lives, which vehicle is hers, finds it among all the others parked on a dark street, knows exactly where her license is and takes it, and neither James nor Duane called the police? Or thought to follow or chase this man down the street as he walked away?
Really?
If Duane and James were so worried, why didn’t they call the cops? Why did they never report Samantha missing?
Duane had a simple answer: He didn’t think police would do anything until Samantha had been missing for twenty-four hours.
Interesting. That was the same thing James Koenig had told Doll in his interview immediately before.
* * *
—
Later that night, Doll sent two officers, armed and unannounced, to James and Duane’s house. Doll had some more questions, but her real motive was to get a sense of how the two would react when caught off guard.
What these officers found only made Doll more suspicious. When James came to the door, the
officers reported, he wouldn’t let them in. Instead, he wedged his way through the doorframe, stood outside, and shut the door firmly behind him. When they asked to speak to Duane, James went back in the same way, and Duane entered and exited the same way too.
These were the actions of a frantic father and boyfriend? You insist your daughter’s been kidnapped but you won’t let the police in your house?
Jeff Bell was tasked with surveilling James Koenig round the clock.
* * *
—
Days went by.
Could James really have done this? Every investigator on this case thought he was an honest man who truly loved his daughter, but still, they wondered. They tried not to tip their hand.
It didn’t matter. James wasn’t stupid. He knew he was a prime suspect. He knew he had to push the department to look elsewhere.
He encouraged Samantha’s friends to talk to the media.
“A beautiful girl who didn’t know she was beautiful,” her one-time coworker Heather Cartwright told the press. Cartwright didn’t seem to realize she was using the past tense. She said she believed Samantha had been taken, because, she said, Samantha “wouldn’t let her dad anguish like this on purpose.”
* * *
—
The next Saturday, February 11, hundreds of people gathered for a candlelight vigil in Town Square Park. Children, police, first responders, and strangers all wore small pictures of Samantha pinned to ribbons in lime green, her favorite color. James was there, cradling his daughter’s six-year-old pit bull Sheeba and wearing Samantha’s picture over his heart.
Back at the FBI field office, Steve Payne was frustrated. Though APD had brought the FBI in three days ago, Samantha’s father had done more than the entire police department. He’d set up a tip line and a volunteer site right next to the coffee kiosk. He’d had a huge placard made up, his daughter’s face nearly five feet high and propped up against the roadside shack, KIDNAPPED printed in huge black letters. He was asking cross-country skiers to search for his daughter along trails. Friends and strangers scrawled messages of hope on the snow in neon green spray paint.
It was impossible to live here and not know who Samantha was by now. Rather than losing interest in a missing girl way up in Alaska, the national media became even more intrigued. Producers from Nancy Grace wanted to interview James. ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and Fox News aired the story. Facebook messages were coming in from as far away as New Zealand.
Payne, meanwhile, was laser focused on facts. He had agents contact all the airlines for evidence Samantha had left the state.
Nothing.
How about boats, cruises, ships? Any record of her on a manifest or as a fast hire?
Nothing.
Payne had agents run the names and photos of more than two dozen friends and acquaintances Sam resembled, in case she’d faked her passport or used one of theirs.
Nothing.
Samantha’s cell phone hadn’t been used since the night she disappeared. It was still turned off. Could she have fled in a car? There were only three main highways out of Anchorage, but none had any real surveillance cameras.
Payne had never seen a case like this: zero physical evidence, nothing to indicate Samantha had been abducted. Yet here was an eighteen-year-old girl, her face all over the news, a city of three hundred thousand people looking for her, with no money—and even if she had stolen from the register, that was maybe two hundred dollars at best—no proof she had even left town. If Samantha wasn’t abducted but also hadn’t run away, what was the answer?
What were they missing?
Bell thought the same. He was now toggling between the FBI and APD, feeding information to Payne while helping Doll. Bell’s role was as much therapeutic as investigative: Payne disliked Doll, who he thought was way too confident for a rookie, and Doll likely resented Payne for bigfooting her first missing persons case. For his part, Bell wasn’t as convinced as Doll that James was involved, but nor was he as convinced as Payne that Samantha had been taken.
In fact, Bell was beginning to suspect that Samantha set the whole thing up.
Again, this level of media attention alone would make it impossible for Samantha to hide out in Anchorage. The search of Duane’s truck turned up nothing. The only logical explanation was that Samantha staged the abduction, and the man in the video was her accomplice.
The Special Assignment Unit was called in. Vice was called in. Police arrested about fifty people, confidential informants mainly, and asked what they’d heard about Samantha Koenig.
A lot, it turned out.
* * *
—
Detectives were told that the Russian Mafia was involved as payback for something James had done. Or the Hells Angels, same reason. Samantha had been dealing, did the cops know that? Someone else heard her brag that she’d been “doing licks,” stealing from suppliers. Others heard she owed drug money and was being held for ransom.
A woman came forward claiming that people close to Samantha knew she was heavily into meth. These same people also alleged that Samantha stole five thousand dollars from James a week before her disappearance. That relationship wasn’t as rosy as James claimed, they said. Samantha had always been desperate for her father’s attention and would do anything to get it.
On February 15, word flew that Samantha’s body had been found.
It wasn’t true, but it was an indicator of how out of control this investigation was. The FBI and APD needed to contain the panic and find Samantha, but Bell knew the truth: This was a small department, only 350 police. They couldn’t pay overtime indefinitely. Two weeks in and everyone was burning out. The longer this dragged on, the less likely they’d ever find her.
And they had James Koenig, his reward fund now up to sixty thousand dollars and his Facebook page generating lead after lead, making investigators look incompetent at best.
THREE
At 7:56 P.M. on February 24, Duane got a jolt: a text from Samantha’s phone number. She was more than three weeks missing.
Conner park sign under pic of albert aint she purty.
Duane and James shared the news with APD and rushed to Connors Bog Park, a popular trailhead for runners. They beat APD by about fifteen minutes.
There, tacked to a bulletin board, under a flyer for a missing dog named Albert, was a ziplock bag containing a rambling ransom note and black-and-white Xeroxed Polaroids of Samantha. In one picture, what looked like silver duct tape covered her mouth and chin. She was wearing eyeliner and looking at the camera, her hair braided. In the surveillance video, Samantha had been wearing her hair down.
In the same photo, Samantha’s head was held by a man, but all that was visible of him was one hand and a muscular arm. In the upper part of the picture was a copy of the Anchorage Daily News date: February 13, 2012.
Proof of life.
The note itself, typed on plain white paper, only added to the mystery. It referenced Duane’s ATM card, gone missing with Samantha.
“I may not use the card much in ak due to small pop,” it read, “but as I will be leaving soon I will be using it all over.” The note implied Samantha was no longer in Alaska and had been moved through an arid state in the Lower 48. “She did almost get away twice. Once on tudor [road] and once in the desert. Must be losing my touch.”
The demand: Thirty thousand dollars, deposited into Duane and Samantha’s account immediately. The note went on to say if this and other demands were met, Samantha would be freed in six months.
* * *
—
This case was now officially a kidnapping, a federal crime. For the first time since Samantha had gone missing, Payne felt something like relief. The case was his now, not APD’s, and he could tell James what sounded like a line from a movie, but no less true.
“We can now bring the full force of the FBI to bear,” Payne s
aid. “We don’t have to justify anything to anyone.”
Payne felt he had a crack team. Among his investigators was Jolene Goeden, who had years of experience working crimes against children, human trafficking, sex crime, and homicide, plus ten years working with rapists and serial killers. Goeden would say she had heard the worst of the worst, yet her spiritual beliefs gave her both strength and sympathy: So many of the offenders she worked with had been abused as children too. Goeden was a master at separating the person from the crime, but never shied away from brutal truths. She was perfect for this investigation.
Then there was Kat Nelson, a young, vibrant investigator who loved facts and numbers. What would bore most anyone electrified her: sifting through digital footprints, cell phone records, credit card receipts, property records and tax returns, organizing reams of data to create a narrative.
Payne, Goeden, and Nelson, along with Doll and Bell, were a small group on the verge of a very big case.
* * *
—
Payne already had traces on cell phones belonging to Samantha, James, and Duane. When the ransom text had been sent from Samantha’s phone to Duane’s, Nelson watched in real time. It had taken three weeks, but now there was connective tissue, however thin, among investigators, Samantha, and whoever else was involved.
Payne made sure every investigator had eyes on the ransom note. He sent the original to FBI headquarters in Quantico for processing: fibers, fingerprints, DNA. Payne wanted to know how the note and the photo were made—what typewriter (if it was in fact a typewriter and not a computer), what kind of ribbon, ink, printer. No detail was too small.
He called in the FBI’s storied Behavioral Analysis Unit, despite Bell’s skepticism. What Bell knew of BAU came from TV and the movies. He pictured clean-cut paper pushers who sat in headquarters, thousands of miles away from a crime scene, with a superior deskside air that somehow resulted in a detailed, bang-on profile of an unknown suspect.
American Predator Page 2
