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Lost Women of Alaska: The Rising Crisis of Missing Indigenous Women · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: I want you to just close your eyes for a second, seriously,
• 0:02
  just for a brief moment. I want you to picture Alaska.
• 0:05
  What actually comes to mind.
• 0:07
  Speaker 2: Well, that's an easy one. I think for most people.
• 0:09
  It's the postcards. You're seeing these massive glaciers calving into
• 0:13
  the ocean, or you know, maybe the Northern Lights dancing
• 0:16
  over a little lug cabin.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: The cruise ship commercials.
• 0:18
  Speaker 2: Exactly, or a moose just walking through pristine, waist deep snow.
• 0:24
  It is the Last Frontier. It's the place you go
• 0:28
  to escape the noise, to find absolute freedom, to find
• 0:31
  yourself out in the wild.
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that is the Alaska that they sell on the
• 0:34
  cruise ships. Yeah, that's the Alaska of the glossy travel brochures.
• 0:37
  But there's a second Alaska. Yeah, a shadow version of
• 0:41
  that exact same place. And in this Alaska, that vast
• 0:45
  isolation isn't peaceful at all. It is a weapon, it
• 0:48
  really is. The silence isn't tranquil. It is a cover.
• 0:53
  And if you are a woman, specifically an Indigenous woman
• 0:56
  that romanticized Last Frontier can well it can very quickly
• 1:01
  become a cage.
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: It is a terrifying dichotomy. You have the breath taking
• 1:05
  beauty on one side and this brutal, almost completely hidden
• 1:09
  reality right.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: There on the other, hidden in plain sight.
• 1:11
  Speaker 2: Right. And the reason we're talking about this today, specifically
• 1:14
  today February twenty five, twenty twenty six, is because that
• 1:18
  shadow version of Alaska is finally getting the absolute spotlight
• 1:22
  it deserves.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: Goodness.
• 1:24
  Speaker 2: Tonight marks the premiere of Lost Women of Alaska on
• 1:27
  Investigation Discovery, and it actually hits HBO Max tomorrow.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: And this is a major release. I mean, it's a
• 1:33
  three part docu series executive produced by Octavia Spencer. But
• 1:37
  here is the thing for you listening right now. We
• 1:39
  aren't here just to review a TV show, No, not
• 1:42
  at all. We aren't here to tell you whether the
• 1:43
  cinematography is good or if the pacing works for a
• 1:46
  true crime binge. We are doing this deep dive because
• 1:49
  the data underneath this show, the actual reality that this
• 1:53
  series uses as its foundation, It reveals something that honestly,
• 1:57
  it keeped.
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: Me up last night, it should keep all of us up.
• 2:00
  It's an incredibly heavy topic.
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: You dug deep into the crime stats for this deep dive,
• 2:04
  and I want to start right there. Just hit me
• 2:07
  with the one number that sums this up, the one
• 2:09
  stat that anchors this entire conversation.
• 2:11
  Speaker 2: It is the consistency that scares me more than anything else. Okay,
• 2:14
  it's a number that should just stop everyone in their tracks.
• 2:18
  For seven consecutive years, leading right up through the twenty
• 2:21
  twenty data, Alaska has held the top spot in the
• 2:24
  United States for women murdered by.
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: Men seven years in a row.
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: Seven years. That is not a fluke. Yeah, that's not
• 2:31
  a statistical anomaly or just the bad year. That is
• 2:34
  a deeply ingrained pattern. That is a permanent state of emergency.
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 2:38
  Speaker 2: The rate is three point four to three per one
• 2:40
  hundred thousand people, which, to put that in perspective, is
• 2:44
  more than double the national.
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: Average, double the national average. So if you are a
• 2:48
  woman living in Alaska, statistically, you are walking through a
• 2:52
  landscape that is twice as dangerous as anywhere else in
• 2:55
  the entire country when it comes to lethal violence from
• 2:58
  men exactly.
• 3:00
  Speaker 2: And when you peel back that number, when you really
• 3:01
  look at who is dying, the disparity gets even more.
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: Horrifying because it's not evenly distributed.
• 3:07
  Speaker 2: Not even close. We aren't just seeing violence against women broadly.
• 3:11
  We are seeing a specific, haunting epidemic that is directly
• 3:15
  targeting Indigenous women.
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: So our mission today with this Deep Dive is to
• 3:20
  unpack this. We aren't just going to recap the documentary
• 3:23
  point by point. We're going to use the source material
• 3:26
  surrounding this series to really examine this epidemic. Yeah, because
• 3:30
  we need to talk about a specific uptick in these
• 3:32
  crimes that has been recorded right up to this year,
• 3:35
  to twenty twenty six.
• 3:37
  Speaker 2: We absolutely have to and to do that properly, we're
• 3:40
  going to structure this Deep Dive in a way that
• 3:42
  connects the micro to the macro.
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: Right the small scale to the huge systemic issues.
• 3:48
  Speaker 2: Because you really can't understand the statistics without understanding the
• 3:51
  human stories. We're going to look at the terrifying case
• 3:54
  of a serial killer in Anchorage, a man who literally
• 3:58
  treated the city as his personal hunting.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: Shutter inducing phrase right there, truly, and we will.
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: Look at the victims who, you know, they are so
• 4:05
  often reduced to just headlines or case numbers on a police.
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: Blotter, which is exactly what this show is fighting against exactly.
• 4:11
  Speaker 2: We'll also talk about the unlikely hero who actually stopped.
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: Him, and then we have to zoom out, because this
• 4:18
  is the part that I think is going to surprise
• 4:19
  a lot of people who are just tuning in for
• 4:21
  a true crime story. We have to look at why
• 4:24
  this is happening.
• 4:25
  Speaker 2: The root causes, yes, the.
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: Legal black holes, the geography, the history. Why does the
• 4:31
  law in Alaska seem to just stop working the absolute
• 4:34
  second you step off the pavement.
• 4:36
  Speaker 2: It's complex, but it's crucial to wrap our heads around.
• 4:39
  As Octavie Spencer put it in the press, for this show,
• 4:42
  the goal isn't just true crime entertainment. The goal is
• 4:45
  to amplify underrepresented voices.
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: So let's get into it. Let's start with a real
• 4:49
  catalyst for this entire conversation today, the series itself, Lost
• 4:53
  Women of Alaska.
• 4:54
  Speaker 2: It's a three hour event and from the source material
• 4:56
  we've reviewed, it seems like the production is trying to
• 4:58
  walk a very fine, very deliberate line. How so well
• 5:02
  it blends archival footage, intensive interviews with investigators, and very
• 5:07
  intimate storytelling with the families, right.
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: And that narrative arc is key here. It's designed to
• 5:12
  peel back the layers. You know, often true crime media
• 5:16
  stops right at the who did it?
• 5:18
  Speaker 2: We find the bad guy put him in handcuffs, roll
• 5:21
  the dramatic credit.
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: Exactly, But this series seems totally determined to ask a
• 5:25
  much harder question who allowed it?
• 5:28
  Speaker 2: Yes, that focus on the intersection of race and systemic
• 5:32
  failure is really what drew Octavius Spencer to the project
• 5:36
  in the first place. I mean, she's an Oscar winner,
• 5:38
  obviously a massive powerhouse in Hollywood. Having her name attached
• 5:42
  brings a level of mainstream visibility that, frankly, this issue
• 5:45
  has desperately needed for a very long time.
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: It changes the scope of who is paying attention absolutely, But.
• 5:51
  Speaker 2: To understand the system and how it failed, we do
• 5:53
  have to look at the monster at the center of
• 5:55
  the series, the man who spurred this specific investigation to
• 5:58
  begin with, Brian Stephen Smith.
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: Ryan Stephen Smith. He is a South African immigrant, and
• 6:04
  the way the sources describe his presence and anchorage, it's
• 6:07
  just chilling. He didn't just live there, he operated there.
• 6:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: The source Materia uses the phrase personal hunting ground.
• 6:13
  Speaker 2: That phrase always makes my skin crawl. Hunting ground. It
• 6:17
  implies he felt he had absolute total ownership over these
• 6:20
  women's lives, like they were just pray waiting for him,
• 6:23
  He did think that, and the evidence entirely backs that up.
• 6:27
  This wasn't some crime of passion and the heat of
• 6:29
  the moment, This wasn't a bar fight gone horribly wrong.
• 6:33
  He filmed his murders, He documented them, He carefully documented them.
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: There is a specific quote from one of those videos
• 6:39
  that is mentioned heavily in the show, and I think
• 6:42
  we have to say it here, as hard as it is,
• 6:44
  because it really encapsulates his mindset. He was captured on
• 6:48
  his own video saying, everybody dies in my movies.
• 6:50
  Speaker 2: Everybody dies in my movies. It is absolute, unfiltered narcissism
• 6:54
  and sadism combined. He viewed himself as the director of
• 6:57
  these women's.
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: Deaths, just playing god with a camera exactly.
• 7:01
  Speaker 2: He was eventually sentenced to two hundred and twenty six
• 7:03
  years in prison in twenty twenty four. He confessed to
• 7:07
  at least three murders, but the investigation suggests he is
• 7:09
  suspected in up to a dozen.
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: Up to a dozen that is a terrifying thought that
• 7:14
  we only know for sure about three. That leaves nine
• 7:16
  families potentially out there without any.
• 7:18
  Speaker 2: Answers, wandering in the dark.
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but I want to pivot immediately because one of
• 7:23
  the core values of this deep dive today and of
• 7:26
  the docu series itself, is that we do not let
• 7:29
  the killer be the main character.
• 7:31
  Speaker 2: He doesn't deserve that airtime.
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: No, he doesn't. We need to focus on the women absolutely.
• 7:36
  Speaker 2: The series downright refuses to sensationalize the violence without humanizing
• 7:41
  the victims. First and foremost, these weren't just bodies found
• 7:44
  in the snow. They weren't just statistics on a depressing
• 7:47
  police report. They were mothers, sisters, daughters.
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: They were real people.
• 7:52
  Speaker 2: They had lives, they had inside jokes, they had favorite foods.
• 7:55
  They mattered.
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: So let's talk about Veronica Buchak. What do we actually
• 7:59
  know about her life?
• 8:00
  Speaker 2: Veronica, she was fifty two years old. She was in
• 8:03
  a nupiac woman from Saint Michael, which is a very small,
• 8:06
  remote village in Alaska. But the most important thing to
• 8:10
  know about her, above everything else, is that she was
• 8:12
  a mother. She had seven children.
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: Seven kids. That is a big family. That's a lot
• 8:18
  of love and a lot of connection back to her community.
• 8:20
  Speaker 2: It really is. The source mentioned she was struggling with
• 8:23
  homelessness and anchorage at the time she vanished and That
• 8:25
  is a key vulnerability. We will absolutely discuss later the
• 8:29
  dangers of this urban migration. She vanished in July twenty eighteen.
• 8:33
  She was last seen hitchhiking. Her family was actively looking
• 8:37
  for her. They were worried, sick. But her skull wasn't
• 8:40
  found until April twenty nineteen.
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: Almost an entire year later. And where was she found?
• 8:46
  Speaker 2: That's the tragic part. It wasn't found by a massive
• 8:49
  police dragnet. It wasn't found by a sophisticated search and
• 8:52
  rescue party with dogs. Her skull was found by teenagers
• 8:55
  out walking on a trail.
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: God, imagine being those teenagers I know, and imagine being
• 8:59
  her family right waiting all that time, holding out some
• 9:02
  sliver of hope, only to have that be the conclusion.
• 9:06
  The source mentions her daughter, recalling her resilience even despite poverty,
• 9:10
  despite the intense struggle of homelessness. She was a resilient,
• 9:13
  strong woman. She was out there trying to survive.
• 9:16
  Speaker 2: And yet in Smith's videos, and I hesitate to be
• 9:19
  graphic here, but this is the brutal reality of the case.
• 9:23
  He is seen stomping on her neck. He treated her
• 9:26
  like she was literally nothing, like she was disposable. He
• 9:30
  took all of that immense resilience and just tried to
• 9:32
  crush it under his boot.
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: And then there is Kathleen Joe Henry.
• 9:36
  Speaker 2: She was younger, right, Yes, Kathleen was thirty years old.
• 9:39
  She was a yippick woman from cot Lick. The descriptions
• 9:43
  of her and the sources are just heartbreaking because everyone
• 9:46
  talks about her infectious smile. They talk about how much
• 9:49
  she deeply loved her family. She was someone who lit
• 9:52
  up a room when she walked into it.
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: And she was killed a year later, September twenty nineteen.
• 9:57
  Speaker 2: Yes, and the details of her death are arguably even
• 10:00
  more disturbing because of the duration and the specific location.
• 10:04
  She was lured to a Townplace Suites hotel right in Anchorage, a.
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: Hotel like just a regular everyday chain.
• 10:12
  Speaker 2: Hotel, a completely regular hotel. Smith tortured and killed her
• 10:16
  over the course of eight full days.
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: Eight days. Wait, I have to pause there. How does
• 10:20
  that even happen?
• 10:21
  Speaker 2: That's hard to fathom.
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: Seriously, how do you torture someone for eight days in
• 10:25
  a commercial hotel without a maid, hearing something, without a
• 10:29
  guest next door complaining about noise, without management, or literally
• 10:33
  anyone noticing.
• 10:34
  Speaker 2: That is the pivotal question, isn't it? That speaks volumes
• 10:37
  to the indifference of the surroundings. It speaks to exactly
• 10:40
  who we as a society choose to see and who
• 10:43
  we choose to completely ignore.
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 10:45
  Speaker 2: If she had been a wealthy tourist or someone from
• 10:48
  an affluent neighborhood, maybe someone would have paid attention to
• 10:51
  a strange noise or a missing person. But she was
• 10:53
  an Indigenous woman, She was vulnerable, and she was functionally
• 10:57
  invisible to the people going about their days around her.
• 11:00
  Our body was eventually just dumped on a highway pull out,
• 11:02
  wrapped casually in a blanket.
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: It's just sickening. It makes you lose faith in bystanders.
• 11:07
  Speaker 2: And the police found a memory card. It had thirty
• 11:09
  nine images and twelve videos of exactly what he did
• 11:12
  to her. He documented the entire eight days.
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: But when we look at Veronica and Kathleen together and
• 11:18
  the other potential victims he targeted, we see a very
• 11:21
  distinct pattern. The source calls it the deadly triad. Can
• 11:25
  you break that concept down for us?
• 11:27
  Speaker 2: The deadly triad refers to three heavily interconnected threats facing
• 11:31
  Native women in these areas homicide, sexual assault, and disappearances.
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: They all feed into each other exactly.
• 11:39
  Speaker 2: These women shared specific overlapping vulnerabilities. They were facing homelessness,
• 11:44
  battling addiction, and dealing with severe marginalization. They were separated
• 11:49
  from their tight knit support networks in their home villages,
• 11:52
  living in a massive city that quite frankly didn't seem
• 11:56
  to look out for them at all.
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: And that brings us to how this all actually came
• 12:00
  to light because for a long time Smith was operating
• 12:03
  with total impunity. He wasn't caught because of a high
• 12:06
  tech police surveillance operation. No, he wasn't caught because of
• 12:09
  a brilliant detective deduction with strings on a corkboard. He
• 12:13
  was caught because of what the sources call an unlikely hero,
• 12:17
  Valerie Castler. We have to talk about how this entire
• 12:20
  house of cards finally fell down, because with all that
• 12:23
  systemic failure we just touched on, you'd think Brian Steven
• 12:27
  Smith would literally never be caught, and.
• 12:29
  Speaker 2: He wouldn't have been, not by the justice system anyway.
• 12:32
  He was ultimately caught by a glitch in his own matrix,
• 12:36
  by his own arrogance.
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: Tell us about Valerie. Let's get into her story.
• 12:40
  Speaker 2: Valerie Castler was a sex worker, and the source material
• 12:44
  is very clear about the sequence of events here. She
• 12:47
  stole Brian Stephen Smith's phone.
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: She just sotole his phone, probably thinking hey, I can
• 12:53
  pawn this, or maybe she felt she was owed money
• 12:55
  for something.
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: Exactly, it was a petty crime. It was a complete
• 12:58
  crime of opportunity. She grabs the phone from a center console,
• 13:01
  maybe thinking she can get a hot meal or some
• 13:04
  quick cash out of it. She gets out of his
• 13:05
  truck and he drives off.
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: But then she actually opens the digital contents.
• 13:10
  Speaker 2: Right, she finds the SD card inside. And I want
• 13:13
  you to really put yourself in her shoes for a second.
• 13:16
  You are highly marginalized. You probably have a deep, ingrained
• 13:20
  distrust of the police because of your line of work,
• 13:23
  because you're constantly criminalized yourself, and you are suddenly holding
• 13:27
  in your hand high definition proof of torture and murder.
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: That is a completely terrifying moment, because if you go
• 13:34
  to the police, you are immediately implicating yourself. You have
• 13:36
  to walk into a precinct and say, hey, officers, I
• 13:38
  stole this phone.
• 13:39
  Speaker 2: Exactly. You have to confess to a crime. The absolute
• 13:42
  easiest thing for her to do, the safest thing for
• 13:44
  her to do for her own freedom, would be to
• 13:46
  smash that little car into pieces and throw it in
• 13:49
  a dumpster. Just walk away, survive, keep your head down,
• 13:53
  and stay out of it. But she didn't do that, No,
• 13:56
  she didn't. She walked right into the station. She intentionally
• 13:59
  labeled her self a thief just to catch a monster.
• 14:02
  The Source calls her an unlikely hero, and I think
• 14:05
  that is the most perfect description possible. Without her theft
• 14:08
  and her profound bravery to act, Smith might still be
• 14:11
  out there hunting today.
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: He almost certainly would be, because he had been operating
• 14:15
  for years, and the police response, as highlighted very heavily
• 14:19
  in the docu series, had quote unquote lagged.
• 14:22
  Speaker 2: It absolutely lagged. Despite constant frantic warnings from the community
• 14:26
  about missing Native women, the initial investigations were painfully slow.
• 14:31
  Why is that There is a pervasive sense that these
• 14:33
  women were categorized as high risk lifestyles and therefore their
• 14:37
  disappearances were treated as almost inevitable rather than urgent crimes
• 14:41
  to be aggressively solved.
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: There is a quote from an investigator in the source
• 14:45
  that really struck me, they said, when a case stays
• 14:48
  with you, it never really ends. It sounds like the
• 14:51
  individual detectives on the ground carried the weight they felt
• 14:54
  the tragedy, but the system itself was just entirely sluggish.
• 14:58
  Speaker 2: That is a crucial distinct to make. Individual officers often
• 15:02
  care very deeply. You can see the emotional toll it
• 15:05
  takes on them in the interviews. But if the department
• 15:07
  itself is underfunded, or if the standard protocols prioritize completely
• 15:11
  different types of crime, or if there is institutional bias
• 15:14
  at play, the end result is exactly the same. The
• 15:17
  predator keeps hunting, and a.
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: Kavius spencer is actually trying to change how the general
• 15:21
  public sees this too. Right with the detect the SOS
• 15:25
  initiative mentioned in the materials.
• 15:27
  Speaker 2: Right it is a campaign about urging viewers to actively
• 15:32
  recognize signs of vulnerability in their own communities, to not
• 15:36
  just look away when they see someone who might be
• 15:37
  in serious trouble. Because clearly, relying solely on the system
• 15:41
  hasn't been remotely enough to save these women.
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: So we have the show the terrifying killer, the deeply
• 15:46
  mourned victims, and the hero who's stepped up. But now
• 15:49
  I want to pivot and get into the numbers because
• 15:52
  the source material keeps mentioning this specific uptick. We are
• 15:55
  sitting here in twenty twenty six now and looking back
• 15:59
  at the data from twenty five twenty up to the
• 16:00
  present day. The picture is well, the source calls it
• 16:04
  a grim picture.
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: It is intensely grim. We mentioned earlier that Alaska Native
• 16:08
  women are disproportionately affected. Let's actually break that down so
• 16:11
  people understand the scale. Native women make up about nineteen
• 16:13
  percent of the population in Alaska.
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: Okay, so roughly one in five people.
• 16:17
  Speaker 2: That they represent forty seven percent of all reported rate victims.
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: That is almost half, so nineteen percent of the population,
• 16:23
  but nearly fifty percent of the sexual assault victims exactly.
• 16:26
  Speaker 2: The math is horrifying, and in domestic violence cases they
• 16:30
  are overrepresented by two hundred and fifty percent. The lifetime
• 16:34
  victimization rate, meaning a percentage of these women who have
• 16:37
  experienced severe violence in their lifetime, is over eighty four percent.
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: Eighty four percent, that is practically everyone it is. Compare
• 16:45
  that to the national average for context.
• 16:47
  Speaker 2: Nationally, for all women across the US, it is around
• 16:50
  thirty five percent, which, let's be clear, is still way
• 16:53
  too high, of course, but eighty four percent is an
• 16:55
  absolute epidemic. It is a pervasive, everyday reality of life.
• 17:00
  And when we look at homicide rates, specifically, going off
• 17:02
  the twenty twenty data, Alaska Native women were killed by
• 17:06
  men at a rate ten times higher than white women.
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: Ten times higher. That isn't the statistical margin of error.
• 17:10
  That is a massive chasm.
• 17:12
  Speaker 2: And the recent data shows this isn't getting better fast enough.
• 17:15
  The source mentions a surge or an uptick over the
• 17:17
  last few years. In twenty twenty three alone, Alaska reported
• 17:20
  one hundred and fifty five m MIP incidents. MAMIP stands
• 17:24
  for missing and murdered Indigenous persons.
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: Break that one fifty five number down for me.
• 17:27
  Speaker 2: That was one hundred and forty three missing persons and
• 17:29
  twelve murdered in a single calendar year.
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: And what about the twenty twenty four data.
• 17:34
  Speaker 2: In twenty twenty four, the Department of Public Safety data
• 17:37
  showed that women and girls accounted for a staggering sixty
• 17:40
  nine percent of all Alaska Native murder victims.
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: But here is where it gets really interesting and honestly
• 17:47
  very disturbing. Regarding how we handle data. There is something
• 17:51
  in these numbers that I really need you to clarify
• 17:53
  for everyone. We see these alarming headlines about a surge
• 17:56
  or an uptake in MP cases. Is the violence actually
• 17:59
  suddenly increasing or is something else entirely going on behind
• 18:02
  the scenes.
• 18:03
  Speaker 2: It's a bit of both, but something else is the
• 18:05
  real story here. You have to look at the massive
• 18:07
  discrepancy in the actual data logging. The source heavily mentions
• 18:11
  a study from an organization called Data for Indigenous Justice
• 18:15
  or DIJ right.
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: I have that note here.
• 18:17
  Speaker 2: Okay, So in twenty twenty one, if you looked at
• 18:19
  certain earlier official state or federal reports regarding missing Indigenous
• 18:23
  women in Alaska, do you know how many cases were
• 18:25
  officially flagged?
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: I'm guessing it was incredibly low based on how you're
• 18:29
  setting this up. Nine Wait, nine a single digit, just
• 18:32
  nine missing or murdered women in the whole state.
• 18:35
  Speaker 2: Nine That was the official narrative. Then DIJ does their
• 18:39
  own rigorous study. They actually go into the remote communities,
• 18:42
  They sit down and speak to families, They cross reference
• 18:45
  tribal archives. They documented over one thousand MMMIWG two S cases. Wow,
• 18:53
  that's missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and two spirit individuals.
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: How do you go from nine to over one thousand.
• 19:02
  That's not a rounding error, that's not a typo, that's
• 19:04
  a completely different reality being suppressed.
• 19:06
  Speaker 2: You go from nine to one thousand by actually caring
• 19:09
  enough to look, by listening to families instead of shutting
• 19:12
  the door on them, by not actively dismissing reports at
• 19:14
  the front desk. You don't just lose nine hundred and
• 19:17
  ninety one cases. You systematically ignore them.
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: You bury them in paperwork.
• 19:21
  Speaker 2: You categorize a clear murder as an accidental exposure to
• 19:24
  the cold, which happens all the time up there. You
• 19:26
  label a missing sixteen year old as a habitual runaway
• 19:29
  so you literally don't have to launch an investigation. You
• 19:32
  dismiss a frantic mother because sadly, the ingrained bias says, oh,
• 19:36
  she's just from the village, she's probably drinking. Her daughter
• 19:38
  will turn up.
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: So when we see this huge uptick to one hundred
• 19:41
  and fifty five incidents in twenty twenty three, or these
• 19:45
  incredibly high numbers being reported in twenty twenty six, we
• 19:48
  aren't necessarily seeing a sudden, brand new wave of violence.
• 19:51
  We are just seeing the fog finally lifting.
• 19:54
  Speaker 2: We're finally counting the bodies that were always there. That
• 19:57
  jump in numbers shows that the uptick might partly be
• 20:00
  an uptick in actual violence, but it is definitely undeniably
• 20:04
  an uptick in awareness and honest reporting. We are finally
• 20:07
  seeing the true horrific scale of the crisis because people
• 20:10
  are finally counting correctly.
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: So the crisis was always this huge, we just weren't
• 20:14
  looking at it through the right lens, or we.
• 20:16
  Speaker 2: Refuse to look precisely. And that brings us to the
• 20:19
  core of this deep dive, the why why is this
• 20:22
  happening in Alaska? Specifically, why is the rate so astronomically
• 20:25
  higher here than anywhere else? The source breaks this down
• 20:28
  into a few distinct categories, and the very first one
• 20:30
  is simply geography.
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: The two Alaska's concept we talked about at the top
• 20:34
  of the show.
• 20:34
  Speaker 2: Right, Alaska is unfathomably vast. We are talking about hundreds
• 20:40
  of remote villages that are completely off the grid. They
• 20:43
  are not connected by roads. You can't just hop in
• 20:45
  a car and drive there. You have to take a
• 20:47
  tiny bush plane or a boat.
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: So let's play this scenario out for the listener. If
• 20:51
  a violent crime happens in one of these remote villages.
• 20:54
  Speaker 2: If a crime happens, you can't just dial nine to
• 20:57
  one one and expect a squad car with sirens blaring
• 21:00
  to pull up to your house in five minutes. Law
• 21:03
  enforcement response times can literally span days.
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: You're telling me you have to wait days for a.
• 21:08
  Speaker 2: Cop days because if the weather is bad, and let's
• 21:11
  be real, this is Alaska. The weather is constantly terrible.
• 21:14
  The state troopers literally cannot fly in safely. They are
• 21:18
  grounded in Anchorage or Fairbanks.
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: So you are stuck in a tiny, isolated community with
• 21:23
  the perpetrator of the crime, potentially for days, just sitting
• 21:27
  there waiting for help.
• 21:28
  Speaker 2: And by the time that help finally touches down on
• 21:30
  the airstrip, the crime scene is completely compromised. Vital evidence
• 21:35
  is washed away by rain or buried under a fresh
• 21:37
  foot of snow. The act of vanishing becomes incredibly easy.
• 21:41
  The physical landscape itself actively aids the predator.
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: That is legitimately terrifying, just the claustrophobia of that isolation.
• 21:49
  But it's not just the weather causing this, it's the
• 21:52
  actual law. I keep seeing this specific phrase pop up
• 21:55
  in the research jurisdictional chaos. Yes, it sounds like a
• 21:59
  bad action movie title, but in practice it seems to
• 22:02
  be the main reason these crimes go completely unsolved. What
• 22:04
  is actually happening legally up there?
• 22:06
  Speaker 2: Now? This is the legal tangled web, and it all
• 22:09
  centers on something called Public Law to eighty. It's a
• 22:11
  very boring bureaucratic name for a law that essentially broke
• 22:15
  the entire justice system in Alaska.
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: Broke it? How walk us through it?
• 22:19
  Speaker 2: So in most of the US, what Alaskans call the
• 22:22
  Lower forty eight tribal lands have a direct, established relationship
• 22:26
  with the federal government. If a major felony crime happens
• 22:29
  on a reservation in Arizona or South Dakota, the Feds
• 22:32
  or the tribal police handle it. They have the federal funding,
• 22:35
  they have the clear jurisdiction and authority.
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: Okay, that seems straightforward enough.
• 22:39
  Speaker 2: But in Alaska, p L two eighty came along and
• 22:41
  took that federal authority and just handed it directly to
• 22:44
  the state of Alaska. It basically said, here, Alaska, you
• 22:47
  are now entirely responsible for policing the tribes. The Feds
• 22:50
  wash their hands of it on paper.
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: To a lay person, that doesn't sound entirely terrible. The
• 22:55
  state police should handle state crimes within their borders.
• 22:58
  Speaker 2: It wouldn't be terrible if the state actually stepped up
• 23:01
  and did it. But remember, Alaska is massively huge. You
• 23:04
  have two hundred and twenty nine distinct federally recognized tribes
• 23:07
  spread over these insane distances we just talked about, the
• 23:11
  State of Alaska looked at the map, looked at their
• 23:13
  operating budget, and basically said, yeah, we can't afford to
• 23:15
  send highly trained troopers out there to all these places.
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: So the FED stepped out entirely because of the law,
• 23:22
  and the state stepped out practically because of the budget constraints.
• 23:25
  Who is left to protect.
• 23:27
  Speaker 2: These women Nobody? That is the chaos. You have dozens
• 23:30
  of villages where there is literally no dedicated law enforcement
• 23:34
  presence at all. If you dial nine one one in
• 23:37
  some of these places, the dispatcher answering the phone is
• 23:40
  hundreds of miles away in a city, and the answer
• 23:42
  you get is, well, we'll try to get a trooper
• 23:44
  on a plane there in two or three days if
• 23:46
  the weather holds.
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: Imagine being a victim of severe domestic violence. We're seeing
• 23:51
  a known predator stalking around your village and knowing the
• 23:54
  absolute closest police officer is a three day plane right away.
• 23:59
  Speaker 2: That is exactly the vacuum where lawlessness thrives. The Indian
• 24:03
  Law and Order Commission report, which was published way back
• 24:05
  in twenty thirteen, explicitly noted that underfunded policing was a
• 24:09
  major driving cause of this highly disproportionate violence. It creates
• 24:14
  a complete vacuum where predators know the clock is always
• 24:16
  on their side.
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: And then, of course, taking another step back, we have
• 24:20
  to talk about history. You simply cannot separate this modern
• 24:23
  crisis from the history of colonialism in the region.
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: No, you absolutely can't. The source material explicitly connects the
• 24:30
  violence we see today directly to the legacy of colonialism.
• 24:34
  We are talking about decades of force assimilation. We are
• 24:37
  talking about massive land dispossession. We are talking about the
• 24:41
  horrific era of boarding schools where language and culture were
• 24:45
  violently erased.
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: And that kind of deep communal trauma doesn't just disappear
• 24:51
  when a law changes.
• 24:53
  Speaker 2: It doesn't. It morphs, It becomes intergenerational trauma. It manifests
• 24:56
  today as crippling poverty, it manifests as severe addiction issues,
• 25:01
  and then crucially, you have the modern phenomenon of urban migration.
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: This is exactly what happened to Veronica and Kathleen, right,
• 25:08
  the woman we talked about earlier.
• 25:09
  Speaker 2: Yes, people leave these remote villages. Maybe they're looking for
• 25:12
  better work, maybe they're escaping local abuse, maybe they just
• 25:15
  want a different life in the city, and they migrate
• 25:18
  to a massive hub like Anchorage. But the moment they arrive,
• 25:21
  they are totally separated from their community safety nets. They
• 25:24
  don't have affordable housing lined up, they don't have familial
• 25:27
  support nearby, and that is exactly where they encounter seasoned
• 25:31
  predators like Brian Stephen Smith.
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: He targeted them because he knew they were highly vulnerable.
• 25:36
  He knew they were in the eyes of mainstream society,
• 25:40
  totally invisible.
• 25:41
  Speaker 2: And that leads directly to the final root cause. The
• 25:43
  sources outline deep seated racism and systemic indifference the quote
• 25:48
  unquote invisible crisis. Reports of assaults against Indigenous women are
• 25:52
  constantly dismissed. The source heavily mentions police regularly brushing things
• 25:56
  off as just drunken incidents, if.
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: They even show up to take the report, and there
• 26:01
  is such a deep distrust in authorities because of that.
• 26:04
  If you honestly believe the police won't lift a finger
• 26:07
  to help you, or worse that they will somehow blame
• 26:09
  you for your own assault, you just don't report the crime.
• 26:12
  Speaker 2: Which leads right back to underreporting, which leads to bad
• 26:15
  flawed data, which leads to a lack of state and
• 26:18
  federal funding. It is an incredibly vicious, self sustaining cycle.
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: Okay, we have painted a very heavy, very dark picture
• 26:24
  here today, but the core of this deep dive is
• 26:27
  also about looking forward. What is actively being done right now?
• 26:31
  Because the source does clearly mention some paths.
• 26:34
  Speaker 2: Forward, There is movement. It is undeniably slow, but it
• 26:37
  is there. In terms of big legislation, there was a
• 26:40
  major Alaska state law finally passed in twenty twenty four.
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: What does that specific law actually do to help?
• 26:47
  Speaker 2: It legally mandates that m mip entries must be actively
• 26:50
  put into national crime databases. Remember that terrifying gap we
• 26:54
  discussed between nine cases and a thousand cases. This law
• 26:58
  specifically tries to close that reporting loophole. It also legally
• 27:02
  requires cultural diversity and sensitivity training for all state officers.
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: So they can actually communicate respectfully and effectively with the
• 27:10
  native communities they are sworn to serve.
• 27:12
  Speaker 2: Exactly. It's about bridging that massive trust gap. And on
• 27:15
  the federal level we have VIAWA, the Violence Against Women Act.
• 27:19
  The recent reauthorizations have expanded tribal jurisdiction somewhat, giving tribes
• 27:23
  more power to prosecute non natives, although again Alaska's highly
• 27:27
  unique legal status under PL two eighty mixed implementing that
• 27:30
  incredibly complicated The.
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: Legal knots are just everywhere. There's also the Not Invisible
• 27:35
  Act Commission mentioned in the documents.
• 27:37
  Speaker 2: Yes, established in twenty twenty. They are a joint commission
• 27:40
  recommending far better coordination between the various agencies. Because right now,
• 27:45
  the FBI, the state troopers, and the tribal police often
• 27:49
  aren't talking to each other effectively at all. The commission
• 27:52
  is trying to force these isolated silos to connect and
• 27:56
  share data.
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: What about the community itself, because usually historically when the
• 28:01
  federal or state system entirely fails, the local community is
• 28:04
  forced to step.
• 28:05
  Speaker 2: Up, and they absolutely have. They are doing incredible work.
• 28:08
  There is MMP Awareness Day, which received a major official
• 28:12
  proclamation in twenty twenty four. There are crucial organizations on
• 28:15
  the ground like the Alaska Native Women's Resource Center. They
• 28:19
  are providing actual tangible toolkits to vulnerable families, teaching them
• 28:23
  exactly what to do if someone goes missing in the
• 28:25
  critical first forty eight hours, how to quickly create an
• 28:28
  effective flyer, who to call in the media, how to
• 28:31
  relentlessly demand attention from the police.
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: And the Tanana Chiefs Conference is mentioned prominently as well.
• 28:36
  Speaker 2: Yes, they are heavily pushing for major systemic legal reforms,
• 28:40
  and we also have to acknowledge the role of the
• 28:42
  media here. The documentary itself, Lost Women of Alaska isn't
• 28:46
  just passive entertainment for true crime fans. The source clearly
• 28:49
  says it transforms true crime into active advocacy.
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: And the actual proceeds from the series are supporting victim's funds.
• 28:57
  Speaker 2: Correct. That is a real tangible impact. It is putting
• 28:59
  out actual financial resources back into the hands of the
• 29:02
  deply affected people who need them the most.
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: But massive challenges remain. We absolutely cannot pretend this is
• 29:09
  magically fixed just because a TV show came out.
• 29:11
  Speaker 2: Huge challenges, funding shortages across the state are chronic. Implementing
• 29:16
  these new laws down to the local precinct level takes
• 29:19
  years of time, and there is still a persistent gap
• 29:22
  in the federal logging of cases. Only a tiny fraction
• 29:25
  of m MIP cases actually make it to the FBI databases.
• 29:29
  We are still actively fighting against the ingrained, invisible nature
• 29:32
  of these crimes every single day.
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: So as we start to wrap up this deep dive today,
• 29:36
  let's just summarize the core message here. We have one
• 29:39
  hundred and fifty five m MIP incidents officially reported in
• 29:42
  twenty twenty three.
• 29:43
  Speaker 2: One hundred and fifty five incident.
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: That is one hundred and fifty five veronicas one hundred
• 29:47
  and fifty five Kathleens. The title of the docu series
• 29:51
  is Lost Women, But after reading all this source material,
• 29:54
  I feel like lost is just too passive of a word.
• 29:58
  Loss sounds like you absent mindedly placed to your car keys.
• 30:01
  Speaker 2: I completely agree. They aren't just lost, they are stolen.
• 30:04
  They are systemically failed. Behind every single one of those
• 30:08
  sterile statistics is a vibrant human life that was violently
• 30:11
  cut short, or a family totally suspended in the absolute
• 30:14
  agony of the unknown.
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: The source material concludes by stating, very simply, silence is
• 30:19
  no longer an option. And I think that is the
• 30:21
  ultimate call to action for us, for the people listening
• 30:23
  to this right now, it is.
• 30:25
  Speaker 2: We need to view this docuseriies not just as something
• 30:27
  to casually binge watch on a Wednesday night with a
• 30:29
  glass of wine. It is a vital witness to an
• 30:31
  ongoing crisis. It is a loud, unapologetic demand for accountability.
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: I want to leave everyone with a final lingering thought.
• 30:38
  Today we talked extensively about Valerie Kasler, the unlikely hero
• 30:42
  of this horrifying story.
• 30:43
  Speaker 2: The woman who stole the phone from the truck.
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: Right if it took a total chance theft, a literal,
• 30:49
  random act of petty crime in a parking lot to
• 30:52
  finally catch a prolific serial killer who had been operating
• 30:56
  completely unchecked for years. If that incredibly slim margin of
• 31:00
  luck is what it took to finally stop Brian Stephen Smith.
• 31:04
  Speaker 2: I know exactly where you're going with this.
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: How many other predators are currently hiding right now in
• 31:08
  the jurisdictional chaos of the last Frontier simply because no
• 31:12
  one has stumbled upon their SD card yet?
• 31:14
  Speaker 2: That is the exact question that should keep us all
• 31:16
  awake tonight.
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us for this deep dive, Stay curious,
• 31:19
  stay safe, and whatever you do, don't stay silent.