Murder Under the Midnight Sun

Murder Under the Midnight Sun is an excellent beginning effort in the popular genre of true-crime podcasting. I found the focus on Alaska to be an intriguing specialization, and I’ll definitely be returning for more listening in my free time. Be sure to listen if you have a chance. Following is the transcript of Episode 03, the first part of a missing persons’ series. Thanks, Ariel, for permission to share your content!

Murder Under the Midnight Sun, Episode 03 – Missing in Alaska, Part 1

Ariel: Welcome back to Murder Under the Midnight Sun. This is Ariel, and I would like to thank you so much for joining me for Episode 03. This week I’m recording in an actual closet, instead of my closet-sized house, hoping that the sound will be a little bit better quality. Before I get into this episode, I want to give a couple of announcements and some thank yous. I really want to thank those of you that liked, reviewed, shared, subscribed, etc., and gave me some really good motivation, tips, things like that.

The response has been beyond what I was expecting. It really means a lot to me, because this is definitely a passion project, and it inspires me to keep going and do better. I wanted to give a shout-out to some five-star reviewers. I think I’ll go ahead and read my favorite one each week, not all of them. I do want to announce I’m starting a contest which will go ahead and encompass everyone who’s reviewed already. Those of you that give me a good review between now and the end of May, I’m going to enter you in a drawing, and two winners will receive a couple of schwag gift bags. If you’d like to enter, go ahead, review, and I’ll announce the winners on June 1st.

This week I got some five-star reviews from Ryan.TalkNerdy – thank you, Ryan, so much; Ghetto.5767768 – thank you; Classon.Cassio – awesome review, thank you so much; Erica K. – thank you, girl, love ya; and FantasyBaller9000 – you’re my favorite review of the week. It says, “I’m a big fan of the genre, and I freaking love the title. The podcast has more potential than anything I’ve heard in a while. Can’t wait ‘til the next episode drops.” Thank you so much. That means so much to me.

And I just wanted to give you a little update on my social media. You can reach me on Instagram at Murder Under the Midnight Sun. I’ve started posting pictures of victims, locations, etc., and some of the perpetrators, just so you can get a visual idea of the situation. I’m at Twitter, @MurderTheSun. Facebook, I’ve got a Facebook page – facebook.com/UnderTheMidnightSun. I did start a Patreon, so if you want to donate to my Red Bull fund, which basically keeps me functioning, I’m on Patreon.com, UnderTheMidnightSun. Thank you so much. I look forward to talking to you guys in the future, and, again, the response has been so awesome. It’s just making my life right now. Thank you.

I know I said I was going to start a serial killer series this week, but I decided to push that off for another week or so, because I felt compelled to cover some local missing persons cases, especially cases that seem like there could be foul play involved and that seem like they could be solved and that maybe have been forgotten or maybe didn’t receive the media attention they deserve, that kind of thing, just hoping to bring these cases to the attention of people listening, and maybe something good will come of it. You never know. Either way, I just don’t think that these people should be forgotten.

I just want to give you a little bit of information on Alaska, as far as missing persons cases. This may not surprise you, but there are a lot of missing persons cases in Alaska, like way more than I was expecting, completely. Apparently there’s a part of Alaska nicknamed the Bermuda Triangle, which I don’t know why they just didn’t call it the Alaska Triangle, but – I just learned about this myself last week – but the sheer number of people that have gone missing there reportedly 20,000 in the last 50 years. It’s the highest number of missing people in any location in the world.

I don’t know if that’s accurate, but I did see it on The History Channel, so, who knows. You know, there is a ton of wilderness out there. It is really, really easy to get lost in the dense woods when you don’t know what you’re doing, and small planes go missing all the time because they crash and they’re never found, and beyond that, I do see that there’s a ton of local cases highlighted in the news every year, and a lot of times they’re people that have just gone missing in town, which is even more mysterious and suspicious. You know, sometimes they’re solved or they have obvious answers such as someone goes missing in the wilderness and it’s really cold out – the sad fact is that they probably just passed away due to the elements. Then there are the other cases, like I was saying, where someone goes missing in the middle of the city and there’s no easy explanation or solution. When there’s no closure in cases like this, friends and family members are left eternally wondering what happened to their loved ones.

Sometimes they’re next to impossible to solve when the person just disappears from their house or apartment and there’s absolutely no clues and it seems like they could have just walked away from their life and they’re never seen again. The sad thing is, though, even in the city, you’re always just within a few miles or less of huge stretches of wilderness, large bodies of water, where it’d be really easy to hide evidence forever. There’s actually 3 million lakes in Alaska, so just think about how much water space there is. In Anchorage alone, I don’t know how many lakes there are, but it seems like there’s a ton. I know there’s at least probably six within walking distance of my house, and a fast-running creek.

OK, so I chose some cases to cover that don’t have solutions yet seem solvable. In nearly all of these there might be at least one person out there who knows the answer or that might have seen something without even realizing it. At the very least I just want to bring  more attention back to these cases because it just makes me feel so sad when I think about how, once these people’s stories fade away, it’s just their family left wondering what happened. So, it makes me feel really empathetic towards their situations and want to help them in any way that I can. The weird thing is, in all my years of being interested in true crime, I’ve never really been that much into missing persons cases unless they have some really weird, mysterious elements or clues, mostly because, like I said before, one of my main aspects that draws me to this is the psychology of the perpetrators, so if I don’t know who that is, there’s not much to really research about it. Obviously I can learn more about the person, but a lot of times these cases are just completely unsolvable. There’s obviously been so many that have been in the news, like for years, that seem like the person is just gone forever and will never be solved, and that’s so sad, but it’s even sadder when these cases that also deserve to be in the media for years and years just kind of disappear because there’s no leads or anything.

So, as I was researching this I wasn’t even sure I was going to cover this topic, but I went into this podcast – sorry, not podcast – a Facebook group about Alaska missing cases, and I started talking to a lot of people in there, and the amount of response was beyond overwhelming. I got probably 70 people or so responding and giving me really good information and naming people I should talk about – some I had known about, some I kind of remember but I’ve forgotten in the years since nothing’s happened on their cases. So, I just want to thank all of you in that group that sent me messages and those of you that personally contacted me as somebody that either is a family member or a friend of somebody that went missing and really want their case to be discussed. I appreciate that so much because the more information that anyone has on a case the more likely it is to be solved, and the more information I can disseminate to other people the more likely it is to jog somebody’s memory.

So, the first case I decided to cover is that of Erin Marie Gilbert, and she was actually the case that I kind of stumbled upon while looking into just various local crimes. And I had heard about this when I was younger because she went missing at Forest Fair in 1995, and I used to go to Forest Fair all the time. I haven’t been there in a couple of years, but in the early 2000s to like 2010 I went there several years in a row, and I know my parents definitely referenced this case to me saying to be careful because someone has gone missing there before, etc. So, I had heard about it, but once I looked into it I got even more compelled to discuss it and learn more because it just kind of called out to me in a way.

Erin was born May 4, 1971, and had moved to Alaska from the West Coast only about a year before disappearing. She disappeared July 1, 1995, from the Alaska Forest Fair, which takes place in Girdwood, Alaska. For those non-Alaskans, the Forest Fair is this yearly event that happens on July 4th weekend and is in the ski resort town of Girdwood, which is about 40-45 miles south of Anchorage, right on the coast. It consists of booths with people selling food, jewelry, art and crafts, things like that. There’s face painting for children. There’s a stage where local musicians can play throughout the weekend. During the day it tends to be kind of a family event, you know, you see kids everywhere. There’s fair food – which I’m a huge fan. Who doesn’t love an elephant ear? And at night it turns into kind of a party scene. There’s a beer garden. There’s trails off into the woods where people go camping all weekend, which I have done before, and it is so much fun.

Little bit of a background on Girdwood, just so you can kind of picture it, and I’m also going to post some pictures on Instagram and Facebook, because it’s a really pretty town. It’s one of probably the most picturesque communities in Alaska. The town itself is nestled up against a mountain range. It’s just across a highway from the ocean, and more adventurous types that live in the area actually go surfing in the ocean, including some of my family members. I’m not nearly as adventurous as them. I’m kind of an indoor kid. There’s a really pretty river that goes through the town and there’s miles and miles of forest. It’s very pretty, like I said. There’s only about 1,000 year-round residents, and it’s a huge tourist attraction in both winter and summer. I mean, people come in the winter to go stay at the rest and go skiing, and they come in the summer to go hiking up the mountain, and it’s just such a gorgeous place.

There’s also a huge tram that you can take to the top of the mountain with a fancy restaurant up top, and there’s a massive hotel down below that has always reminded me of the Overlook Hotel, especially based on its location – which I’ll post a picture of it, and I hope somebody out there agrees with me. The local residents tend to be more outdoorsy, hippies. It’s kind of a weird combination of hippies and super-rich people and super-rich hippies, because it’s possibly the most expensive place to live in Alaska. I couldn’t find exact data, but it’s definitely up there. If you look at a cost-of-living index where 100 is average, Alaska, as a whole, is 130; Anchorage is 131; and Girdwood is 150. That just gives you an idea of the expense to live there. Part of it is because it’s not self-contained. There’s not a ton of businesses there, so a huge amount of the residents commute to Anchorage, which, that’s a lot of driving. It’s a really pretty highway, but I would not want to drive back and forth on it every day.

Alaska’s actually fourth behind New York, Hawaii, and Washington, D.C., for cost-of-living, only, and with Girdwood being higher than Alaska as a whole, you can understand how costly it is. Some of the houses there are like half a million dollars. It’s crazy. And, I have actually thought about living there in the past, but, like I said, I’m a little bit of an indoor kid. I don’t think I’m really outdoorsy enough to make use of living there as well as one could, and, like I said, I would hate the commute. It’s so expensive. I’m poor. I can’t live there, but it is one of my favorite places to drive to, away from the lights of Anchorage. It’s such a gorgeous drive, and in the winter there’s just crazy stars out and it’s a really good drive to take if you want to see the Northern Lights around end of summer, fall, and I would say that area’s probably the place I see Northern Lights the most in Alaska. So, that’s just a little bit of background on Girdwood, give you an idea of what kind of little community it is. It’s really cute.

So, Erin Gilbert had gone to the fair on a first date, and when she and her date returned to his car, they noticed that the lights had been on all day and his battery was dead. So, she stayed in the car, and he went off to find someone to help jumpstart it, and when he got back to the vehicle – he estimated it was around an hour or two – Erin was no longer there. By his estimation, he searched for her until about 1 a.m. before calling the cops for help and contacted the family early the next morning trying to find out if she had made her way home. Unfortunately, no trace of her was ever found.

Her case just really grabbed my attention for a couple of reasons. You know, the first reason is the location of her disappearance. I’ve gone to the Forest Fair so many times, and I’m really familiar with the area, and at the fair time it’s just always packed full of people. I don’t know the exact numbers, but definitely thousands of people stream through that fair every year. It’s insanely packed, like standing room only, just crowds, just … Yeah, it’s kind of like a county fair but packed into this really small space in the woods, and it’s just really hard to believe someone could go missing without someone having seen something in such a packed area, and especially in the middle of the day. I mean, I think this was around 6 p.m. It was in July, so the sun is pretty much out always. Gets kind of dark around 2 a.m., but doesn’t stay dark very long, and yeah …

So, it was just a very strange place to disappear. That jumped out at me. The other thing about Erin was that she was the kind of girl who really stood out in a crowd. She was almost 6 feet tall. She was very athletic, and she had a very beautiful face. She was 24, in the prime of her life, when she went missing, and that vitality is just so obvious in the huge smile that she has in her Charley Project picture. It just like jumps off the page and it just makes you feel so like, “How could this happen to somebody this alive?” You know?

I was actually fortunate enough to be able to speak with Erin’s sister Stephanie recently, who, she actually sent me a family picture of herself, Erin, and their sister, Catherine, which I did post on Instagram and Facebook. So, if you want to go see a picture of the sisters, you can see it on there. They were really close. Stephanie just has such good memories of her sister. She was smart. She did really good in school. She was funny, athletic, just a pretty responsible person, really reliable. She was working as a nanny, and she just wasn’t the kind of person to go disappear or leave the area without contacting anyone. She was close with her family, and, you know, she was really loved by them. There was absolutely no problems within the family. There was just no reasons why she would disappear, basically. She was just a good person, and when you look at her, you kind of get this vibe of like that girl next door, just super-friendly and looks like she could befriend anybody.

She was full of so much potential. She wanted to be a writer, and she was also planning to attend cosmetology school. Like I said, it’s been 22 years since she went missing with nothing having been found. That just blows my mind. The family still misses her, obviously, and they still hope for an answer some day. I feel so strongly that this case is solvable and that someone out there has to know something or have seen something, and I really hope that person decides to come forward someday so that Erin’s family can have some peace or at least an answer. You know, talking to Stephanie … I was already feeling so compelled to look into this case, but talking to a family member just made it so much more real, and I just have major empathy for the family having dealt with this loss, especially for so long without any answer. It’s unbelievable.

I’ve never experienced similar circumstances, but I do know the pain of loss, and it creates a black hole inside of you and kind of sucks everything into its gravity, and while it may shrink over time, it never goes away entirely, and I imagine not having any explanation for why this happened probably makes it just that much more worse. So, on the day that she went missing, Erin was – she was 5-foot-11. She had shoulder-length dark brown hair, a very pretty face. She was Caucasian – sorry, forgot to mention that. She was wearing a black leather jacket, black jeans, hiking boots. Like I said, she definitely would have stood out in a crowd. She was pretty tall, very pretty, and probably dressed pretty “cool.” Like, when I think about that outfit, it’s totally so ‘90s to me, kind of grungy.

So, if you happen to know anything or if you maybe saw something or you think you saw something, please call Anchorage Crime Stoppers at 907-561-STOP. That’s 907-561-S-T-O-P. The calls are completely anonymous. They are never recorded, so if you call in a tip it will never come back to you unless you want yourself to be known publicly. I’m honestly not sure if there’s a reward involved in this one, but oftentimes Crime Stoppers has their own reward for people calling in tips for different cases, so you would have to contact them to find out exactly what’s going on with this exact case.

And while this case is so old, I saw that it’s still considered to be an open missing persons’ case. Obviously, it hasn’t been solved or closed, but it’s so cold I could not find any update on it from the police in the last, you know, intense amount of years. And there was a huge search of the area. People flew overhead in a plane with heat-seeking technology. People walked through the woods. They covered a lot of ground, and they found absolutely nothing, which sounds hard to believe, but if you’ve ever been there you know that Girdwood is just surrounded by insane amounts of wilderness and it’d be pretty much impossible to cover it all in a search like that. So, it’s so sad that nothing was ever found, but I’m actually not incredibly surprised based on the location, and there’s also just a ton of mountains in the area that are pretty accessible.

So, that’s just the first case that I wanted to talk about. It really drew me in, and I wanted to make sure that I covered it with as much information I could give and as much respect as I could give to the situation. I just feel so horrible for the family and wanted to do whatever I could to bring attention to this. So, that is the first case. And, again, thank you so much to Stephanie for reaching out to me. That really meant a lot, and I’m glad I got a chance to talk to you. Much love to you and your family, and I’m just happy I could do anything possible to help, really. And, once again, I will post pictures of both Erin and the location up on Facebook and Instagram and I’ll share on Twitter. So, go ahead and follow me on any of those if you want to look at those. Girdwood is just a really cool-looking place, so it’s just interesting for people not from Alaska to see our ski resort. It’s really cool.

So, the next missing person’s case I’d like to discuss is that of Mary Anne Alexie. Mary Anne was born November 13, 1979, and she was 32 years old when she went missing October 10, 2012, in Anchorage. Mary Anne’s case got my attention because she disappeared from the, basically, middle of the city, which is pretty uncommon, especially when absolutely no clues have been found or anything like that. She was actually from Fairbanks. She was from out-of-town. She had just come to Anchorage like the day before to attend classes at the Alaska Career College. She was interested in getting certified to be a medical assistant, however, she didn’t show up for classes on her first day, and the next morning, at around 3 a.m., she called some friends. They said it sounded like she’d been drinking. She was disoriented. She said that she was lost but she knew was in Spenard, and after that phone call she was never heard from again.

Unfortunately, she was known for having a bit of a history of alcohol abuse, and she’d been drinking in one of the less-reputable parts of town. For those of you not from Anchorage, a little bit of information about Spenard. It’s a neighborhood in midtown, and historically was actually its own town, separate from Anchorage. During the ‘70s, it became one of the hubs of prostitution and drinking, and it’s really evolved since then. I mean, I sometimes see sex workers and drunk people passed out in the area, but these days it’s kind of got more of a hippie vibe. You know, a lot of bike club type people live there. They have their own annual event called Spenardi Gras where they just kind of celebrate their community, and it’s a lot different than it used to be, but it’s still not the best place for a lone female to be drinking.

As in most of the world, natives of Alaska have not historically received the best treatment from other races, and while natives here kind of have more advantages in comparison to some of the Native Americans in the rest of the United States, there is actually a higher incidence of violence against native Alaskans than there is in any other area of the United States. Part of this is due to poverty and poor policing in some of the villages, but, in Anchorage, a lot of this violence is due primarily to racism. One of the serial killers I will be discussing in a future episode actually targeted natives, both men and women, and there have been so many unsolved homicides of native Alaskans over the years that definitely don’t receive the amount of media attention they deserve. The sad fact is that these victims are often homeless and/or intoxicated and are less sympathetic in the public eye.

It’s really sad to me, but it seems like Mary Anne’s case may have suffered similar treatment due to the fact she was a native Alaskan woman who was intoxicated and in a dangerous part of town, especially at 3 a.m. While people may not say it outright, there can be a lot of underlying victim blaming in situations like this. Some people think the person put themselves in danger, so maybe they’re less sympathetic. I don’t give a fuck if you’re sleeping outside, completely passed out drunk, no one is deserving of violence, and all victims deserve their stories to be told.

I’m sure many of you have heard of the term missing white woman syndrome. It’s a fucked-up thing where upper middle class white women that go missing get way, way, way more media attention than pretty much any other race. In my opinion, it helps if you’re also pretty and blonde. You know, we’ve all seen pictures of Natalie Holloway over the years, but think how many non-white women have gone missing in the last 10 years and have received basically no media coverage. Even worse, it seems like upper middle class white women tend to not get victim blamed much, or at all. I mean, it seems pretty probable that Natalie may have left the bar with Joran van der Sloot under her own will, but where are the assholes blaming her for putting herself in danger? You know, it’s just this ridiculous double standard that makes me really mad, in case you couldn’t tell, but I digress.

Mary Anne seems to be just another statistic, another murdered native Alaskan woman doomed to be forgotten, but she’s not and shouldn’t be. I saw an incredibly sad interview with her sister, Josephine, discussing how the family thinks her case was put on the back burner, and it seems that way to me, too. I mean, I was trying to research this and I couldn’t really find very many articles about her beyond the original missing persons stories, but what I do know is that Mary Anne was a mother and a wife. She left behind four children and a husband. She had dreams. She wanted to go to college to better herself and get a good job. She was a pretty small woman – only 4-foot-11 and 120 pounds. She had shoulder-length dark hair and looked much younger than her years. She had a tattoo on her upper right arm, which I did find a picture of, and it appears to be a word or a name on a scroll, but I couldn’t find a big enough picture to read it. I really wish I had more information about her, but, like I said, I couldn’t really find any more articles that were written past October 10, 2012, which is super-sad. I’d like to know what she did in Anchorage before she went missing and who she was as a person, but I just couldn’t really find it. If you know something about the disappearance of Mary Anne Alexie, please contact APD at 907-786-8900. I will be sharing pictures of Mary Anne on Facebook and on Instagram today if you want to go take a look at her, and if you are a family member, a friend of hers, and have more information you would like me to share, I would gladly do that. Please do not hesitate to contact me. The best way is to email murderunderthemidnightsun@gmail.

I was originally planning on covering a couple more cases during this episode, but I got a little bit more passionate and talked a lot more than I was planning, so I’m going to actually turn this into a couple of parts. So, this is going to be part one, and I’ll release part two probably in a couple of days. In the meantime, please find me on social media, and, if you’re an Alaskan and you have any recommendations of local cases I should cover, both missing persons and otherwise, don’t hesitate to contact me. I’d love to hear from you, and thank you all so much, again, for listening and for supporting. It’s been great. I just feel so passionate about this that I can’t even express it. I actually got super teary eyed researching these cases, which is not normal for me. So, it was interesting. Thank you, guys. Good night.

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