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Up and Vanished in the Midnight Sun is released every Thursday and brought to you absolutely free. But for ad-free listening and exclusive bonuses, subscribe to Tenderfoot Plus at tenderfootplus.com or on Apple Podcasts.
Up and Vanished in the Midnight Sun is intended for mature audiences and may include topics that can be upsetting, such as emotional, physical, and sexual violence, rape, and murder. The names of survivors have been changed for anonymity purposes. Testimony shared by guests of the show is their own and does not reflect the views of Tenderfoot TV or Odyssey. Thank you so much for listening. Hello. Hey. Hey. I'm fucking scared. He was a cab driver for Checker Cab.
He dropped everybody else off but her. And he says, "You know what? I could have killed you and nobody would have known about it." He pulled out a knife. This guy, though. His name starts with J. What was the name that you knew him by? Oregon John. I was the last person to see her alive, besides the guy that killed her. The more you look into it, the more unanswered questions and red flags there were.
Everybody was pretty consistent about what they said about Joseph. You're dealing with a successful professional person who just vanishes. The state's conclusion, he had been attacked by a bear and they just didn't find the body. There's going to be parts and pieces that the bear is not interested in. Yeah, they're not going to leave half of a carcass. Either he doesn't want to be found or someone doesn't want him to be found.
So you guys were never boyfriend/girlfriend then? No, we were just friends. Him and I, just friends. Better off friends. Do you still have the texts that you can refer to? No, because my phone got... Everything I had on my phone was gone. The roommate lied about his whereabouts on Saturday night. There was also an issue with apparently texting your friends to try and get them to create an alibi. I was just trying to save my skin. Save your skin from what, though? It's not like you were doing anything wrong.
If you come to Nome, you're not going to go very far. You can go about 90 miles that way and 90 miles that way and about 75 that way. And that's it. When I first touched down in Nome about two years ago now, the first person I met was this guy. Literally on the plane there. And within the first hour of me being there, he was talking to me on record. They haven't found a body. They haven't found anything. The evidence is gone. You sure about that? What does that tell you? She's not there.
There's a lot of people that come up to hide. Because you can disappear up here if you wanted to. I've been in the home now for 25 years. There's a lot of people that show up here. All of them are chasing the yellow guy. I mean, you can go out here in this driveway here and dig a bunch of dirt up, you'll find gold, you know. He's a gold miner who's been there for two decades. And he seemed to hear a lot of talk in the town about Florence Okpialik's disappearance. West Beach, there was a lot of people out there looking for her.
all the way up through that country. I don't know the parameters of who she was with or what, you know. But I do know that she was supposedly last seen with this guy. They found her things in his tent. Do you know who that guy may have been? No. I don't know the guy's name. I don't even... I'm just an old man. Yeah. And I think logically. I'm a logical thinker. She could have wandered into the wrong tent. Some people don't like that.
Drive down the damn beach and you just see somebody walking along and jump out and kill them. That don't make any sense either. You must have had some interaction with them. And the people on that beach is the ones that had interaction with her. Where the guy went, I don't know. But he's not here? No. He's not. I don't know where he went, but I do know that if I was an investigator, I'd be on his ass like stink on shit.
From Tenderfoot TV in Atlanta, this is Up and Vanished in the Midnight Sun, Chapter 2. I'm your host, Payne Lindsey.
Kind of hard to forget this guy, an old-town miner and gnome who seems to have heard all the chatter. I love that line. And he was right. He was not a gnome. He was in Ketchikan, Alaska, and he goes by the name of Oregon John. I was gold money, and that's what I was doing, a gnome for four years.
I was driving a taxi cab up in Nome. You've been to Nome? Let's revisit my interview with John for a second. Why'd you want to get out of there eventually? I had some legal issues, remember? A girl came and hung out in my tent one night and she walked off somewhere and somebody kidnapped her. And yeah, yeah, she passed out and in the morning I woke up and she was gone but I left her shoes and her phone. Well, there was no trace of her. Why did they fucking think you did it, man? Because I was the last person known to have seen her alive. She just vanished.
And they thought I did it, so I bounced. I was the last person to see her alive, besides the guy that killed her. — Besides the guy who killed her. We'd go on all day about the things that John said that don't sit well with me, but going back and listening again, something did stand out to me. — Nome is corrupt. You have no idea. Three times in the last 12 years, the law enforcement department has been shut down and taken over by the feds. They are so corrupt up there, dude. It's crazy. You know about the judge that disappeared, right?
He's talking about Joseph. In unsolved murder cases, the inevitable always happens. The conspiracy theories. The cops did it. They ran on it. This person's a suspect. That person's a suspect. But rarely are any of those things actually true.
On that first day in Nome, I talked to Ray for about two hours. And he was very well aware of Joseph Balderas' disappearance too. If a bear's gonna eat you, he's not gonna eat your tennis shoes. I just don't think that's what happened to him. I don't know how animals are, when a bear eats you, you're gonna eat something. I've seen people getting eaten up here before, you know, and there's something always left. What I think happened to him, is he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The guy was just in the wrong place, I think.
Maybe he walked in on drug deals going on or something like that and they just, that happens. Do I think they'll ever find him? No. People hunt, they fish here. Somebody will come across something if it was there. I don't think he's there. I think he's in the ocean somewhere. There's all kinds of things that can happen to you here. We can go right back to Adam and Eve. Cain and Abel, the human species is the only species that will kill for no reason. We're not kind people. I just see it, I see it.
Death don't mean anything. Why is that? Because it's on TV. You watch a crime story or a detective story, there's always somebody getting killed. But you never see the end result of that. The family, the people that's affected by that guy's death. Death to these people don't mean anything. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. You're referring to Joseph's case? Yeah. I've never heard of him being involved in drugs. What I hear, he never was that way.
But his roommate was. Why in the hell would you drive out there? I mean, I sure as hell ain't gonna drive clear out there. I can see everything I want to see from the road. That's suspect to me. I don't think he's there. His car's there. If I did the guy in, I guess I'd drive his car up there and make it look like he got lost. When he disappeared, there was lots of people looking for him. If he'd been eating that bear, they would've found something. I think his car was driven out there.
Joseph dropping out of communication with his fiancée early in the morning on Saturday, June 25th, then his truck surfacing 40-plus miles outside the city, parked in a strange spot. It's just a flat-out confusing set of circumstances, but with no body in this case, Joseph's truck remains a central piece of evidence. — I don't know, it seems awful suspicious. Without a piece of anything to go on other than his truck.
This is Jim West, a known local who was helping spearhead the search back in the day. The first private investigator interviewed Jim a few weeks after Joseph disappeared. We've been taught at Search and Rescue that the last person is going to be seen within about a mile or half a mile of his truck. And we covered all that area, big time.
You towed it, correct? I towed it, yes. Did you notice anything suspicious about the truck? There was flowers on the windshield. There was no evidence of foul play or anything like that. There were several sightings of Joseph's truck that weekend, some of which don't seem to really align. But the thing is, sometimes eyewitnesses can just be wrong. But not everybody. Not much of evidentiary value was ever found in Joseph's vehicle. But his cell phone is missing along with him.
And it's not the only important thing missing. In March of 2016, about two months before Joseph went missing, he went to a local outdoor store in Nome and purchased a handgun, a Taurus PT111 G2 subcompact 9mm. But according to Joseph's friends and family, he wasn't really that into guns. So was it for protection? Just to fire off rounds in the wilderness? We don't really know.
What we do know is that it's missing, along with its traveling case. Where'd it go? According to the Alaska State Troopers' report, upon their first visit inside Joseph's home, they noted, quote, "no signs of foul play, no blood, broken objects, bleach, freshly cleaned areas, etc." But they did notice a full box of American Eagle 9mm ammo in Joseph's room, and exactly one round was missing from the ammo box.
But the state troopers didn't seem to find this interesting at all. Both the gun and the case are missing. Not only was his gun missing, this new handgun that he had purchased, but the case for the handgun was missing. I think that's a very significant fact.
The troopers didn't even enter that handgun into the computer system, missing or stolen. Why would they do that? You know, they weren't interested in it. I mean, this is just my impression. The case was done, they had moved on, and they didn't want to reopen it and do more work on it. It's just been completely overlooked. The missing gun and the case that went with it is really significant, I think. I mean, they just completely ignored the whole issue. These are big leads to follow up on in a missing persons case.
Let's go back to Christine for a second and the whole frustrating story about her cell phone. In one version, Christine says that her brother punched in her password and then somehow disabled her phone.
I have an iPhone, like a lot of us do. And here's how this actually works. After you punch in the wrong passcode six times, the phone will lock you out for one minute.
On the 7th, 5 minutes. 8th, 15 minutes. 9th, 1 hour. And finally, if you put the wrong passcode in 10 times in a row, it will permanently lock you out. Her brother must have been a pretty fast typer. What's interesting is that, at the time, Christine had an iPhone 6S, one of the last iPhones that you could unlock with a thumbprint.
So her brother disables it because he doesn't know her pin code. But then all of a sudden, she couldn't remember her pin code either? I'm confused. Who exactly disabled the phone? He disabled it and I couldn't remember my pin code because on the iPhones I could use my thumb. And so that's what I was using. And so he disabled it. So every pin code I thought it would be, I used and it wasn't. So it ended up disabling it.
When it comes to Christine restoring her iPhone, we could split hairs on this all day. The bottom line is, it's fucking weird. So her phone is erased immediately after Joseph disappears. Her entire phone is erased. That is a little bit concerning. Maybe it's odd timing, or maybe not. But if you start looking around at other places, people like Joseph's roommate Jake start to feel like a bigger part of this story.
— The roommate was interviewed right away, told the troopers he was gone Saturday night with friends, but that he saw Joseph the next morning walking down the hallway in the house. Sunday morning, after Joseph had stopped responding to anyone. He's the only person who claims to have seen Joseph on Sunday. — So if his roommate Jake is telling the truth, he's the last person to see Joseph alive. Here's Joseph's sister, Selina.
- Everything doesn't add up, all the inconsistencies. He saw him mourning with the backpack whenever somebody else witnessed the truck already planted out there on mile 44. But all the other sightings from different people who aren't related, they don't connect. They're all different timings. - His roommate Jake has stuck with his story of seeing Joseph on Sunday, 24 hours after anyone else had heard from him. The private investigator Andy asked Christine about this.
Why not? Yeah.
Andy Klamzer interviewed one of Joseph's co-workers who had some more insight on Jake and Joseph's relationship. Had Joseph said anything to you about his roommate, Jake Stetton-Benz? He said, Camille, he's awfully quiet. We don't talk. I don't know what to do with him. I said, have you tried? He said, yeah, he just comes and goes. He has a dog that's messy, into the garbage all the time. He was messy and had a dog and was very strange to me.
He said, but other than that, we're ships in the night. Jake was a lot younger than Joseph and seemed to throw parties a lot at the house. And according to friends and family, Joseph didn't really like this. Not to mention, he wasn't paying his bills either. Joseph mentioned to a co-worker on Friday, June 24th, that he was really upset about Jake using up all the internet and not paying for it. And this comment seemed out of character for him. However you slice it, there was clearly some tension there.
Aside from Joseph's handgun, which is currently still missing, when the police originally searched his house, they took photos and notes of what they saw. But when they came back about a week later, they noticed something that wasn't there beforehand: a rifle. There was a weapon involved. When a trooper went into the room, he didn't see anything. And then all of a sudden, when he goes back into the room, there was a rifle. Inside Joseph's room? Are you solid on that?
And when they asked his roommate Jake about it, he claimed he didn't know whose it was. What do you mean? - They found a rifle in his room. - Jake's uncle put it there. Kevin. - Kevin would be his uncle. - What's the uncle's name? - Kevin Pesquia. - It was eventually learned that Jake's uncle, Kevin, had just mysteriously put it there, unbeknownst to Jake himself, who just sets guns in people's houses and not tell them. - Kevin Pesquia is a former officer that was fired.
Why would he place a gun in somebody else's room after the guy who went missing? Andy Klamzer briefly talked to Jake when he was a gnome and asked about this rifle. So when the rifle got dropped off here, was it in the case? Okay. So have you ever shot it? Kevin or...
It's too bad that your uncle didn't just tell you he was dropping it off. This became a topic of interest on their conference calls, too. Here's Selena. Said that we found a rifle in his house. We showed up and there was no rifle. We showed up again and there was a rifle.
So there's this disappearing and reappearing rifle that Jake at first claims wasn't his, only to find out later it actually was his, but he just didn't know how it got there. What? Andy asked the state trooper, Sergeant Cross, about this. The family and the attorneys were confused about the issues surrounding the .308 rifle that Kevin Pesquia put in the storage area after Joseph disappeared.
It seemed odd to them that Jake wouldn't recognize the rifle, which had been given to him as a gift by his father. A 20-year-old who was given a nice rifle by his dad as a gift the year before, why would he not recognize it? Do you recall anything about that? I don't know why he wouldn't recognize it. Save on Cox Internet when you add Cox Mobile and get fiber-powered Internet at home and unbeatable 5G reliability on the go.
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Get your quote today at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Pretty much right away after he went missing, the family went out to Nome. One of the family members talked to the roommate. Here's Joseph's sister, Selena, recalling her first visit to Nome. We went to the search, the first search. We were sitting with his mother, his
and Christine's parents. And this boy comes in and talks to Bonnie. She's referring to Jake, Joseph's roommate. But at the time, she didn't know that. I didn't know that was her son. Bonnie is his mother. Here's Joseph's mom, Nelda. It was a room full of people that just shook his hand, looked up and saw him. He had scratches all over his face. It looked like somebody grabbed your face and scratched you.
You would follow up on that. You'd talk to the people who were with him. If something happened, did his face get scratched? I mean, this is police work 101. It could have just been something that happened innocently. Or it could have meant that he was in a fight. Something happened between him and Joseph, and Joseph fought back. They could explain the scratches. I asked him to take pictures of his face.
The scratches on Jake's face seemed fresh. And at the time, they didn't even know he was his roommate. As they started putting two and two together, this became much more concerning. When we realized that was his roommate, everything's starting to look shady now.
I told Cross, "You need to interview him. You need to go see." It feels like everybody's connected. Everybody's scared. You live in this small city. You can't get out of this small town. And many of the people that I have talked to that have told me things are very scared. When we first met Joseph's sister, Selena, and his mother, Nelda, we were at their home in Lubbock, Texas. For years, they had their own tip line, and Selena would answer every single call.
One call in particular really stood out to her. - Yeah, hi, I was calling to, I guess, report some clues. - Okay, what would you like to report? - Okay, I was at Nome in August, talked to everybody that I could talk to about it. Nobody thought he got stung by a bear. Nobody feels like he went out into the wilderness. I know he had also
had a relationship with Christine Pasquoya. Her relationship with Joseph, was it friendly? Was it intimate? Her sister had said that they were like boyfriend-girlfriend. And I know the family was kind of putting a squeeze on him to kind of hook up with her. He went to their house for dinner and family dinners, and they treated him kind of like family. I talked to . She works at the Native Village at Council.
And Jake Stanton-Benz works there. She told me that she let him know he could go help in the search. And he said no. She asked him again a day later and he said, "No, just so you know, I don't even know the guy." And I know they were roommates. Do you feel like there's a reason why he didn't go help? Well, I don't know. It was his roommate, so... And then he made a point to say that he didn't know him.
So I don't know if anybody's asked him if he didn't go help because he had to work. Because his supervisor told him he could go help twice. And then he said, no, and just so you know, I don't even know him. I've also talked to...
Jake's uncle.
Was there a third roommate in the house too? This would change things. She's referring to Jake and Christine's family. From her impression, their behavior just seemed a little off.
They were really chatty and typically they're the kind of people that are really kind of standoffish and just the more I kind of started asking around, it became clear that there was something, like they're covering up for each other or something. I can't explain it. The parents of Chris being, they suddenly kind of gravitated towards being more friendly with the old man of Nome and I mean being friendly
There's a lot of things that need to be cleared up in this case. Why is it that so many details are just inconclusive? I'm holding back as much as I can to not fall down all these rabbit holes, but some of them seem actually worth exploring. It's time to dig a little deeper and push for our own tips. About a year ago, we made our own tip line for Florence Okpialuk and Joseph Valderas.
and we put up a $50,000 reward for information leading to an arrest. We did not put this number out publicly, but it's very easy to find if you live in Nome. For months and months, we got nothing. Not a single call. But then seemingly out of the blue, I started receiving very cryptic anonymous messages. "Payne, I want to stay anonymous, but I have a lot to tell you. I knew Kevin Pesquia."
and I don't know why nothing came out about his dark past. He was crazy. One time Kevin told me something weird. He said, "I know how to make people disappear. I used to be a cop." He was always anxious, always angry. On Saturday, June 25th, I was driving out. It was around 3 or 4 p.m., and that's when we saw Joseph's truck. It was off the road, down the hill, and there were two men standing next to the vehicle.
One was tall, and the other was shorter. One had a black jacket, the other, a blue one. Both doors of the truck were open, and they had their backs to us, and hoods covering their faces. They clearly didn't want us to see them. I never told the police this. Who do you think they were, Payne?
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Up and Vanished in the Midnight Sun is a production of Tenderfoot TV in association with Odyssey. Your host is Payne Lindsey. The show is written by Payne Lindsey with additional assistance from Mike Rooney. Executive producers are Donald Albright and Payne Lindsey. 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.
Supervising Producer is Tracy Kaplan. Additional Production by Victoria McKenzie, Alice Kanik-Glen, and Eric Quintana. Artwork by Rob Sheridan. Original Music by Makeup and Vanity Set. Mix and mastered by Cooper Skinner. Thank you to Oren Rosenbaum and the team at UTA, Beck Media and Marketing, and the Nord Group. 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. For more podcasts like Up and Vanished, search Tenderfoot TV on your favorite podcast app or visit us at tenderfoot.tv. Thanks for listening. If you want to be a bigger part of the discussion here, go join the Up and Vanished Discord. We put a link to it in the episode description. At your job, do you ever have to deal with a nose roller? How about a snub pulley?
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