AK 239: The Enemy Is Already Here

The Oregonian ran his obituary and his, girlfriend, “beneficiary” was just about to cash a two-million-dollar life insurance policy on George.

However, my forensic team looked into the case and found good old George had fooled just about everyone. Just about everyone but us. I sent what was left of “George” for biometric DNA analysis to our FBI lab in rural Virginia.

George was burned in a house fire so badly that very little of him was “allegedly” left. Since he lived in a rural community no one noticed the fire for hours and hours. But for a body to be this decomposed the Oregon forensic specialist said he’d have had to have been soaked in heating oil, and set on fire for hours. His beneficiary said that’s exactly what happened.

The beneficiary was conveniently away for the weekend and there was a leak in the 200-gallon heating oil tank in the basement.

As the story went, he was trying to plug a hole in the tank when, talking on his cell phone to his girlfriend he dropped it, causing a spark and catching him on fire.

It all sounded very “fishy” to me from the get go.

All that was recovered were teeth and bone fragments, that were, in fact, George’s. But the huge mistake the couple made was to incinerate the body of another person. The second DNA sample that my team personally took turned out to be partially George’s “friend,” Albert Tuck.

Pseudocide is not very common, except maybe in novels but my team found out George, while looking common and uneducated, was anything but.

George received his undergraduate degree in mathematics from Harvard and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He then taught upper division mathematics at Harvard University.

George was, clearly, no dummy. He had managed to fool the Clackamas County Medical Examiner and a forensic pathologist of the Oregon State Police. Had it not been for my team, this case would have been closed months ago.

But George’s Oregon Trail had grown cold. A local journalist with a big mouth and a penchant for making a name for himself spilled the beans about the FBI results and the beneficiary vanished.

No one could positively identify her and no picture of her even existed, which was highly unusual. No fingerprints in the burned house or car turned up any woman at all!

The only thing everyone said about her was she had fair skin, bright red hair and was drop dead gorgeous.

No offense to Oregon but there just isn’t that many unidentified, drop dead gorgeous women living in the woods!

An avid reader of the Oregonian saw George’s picture while on vacation fishing in Ketchikan. The witness swore he had spotted George on these docks getting on a boat!

The owner of that boat told the Ketchikan police that a man, fitting George’s description, paid cash and asked to be taken to Prince of Wales Island.

It seemed very suspicious. There are fishing lodges over on the west side of the island in Craig but George was dropped to very specific GPS coordinates on the uninhabited south east side.

Now Alaska is made up of over 3,000 islands with only about 1,500 of them named.

Prince of Wales Island is huge.

It’s the size of the country of Ireland and slightly larger than the state of Delaware!

The island is the fourth largest in the United States, with a coastline of approximately 1,000 miles!

That’s right 1,000 miles of coastline.

Roughly the distance from Los Angeles, California to Portland, Oregon! The sheer vastness of this one rugged island alone would be the perfect place for someone to disappear.

Standing in my hotel room, the show, Alaska Today, is discussing President Obama’s nuclear speech in Japan from 2016: