Northernmost

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For seven years in the 90s, she lived in the northernmost community in the United States, Utkiagvik, Alaska, population less than 5,000. Well in spite of all the warnings, I just never really thought. That a polar bear would actually come to my house that just seemed fantastic. One day, one typical day, I was leaving the house for work and I turned the deadbolt behind me and I looked up the hill to see if the bus was coming. The bus was not coming but a bear was crossing the road in front of my house. So I froze and the bear, I don't think, had spotted me yet but it was looking around. It was hungry and then I could see that it did see me. Its eyes locked onto me. It was like laser lock on a gun. I wish I could say that I was brave and I did something smart but I was absolutely and totally terrified. I couldn't even scream, I dropped my door key and I just did watching the bear and the bear came closer and closer and then a snow machine whizzed between me and the bear. My neighbor, Claire O'Peah, had come out on his snow machine and he had somebody behind him on the machine who had a rifle, a high-powered rifle, an ordinary rifle wouldn't help much. They heard the bear away from me like it was a cow yelling at it. I found out later that the elders had actually been tracking this bear. It had been seen in different parts of town. It had actually chased the mayor, Mayor Amawa, who had much better presence of mine and fleetness of foot than I did, he jumped in a dumpster to get away from it. Rebecca had moved to Utt-Kiagvik to take a job at the public defender's office. Alaska is simply organized into burrows instead of counties. The north slope burrow is virtually essentially the northern tier of the state. The population of the burrow is about 10,000 on the whole but it's the size of I believe Wyoming and the caseload was huge. It wasn't out of the ordinary for Rebecca to be responsible for over a hundred defendants at once. At the time the town was known as Barrow, in 2016 residents voted to rename it Utt-Kiagvik, its original indigenous name. The Anupiat people have lived in the area for over a thousand years and make up over half of the population of Utt-Kiagvik. Rebecca knew that is a white person who didn't grow up there should be an outsider in the community. Utt-Kiagvik is on the shore of the Arctic Ocean, about 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Rebecca says when she lived there, the temperature frequently dropped to 40 below. None of the streets are paved. They would just crack every time they froze and then thawed. Everything has to be on stills of one kind or another because of the permafrost just beneath the surface. If buildings are built directly on the surface that will cause the permafrost to melt and the building will get out of whack and eventually implode upon itself. The little house that I rented from the Utt-Kiagvik Anupiat corporation had no plumbing. So water was delivered weekly by truck. The shower had a hole in the floor where water simply drained out onto the tundra. Even in the winter, you might think that that would be cold but when you think about it, cold sinks so the cold did not rise into the hot shower and it was a perfectly tolerable system. Three years after Rebecca moved to Alaska in the summer of 1993, she took a vacation to visit her family. I had flown a home to South Carolina for my birth day, for my parents' birth day. And I was standing in my mother's kitchen looking out at the beautiful magnolia trees blooming in their yard when the phone rang. And it was my office manager, Elizabeth Connoirick, and she told me about this new case. And when she said the Apollo sisters, I was absolutely appalled. Elizabeth told Rebecca that Bernice and Wanda Apollo had been found strangled in their home. One of them had been raped. According to an article in the Anchorage Daily News, they'd been found on Tuesday, August 3rd. Bernice was 27 and Wanda was 30. There are no roads that connect Utgeogvik with any other community. There's no escape route. Nobody can get on the freeway and head for Fairbanks, that's 500 miles of open tundra. You can't flee by boat on the Arctic Ocean. Your body is probably never going to be found. The only practical way you're in the route is by air, so the killer was still in town. I'm Phoebe Judge, this is criminal. Utgeogviks law enforcement officers were looking at a man named Amos Lane. He had a previous conviction for sexual assault in the first degree. Doctors didn't have enough to charge him with the murders yet, but they arrested him on unrelated misdemeanor charges. Rebecca's office would be defending him for the misdemeanor and possibly in a murder trial. Rebecca decided to fly back to Alaska earlier than planned. The tundra is a very different thing to fly over. It's really like no other place on Earth, it's not flat like Kansas or Nebraska. It's a series of frost heaves and small ponds from the air. It looks like nothing so much is green cake batter, just whipped in different ways. And flying over the broken sea ice, it looked like grease in a frying pan. Rebecca Wright Stevens moved to Utgeogviks for a job with the public defender's office when she was in her forties. She was a widow and had two children in college and law school and needed a way to pay for it. And I learned that far off Alaska, oil rich Alaska paid public defenders very well, particularly if you were willing to go to one of the remote offices. So I flew to Juneau, took the Alaska bar and passed and applied for jobs. Rebecca spent most of her law career up to that point, working as a public defender in Washington State. She says in law school, the cases she found most interesting were the criminal ones. Each one was lying a short story. You could see the pressures operating on people, driving them to whatever they did. And then you could see the system attempting to deal with it. Everyone told me though that I could not go into criminal law. You cannot make a living at criminal law and I wasn't tough enough for it. When I started law school, I was what used to be called a reentry woman, having stayed at home for 10 years. I knew no other women lawyers. In fact, I knew very few women that worked outside the home. We were only about a dozen or 15 women in a class of over a hundred at Champaign, Urbana. There was not even a lady's room. They had to convert part of the men's locker room to give us a lady's room. Rebecca graduated in 1976. 13 years earlier, the Supreme Court ruled on a case, Gideon vs. Wainwright, where the defendant argued that even though he couldn't afford one, he had the right to a lawyer. The court unanimously agreed, and nationwide, states developed and funded public defender systems. Rebecca knew it was exactly the kind of law she wanted to practice, even though she says some people didn't consider public defenders real lawyers. She remembers hearing the joke, "Please don't tell my mother, I'm a public defender. She thinks I play piano in a whore house." 17 years later, in 1993, when Rebecca flew back to Alaska to defend Amos Lane, she went straight from the airport to the courthouse with her suitcase. We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus. This November, I'm going out on the road with a brand new live show. This one is about my own family. And in part, about how when we were starting Criminal, my own sister was in prison in Iowa. I hope you'll come. We'll be in Chicago, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, DC, Raleigh, Austin, Minneapolis, Denver, LA, San Francisco, Portland, Oregon, and Seattle. You can find out more at this is criminal.com/live or click the link in the show notes. Support for Criminal comes from Kachava. 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Amos Lane's arraignment took place in Utkiyogviks Courthouse on Friday, August 6, 1993. I was surprised when I opened the doors. Usually, the courtroom was pretty quiet and empty, especially on a Friday docket. It was packed. The entire Epolyn family was there looking exhausted. There were a large number of community members there. Some of them out of concern, young mothers and elders. And then a certain percentage of people were there because simply because there's no movie theater and court watching was a bit of entertainment or diversion. So I went up and I took my place beside Amos, I wish I wasn't dragging my suitcase, and I wished very much that I'd had a chance to talk to him before court began because I had to make a bail argument on his behalf. Rebecca says that even though Amos was in court for the misdemeanors, unrelated to the murder of Bernie Sinwanda Apalok, a lot of people suspected that he had killed them. Rebecca remembers thinking he'd been arrested on the misdemeanor charges as a way to keep him from leaving town, while investigators tried to find enough evidence to charge him with murder. What were the charges that they were holding him on? There was one he was charged with assaulting a man named Harold Kilbear. Amos whispered to me that Kilbear was hitting his girlfriend and Amos just tried to stop him, and of course there was no way I could really argue that to the court at that time. And I asked Amos not to be whispering to me. The courtroom was packed and everyone in the courtroom in that small town was a potential juror, so we couldn't afford to be whispering and looking like conspirators. The other case, he was charged with stealing ivory from a prolific ivory carver. The final charge was that Amos had violated his parole conditions. After his prior rape conviction, he'd been released into a rehab facility in Ukiagvik. He'd been allowed out for the weekend that the Apalok sisters had been killed. And he had violated his parole conditions by going out and drinking as he had done. Amos told Rebecca that his rehab counselor was there in the courtroom. They were still waiting on the hearing to begin. So Rebecca quickly went to speak with the counselor. I asked him what kind of issues Amos was dealing with. And he said grief issues from the death of his mother. He said that in the community of Point Hope, which is even smaller and more remote than Ukiagvik, she had been dragged into a house by three men raped and tortured to the extent that she died the following day. Rebecca later learned that Amos had been a teenager when his mother died and started drinking at a very early age. During the bail hearing, Rebecca called the rehab counselor to the stand. And had him explain that in his opinion, Amos was still in compliance with his conditions of remaining entreatment. So the upshot was the magistrate dismissed that case and set the other coupcases for trial, and Amos was allowed to return to the treatment facility. Tell me what were your next steps? What did you else to do learn about the case? At that time, I realized, of course, that public safety is under a huge amount of community pressure to solve the case, actually pressure from the governor's office, and from all over the state. So when they said they wanted to talk to me, I went over to public safety offices to meet with them. It was unusual that they would request the presence of the public defender. So they started to ask me what Amos had told me during a raid, but Amos told me nothing. He didn't tell me anything during a raid, but he didn't tell me anything when I went to see him at the jail. He never confided in me, never trusted me enough to tell me anything, but public safety thought that he had, and they wanted the names of his relatives and any other information I could give. And of course, I said to them that I didn't have any such information, and I wouldn't give it to them if I had. And it was them that I realized that they had a running tape recorder and a drawer, and they were trying to, that was quite illegal, they were trying to record me divulging some kind of confidence from my client. Of course, I didn't have any confidence and would not have divulged it. So I left that interview quite angry. Rebecca started to play together. timeline of the weekend the appolic sisters had been killed. She wanted to figure out who last saw them and when. Amos had returned to his rehab facility by Sunday night, but the sisters hadn't been found until Tuesday, so if anyone had seen them after Sunday night, Amos would have an alibi. Investigators interviewed dozens of people, but a lot of them couldn't remember exactly when things had happened that weekend. It was summer, so the sun never set. What if the next three days, the sun just shown continually? There's no twilight, there's no peaceful dawn, there's no noon, there's just continuous endless dazzling sunlight. Under those circumstances, particularly if it goes on for weeks and even months, little differences like whether it's Friday night or Saturday morning. They don't seem to matter anymore. Time itself becomes different. Bernice and Wanda's neighbor said that Bernice had stopped by sometime over the weekend to borrow a cigarette. And he remembered vividly because he was annoyed. She'd kept the pack instead of taking one or two. But he couldn't remember if this was on Saturday, Sunday, or even Monday. By this time I had quite a network of former clients and I went to see an individual whom I had represented previously who was a different distant relative of Amos's. This fellow, his name was Nate, was reluctant to talk to me. He was fed up with the court system. But Nate finally told Rebecca about something he'd seen the weekend Bernice and Wanda had been killed. He had seen Amos riding someone's three wheeler that Amos was very intoxicated. That Bernice and Wanda were very intoxicated and that Amos was following the young women on his three wheeler. We'll be right back. Support for criminal comms from Wayfair. If you're hosting family and friends, you might feel like your home is in need of an update. If that's the case, you should check out Wayfair. For all things hosting, Wayfair delivers high quality, customer trusted products for your home so you can host and celebrate without this dress. Maybe you could use some new coasters or a nice tea tray to serve hot drinks or maybe a couple of holiday themed mugs. And with Wayfair verified, you can rest assured you're getting quality. Every product is hand-vetted by product specialists using a 10-point quality inspection. I could use a new rug or a mat for my Christmas tree this year. And Wayfair has lots of options from rotating tree stands to embroidered rugs. When refreshing your home this holiday season, Wayfair delivers exactly what you need. Head to Wayfair.com with code criminal to shop all things home. That's spelled W-A-Y-F-A-I-R dot com code criminal. Support for criminal comes from what not. When you're selling online, getting your products in front of the right people isn't always easy. What not lets you connect directly with buyers who are ready to shop. What not is the largest live shopping platform where sellers are building real businesses around everything from beauty and collectibles to electronics, luxury fashion and even cookies. Whether you're just starting out or already running an established business, anyone can sell on what not. And you're doing more than just listing products. You're building real connections with buyers. All you have to do is go live, showcase your products in real time and turn what you love into real income. One of our producers tried out what not as a buyer, shopping for a bandana for her dog. And she found lots of great handmade options in different kinds of colors and patterns. Download what not today and get $20 of your first life purchase. Search what not spelled W-H-A-T-N-O-T in the App Store, sign up and take a shopping trip, term supply. Rebecca Wright Stevens was expecting her client, Amos Lane, to be charged with the murder of Bernice and Wanda Apollo. It's a public defender. You are defending people who are guilty. You know, those that have been wrongly accused, but also those that are guilty. When your client might be guilty, but they still deserve defense, how do you square that? I was trained in due process and it is a process. I don't think of them as guilty. I think of them as defendants. And actually in a trial, I always file a motion that they not even be called defendants that they be called by their name. It was never up to me to decide guilt or innocence. During a trial process or during an investigation, if it did become apparent that a guilty verdict was appropriate, there's still a lot of work to be done. Sometimes because of community anger or because of definitions of crimes, a person is overcharged. And that's a serious type of unfairness. And a public defender can do something about that. Sometimes people are over-sentenced. And that's a public defender job and an appealable issue. Even the guilty are entitled to a fair process. Rebecca says that even though law enforcement suspected Amos, they were having a hard time finding enough evidence to charge him. They started looking at other suspects. A bus driver had told inspectors that Bernice's fiance, John Adams, had been on a bus headed home late Saturday night, and that John said he and Bernice had just had a big fight. John later told investigators that Bernice had thrown her ring in his face. When John went home on the last bus that evening, the bus driver who knew John saw him looking very despondent and saw him holding the ring in his hand. At that time, they lead detective in the case was an individual with whom I had had run-ins before. I felt that many of his tactics were coercive and perhaps borderline. This detective met me in the lettuce section of the grocery store one day and told me that John Adams had confessed to this case and so Amos was no longer a suspect. I was quite surprised. I was also quite dubious. Then Rebecca heard from Amos that he'd received a subpoena from the state to testify to back up their case against John Adams. They expected that Amos would testify that yes he had been with the sisters that night and then the state could explain is that's why John Adams flew into a rage. That's what the argument was about. That's why Bernice threw the ring at him and that's why he flew off the handle and the double homicide resulted. But under the Fifth Amendment, prosecutors couldn't force Amos to say anything that might be self-incriminating like the fact that he had been with the sisters that night. So if the state wanted him to testify to back up their story about John, Rebecca said they would have to grant him immunity so that Amos could never be prosecuted in the death of Bernice and Wanda. I felt very uneasy about that deal. I felt that's one thing about working in a small town. You know all the players so well. Knowing that detective, I felt that he probably had been coercive. I didn't really believe that John Adams had confessed. So it troubled me that Amos was being offered immunity. But that when any client is offered immunity, that's a wonderful opportunity or deal. And so it's not a public defender role to say no you can't do that. So he got his immunity. John Adams trial began in July of 1994 about a year after Bernice and Wanda Apolic had been killed. John's lawyer brought in an expert in false confessions to testify. And this individual explained to the jury how exactly what are the mechanics of coercing testimony from a defendant. The ways in which a defendant can be brow beaten into saying things that he doesn't believe or going along with things that he doesn't even remember. The jury was shown the video of John's confession. In it, a detective asked John questions like, "You loved her, but you just lost your temper, right?" and said things like, "I sympathize with you, man. Someone can drive you crazy, we all know that." John is sitting there, tear-streaked face, obviously exhausted, not remembering details any longer, being badgered endlessly. And I could watch the body language of the jurors. They began to cross their arms over their chest or put their heads in their hands or and somewhere just deliberately looking away, trying not to follow it any more. Then Amos was called to the stand and was sworn in. Rebecca says at first he seemed confident. But then as the district attorney began to ask questions about the evening that Bernice and Wanda died, Amos began to grow visibly nervous and evasive. And he admitted that he was drinking. He admitted that he saw the young women when the DA said, "And then you went over there, right? No, I never went over there." But Rebecca says the prosecution's argument depended on Amos being there. In their version of events, John Adams had found out that Amos was spending time with his fiance, and that's what made John mad enough to kill the sisters. While Amos was still on the stand, the prosecutor revealed that investigators had found something tangled up in blankets at Bernice and Wanda's house, a part of a key from a three-wheeler that belonged to Amos's uncle. Amos had just testified that the weekend the sisters were killed, he'd burrowed his uncle's three-wheeler. Then the prosecutor said that they'd found something else, underneath Bernice's body. It was a card with an appointment reminder on it for the rehab facility where Amos had been staying, and it had Amos's name on it. In the courtroom, Rebecca remembers everyone was staring at Amos on the stand, and at first Noah noticed John Adams, who had stood up from the defense table, and moved towards Amos as if to attack him. Rebecca remembers someone in the courtroom screamed, the judge had to clear the courtroom for a break. The fact that he was there, of course, does not in and of itself mean that he killed the young women. It could easily have been that they just watched TV or played cards or drank, but it did not mean that he killed them, but there was evidence that he had, in fact, been there. A lot of the sewer hearing for the first time. The part that truly disturbed me and that I woke up the night after the trial, I still find this disturbing to think about. The coroner testified that the bodies were moved at some point. Not kind of stuck in my head. How would that have played? Who was there later? Why would the bodies have been moved? Why don't we know who that was? And then it occurred to me to wonder, was it Amos who went back? Was he looking for the appointment card? The appointment card with his name on it? The one that had been found beneath the body of Bernice Apollock was that who had moved the bodies, and I had no answer to that question. The jury left to deliberate at six o'clock later that day, and at 9/15 Rebecca heard that they had reached a verdict. They found John Adams, not guilty, and cleared of all charges. John continued living in Utt-Giagvik, and with the support of his in-laws raised the young daughter he'd had with Bernice. Amos Lane, who had immunity for the murders, was charged with perjury because he lied about not going to Bernice and Mwanda's house. He pled no contest, but was released for time served. Rebecca stayed in Alaska for a few more years, but in 1997 she moved to Kentucky, after reconnecting with an old classmate from law school, a man named Jim. They got married, and both started jobs with the Kentucky Department of Public Advocacy. She heard that Amos Lane moved to Anchorage, and started an ivory carving business. In 2016 she came across a news story about him. He disalted a police officer and pled guilty to felony assault. Six years later, in 2022, Amos was fatally shot by police officers after he pulled a gun at a traffic stop. Bernice and Mwanda of Pollock's Abituary said they left behind a big family, and that a memorial fund had been set up for them through the Utt-Giagvik Presbyterian Church. No one has ever been convicted for the murders. Rita Wright's Stephen's book is "Sisters of the Midnight Sun" or "Murder in Arctic Alaska" will have a link in the show notes. Criminal is created by Lauren Spore and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajiko, Lily Clark, and Lena Cellison. Our show is "Mix and Engineered" by Veronica Semonetti. Julie now-exander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at ThisIsCriminal.com, and you can sign up for our newsletter at ThisIsCriminal.com/newsletter. We hope you'll consider supporting our work by joining our membership program, Criminal Plus. You can listen to Criminal This Is Love and Phoebe Reed's Mystery without any ads, plus you'll get bonus episodes. These are special episodes of me and Criminal Co-Creator Lauren Spore talking about everything from how we make our episodes to the crime stories that caught our attention that week to things we've been enjoying lately. To learn more, go to patreon.com/criminal. We're on Facebook at ThisIsCriminal, and Instagram and TikTok at Criminal_Podcast, where also on YouTube at youtube.com/criminalpodcast. Criminal is part of the VOX Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.