6. Murder and Meh

and the look of Olie's. Fact Paisley committed at least five murders and three bombings. Fact. Paisley and Peggy started a business, Max Inc. Shortly after they married in nineteen Fact, Paisley and Peggy's partner, the company's vice president, was a man named Danny Zivinage. Fact, Peggy received a windfall of cash after Nick, her first husband, disappeared. These things we can prove now. Claims, and again these are Jerry Paisley's claims,

not mine. Claim Peggy Beggett met with mob boss Joe Banano in the summer of nineteen seventy two, right before Nick Baggetts vanished. Claim Joey Tarrola, a Banana lieutenant nicknamed Joey the I, asked Paisley to carry a locked suit case to Alaska sometime around September nineteen seventy two. Claim Paisley flew the suit case to Anchorage, where he met up with three men, Danny Zevanich, Jean Fowler, and Larry Fowler. Claim Zevenitch later told Paisley that the suit case contained

a bomb and that the congressmen were assassinated. From my Heart Media, this is Missing in Alaska. The story of two congressmen who vanished in nineteen seventy two and my quest to figure out what happened to them. I'm your host, John Waalzac. On January, Paisley reiterated his claims during a follow up interview. He kept naming the same names, including Larry Fowler. Only twenty seven days later, Fowler was shot to death on a remote road in Alaska. And that's

a fact. Are you aware that twenty seven days after Paisley spoke with an agent in prison, that Larry Fowler was murdered? Did you know it was that shortly after Paisley spoke with an agent. Yes, that's Dave Tullis of the Alaska State Troopers, one of three investigators who interviewed Paisley, that whole homicide was a little bit strange also, But Larry Fowler was had a reputation, was not the nicest guy you'd ever want to meet here in Alaska. And

Larry Fowler's homicide was odd. Yes. Why he was apparently drinking late at a club. He was the owner of a pawn shop. Uh. He called for a taxi. I don't know where his vehicle might have been at the time, uh, and instructed taxi driver where to go, and he ended up on the upper part of the hillside got really he had fallen asleep, woke up, was really disturbed. As I recall it, he pulled out a handgun and threatened

the text cab driver. According to the surviving member of this which was a text cab driver, task cab driver just happened to have a weapon in his vehicle. He pulled it out and immediately shot Larry Feller. The cab driver said he acted in self defense. This task cab driver did not have a history of crime. He was a immigrant to the United States and to Alaska. He

was I believe polish um. But I didn't find anything completely bizarre about his story, except for the fact that he just shot somebody, with the provocation being that he thought his life was being threatened and he was employing self defense. But it was just a strange homicide time. We had other homicides that followed. They were a little bit strange, also involving some Russian immigrants, but this one

was particularly strange because Larry Feller was the victim. The night Fowler died, he had been drinking at an Anchorage bar called the Time Out Lounge. That's where the cabby picked him up. The cabby claimed that Fowler directed him into the hills outside Anchorage. He claimed that Fowler at some point, for some reason, pulled the gun, pointed it at him, and said, you will be dead, motherfucker, you will be dead. He said, he shot Fowler and self defense.

He was afraid, in part because other local cabbies had been murd heard recently during botched robberies. Fowler's family found the story suspicious. Why was Fowler in some random, remote area outside Anchorage. Why would he pull a gun on the driver. Fowler was wealthy, He certainly wasn't trying to rob the driver. The night he died, Fowler was dripping in golden diamonds and he had cash on him on the flip side. The cops didn't believe that the driver

was trying to rob Fowler either. They said the physical evidence backed up the driver's story and he took and passed a polygraph or Lie detector test. So on the surface, it seems that the timing of Fowler's death so soon after Paisley named him as someone with knowledge of the missing congressman's alleged assassination was a pure coincidence. While digging into Fowler's death, I managed to track down one of his friends, Bob Wheel, who had breakfast with him the

day he died. That day, Wheel was raising money for his rotary club. He wanted it Fouler to chip in. The fundraiser was, shall we say creative. My rotary club does an event every year called Moose Marble Madness, and believe it or not, we take two thousand genuine moose nuggets. I don't know if you've ever seen what a moose turd looks like, but they're about this bigger round. They're kind of oval shaped and because of their diet being these birch trees and willow trees and all that kind

of thing. When they take a dump, I mean, it's a solid, oval shaped nugget that's very hard. So we came up with the brilliant idea myself and my dentist and another dentist that was in my rotary club thirty one years ago, and decided to call it Moose Marble Madness. We numbered one through two thousand of these moose turds, and then we had tickets made and we would sell the turds for ten bucks apiece, and we'd go up in a helicopter and they would drop the moose nuggets

out of a helicopter. Anyway, that morning, the day he died, Larry Fowler gave his buddy Bob Wheel a hundred bucks for ten tickets. The next day, when we learned of Fowler's death, he was stunned. He was also confused. Like Fowler's family, he wondered what his friend had been doing on some random, unfamiliar road. Why was he there? A

short time later, we'll hurt an explanation. The only thing I know is that apparently somebody, somebody sent a woman in there from what I have heard, and the woman slipped Larry a piece of paper with her phone number on it and her address and said something in the effect why don't you come see me or visit me

or something. So when Larry left the bar at one or two am, that was the reason for the taxi cab driver being on Rabbit Upper on Upper Rabbit Creek Road was apparently going to this woman's address that was on the piece of paper that Larry had that this woman had slipped him the night before. Fowler was married at the time, so if he was meeting up with another woman that night, it could explain why he was in an unfamiliar place and why it would be kept

hush hush. Well, wasn't the only person who told me this. A second source said he heard the same thing. That source speculated that it was a setup, that Fowler was lured out of the bar and killed for some unknown reason. So who was this mystery woman? Did she know Fowler previously? Probably not, since she had to give him her phone number. Adding to the intrigue, multiple sources told me that at the time of his death, Fowler was funneling illegal contributions

to political campaigns and cash directly to multiple politicians. I've heard names of people allegedly involved in the scheme, but without further proof, I can't disclose them for now. Ultimately, investigators believe the cab driver and in U the Anchorage d A declined to prosecute him. So Larry Fowler, one of five men Jerry Paisley said was involved with or knew of, the alleged bombing of the missing congressman's plane,

was killed before investigators could question him. But what about the other four men Paisley named Joe Banano, Joeya Tarrola, Danny Zivinich, and Jeane Fowler. Banano died in two thousand two. Iya tar Rolla died in I tried to interview Aya tar Rolla before he died, but when I reached him by phone in late he declined to comment and he hung up on me. Zivinich declined multiple requests for an on the record interview, and Jean Fowler, well, wait, we'll

get to him, Okay. So after Jerry Paisley made such startling claims, what exactly happened? What kind of investigation took place? Here's Dave Tullis, the Alaska State trooper. To my surprise,

when I got back with the tapes. Uh, we did a transcript which I looked over and stored the tapes in evidence, and after I decided this was pretty big news and something that needs to be shared with bosses plural, I went to my sergeant and my lieutenant and gave them my transcript and a copy of my notes, and they looked at it for not a long period of time and said, we need to pass this off to the FBI. And they notified the FBI and gave them the transcript. And part of my recollection is that they

gave them the tapes. Now, whether those were duplicate tapes the original tapes, I'm not sure. On December, the FBI's Anchorage office received a copy of the Paisley transcript. That did the bureau to launch a preliminary investigation, led by Special Agent Luianne Henderson. Multiple people described Henderson to me as an outstanding, hard working agent, but for some reason, her investigation into Paisley's claims was by all accounts, cursory, insufficient,

and weak. Mainly, it consisted of reviewing the transcript, looking at court records, reviewing FBI files, and reading old newspaper clips. To my knowledge, Henderson conducted only a single interview on September. That day, Henderson and another agent spoke with Danny Zevenitch, Paisley's former business partner, the man who Paisley claimed told him that the missing congressman's plane was bombed. The FBI's

interview was Zvinich, lasted a total of forty five minutes. Then, on that very same day, the office of the U S Attorney in Alaska declined to prosecute the case, which, funny enough, nobody seems to remember. Bob Bundy, the U S Attorney at the time, told me doesn't remember the case.

Karen Leffler, the assistant U S attorney who handled it directly told me she doesn't remember the case, Whiley Thompson, at the time, the Special Agent in charge or s A C. Of the FBI in Alaska, told me he doesn't remember the case, and former special Agent Lewin Henderson declined a request for an on the record interview in September. The same month, the FBI closed its investigation into Paisley's claims. It replaced s a C. Wiley Thompson with another agent,

Marshall Bratton. Bratton's name is on an FBI document acknowledging that the U. S. Attorney's Office declined to prosecute the case. Bratton told me he doesn't remember the case either. Kevin Friesley, a supervisor in the FBI's Anchor's office at the time, decline interview request. When I reached him by phone, he hung up on me. Danny Zevinich also declined multiple requests for an on the record interview. So basically nobody remembers the case and or nobody wants to talk about it.

It's important to know that Zivinich's bar was at the time a popular watering hole for FBI agents. Many of the same agents who would have been tasked with investigating him were friends with him and hung out at his bar. I'm not insinuating that this was the case with Special Agent Henderson, who to my knowledge was not friends with Zivinach and did not frequent his bar unlike some of her colleagues. But why did the FBI only conduct a

single interview the Zivinach interview. Theoretically the Bureau could have interviewed Larry Fowler, I guess, but to be fair, Fowler was killed only weeks after Paisley first named him, but the FBI never interviewed any of the other people Paisley named. Joe Banano was never interviewed, Gene Fowler was never interviewed, Joey A. Tarola was never interviewed, and Peggy Baggatte wasn't interviewed. The FBI only interviewed one person, Danny Zivinich, for forty

five minutes. The three Arizona and Alaska investigators who interviewed Jerry Paisley before the FBI got involved have serious doubts about how the bureau investigated, or more specifically, failed to investigate, Paisley's claims. Do you think, given the severity and the seriousness of Jerry Paisley's allegations, that it is sufficient enough of an investigation to basically review archives and newspaper club bangs and talked to one suspect for forty five minutes.

I would have to say no, I don't think that's sufficient at all. And one of the things I was cautious about is Arizona doesn't really allow recordings in a penal institution, but the Elastia State troopers insisted, and I insisted that we record the conversation. Had we not done that, there would have been no record of really what happened except our notes. The FBI doesn't record hardly anything. In my experience. They used three O two's where they write

their notes, but they do not record. And I was very pleased that the troopers insisted, and I insisted on recording their conversations, and I was quite surprised that it didn't go any farther than that. In the FBI apparently didn't do an extensive investigation on the subject, and I didn't really know how much they had or had not done, but word filled back over a couple of years, and I thought it was not well done at all. Dave Tullus is a reliable swords if there ever was one.

He served for twenty years in the US Air Force as both a fighter pilot and an aircraft accident investigator. He served for six years as an Alaska State trooper investigating major crimes, including homicides, and later he worked for the Anchorage International Airport Police and Fire Department. Then he retired. Mike Grimes, one of the other two investigators, also had decades of experience, first as a patrolman for the Anchorage Police Department, then on the vice squad, and finally as

head of the department's homicide unit. Getting back to the FBI. When you got back to Alaska, what follow up did you see on what Paisley had told you about the alleged bombing. When I got back, I do you know him telling me this, I knew how big a deal it was, um, you know, to us Congressman might have been murdered while they were in Alaska. I called an FBI agent that I worked with numerous cases homicides and such as am and we met and I told her, and then you know, she said, you know, I gotta

take this right to the s AC, you know. And I at that time I waited till uh we were thinking these murder these talents about if the body showed up or whatever. They were probably trooper cases, you know

from where he's saying, they took them out somewhere. So Dave tall Us took the cassette tapes and had them all transcribed, and the transcription of multiple pages not that thick, and and so I waited until I got the transcript back, and uh so I ran off an extra copy and met with the FBI agent blue Ann Henderson, and I told her about it, and I said, here's the transcript, and I said, this is way way out of my league as far as uh my jurisdiction on such as that.

And she took it and I didn't hear anything from her for three or four weeks, you know, nothing, and uh you know, which really uce me because we had worked so closely on some other cases. Uh. I mean, we did a drug murder where we had to uh again flight Arizona and worked with drug murder and brought the guy back with us. Uh, and he took us to where the body was up in Alaska. But so we had a great relationship and I really a lot of respect for it. Anyway, she came back or didn't

come back with any information. I finally kept calling and calling and uh you know, and she said, well, meet me somewhere. So obviously she didn't want to meet in her office or my office. So we went and met and she said, I said, what's going on? I said, I keep waiting for a phone call with somebody wanting to interview me. And she goes, uh, this ain't being handled out of here. This thing s a C. He

called Washington, and Washington said, don't do anything. You don't put anybody on this, do not open investigations, send everything you got to us. I go, oh okay. Then uh So, I said, well, I would imagine that there whoever they send to look into this is going to be calling me. That only makes sense. I know everybody. I did. That took the statement from him, and uh And I worked with the FBI over and over. I had just graduated from the FBI National Academy the year before that Quantico.

I had been brought to Quantico to instruct on our homicide response team set up. And I've been to Quantico and FBI Academy JE probably seven eight nine times and they're not gonna call me. I mean that. I was amazed. I mean I was brought in the Alaska representative for the founding of the International Homicide Investigator Association, and I

was the Alaska guy then. So I had been vetted by the the FEDS over and over again, and these guys are going to come out of Washington, d C. And they're not gonna call it one guy that knows all these people. That doesn't even make sense. The FBI's investigation went nowhere. Like Grimes and Tullus, Tom Davis, the third investigator, also had a long distinguished career in law enforcement. He worked for decades for the Arizona Department of Public Safety,

focusing for a time un organized crime. Davis told me that other than him Grimes and tell us, someone from the FBI also interviewed Paisley directly. If that's true, and I can't prove that it is, there's no official record of the interview and no information on who conducted it. The Bureau I know for a fact interviewed Jerry Um only because they're answered to me was that we didn't need your approval. And I said back when I said, that's right, I said, did he cooperate? Wow, he's not believable.

It's okay to your knowledge. Was there any more in depth investigation or follow up? No, But a lot of that basically has to do with the fact that the conversation had to do with a person that um, get in line, my friend. Uh, and you you want to push your weight around, that's fine, but get in line. In conclusion, then Tom Davis, Mike Grimes, and Dave Tollis, three seasoned investigators, interview Jerry Paisley in Arizona in November.

Paisley told them that he transported a locked suitcase to Alaska nineteen seventy two that Danny's Ivanache, with whom he and Peggy Begett started a business, told him the suitcase contained high tech explosives and that the missing congressman's plane

had been bombed. The FBI learned about this and conducted a cursory feeble investigation, and the U. S. Attorney for Alaska, the Assistant U. S Attorney, the Special Agent in charge of the FBI in Alaska, and the S A C who replaced him, none of them supposedly remember any of this. I guess it's possible to forget that time in your career when a murderer with mob ties who married the widow of a missing congressman claimed the congressman was assassinated

and that a famous missing plane had been bombed. Is that something you would forget? So the FBI didn't do much and the U. S. Attorney's office declined to prosecute the case. What about the media In the mid nineties and enterprising producer for Dateline NBC named Chris Shoal learned about Paisley's allegations and launched his own investigation. Shoal, who's now an executive at NBC News, did a really good job. I respect him. We had some of the same sources.

One of these sources gave me copies of letters and emails Shoal sent in the nineties and early two thousand's. Typically I would never report the content of another reporter's correspondence. But since so few people investigated Paisley's claims, so many sources have died, and the information is valuable, I'm breaking that rule. And an email sent to a source on September sev Seal wrote that he spoke quote to a

former reporter for the Anchorage Daily News. He won a Pulitzer for reporting on the mafia and Alaska in the nineteen seventies, and he told me my theory was not only plausible, but that law enforcement sources of his speculated about a bomb even back then. Shul continued quote. The reporter told me one of his law enforcement sources took several statements from witnesses that night who reported seeing someone lurking around the plane. I'm trying to locate the officer

who told the reporter this and ultimately those witnesses. So here we have a four time Emmy Award winning investigative producer saying that one of his sources, a Pulitzer winner, heard directly from a cop that witnesses saw someone lurking around the congressman's plane the night before it disappeared. I know that's a chain of so and so heard from so and so, but look at the provenance. A cop told a Pulitzer winner, who in turn told a respected

producer for Dateline NBC. In a separate letter to a different source, which I also obtained, Schol emphasized that he was in no way a conspiracy theorist. Quote. My profession requires skepticism, but I'm also a committed investigative journalist, and frankly, it just seems like something stinks here. He goes on to say that he was quote immensely skeptical of claims made by people like Paisley, who clearly enjoys talking about

his past exploits. That alone may be enough motivation for him to lie, but beyond that, he seems to have little reason to completely fabricate a story, and in fact, large chunks of what he's saying I've been able to document. Honestly, I dreaded asking Schul for an interview. This is just a weird situation for both of us because now not only is schulan executive at NBC News, but specifically he helps to oversee news standards, working on issues of fairness

and accuracy. Typically, he would be one of the people helping to decide whether or not NBC reporters should participate in a project like this. So was surprised that he agreed to do an interview, and I was excited to speak with him. You had the rare opportunity to speak to Jerry Paisley. Did you interview him in President I met him? Um, yeah, not with a camera, but yes, he wasn't a jail um um it was whatever the name of the jail is there in Tucson, the PMA

County Jail, right, that sounds right. And what was what was that experience like meeting him? Um? Weird? I mean I arrived and you know, you go through the normal security stuff with the jail, um, glass reinforced doors, all of that kind of thing, went past the security booth, checked in my my stuff, um and uh, and went

into the room, and it was a small room. Uh. He was sitting across the table from me, kind of at an angle and uh, I he was not wearing handcuffs, um uh and just was sitting there and we kind of shook hands, um and I sat down. He sat down, and that's about when he told me he uh he could kill me right right then if he wanted to, which was you know, I actually thought it was pretty silly. You know. It seemed like he was trying to uh a little bit of bluster, a little bit of a bluff.

I didn't take him seriously, um, but it was I thought a pretty good sign uh as to what this guy was all about. I asked, so what he meant in the nineties when he wrote that quote something stinks here? Well, it was so weird, right, I mean, Paisley was an unquestionably lousy guy. And uh the fact that he was uh later got married to the the wife of a congressman who died, and that he was making claims about having some involvement in that um thinks right. I mean

I don't know what it means. I wasn't able to determine for sure that he was telling the truth. That's clear. But I also wasn't uh aware of any evidence that I came across that would indicate he had a real good reason to lie. Prisoners, you know, guys like that lie all the time, and and they sometimes do it for their own reasons. It's not always clear what their

reasoning is. Maybe he wanted to transfer to another facility somewhere, but from what I remember, there was no real upside to him lying about this, and I, as I had been told, he had also been truthful to uh, you know, on law enforcement officer on a number of other occasions about other things he had been involved with that they sort of knew he had been involved with. So my my conclusion was, this is weird. It stinks. It just by by that, it doesn't mean uh that I had

you know, had this nail down. It means that something wasn't right. Has felt that way to me. Chol said that while he can't prove anything Paisley came across as truthful, I can tell you that when I when I walked in, when I sat down with him, um, I I came away believing him, at least in part and partly because he did not actually fest up to anything that would have made his role look you know, huge, right, He

fessed up to a fairly minor role. Um and and he also professed that he didn't really know why that's my recollection anyway, He didn't really know what he was doing or the purpose of everything behind it. But he played this role, he said, so I to me, I came away because I thought, you know, if this guy was really trying to hype himself, he would have made

himself a bigger character. He was already uh, you know, I think in life imprisoned at that point, he had really nothing to lose by fessing up two more uh, and I found him, you know, I mean, I've interviewed a lot of people through the years who um, who are lying or who have an incentive to life, and I have a pretty good radar for that. There's no way to know for sure with him, but I just found incredible. Seal also spoke briefly with Peggy Baggage. I

assume there's probably nothing you can share directly about that conversation. Yeah, I don't want to get into the details. It's it's fair to say she thought she thought Beasley was a bad guy. Yea. She regretted it you put it that way, but beyond that, I don't want to characterize anything. Ultimately, despite Shul's hard work, Dateline didn't run the story, mainly

because there was no definitive ending. So who was the pulitzer winning reporter who told Schul that witnesses saw someone lurking around the missing congressman's plane the night before it vanished? In an email, should didn't name the reporter, but his description of a reporter who won a pulitzer in Alaska in the seventies narrow sings down significantly. In fact, there are only two people who fit that profile, Bob Porterfield and Howard Weaver. Porterfield and Weaver worked for the Anchorage

Daily News in ninety six. They want a Pulitzer for a series they did on the statewide influence of the powerful Teamsters Union. I tried to interview the men, both of whom are still alive. Porterfield declined requests from on the record interview. Weaver, however, agreed to speak with me, but after our initial email exchange, he stopped responding. Schul said that if memory serves him, it was Weaver, not Porterfield, who told him that witnesses saw someone lurking around the

plane the night before it disappeared. Oddly enough, Weaver's name has come up repeatedly during my investigation, sometimes in unexpected situations. Multiple people, not Chris Shoal, but others, told me that Weaver knows much more about all of this than he's letting on. That he has specific important information about Paisley's claims. So Howard, if you're listening, call me. Around two thousand and award winning Alaska author named Charles Wolf started digging

into Paisley's claims too. Among other people, woll four spoke with Mike Grimes, the Anchorage cop who helped interview Paisley. Grimes said he gave woll four everything he had, but for some reason, woll Fourth never wrote a book like Chris Schal, he dropped the project. According to Grimes, woll four got scared off. Woll Fourth did not respond to recent interview requests, but I did have a chance to

speak with him briefly by phone. In During that call, wll Fourth told me that he dropped the project not because he was scared off, but because he was unable to corroborate Paisley's claims to definitively establish beyond doubt the correct narrative. But there's something odd here. See. Wal Fourth went to high school with Mark Beggatte and Tom beggat He's a friend of the Beggatte family. In fact, he told me that the Beggatte family cooperated with him on

the project. So if you take him at his word, then he was investigating claims made by his friends x step father that their mother had been involved in the assassination of their father, and he was going to publish a book on all of this. Does that make sense

to you? I mean, maybe to get ahead of the story, I guess, But it makes more sense to me that woll Fourth conducted what would typically be referred to as opposition research or OPO to see what dirt he could dig up on Mark Beggatt before Beggetts ran for public office. Shortly after wall Fourth dropped the project, Mark Beggatt was elected the mayor of Anchorage. He served two terms before winning a seat in the US Senate in two thousand eight.

He lost his reelection bid. He lost a guber nottorial bid two Tom begat his brother, is also a politician an Alaska state Senator via email. Tom Beggett's denied that Wolforce research was some kind of OPO project conducted on behalf of the Beggage family, But that's not consistent with what Wolf Fourth, who spent six months on the project, told me. In wolf Fourth said quote, it was kind of a deal where the Beggage has welcomed me to

work on it before Mark ran for mayor. I think they wanted to know what's the worst out there, and if I found anything, I was going to publish it. I was going to do a book. Wolf Fourth didn't publish a book, but he did go on to work as a consultant and speechwriter for Mark Beggatt from two thousand three to two thousand nine. So, in conclusion, before me, there were at least two other j analists who investigated Paisley's claims, Chris shal the Dateline producer, and Charles Wolfforth,

the author. However, Paisley's claims were never made public until that's when I published fore Gone, an initial story on my findings, and that year I pitched my research to every major news outlet in Alaska, every newspaper, every magazine, every TV station, every news radio station. Not a single outlet in the state reported anything I found, And you know what, I respect that. Okay, nobody owes me anything, obviously,

but this isn't about me. These were serious claims about a missing politician that prompted a previously unreported FBI investigation, and I made clear that I wasn't alleging anything. I did not pitch the story saying the plane was bombed. I pitched the story saying Jerry Paisley claimed the missing plane was bombed. I offered to connect reporters in Alaska to my own sources. I offered to provide documents. In the end, only a single allowsk of reporter interviewed me,

and then that reporter didn't air the piece. In my opinion, Paisley's claims deserved to be investigated. Here we have a convicted murderer with documented mob ties who married the widow of a missing congressman and claimed he played a part in the death of the congressman. So why did the Alaska media ignore this story. I'm not entirely sure, but I can make a few educated guesses. First, it's toxic. Alaska is huge land wise, but it has a small

insular circle of political and media elites. Why rock the boat? Why piste off a powerful political family in the state the Beggage is Second, I think there's general sympathy for the Beggage kids, which I understand. They lost their dad at a young age. They suffered a horrible loss and lifelong grief. Honestly, I feel bad for them. Third, the story is complex. It's easier to ignore than to investigate. I mean, here I am nine years later. Fourth, I

was just a freelancer. It was easy to ignore me. Thankfully, though, I did get some press. In November, my friend and former colleague at Seattle Weekly, Rick Anderson, a really amazing old school reporter who later died, wrote a cover story on my findings. It was Seattle, not Alaska, but Seattle is the closest major American city to Alaska, and I'll always be grateful to Rick for writing that story. Rick's

story opened Pandora's box. After it ran, I got many new tips, including one which really blew me away, a tip from a reliable source who said they may have found part of the missing plane. So later, in part because of that tip, we're going to Alaska. But first we're going to Arizona next time on missing in Alaska and your father met him at the airport. My father, Yes,

Oh wow, did you did you not know that? No? No, this is the only thing I know about anything to do with with with with What I think you're talking about is Jerry was telling people there's a real big deal about to go down, and that was right about the time that the that the baggage plane went down. But uh no, this you're blown me away with this. Before we go, two things. First, we're dropping a bonus

episode this week. It's the full text of a never before published report on Jerry Paisley, prepared by a private investigator for Dateline NBC. So check it out. Second, something new an epilogue. Two years after the FBI ended its investigation into Jerry Paisley's claims, the bureau got an interesting new lead. A tipster whose name is blacked out in records I obtained, sent the FBI copies of letters exchanged between two people who discussed the alleged assassination of the

missing congressman. The names of these two individuals are blacked out, but let me read you part of an official FBI document with the word blank substituted in for redacted sections. Quote.

The correspondence, which covers the period September twelve to October thirty one, consists of letters allegedly written by Blank to Blank that he had a conversation with Blank in which Blank claims that while in Alaska nineteen seventy two, he and Blank placed the bomb aboard Congressman Hail Boggs's plane. Blank allegedly told Blank that the bombing was carried out on the orders of his boss, alleged Blank, who was

doing a favor for Hoover. According to Blank, Congressman Boggs wanted to cut the budget of the FBI, and Hoover wanted Boggs taken out. So again, that's part of an official FBI memo. Now here's something written by the tipster who forwarded the mysterious letters to the bureau. Quote the Hoover angle sounds far fetched to me. A convict conning a convict. On the other hand, however, the insurance motive

obviously could have some basis in fact. At any rate, I will keep you informed if there are any subsequent letters. This is absolutely fascinating. Someone somehow got copies of letters exchanged between two people, two convicts, apparently discussing the alleged assassination of the missing congressman. Was one of the convicts, Jerry Paisley. Maybe maybe not. I don't know something else

that's very interesting. The mystery letters covered the period of September twelve to October, so the letters start on September. That was exactly one day before the FBI interviewed Danny Zivinach, one day before the U. S. Attorney's Office declined to prosecute the case. So your task this week involves these letters, specifically the tipster who sent them to the FBI. The FBI blacked out nearly all of the tipsters information, nearly all.

At the bottom of the tipster's letter, still visible in the footer, you can see the following Vanderbilt University one two zero seven eight Avenue South, Nashville, Tennessee three seven to one two telephone six three two one nine five six eight facts six to seven zero seven seven eight. So whoever sent the FBI the mystery letters in used Vanderbilt University letter head. If you know who sent the letters, or you are the person who sent the letters, please

contact us. You can reach us by phone at one eight three three m I A tips that's one eight three three six four two eight four seven seven again one eight three three six four two eight war seven seven, or you can reach us via email at tips at i heeart media dot com. That's tips, T I P

s at i heeart media dot com. An important note, none of the people Jerry Paisley claimed took part in or had knowledge of the alleged bombing Joe Bonano, Joey A. Tarola, Danny Zevianich, Gene Fowler, Larry Fowler, or Peggy Baggage where ever charged with or convicted of crimes tied to any of Paisley's allegations. Ben Boland is our executive producer. Paul Decan is our supervising producer, Chris Brown is our assistant producer, Seth Nicholas Johnson is our producer. Sam T. Garden is

our research assistant. And I'm your host and executive producer, John Wallzac. You can find me on Twitter at at John Wallzac j O n W A L c z A K special thanks to Tom Davis, Mike Grimes, and Dave Tullis for having the courage to speak out while so many others remained silent. Missing in Alaska is a co production of I Heart Media and Greenfork Media. H