Anonymous Call Solves 30-Year Alaska Cold Case Murder

0:00It's fall in Jeep country and during the drive-in-to-fall sales event get a great deal on 4x4s that refuse to be contained like Jeep Wrangler. Confidence built into every drive with the most awarded SUV ever, Jeep Grand Cherokee, and freedom that can't be denied with the open-air freedom in Jeep Gladiator. After 85 years, it's no surprise that Jeep became America's SUV brand, yet a great deal during the Jeep Drive-in-to-fall sales event. Jeep is one more awards-overd's lifetime than any other SUV brand, even the Jeep Gorilla Registered trademarts of FCA-US LLC. Hey, it's Kelly Rowland. You may not know this, but I have Exama, so I get how it can steal your time. But why let Exama take over when you can talk to your doctor about Epglis? Epglis, Lebrichizmab, LBKZ, a 250-mg per 2-mg-liter injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older, who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kg with moderate to severe Exama. Also called a topic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin, or topicals, or who cannot use topical therapies,

1:02Epglis can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you are allergic to Epglis. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. I problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have newer, worsening eye problems, you should not receive a live vaccine when treated with Epglis. Before starting Epglis, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Paid partnership with Lily. Respect your time. Ask your doctor about Epglis and visit Epglis.com or call 1-800-LilyRX or 1-800-545-5979. Your path to pharmacy can be closer than you think. West Coast University's hybrid doctor of pharmacy program can be completed in as little as 33 months, and no bachelor's degree is required to apply. If you've started pharmacy coursework elsewhere, WCU may accept eligible transfer credits to help students keep moving forward. Learn online, train hands on at our Center for Graduate Studies in Los Angeles, and prepare for real-world pharmacy practice. West Coast University, as real as it gets, visit westcoastuniversity.edu. WCU cannot guarantee employment. Have you ever kept a secret?

2:02Oh boy. And I mean, I'm not talking about a small one, right? Like, I'm not talking about throwing a surprise party for someone, or maybe like a piece of borrowed jewelry that you accidentally lost and just quietly replaced, you know, hoping nobody would ever notice. Right. The everyday secrets. Exactly. I want you to imagine keeping a secret so incredibly heavy, just so entirely defining that it actually manages to outlast the very person you were when you made it. Like a secret that takes up this permanent residence in your chest for decades. Silently shaping every single decision you make from that point forward. Yeah, that's heavy. It dictates where you live, who you trust, the relationships you try to build, and just what you see every time you look in the mirror. Well, the human brain just is not evolved to carry that kind of compartmentalized trauma indefinitely. It really isn't. Right. It's this profound psychological burden that fundamentally alters your mental architectures. Who can physically change this thing? Exactly. Most people will thankfully never know what it feels like to carry a concealed lethal truth like that.

3:08I mean, we understand guilt in these short acute bursts, you know. Sure. Like stealing a candy bar as a kid or lying to a partner. Right. But a generational decades-long silence. That's an entirely different category of human endurance. It requires this daily active expenditure of cognitive energy just to keep the vault door closed. And we are plunging into the mechanics of that very vault today on this deep dive. We really are. We're pulling from this absolutely fascinating source report published by Fox News. And it details the sudden jarring resolution of a 30-year-old cold case up in Fairbanks, Alaska. Yeah, 30 years. And usually, you know, when we hear about these decades-old mysteries being solved today, they follow a very specific, almost comforting technological script, don't they? Oh, totally. Like genetic genealogy. Yes. We always expect to hear a story about a distant third cousin uploading their DNA to a family tree website. Right. Or some revolutionary micro forensic technique where they pull a single microscopic skin cell off a decades-old piece of duct tape.

4:11Exactly. But we are looking at something completely different today. We are because there was no sudden leap in forensic science that initially broke this case open. Not at all. There was no surprise witness who woke up from a coma or suddenly remembered a license plate 30 years after the fact. This investigation was abruptly cracked open by the alleged killer's own anonymous confession, which is just wild to think about. It really is. I mean, the technology came later, but the inciting incident here was purely psychological. Okay, let's unpack this. Our single guiding source today is this detailed news report laying out the timeline, the grim discovery, and the ultimate arrest in this monumental mystery. Right. An arm mission for this deep dive is basically to deconstruct the anatomy of a buried crime. Yeah, we're going to analyze the intense, almost crushing physics of a guilty conscience over time. Because it really is like physics, isn't it? Pressure building up? Absolutely. And we're also going to examine how the incredibly brutal elements of the Alaskan wilderness played this dual, almost paradoxical role.

5:15Right. We want to understand how nature itself can both hide a crime for a lifetime. And then significantly delay its resolution even after the truth is finally spoken aloud. It's a brilliant collision of geography, human psychology, and just the relentless mathematics of time. When you evaluate the facts presented in the source material, you are looking at a story about endurance. Endurance, yeah. Endurance of the victim's memory, the absolute unforgiving endurance of the landscape, and the agonizing corrosive endurance of guilt. And for you listening right now, whether you're catching up on true crime developments or maybe you're prepping for a psychology class, or just looking for something fascinating to absorb on your commute. The underlying current we're exploring today is really human nature, specifically that universal human inability to outrun one's own past. Right. No matter how many state lines you cross, no matter how many calendars you throw away, the past maintains this relentless gravitational pull. It's the ultimate tether, isn't it?

6:15It is. I mean, you could change your location, you could change your profession, your marital status, your entire life context, but you take your brain with you. Yeah. The exact same mind that processes the sensory details of an event in 1993 is the mind sitting in a living room chair in 2025 trying to watch television. The geography changes, but the hardware recording the memory does not exact. That takes us right to the beginning of the timeline, establishing our source November 1993 back to the start. The report introduces us to the victim. His name was Patrick Orville, dearth, right? He was 34 years old when he was reported missing to the Fairbanks Police Department. And he just vanished just going and for over three decades, investigators had absolutely zero answers. I mean, the trail didn't just go cold, it evaporated totally dormant. The case went completely dormant. Then the article introduces us to the suspect Christopher Pops, who is 54 years old at the time of his arrest in Michigan in July of 2026.

7:15So what's fascinating here is the sheer mathematics of time. They provide a crucial subtext about the power dynamic at the time of the disappearance. Let's do the math on that. Right, if we look strictly at the text, we have to do a little bit of reverse engineering. So Christopher Pops is 54 in July, 2026. Okay. That means back in November 1993, he was only about 21 years old. Wow. We 21. Right. And Patrick Deerth, the victim, was 34. We know from the report that they're coworkers. Oh, right. So right away, we have this very specific workplace dynamic. A 34 year old established man and a 21 year old who was barely into actual adulthood, navigating a shared environment. A 13 year age gap in a blue collar workplace is massive. It's huge. You're talking about a significant difference in life experience, in emotional regulation, and in authority. Whether that authority is official on the payroll, we're just socially understood on the shop floor. Exactly. Because a 21 year old is often still figuring out their baseline identity, you know, operating on impulse.

8:19Yeah, the frontal lobe isn't even fully developed yet. Right. Whereas a 34 year old is generally much more cemented in who they are. So when you extrapolate the psychological burden of time, based on that specific age gap, it just becomes staggering. Yeah. Pops lived with this secret for roughly 33 years. 33 years. He carried this ghost from Fairbanks for significantly longer than he would even been alive at the time the alleged murder took place. That is, I mean, that's hard to even wrap your head around. His entire adult life, three solid decades, built in the shadow of an action he allegedly took when he was basically still a kid. I'm really trying to visualize what a cold case actually looks like mechanically within a police department. Because to me, it feels like a library book that has been misfiled in a massive sprawling chaotic national archive. That's a great analogy. Like the information exists, right? The physical object, the file, the evidence, the location of the victim. It's right there somewhere in the universe.

9:19But because the index card is missing because there is no digital tag pointing to it, it could sit untouched for centuries. Unless someone walks into that library, walks past millions of other books, points to one specific spine on one specific dusty shelf, and says, look right here. Exactly. Nobody is ever going to find it otherwise. Without that guiding finger, the mystery remains permanently swallowed by the sheer volume of the world. And that is a highly accurate representation of how law enforcement confronts true cold cases, especially in a geography like Alaska. Oh, I can only imagine. The universe of possible locations for a missing person in the Alaskan interior is unfathomably large. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of square miles of dense forest, tundra, deep lakes, mountain ranges. Right. Without a specific data point, the search area is essentially infinite. And a missing person case in 1993, before cell phone tracking, before ubiquitous CCTV cameras on every street corner. Before we all had a digital footprint basis.

10:20Exactly. It relied almost entirely on human witnesses. If nobody saw you leave and nobody saw where you went, you simply ceased to exist on paper. Hey, it's Kelly Rowland. You may not know this, but I have XM. So I get how it can steal your time. I let XM take over when you can talk to your doctor about Ebbgliss. Ebbgliss, lubricism app, LBKZ, a 250-mg per 2-mg leader injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older, who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kg with moderate to severe axima. Also called a topic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin, or topicals, or who cannot use topical therapies. Ebbgliss can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you are allergic to Ebbgliss. A allergic reaction can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have newer, worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with Ebbgliss. Before starting Ebbgliss, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Pay partnership with Lilli. Respect your time. Ask your doctor about Ebbgliss and visit Ebbgliss.com or call 1-800-LilliRX or 1-800-545-5979.

11:28Earn your Farm D in as little as 33 months with West Coast University's hybrid program no bachelor's degree required. Eligible transfer credits may be accepted. West Coast University, as real as it gets. Visit westcoastuniversity.edu. WCU cannot guarantee employment. Imagine your friend tells you she's taking an innocent family trip to Greenville, South Carolina. We'll call her Emma. The trip sounds great to you. Hiking at Jones Gap, dinner at Topsoil, a room at the best hotel in town. Harmless, right? Here's the thing. Emma and her family never return from Greenville. They disappear. You search for answers, but nothing adds up. Emma had a great life back home. You guys were best friends. What happened? Well, the truth is, once Emma realized she could have access to Michelin recognized restaurants, nature, local shops, and performing arts all in one place, everywhere else started to seem a little. Emma's vacation is a cautionary tale.

12:29If you're coming this way, don't forget to tell your friends and neighbors goodbye. Visit Greenville, South Carolina, but you may never want to leave. Learn more at visitgreenvillesc.com I want to understand how a person functions day-to-day with that exclusive devastating knowledge. How do you move across the continent to Michigan, build a career, maybe have relationships, go to the grocery store, pay your taxes, all while a massive percentage of your cognitive bandwidth is perpetually anchored to a remote spot of a highway in Alaska. Well, it requires a psychological mechanism called dissociation, specifically compartmentalization. compartmentalization. Yeah, the brain literally builds a wall between the trauma of the event and the mundane reality of daily life. However, compartmentalization is not a perfect seal. The Nut Leaks. It leaks and it requires constant maintenance. Every time pops her to siren, every time a news program mentioned a cold case being solved by DNA.

13:29Every time the month of November rolled around, that wall would take a hit. Wow. The nervous system flares. 33 years of that underlying low-grade home of terror takes a devastating physiological and psychological toll. I have to admit, I am confused by a common cultural narrative here. We always hear this phrase, you know, time heals all wounds. Oh, yeah, we hear that all the time. We say it to comfort grieving people, but in the context of an unsolved mystery where there is zero resolution, I don't see how time heals anything. It really doesn't. Doesn't time actually just compound the trauma for the community and compound the guilt for the perpetrator? Like, if you have a rock in your shoe, walking another 10 miles doesn't heal your foot. No, it causes a blister to turn into an infection. Right. That is a brilliant way to conceptualize it. Time on its own is entirely neutral. Time only heals wounds that have been cleaned, treated, and exposed to the air. It's exposed to the air, exactly. A secret like this is an infection that is sealed off under the skin. For the community and the family of Patrick D'Earth, they are dealing with something psychologists call ambiguous loss.

14:35Amiguous loss, meaning what exactly? Meaning not knowing if you walked away to start a new life, if you was in a fatal accident or if you was a victim of foul play, it creates a psychological limbo. You can't even move forward. Right. The brain cannot process grief. Because it does not have a confirmed data set to grieve over. The grieving process cannot properly begin. That's heartbreaking. It is. And for the perpetrator, the passage of time without consequence creates a very complex internal reality too. The relief of not being caught is constantly at war with the paranoia of impending discovery. Which brings us to the breaking point. The moment the silence finally fractured and that wall he built completely collapsed. Let's jump forward in the timeline to January 22, 2025. The breakthrough. Yes. The Alaska State Troopers receive an anonymous tip. The caller claims to have committed a murder in the Fairbanks area all the way back in 1993. Right. But the source material gives us this one incredibly crucial, deeply bizarre detail.

15:37The spokesperson Austin McDaniel noted that pop said didn't just make one phone call. Right. He made multiple anonymous tips to different Alaska law enforcement agencies, all claiming responsibility for the death. And here's where it gets really interesting. That detail of multiple calls to different agencies is the skeleton key to understanding his psychological state in January 2025. Because it wasn't just a fluke. Exactly. This was not a fleeting moment of weakness. This was not a situation where someone had one too many drinks, picked up the phone, blurred it out of confession, and then hung up in terror, hoping the police wouldn't take it seriously. Yeah. Calling multiple different agencies indicates a systematic, desperate compulsion to be heard. If we connect this to the bigger picture, it reveals a profound internal conflict. One part of his brain is completely overwhelmed by the pressure of the secret. He needs to expel it. He needs someone to know where Patrick Dirt is. The out pressure inside the vault has exceeded structural capacity. Beautifully put, yes.

16:37But his survival instinct is still clinging on. He desperately wants the emotional relief of the confession. But he is still terrified of the immediate physical consequences of giving his actual name. Right. Of handing over his freedom and walking into a prison cell. But why not just call 911 once, give the location and be done with it. Why call the troopers, and then presumably the local Fairbanks police department, or whichever other agencies he reached out to. It's almost like he was shopping around for a reaction. Yes. It is the ultimate psychological push pull. It reminds me of a digital, modernized version of Edgar Allan Pose, the telltale heart. Oh, absolutely. But the twist here is that he isn't hearing the victims heart meat under the floorboards driving him mad. He is actively creating the heartbeat himself. He really is. He is dialing the phone over and over and over again, pinging these different switchboards across Alaska. Because the silence of getting away with the crime had somehow become louder and more unbearable than the fear of actually being caught. He became his own haunting.

17:38And when you analyze why he might have targeted different agencies, you have to consider the physical reality of reporting a 32 year old crime anonymously. What do you mean? Well, imagine you are a dispatcher at a busy police department. You pick up the phone and a voice on the other end refusing to give a name says, I killed someone in 1993. Yeah. Without a body, without a recent missing persons report crossing your desk that morning, there's a very real statistical probability that the dispatcher might just write it off. Right as a prank. A prank, a delusion, or a crank call from someone experiencing a mental health crisis. I don't even think about the intake mechanics of that. The dispatcher is trained to deal with immediate emergencies, right? Car crashes, domestic disputes, robberies and progress. Exactly. A guy calling to talk about 1993 is going to get a low priority or, frankly, a ton of skepticism. Right. So pops might have made that first call, felt this massive adrenaline spike, waited for the CNN breaking news alert to report that police were searching the area.

18:39And then nothing happened. Nothing. The burden of a confession that falls on deaf ears must have been maddening. He finally summons the courage or perhaps the sheer exhaustion to admit to the darkest thing he has ever done and the universe seemingly ignores him. Wow. The system doesn't validate his guilt. So he calls another agency and another. He is practically begging the institutional framework of justice to validate his reality. I am struggling to understand the logic of anonymity here, though. How so? From a modern practical standpoint, how can someone in 2025 call a police station multiple times and actually believe they are anonymous? Yeah. Do you think the anonymity was a shield he genuinely believed in or subconsciously? Did he know that by engaging with modern digital infrastructure over and over, they would eventually trace it back to him? It's a great question. Was the anonymous tip just a thin veil he was begging them to pull down? That is the crux of the modern confessional paradox. On a conscious rational level, he likely took steps he thought were secure.

19:43Like what? Perhaps he used a blocked caller ID, a prepaid burner phone or a voice over IP service routing through a VPN. He told himself, I am safe. But human behavior and extreme stress is rarely that linear? Subconsciously, when you engage in high-risk behavior repeatedly and calling law enforcement to confess to murder is the definition of high risk. Yeah, clearly. You are inviting capture every single call creates a data point every calls a voice recording every call is a ping on a cell tower, a transaction log in a telecom database or an IP address log on a server. Right. By doing it multiple times, he was laying down a massive digital breadcrumb trail. Whether his conscious mind admitted it or not, a part of him wanted the search party to find his front door. He provided the where and the what. He finally gave them the coordinates of the library book. Yes, he did. But as we look at the next part of the source material, we see that giving up the secret wasn't enough to bring immediate closure.

20:44The universe wasn't ready to let him off the hook just yet because the Alaskan wilderness itself stepped in to hit the pause button on justice. This is where the physical geography of the crime becomes just as crucial as the psychology we've been discussing. According to the Fox News report, after these tips came in, the Alaska Bureau of Investigations cold case investigation unit officially took over. Right. They have the tip. It is January 2025. They know exactly where they need to go based on his calls, but the search was drastically delayed. They couldn't actually mount an operation to search the area until May of 2025 for entire months later. Yeah. And the reason given by spokesperson Austin McDaniel is intensely practical, but still absolutely mind blowing for a homicide investigation. The area was buried under deep snow and daylight was extremely limited. We have to really contextualize what winter actually means in the interior of Alaska. We aren't talking about a heavy snowfall in Chicago or New York here.

21:44Right. That's a whole different beast. Fairbanks in January is an environment entirely hostile to human activity. You're dealing with ambient temperatures that can plummet to 40 or 50 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Which is just I can't even fathom that kind of cold. The ground isn't just frozen. Promofrost makes it effectively as hard as reinforced concrete. Furthermore, because of its latitude, fairbanks in January experiences only a few hours of very dim twilight. So it's basically pitch black and freezing. True daylight is non-existent. I want to break down the sheer logistics of that for police department. You have a confession. You have the location. The victim's family, if they've been notified at the tip, is waiting. Right. But you simply cannot get to the physical evidence. The sheer frustration for the cold case unit must have been off the charts. Oh, actually. You are staring at a topographical map pointing at a red dot knowing the answer is right there. But you have to wait for the planet's orbit to change the seasons before you can safely deploy a forensics team. Because deploying a search and rescue or forensics team in those conditions is a massive liability.

22:48Ground penetrating radar fails in deep snowpack. Search dogs cannot effectively sent through feet of frozen ice. Oh, right. The dogs wouldn't even be able to snow anything. Exactly. And equipment batteries die in minutes in 40 below temperatures. They had no choice but to wait. That is just wild. And when they finally did get out there in May, when the spring fall causes the snow to recede enough to make the steep terrain navigable, the discovery precisely matched the grim details of the tips. They found human remains inside a barrel. Yes. Located down a steep embankment near mile 47 of the steese highway. The Alaska State Medical Examiner's office officially identified those remains as Patrick Dirt and formally ruled the death of homicide. Mile 47 of the steese highway. A steep embankment. A barrel. Sitting there. Let's talk about the physics of that for a second. This raises an important question about the sheer physical logistics and the adrenaline of this crime back in November 1993. Right. Because a barrel is not light. Moving a deceased human body is incredibly difficult under the best of circumstances.

23:51It is dead weight, shifting, and uncooperative. Placing an adult victim inside an industrial barrel adds significant weight and awkwardness. Then transporting that barrel 47 miles down a rugged remote highway in the onset of an Alaskan winter. And physically wrestling it down a steep embankment that requires immense physical effort. And panic. Panic and the kind of hysterical strength born of pure adrenaline. What about what happens after the barrel rolls down that embankment and comes to a stop? The snow fell and it fell and it fell. For 32 consecutive winters that freezing Alaskan environment essentially swallow the evidence whole. The environment functioned as the perfect accomplice for concealment. But paradoxically, it was also the ultimate preserver of forensic evidence. How so? Well, in almost any other climate, say a forest in Georgia or a desert in Arizona, the natural decomposition process, aggressive animal scavenging, insect activity, and environmental degradation

24:53would have destroyed much the forensic value over three decades. Right. Nature usually reclaims things pretty fast. But the deep freeze of the Alaskan interior locked that barrel in a state of suspended animation. Wait, I need to stop you there because I'm confused about the science of extreme cold. We are taught in basic chemistry that water expands when it freezes. It's called frost wedging. It's how potholes form in the winter. Yes. Human bodies are mostly water. Wouldn't the repeated freezing and thawing over 32 years caused the bone structure to shatter and break apart? That's a great point. Effectively destroying the evidence of how he was killed. Like, how can a medical examiner look at bones that have been through 32 Alaskan winters and definitively say yes, this is a homicide? That is a highly astute question. You are entirely correct about frost wedging. If remains are exposed directly to the elements, freezing and thawing can cause bone to crack, which anthropologists call weathering or taffinomic damage. Right. However, the key here is the microenvironment. The body was inside a barrel.

25:55This container provided a crucial barrier against direct environmental assault. Oh, see. It kept out large scavengers like bears and wolves, and it shielded the remains from direct precipitation and sunlight. More importantly, extreme, sustained cold, effectively halts bacterial putrefaction. Because it's too cold for bacteria to survive. Exactly. The bacteria in the gut that normally break down a body simply cannot multiply its subzero temperatures. Instead of wet decomposition, you often see a process akin to natural mummification or freeze drying where the moisture supplements. Meaning it turns from ice directly to gas? Yes, it turns from solid ice directly to gas, preserving the structural integrity of the bone, and sometimes even desiccated tissue. So the barrel acted as a protective time capsule, and the cold acted as a preservative? Exactly. When the medical examiner analyzes those remains, they're looking for specific, unnatural trauma. For example, a bullet leaves a very distinct signature on bone, a perfectly round entrance wound with internal beveling and an exit wound with external beveling.

27:01It looks completely different than ice damage. Freeze thought damage causes longitudinal cracking, which looks completely different under a microscope than high velocity ballistic trauma or sharp-force trauma from a blade. The cold restricted the breakdown of the evidence, allowing the pathologist to read the bones like a text. It is poetic justice rendered by geography. It really is. He sought the deepest, coldest dark to hide his crime, and that exact cold kept the evidence viable until the technology and his own conscience caught up with him. But I want to go back to the human element of that four month delay between January and May. Imagine ordering a package that you desperately need, something crucial for your life. You check the tracker, and it just says delayed by weather. But it doesn't say delayed for a day or two. It says delayed for a third of the year. Right. Except we aren't talking about a package of winter boots here. We are talking about a murder investigation. Imagine the psychological state of Christopher Pops during those four months. Let's explore that. He makes the calls in January. He pours this poison out of his soul after holding it in since 1993.

28:06He expects the FBI, the state troopers, the news vans pulling up to his house in Michigan. Right. He's bracing for the impact. And then absolutely nothing happens. Yeah. Because the police can't get to the barrel. It must have been an agonizing paranoid purgatory. Yeah. He knows with absolute certainty made the calls. He knows exactly what he told them. Yeah. Next day turns on the news. And there is nothing. February comes nothing March, nothing April, nothing. Wow. Did he start to think he got away with it again? Did he think the police dismissed his calls as a hoax? Just as we discussed earlier. Oh, man, the tension of that. The tension of waiting for a shoot to drop only to realize the shoe is suspended in mid air. Is a psychological portrait almost literary in its design. He cracked the vault open and the world didn't even notice. Your path to pharmacy can be closer than you think. West Coast University's hybrid doctor of pharmacy program can be completed in his little list 33 months and no bachelor's degree is required to apply.

29:07If you've started pharmacy coursework elsewhere, WCU may accept eligible transfer credits to help students keep moving forward. Learn online, train hands on at our Center for Graduate Studies in Los Angeles and prepare for real-world pharmacy practice. West Coast University as real as it gets visit west coast university dot edu WCU cannot guarantee employment. It's fall in America. Make it count at the Ram Drive into Fall sales event. Make it powerful with our strongest Ram 1500 ever. Make it move with the Ram heavy duty with an available Cummins diesel and make it go the distance with a 10 year or 100,000 mile powertrain limited warranty. Hurry and now for great deals during the Ram Drive into Fall sales event. The road fully electric vehicles apply to 2026 model year vehicles non transferable visit moapart.com for complete details on a copy of the powertrain limited warranty. Cummins is a registered trademark of Cummins Inc. Ram and Hemi are registered trademarks of FCA US LLC. Hi, I'm Tasi Hernandez. As a parent, I know they'll be impressed and make all the difference. I have three young sons and I learn that kids don't just hear, I award, they feel them too.

30:08The way we respond in tough moments, the sense of security we provide, they all matters. When we help our kids to feel hurt and support her, we help and then feel safe and protected. That's why I support first five Scalifornia and their mission to ensure every child has a stronger starting life. Learn more at firstfivecaliifornia.com Once the snow finally melted in May and the medical examiner confirmed the grim truth that this was indeed Patrick Dirt and it was a homicide, the entire focus of the investigation shifted. They no longer had a missing person case, they had a confirmed murder and they had audio recordings of the guy who claimed to have done it. The task shifted from finding the victim and the wilderness to tracing the voice on the phone across the country. Which brings us to the final segment of our timeline, the deeply mundane motive, the digital trace and the gears of the legal system, finally catching their target. This is where the grand dramatic narrative of a 30 year-alaskin wilderness mystery crashes headfirst into the stark banal reality of human conflict and modern bureaucracy.

31:12So what does this all mean? The investigators dig into the tips, they use modern tracing and they identify the anonymous caller as Christopher Pops. Right. And the source report tells us the motive, why did this happen? After 33 years of mystery, after a body frozen in a barrel in the snow, after multiple desperate anonymous calls, it boils down to an altercation at an auto shop in Fairbanks. Yeah. They were co-workers, they had a fight at the shop, and that fight led Pops to allegedly pull a gun and shoot Patrick Dirt. The banality of it is striking, isn't it? It really is. It wasn't a complex conspiracy, it wasn't a carefully orchestrated plot for financial gain. It was a workplace argument that escalated to catastrophic lethal violence. Over absolutely nothing, probably. A life ended, a family devastated, and another life irrevocably tethered to guilt. All over what was likely a trivial dispute on a shop floor. It makes it so much more tragic that she are waste of it all. You read these thrillers or watch true crime documentaries, and the murders always have these intricate, labyrinthin motives.

32:14It's like a movie. Right. But in real life, so often, it is just a moment of unchecked rage in a break room or an auto shop. And then 33 years of silence to cover up 10 seconds of anger. It's awful. But how do you prove that motive 33 years later? The police weren't called to the shop in 1993. There were no witnesses who came forward. How do they know it was an altercation? That information almost certainly comes directly from the confession itself. Oh, I see. When Pops was on the phone attempting to explain himself to the dispatchers, he likely offered the context in an attempt to rationalize his actions. We got into a fight. Things got out of hand. I didn't need to do it. Yeah, framing it a certain way. That is a very common narrative structure in confessions. The perpetrator admits to the act, but tries to mitigate the malicious intent by framing it as a spontaneous escalation. I am still hung up on the tracing aspect, though. I want to understand the mechanics of how they found him. We touched on it earlier, but how do you actually trace a tip line? Grimchair.

33:14I thought crime stoppers and police tip lines were specifically designed to strip caller ID data to protect informants. If the system is denied to make you anonymous, how does the cold case unit reverse engineer that anonymity to find a guy in Kalamazoo, Michigan? It is a complex dance between privacy protocols and law enforcement authority. You are correct that public facing tip lines strip the ANI and ALI data. Which stands for? The automatic number identification and automatic location identification. That data is stripped before the call reaches the dispatcher's headset. The dispatcher sees a blocked number. Okay. However, the telecom provider routing the call still has to connect the physical nodes. The infrastructure requires a log of where the signal originated to complete the circuit. So the data exists, it's just hidden from the person answering the phone. Precisely. Once the cold case unit realized they had a credible confession to a homicide, they wouldn't just ask the dispatcher for a phone number.

34:14They would obtain a subpoena or a search warrant and serve it to the telecommunications company that manages the tip lines routing system. Makes sense. Under laws like Kalea, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, telecom providers must maintain the ability to trace calls for authorized investigations. So the provider has to keep those records? Yes. The telecom provider looks at the exact time stamp of the call, pulls the routing logs, and identifies the originating IP address if it was a Voy IP call, or the originating cell tower if it was a mobile phone. So if he used to cell phone in Michigan, the data shows that at 2.14 pm on January 22nd, a signal bounced off a cell tower in Kalamazoo, hit a satellite or fiber optic network, and terminated at the Alaska State Troopers switchboard. Yes. And from that cell tower ping, they get the IMSI number. That's the unique identifier for the SIM card. They trace that SIM card to a carrier, say AT&T or Verizon. They serve another warrant to that carrier for the subscriber information attached to that SIM card.

35:17Wow. So suddenly the ghost has a name. Suddenly the anonymous ghost has a name, a billing address, and a credit card on file. Even if he used a prepaid birter phone bought with cash, the moment he turns it on, it connects to a tower. Oh wait, really? Even a birter phone bought with cash? Oh yeah. Law enforcement can pull the call detail records for that burner phone. Who else did he call? Did he call his wife? Did he call his work? It is a digital house of cards that collapses very quickly, underscrew to me. It is wild to think about. He thought he was whispering a secret into the dark, but mechanically he was turning on a spotlight and pointing it directly at his own house. Exactly. Once they had the identity and the motive, the legal machinery moved with surprising speed. According to the Fox News report on June 25, 2026, a Fairbanks grand jury indicted pops on two counts of second-degree murder, and an arrest warrant was issued that same day. Let's break down the mechanics of a grand jury and the specific charges, because I know people listening might catch that detail and wonder about it. First, why a grand jury instead of just arresting him?

36:20Well, a grand jury is a constitutional mechanism used to determine if there is enough evidence, probable cause, basically, to bring a person to trial for a serious crime. Right. It is entirely different from a trial jury. It is an X-part A proceeding, meaning only the prosecution is present. There is no defense attorney cross-examining witnesses. So it's just the prosecutor presenting their case? Right. The prosecutor presents the evidence to a group of citizens in this case, the audio recordings of the confession, the medical examiners report, the phone tracing data, and asked them to return a true bill of indictment. Okay, I see. In historical, complex, cold cases, prosecutors prefer grand juries because it locks in witness testimony under oath early in the process, and provides a formal, weighty foundation for an arrest warrant across state lines. That makes perfect sense. But the charge itself is what catches my eye, two counts of second-degree murder for one victim. If he only killed Patrick D'Earth, how can he be charged with two murders? Is that a typo in the source material?

37:22It is not a typo. It is a very common, highly strategic legal practice. Prosecutors will often present alternative legal theories of the exact same physical crime to ensure a conviction. So they aren't saying he killed him twice? No, they're not accusing him of killing the victim twice. They are providing a future trial jury with two different legal pathways to arrive at a guilty verdict based on how the jury interprets pop-sustate of mind during that auto-shop altercation in 1993. Can you give me an example of how those two theories differ? Certainly. In Alaska, the first count of second-degree murder might allege an intentional theory. That during the fight, pop-s specifically intended to cause serious physical injury, and that action resulted in death. Okay, and the second count. The second count might allege a depraved heart, or extreme indifference theory. That pop-s didn't necessarily form the conscious intent to kill, but he acted with such extreme indifference to the value of human life. Perhaps by recklessly firing a gun in a crowded shop, that it resulted in death.

38:24Ah, I see. So covering all bases. By charging both, the prosecutor builds a structural safety net. If the jury doesn't believe he planned it, they can still convict him on the recklessness of the act. At sentencing, the convictions would merge, so you would only be punished for one murder. So they have the airtight indictment in June of 2026. And less than a month later, on July 16, 2026, the Michigan State Police arrest Christopher Popps near Kalamazoo, Michigan. Right. He is locked up awaiting extradition back to Alaska. Think about that geographical trajectory. Fair banks, Alaska, to Kalamazoo, Michigan. It is a cross-continental move. Over 3,000 miles away. He removed himself entirely from the geography of his crime. He was running. You do not leave the rugged, isolated frontier of Alaska for the suburban Midwest, unless you are trying to change your context completely. It's like building an entire house on top of a sinkhole. For 33 years, Popps built a life in Michigan. At 54 years old, he might have a family, a career, a mortgage.

39:26Probably dead. He likely had neighbors who knew him as the quiet guy next door, who waved when he mowed the lawn or shoveled his driveway. But the entire foundation of that existence was completely hollow. It was resting on a secret that was inevitably going to cave in. And it caved in because of his own actions in 2025. Now he sits in a holding cell in Kalamazoo, waiting to be put on a plane and flown back to the exact place he spent 33 years trying to escape. Which is just wow. The logistics of extradition will take time, obviously, navigating governor's warrants between Michigan and Alaska, a raging transport with the US marshals. But the psychological running is finally over. The vault is open. What a massive sweeping arc we have covered today. When you step back and look at the entirety of this deep dive into the source material, it is staggering. It really is an incredible narrative. We started with a routine missing person report filed in the freezing dark of November, 1993, for a 34 year old man named Patrick D'Earth. We navigated the mechanics of 32 years of absolute terrifying silence in police archives.

40:30We explored the psychology of a conscience finally fracturing in the winter of 2025, leading to a desperate flurry of anonymous calls. The multiple calls, yeah. We witnessed the incredible science of extreme cold preservation and how investigators were halted by the sheer force of a lask and snow, turning a four month weight into a psychological thriller. A literal freeze on justice. Exactly. And finally, we arrived at an auto shop dispute that ended with digital tracing, a grand jury indictment, and an arrest 3000 miles away in 2026. It is a testament to the persistence of truth. It demonstrates that actions have permanent echoes. You cannot simply bury a tragedy in the tundra and expect the earth to keep it forever. And for you listening to this, I think the real takeaway here is understanding that truth has an incredibly persistent shelf life. But before we wrap up, I want to leave you with a final somewhat provocative thought to mull over. Oh, okay. Something we haven't explicitly stated yet, but that has been hovering over this entire conversation about modern technology and human guilt. The paradox of the anonymous confession.

41:31Exactly that. Think about it. When you try to confess anonymously in the modern digital age, you aren't actually seeking forgiveness. And you aren't truly seeking justice for the victim. No, you're not. You are just testing the waters to see if the world has forgotten about you. You are checking to see if your crime still matters to anyone but yourself. Right. But the brutal, inescapable irony is that the very moment you reach out to check if the microphone is still on, you give the system exactly the data it needs to find you. The very act of trying to relieve your secret anonymously is exactly what guarantees the world will ultimately know your name. You create the very trap that catches you. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy orchestrated entirely by a guilty conscience. Thank you all so much for joining us on this deep dive into a truly haunting piece of source material. We love deconstructing these mechanics with you. Keep asking the hard questions about how things work. Keep examining the gray areas of human nature and above all, stay curious.

42:32We will see you on the next deep dive.