Roger Ellis - AK-239

Ketchikan was a small town, filled in spring and summer with mostly cruise ship tourists wandering up and down Creek Street. Creek Street is a fun place, built entirely over a creek filled with thousands of salmon during spawning season. I overheard a tourist there once say:

“Why are we taking a boat fishing, I could just fish here!”

I thought, “What’s the fun in that?”

In season, thousands of tourists, dodging the rain, would buy all sorts of crazy, worthless, Chinese made trinkets, from a variety of brightly painted little shops, pretty much all owned by the cruise lines!

At a glance, about all there was to see in Ketchikan were tourist traps, rain and totem poles!

When I get back I’ll probably walk downstairs to the New York Cafe and celebrate Christmas with all the other lonely drunks. The guy I met last night worked at about the only jewelry shop left open in town. The jeweler was in bright, ruby red shoes. He was very depressed that he hadn’t convinced anyone “in days” to purchase a “top quality diamond” from him.

I wish the Great Alaskan Lumberjack Show was playing down by the dock.

Log rolling!

Those were the days.

The Willamette River in Portland, Oregon in July. Doug Meyers! What a jerk! He would cut a log lose from a pack then would dare me to knock him off the log. He and I would run on the floating logs to see who’d hit the river first. I think I held the neighborhood record.

Of course, Doug might have a very different version of this story.

Nothing much floats in the Willamette River today other than house boats, dead fish or dead bodies.

Anyway, my hotel room was upstairs just across Stedman Street where I could see the docks and the cruise ships. But since this is winter, no cruise ship is in port. I was so close to the water that I could literally walk across the street and fall into the Gulf of Alaska.

Technically, it’s the Thomas Basin but hey, it’s the same body of water.

I’d gone to Ketchikan on fishing trips in the past but this was business.

I’d volunteer for any dangerous job but this one was “supposed to be” boring and routine.

Ya, it was Christmas Eve.

Ya, I’d be spending another one on the road but I didn’t have anything better to do.

I had no family in Oregon and if this is George Ruddy, there would be no better Christmas present to innocent citizens, anywhere he was, than to put this guy behind bars.

I had no plans for tonight anyway.

However, this night I would never make it back to Ketchikan.

Little did I know that the next two days would change my life forever.

I was to rendezvous with another FBI Special Agent out of the Juneau office and arrest a felon by the name of George Ruddy. Now George had managed to convince the local Sheriff’s office in Clackamas County, Oregon that he was dead, not a small feat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prince of Wales Island is huge.

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

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

That’s right 1,000 miles of coastline.

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

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

“We’ve all become more enlightened since President Obama’s Hiroshima speech earlier this year that called on the world to ban nuclear weapons. At that time, the Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzō Abe, agreed. However since then, Japan has become concerned that the United States would be the only major power in the world to commit to “No First Use.” Meaning the United States would not be the first to use nuclear weapons in the event of a crisis. Many countries such as Japan rely on the United States as an umbrella to help protect them against aggression from their neighbors. Without that umbrella, Japan and others, are threatening to develop their own nuclear weapons. Russian President Ivan Mironovich has stated that Russia would not sign an agreement pledging no first use.”

I just didn’t really pay much attention to global politics.

Again, looking back, I should have.

The phone rings so I turn off the TV and answer the phone,

“Denning.”

For agents that didn’t know me, I used only my last name, as sometimes that was the only name on my reports.

“Ya, okay, I’ll be right down.” I hung up, grabbed my trusty, black drab, parka, and handcuffs, holstered my Glock 23, .40 Cal, and headed out the door.