S4E7: Let's Talk About This

But this isn't his story, it's a human story, one that I've become entangled with. I saw as soon as I turned the corner, basically someone bleeding out. The victims of these brutal attacks were left to pick up the pieces, forced to explore the gray areas between right and wrong, life and death, their once ordinary lives, and mine changed forever.

It kind of gave me a feeling of pending doom. And all the while, our country found itself facing down a long and ugly reckoning with a growing threat far-right, homegrown religious terrorism. Listen to Flashpoint starting July 25th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts up. And Vanished in the Midnight Sun is released every Friday and brought to you absolutely free.

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From Tenderfoot TV in Atlanta, I'm your host Payne Lindsey, and this is up and vanished in the midnight sun.

Hey, it's Payne here today, we're doing an episode that's a little bit different than we've done this season. It felt like it was a good time to sit back and sort of analyze what we've recently heard. Pertaining to Oregon. John and break down in the studio with some of the producers on this show. What our takeaways were from my conversation with him? Since the very beginning, we've heard Oregon John's name. And slowly but surely, we learned more and more information about this person. And when I was finally able to see this person face-to-face and ask him some of these questions, in a lot of ways, his answers spawned even more questions. I'm in the studio today with Mike Rooney, Dylan Harrington and Cooper Skinner, who are all producers here at Tenderfoot. And they were there in the bar when we had this conversation with him. And today, we're going to do something a little out of the box, out of the ordinary in terms of a traditional, up and vanished episode. But I feel like it's very important to break this kind of stuff down before we get even deeper into the story.

I kind of want to hear the perspectives of even our own producers here on what their takeaways were. We were all four there when we were tracking John Down, which was a journey of its own. And I remember vividly landing in Anchorage that one night, and at that point in time, the plan was to fly the next morning to Kodiak, Alaska. But that quickly changed whenever I was messaging him from my fake Facebook and learned that, hey, he's not going to be there. And so we kind of had to think on our feet and decide if we were going to pivot and go try to talk to him right now. And two, who was going to do it, me or my fake Facebook guy? What was your guys take on? Just sort of when the plan started changing and us having to create something new out of seemingly nothing.

I know you talk about that, but if we went there and he's not there. So we really had to make sure on this. And there was no way to really make sure. Until you got to a point where you were talking to him about that.

But then it kind of changed the dynamics of what we were doing in the first place. Because the plan originally was for me to find out where he was going to be. And he was going to hopefully step off the ship and walk down that dock. And I would just be there, waiting for him and just say, Hey, I'm Payne. Lindsay, I want to talk to you about Florence Ocpialek's disappearance. But that changed rapidly as we had more and more conversations about it, and we ultimately decided that if we want to figure out what happened. If we want to actually get closer to that, then we're going to have to do something out of the ordinary here. And leaning into what was already happening and kind of organically evolving and growing. With John talking to this fake person on Facebook, it was a risk that I felt like could maybe yield more information. And I remember just walking into the living room of the Airbnb and looking at you, Cooper. And that clip is in there in the podcast, I go, I'm not from here.

You, you're from Alaska, and you're looking at me, like, Oh God, but at the same time you're like, Hey, actually, what was going on in your head when I said that?

And now the next one's about to begin.

And why did you decide to just jump on board like that?

It was your idea that we kind of both collaborated, where one of us was kind of leading the ship and then the other. One could throw in a fact here and there, just to, you know, calm things down if it got weird.

You know, most of the population there is native Alaskan, but you got all sorts of characters that live there. You know, it has a lot of similarities to Nome, you know, it has a lot of the same culture and a lot of the same architecture. Places like Nome and McGrath are preserved, you know, in a very special way, since it's so remote. You know, people who live in these kind of locations, they learn very quickly how to keep things running, and, you know, use the land to their benefit.

I felt very confident that I would pick up on some of his mannerisms or storytelling aspects of the town or other small towns around Nome. So I just had a lot of backup, so that's why I felt like a little confident going in. But of course, you know, it was crazy at the same time.

One because he had offered to pick me up from the airport and we weren't going to do that. And I didn't want him to be around there or see when I landed if I gave him the honest answer. And I also wanted to go find a place that we could be at and potentially talk to him that we've already scouted out. That is quiet enough, that doesn't have some DJ karaoke night going on, and that we felt was a safe place to talk to him. And so when we touched down, we immediately checked into the Airbnb and within that hour we were suiting up and pulling out our equipment. And I guess Dylan and Mike kind of talked to me about next steps after we landed.

One taxi wasn't enough for both of us in all of our cases, so we had to call a second taxi and it ended up being the same taxi. That took you guys to the place we were going. And then, yeah, it was a bit of a scramble to get everything together, but I think, you know, we've done this enough that it wasn't terrible to get it together. I will say that I'm not super jealous of Cooper being from Alaska.

I'm pretty thankful he's from Alaska, so he was the one who was right next to you talking to him. And I got to kind of stand back a little bit with Dylan. And I know Cooper's also had his moments like in season 3, when he was talking to, or when he was in the car while you were talking to V-Dog.

And it was literally up this big, huge hill that was bumpy, thank God. We were in an SUV. And the first thing that comes through our minds is that there's no quick escaping of this place. You're going to have to go six miles an hour down this hill to leave. But if you remember Season 3, when I talked to this guy named V-Dog, it was a very brief conversation.

He didn't have much to say, but I don't think he made himself look very good either. And actually, since then, he's been arrested by the FBI on other charges, but clearly they've been keeping an eye on him. I'm Dan Taberski. In 2011, something strange began to happen at the high school in Leroy, New York.

But yeah, so Cooper's been in situations like that before, where it's nerve-wracking. And I think that my main goal was to sort of pad my existence there, one-on-one, face-to-face with John, as much as I possibly could. And even down to just the subtleties of two people talking and us looking back and forth. So I can even get a chance to look at him at all and reset and think of a question. Because you have to remember. When we went into this, we were going under the guise of being interested in this job that he has.

And we couldn't just jump right to Gnome Alaska and dig into the details of a missing person's case without looking super suspicious. Unless we really slowly worked our way there, and fortunate enough for us, he was pretty open and he just started talking about his past. And it wasn't very long before Gnome Alaska came up on its own organically.

And Cooper and I had talked beforehand that if he brings it up, we need to say we've been there before and create a conversation about that. And once we started talking about Gnome Alaska and we got into Flo's disappearance and why he left there. That's really when he said some of the biggest and most important things, I think he said in that conversation. And I kind of want to just unpack some of those.

When we were all there in the moment, it's kind of hard to completely digest it as you're hearing it. Because I'm simultaneously focused on making sure I don't blow this somehow. And when he said stuff like, there's a podcast about this case and there's a podcaster. In that moment, I legitimately thought, Well, jigs up, right? And I either show that on my face or we double down right now.

And I just doubled down and tried to ask more questions about it and played stupid. But to me personally, he offered up a lot of information and detail that I'd never heard of before. And, if anything, it makes him, in a more solid way. The last person to be with her, and not only just with her, but, in his own words, with her all night. And we can play a clip of that.

And yeah, yeah. She passed out and in the morning I woke up and she was gone, but I left her shoes in the phone. He mentions that they went to sleep and when he woke up in the morning, she was gone.

He also mentioned that she wanted a place to sleep it off, which based on your interpretation of that, either she was really tired or one could speculate that she was inebriated. We've all been through this tape, we were all there when we heard it the first time. But from you guys, what are your biggest takeaways from some of the statements that Oregon John made in that bar?

He just gave these items over to somebody when they came and questioned him because somebody saw her. Or there was rumor that she went back to his tent, went to West Beach and he's just handing over her items in the morning. And it's like, I would love to just see that, that exchange and see him hand over these belongings of somebody who is never going to show up again. Maybe nobody knew that at the time, obviously no one expected that at the time.

But like, what, what was he like in that moment? And I've always, you know, we've always heard. We've heard the tape of people saying that he handed over these items, but now we have him saying it specifically and what the items are, and that's unprompted.

He just said that out of nowhere, like, Yeah, we were talking about Gnome, or you guys were talking about Gnome, or Florence and the Missing girl, or however it was phrased. But he brought this up, he brought up what was handed over to whoever, and I just thought that was very interesting.

I mean, that's like hard evidence of OK, he also has said in the tape. Because people think I'm the last one to see her, right, OK? And then you're also handing over her belongings, the last belongings we can find that were on her that night.

They think I'm the one who did it when he said he couldn't return to the town. I might be mixing those up, but yeah, that's super interesting that he, he's saying he was the last one to see her. But then, like, I don't know where, she just left in the middle of night when I was sleeping.

It's like, then maybe you weren't the last one to see her? What are you talking about? How do you know that, for sure, that you were the last one to see her? That's a strange thing to say.

I was the last person to see her alive, besides the guy that killed her. And a girl came and hung out in my tent one night and she walked off somewhere and somebody kidnapped her and murdered her. So the guy who fucking really did it, did he get caught or did he fucking anyway?

Did you know that dude who did it? No, I never met him. He was friends with her meth dealer. They conspired together.

That's the thing is up there is. Why would you need to kill a girl? They put out like crazy. Then he brings up at one point that the Nome police are corrupt and they're the ones who are also in on it. And he starts describing for a second about how a Nome police officer raped and killed somebody before Nome is corrupt, you have no idea.

Three times in the last 12 years, the Law Enforcement department has been shut down and taken over by the Feds. They are so corrupt up there, it's crazy. One of the police officers was raping and murdering other girls, I heard that.

And he was basically loosely describing the murder of Sonya Ivanoff from two decades ago. That we had briefly touched on earlier in the season.

Like, what is he doing, why is he suddenly not remembering these facts? And I know you might not remember every fact of everything. But like, who did it and where they found the body is like a very important thing you wouldn't remember. Wrong. That's a strange thing to remember, wrong.

But you remember what items you handed over to the people looking for, and you remember her leaving, and you remember the night before, but you vaguely remember how it ended. Like that doesn't seem you're going to remember if there was a whole search and they found a barrel under somebody's house.

That's that's going to stick in. But he seemed very noncommittal to those details, but he was saying openly again.

It's all over, you know, this is a this is a solved case. And I even mentioned that towards the end of our conversation. Kind of like, why? He was talking about going back to Nome, and if you, if you went back to Nome? Everyone would know who he was. And people are still reaching out to him.

And I was like, why? because they think I'm involved, and I said, but they caught the guy, didn't they and he? He just responded that, Well, they still think that I'm involved.

And so to me, it was just a very specific statement, it was very detailed. I mean, it's not like, like, where did he pull that from? In a barrel under someone's house? That's that's just that isn't true.

I had a friend of mine, she actually called the FBI in because she was working for the guy that killed her. She found the barrel under the house and called the FBI, and the FBI had to rescue me under your house. Buried in a 50 gallon drum.

That girl is telling you about me, and if it is true, then they never found her right, and we haven't found her yet. You have to remember, too, that in this conversation, he doesn't know that we know anything at all about this case.

So he's saying stuff as if it's the first time we've heard anything he wouldn't know. That we could quickly disprove or know for a fact that FLO has in fact not been found, right? And we just kind of played along with that. To me, that's a that's a key thing to remember when listening to John's conversation.

And also that he offered all this stuff up on his own accord, right? I thought going into it that there was a chance, maybe, that we got absolutely nothing, and this lasted 15 minutes.

He's like, you know, send your resume to this website and that's how you get this job and the end, right? But I never had to bring up any sort of missing person for him to start talking about it, which I thought was just, I mean, super coincidental.

Clearly, it's it's on his mind and when he thinks about leaving Nome, this is a part of that, right?

But if you were to believe him and what he's saying, his story is that. They found the body in a barrel. And the FBI didn't tell the family about this at all, and they haven't told anyone about it. And they also, we haven't got to this tape. But he gets a cover up story from the FBI. Kind of a witness protection type thing, where they fly him out of there and protect him, that's a lot to believe, like he's not.

There's nothing he's mixing that up with, right like this is all like some delusion he believes, or a story he's told people or is telling himself.

Yeah, to expand on that, I mean, I think the way you have to look at what Oregon John is saying is through the lens of delusion. You know, like this story, he's telling, he's telling to complete strangers that he thinks know nothing about what he's talking about. So everything he says isn't the truth, it's just whatever he's rehearsed in his head and maybe convinced himself is his truth.

But it's it's him saying whatever he has to say, really. To shut the conversation down, to get you off his back and to make you look away, make you think, Oh, he actually wasn't involved. Maybe he is a good guy. He doesn't want to tell the truth if the truth damns him, if it puts him in prison for the rest of his life. He'll never tell you, and he'll definitely never tell a stranger.

But he will tell you a rehearsed story that he probably believes really deeply.

If you're John, especially if you're innocent, right? But he has seemingly endless stories and details about other elements of this case that go beyond him and point other directions. And they're not even really cohesive, and many of them are just completely boldface lies because we can prove that they're not true.

It makes you kind of dig into the psychology of this kind of person. And why would John be compelled to say stuff like this at all? Especially to a stranger who, in his eyes, in the moment, knows little to nothing at all about this?

Maybe he just doesn't know you guys, so he's like, Hey, I got to show off a little bit. But some of them were very strange lies, like you said. There's a lot of things we know for a fact he was lying about, and a lot of things that I suspect he's lying about. But it's strange behavior all all the way around for me.

And I don't know I would be even the way he talks about her and the whole thing, just how I would handle it. I would if some somebody was hanging out with me the night before and they disappeared. And then I have some of their items in my tent and I'm handing them over. I'd be asking people like Intense near me, like, Hey, did anyone see where she went, or who she went with, or what's going on like?

Or did they just really not know each other at all? And it was like passing in the night, like, we don't know the details of it. So I just feel like I would ask around or maybe get involved in a search. But it seems like he kind of felt the need to get out of town when it all went down.

My tent was a safe place, my camp was known as a safe place for people to come when they were drinking without any. And I swore I was never coming back to Alaska and then I got this fucking job. But I stay out of trouble.

I don't go into town, I don't mess around with girls, I got my wife.

I don't, you know, I don't get in trouble. I used to, I used to ride around on my wheeler with a half gallon of vodka just to get away. But all my female friends that knew me were standing up for me, including my girlfriend. I had rape charges on me. They knew me, you know, because I was really chill with the girls.

You know, there's no reason why I do this. That just really stood out to me because it seemed like a over qualification of himself when it wasn't really necessary. In the moment. And I wasn't really questioning whether or not he may have been involved, I was just nodding my head and believing him in the moment, right?

But just pretending for a second that I think that's true, I'll pretend for a second that sure. All the girls knew him, all the girls trusted him, his tent was a safe place. If that is true, then wouldn't this be the biggest fuck up ever for someone who outwardly, publicly states that people were safe around him?

Well, up until this moment, then, because, based on your story, Florence was not safe that night because as soon as she left your tent, she was kidnapped and murdered. And these are his words, not mine. So you'd think that coupled with that if you're qualifying yourself in that way and you're genuinely that person.

You're a good guy and people trust you and your tent is a safe place. If those things are true, then I feel like simultaneously, you also would be saying, I just feel so bad, right? I can't believe that. After she left my tent, which is a safe place for people to be, she was kidnapped and murdered, you know?

I feel awful about that. He doesn't, or at least he didn't tell me he did.

So claiming that is very strange to me, especially if it's 100 provable that that's not true. It felt like everything he was saying was really to throw you off the scent of a trail, right? Like it was always something that would just shut you down and immediately make you say, OK, he has a good answer for that, let's just move on.

You know, but when you start to add up everything that he was saying, being a friend of all the women, saying, Oh, some other guy did it. They found her body. I mean, that's a huge red flag for anybody, and that's just, why would you do that?

If you're innocent, why would you do that? There's no good answer for that.

But you guys, I remember in the Airbnb in Anchorage, you guys were like rehearsing for hours on hours. Yeah, talking to each other, trying to get your stories right. Yeah, and you can.

You should talk about that a little bit, but it didn't seem like it took much to you. Didn't really have to stay in that much of character to get this out of. No, yeah.

You guys were really preparing, right, Cooper?

So, you know, we got some cred going again if the conversation got a little too spicy. And I also think, you know, just having the extra person there definitely extended the conversation with John. So we got a lot more material in the end. I remember sitting down at the bar and just, you know, being super excited about the audio quality because the music. There was music playing in the background, but it was super low.

And then I'm not even joking, like, right? When John walked in, you know, the music went back up, real loud, and a whole bunch of people came in all at once. So it was the nice, quiet dive bar with just the four of us and John, the bartender, maybe like two other old people. And then, you know, just a few minutes after, when John walked in, a whole bunch of people came in, the music turned up, everyone took all the pool tables.

It was chaos, so it got a little sketchy with, you know, the recording aspect of things in the end, but we definitely got what we came for.

He may be referring to, and if you listen to how he said it to me, it seemed like he was saying that with confidence. That, hey, I thought that you might be hooked up with those guys and it bothered me that he knew about the podcast. And as a listener, it's different right now, hearing this for the first time because a lot of this stuff happened months ago. This particular conversation with Org and John happened well before there was any public information that I, or Tenderfoot Up and Vanished, was investigating Florence's disappearance at all. In any way, shape or form.

Any of the family we had talked to and friends. We kind of instructed them to not say too much to people that they don't know and trust, just to kind of keep it within the circle. So it bothered me as to why he knew that information so specifically that it was a podcaster reaching out to people. And the only thing I could think of, because it was a finite number of places I think he could have learned that from. Was that the day before, one of the times? Actually, the first time I tried to call Kelly was 24 hours before we met with him. And so I'm just guessing and trying to stick things together here. But it would make sense that maybe she mentioned something about that to him. And he just didn't really look too much into it. But it was on his mind when he met with me.

And it's like, Wow, this is really kind of lining up with all these stories we've heard about you and this kind of legend that goes with you, or this lore that goes with you. And it's you're definitely the guy everyone's been talking about, right? And we heard those stories, right? I'm pretty sure we put that story in that he was a cab driver, right?

And he simply says, No, they never talked to me, which I believe him on that one, but he brings up after that just to sort of, I guess, talk about why. The police may or may not have been interested in him, even though they didn't interrogate him, according to John. And he brings up that rental car story. I had heard this story before from several people, but I had never been able to fully. You know, down to the papers of the rental car receipt and everything. Prove it out definitively.

So I hadn't brought it up publicly in the podcast yet. But if you listen back to it, it kind of doesn't even make sense as to why he'd bring it up. Like us, hearing that, knowing no other information, I would not quickly know the association to Florence's disappearance. With that story he's talking about so much so that I had to break it down to the listeners I felt like.

Mike Dylan Cooper Like, in your eyes, what does that story tell you?

And it was suspicious. And why do you rent a car when he has a car? And we were like, Well, you've talked to Andy about this, the private investigator, and you were like, talking about this car? And they're like, Well, did they ever do anything with the car?

Did the police check the car? And we're like, we don't know, right? we're not sure. And then he, Yeah, like you said, unprompted, just kind of volunteers this. When you bring up the police, if they ever talk to him, he's like, Oh yeah, let me talk about this car I rented the day after.

But it wasn't for me, it was for my friends who were underage, couldn't rent a car. They wanted to go fishing, so I let them use it, and then I just rode my four-wheeler around.

And then I pulled up and it's like, what is again? Very good memory about this one part of this timeline, this series of events that happened here, very vivid memory of what happened with this. Unless he's just making all this up on the spot with the rented car. But we've heard from other people who were in Nome that he rented a car the day after, so now he's bringing it up.

Is this some kind of important thing that needs to be followed up on? Like, where is this car now? Has anyone checked it? Have the police looked at this car? Have they not?

Do they know about it? Did they actually question him or interrogate him? I don't know.

And if Florence's body was ever in a rental car like that? In theory, like Andy was saying, there would likely still be some sort of physical DNA evidence in there to be investigated. And, you know, I don't know the answer to that question, whether or not they've done investigative work like that. But based on the people that I've talked to and some of the latest information I'm hearing out of the Nome Police Department is that. It's strongly possible that there isn't even a case file in existence in that building, which I think that would answer that question.

Right, some confirmation?

Okay, well, where were these people the night before, right? You know, do? Did? They also hang out on the beach with him as well? I've seen videos and pictures of some parts of the tent camps there on West Beach from Flo's friends.

And this is within days of her disappearance. And I've been pointed out, I've been pointed out by several people. Which one was John's tent? And there are tents pretty close together in a row, and so if anyone was hanging out outside, unless you were inside your tent, you'd see them.

And so to me, it kind of painted a different picture a little bit. It wasn't like there was every 50 yards just a solo tent, and it's just all you hear is wind. If people like, we're hanging out, they'd all be hanging out. Unless he got super late and everyone was, everyone was asleep, or they went somewhere else besides that.

And so if something happened to her there, someone could have seen something quite easily. I feel like, you know, it makes me wonder, did something happen there? Did they go somewhere else afterwards? Or these friends that John is mentioning? Do they know something that they should be telling the police? Well, I say police, but that they should be telling?

Period.

And challenge some of the statements that John has made and leave the door open for anyone who knows anything to come forward and say something. And I think that in the amount of time that we've been investigating this case, I feel in my gut that we've got to the point where we're at the center of it. Whatever happened to Florence, the answer is somewhere among us right now. And our plan is to stay on it to keep the pressure going.

And press even harder.

I'm like, Yo, what the fuck do you think of this shit? What is going on?

I had to pad in between that, some casual side conversation that had nothing remotely at all to do with that, or else, it would just seem like a literal interrogation. And so I was kind of doing that balancing act and seeing how far I could push it, knowing and feeling that each time I did that, that. Maybe this is the one time that he goes, why do you keep asking about that? I didn't have a good answer ready for that other than just trying to play it off even more.

But then in that moment, really, it would kind of shut the conversation down. I feel like, if I ask it again after that, it's like, I just told you, like, I thought, that's weird. Why are you still saying that? That's really? Why it was a two hour conversation is because we spread out everything to make it feel more organic and normal. I don't know who is responsible for Florence Ocpialek's disappearance.

But if you look at everything we've discovered thus far, and everything that points back towards West Beach, back to Oregon. John's tent, back to him, having her things, all the other stories surrounding him. And that scenario. And that last night that she was there on the beach and never seen or heard from. Again. I think if you couple that with his behavior and how some of his stories don't add up, and some of them are just bold faced lies. It makes me personally wonder, you know, is this the one that's not a lie? is the most important question, the most important answer we're all seeking. Is this the one thing he's not lying about? But he's lying about 90 plus percent about everything else? That would be a little weird, I think.

But, you know, there's no way to definitively know that. But I also think that, you know, we may be dealing with somebody who isn't going to come out and just say something like that. My perception of him is that even talking outside of Flo's disappearance. In this analogy, I feel like he's the kind of person just from my perspective, from talking to him that would convince himself of something that wasn't true.

Hey, it's Payne. If you haven't checked out Talking to Death yet, please go check it out. It's my new weekly show. If you like Up and Vanished, then there's a good chance you might like my weekly show called Talking to Death during this season.

Right now, in the intro segment of every new episode of Talking to Death, we are unpacking the latest episode. Hey Mike, hey, if you want to hear myself and the producers of Up and Vanished, unpack episode six. Go right now on your podcast app and look up Talking to Death and find the latest episode featuring Laura Norton.

Editing by Mike Rooney and Cooper Skinner, with additional editing by Dylan Harrington. Supervising producer is Tracy Kaplan. Additional production by Victoria McKenzie, Alice Kanique, Glenn and Eric Quintana.

TV.