7 | Let's Talk About This

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0:50There have always been and continues to be mixed messages about COVID. But over 7 million lives have been lost with no real accountability. My name is Payne Lindsey and this is Leaked. A deep dive to uncover answers about COVID-19. Available now, wherever you get your podcasts. Up and Vanished in the Midnight Sun is released every Friday and brought to you absolutely free. But for ad-free listening, exclusive bonuses, and early access starting next week, subscribe to Tenderfoot Plus at tenderfootplus.com or on Apple Podcasts.

1:32Do-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun Do-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun Do-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun From Tinderfoot TV in Atlanta, I'm your host Payne Lindsey, and this is Up and Vanished in the Midnight Sun.

2:03Hey, 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.

2:49I'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 them. 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. and 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.

3:34And 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? Yeah, I mean, this one was tough.

4:18I think it was tougher than anything else we've done because I've been working with you since Up and Vanish Season 2. And we've had times where we're like, hey, let's try and corner this guy or let's try and talk to this guy or meet up with this guy. And this one was like, we couldn't get close enough where we were like, kind of there and then we just go and we get there in an hour or something like this like this was a long trek to get to where he was kodiak how long of a flight was that and then how long of a flight we ended up taking and it could have gone disastrously if we went to kodiak i know you talk about that but like if we went there and he's not there so we really had to make sure on this and it was there was no way to really make sure until you got to a point where you were talking to him about that.

5:04My biggest fear the whole time was whether or not he was going to be on that boat, because everything else lined up perfectly. We could see his exact schedule that was posted publicly online. It almost just felt too easy or something. All was going to work out perfectly, unless for whatever reason, he was not going to be on that boat. And just out of my own paranoia, I had messaged him again that night, and we learned that he wasn't going to be. 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 Okpeolek'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.

6:05And leaning into what was already happening and 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? Yeah. I mean, I was right there with you. It took a while to get to the location.

6:46You know, flights are really bumpy. Everyone's tired. And then we all throw our bags down, you know, and then we looked at each other and like, all right, like the journey's over. And now the next one's about to begin. I mean, I said something along the lines of, you know, talk about a big favor. Like me asking you to pretend to be this other person was, I put it, I think, a big favor to ask you. Yeah. Yeah. But you were on board pretty immediately. I just kind of want to talk about why, for those of you who don't know, Cooper is our sound engineer and does all the sound design, does all the mixing and mastering of the episodes.

7:32And he's also been on the ground as part of Up and Vanished since season three, traveling with us and doing a lot of investigative work with us when we're in Alaska. I would imagine this was the first time you'd done something quite like this, and why'd you decide to just jump on board like that? Well, I mean, of course I had the edge because I grew up in Alaska, so I had the power of just like general casual conversation if it came up. I wasn't just like a fish out of the water, you know. I could just kind of like fiddle my way through the conversation if things got weird, or I can bring up this and that about the culture.

8:11So that's why I thought it was a good idea. 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 calm things down if it got weird. And you're from Alaska. Yeah. And also from a tiny town in Alaska, even smaller than Nome. Tell us about that, actually, because that's pretty unique in itself. Yeah, I mean, that's probably another reason why I was just comfortable talking to someone like John was just because, you know, the place I grew up in is very similar to Nome. It's called McGrath, Alaska.

8:46You know, they're like an Alaskan native village. It's got a couple hundred people who live there. 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 Gnome 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 Gnome.

9:28so 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 so we quickly conjure up plan b and we immediately hop on another flight and we've already been on three flights at this point and this day was gloomy to say the least it was windy it was cold it was raining and it was just completely uncomfortable moving around. And we're touching down in Ketchikan. And I've been communicating with Oregon John pretty much every 15 to 30 minutes that day. And I decided to tell him that I was going to be landing a little bit later than we really were.

10:13One, 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 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 talk to me about next steps after we landed.

10:58It was a long way to get to even catch Ken itself from the airport, right? Like it was a long flight, but then you had to get on a ferry, go across the water to actually get to the town. We didn't know anything. There was no Uber. We had to call taxis. 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.

11:37I'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 three when he was talking to, or when he was in the car while you were talking to V-Dog. Yeah. If you remember season three, when I met his nickname was V-Dog, it was Cooper and I that flew out there to Great Falls, Montana, and then drove about another hour outside of that town and just popped up on him, knocked on his door. And that was a spooky moment because when we finally got to the property, we had a general address, but we didn't know what the house looked like.

12:23There's no Google Maps. There's no street view. And it was literally up this big, huge hill that was bumpy. Thank God we're 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 till to leave. But if you remember season three, 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.

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13:39and 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 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 Nome, Alaska, and dig into the details of a missing persons case without looking super suspicious, unless we really slowly worked our way there.

14:31And fortunate enough for us, he was pretty open. And he just started talking about his past. And it wasn't very long before Nome, 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 Nome, 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.

15:27And 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. 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 left her shoes in her 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 you know, either she was really tired or one could speculate that she was inebriated, right?

16:44We'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? Well, I think for one, him basically stating exactly what was left in his tent the morning after when she supposedly left his tent. I think that's important because that whole thing was a little sketchy for me, how we even learned about or how the family even learned about how he had the items, how he returned the items to Blair, Florence's sister. And just that whole story seemed very strange to me.

17:24Like, why was there not much follow-up here? 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 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.

18:09And 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 phrase, 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, okay, he also has said in the tape, because people think I'm the last one to see her, right? Okay. And then you're also handing over her belongings, the last belongings we can find that were on her that night. Well, he actually, he literally says, because I was the last person to see her alive, besides the person who killed her.

18:49Right. And I thought he said it twice. He does say it twice. He says it another time where he says like they think, or maybe he's talking about they think I did it. 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's saying he was the last one to see her, but then like, I don't know, she just left in the middle of the 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?

19:17That's a strange thing to say. He apparently also knows that the last person she was with is the person who killed her, and she was put in this barrel under a meth dealer's house. But the way that he describes who this person may be, who she was last with, who killed her, kind of changes and shifts a little bit throughout our conversation. And we can play some clips of that too. They found her buried under the dude's house, the meth dealer, who was also the search and rescue diver for the police. 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 looted her.

19:58So the guy fucking really did it, did he get caught? Okay. Good. But I still got family members calling me. They actually were doing a podcast and tried to get a hold of me. he mentioned something about a search and rescue guy and then he mentioned something about this meth dealer did you know that dude who did it do you like no i never met him he was a he was friends with her meth dealer they conspired together that's the 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 known police are corrupt and they're the ones who are also in on it and he starts describing for a second about how a gnome police officer raped and killed somebody before gnome 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 dude it's crazy so like one of the police officers was raping and murdering all the girls yeah i heard that yeah yeah and he was basically loosely describing the murder of Sonia Ivanov from two decades ago that we had briefly touched on earlier in the season.

21:10Yeah, which is super weird to me because it's like, it didn't seem like he was unclear or hazy about what happened that night. It kind of seemed like he had a really good memory of what was going on that night and what, you know, that whole time period, he seems to remember pretty well. And then certain things like that, where he's like tricking in Matthew Owens, the police officer who the known police officer who did murder someone like 17 or 20 years ago before that you can almost take that as he's possibly muddying the waters there 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 him what items you handed over to the people looking for her.

22:00And 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 going to stick him. But he seemed very noncommittal to those details. But he was saying them openly again. He's also the only person who's saying anything remotely similar to that besides Kelly, which is the pseudonym we gave her, who is also the person that he presents in our conversation as somebody who would vouch for him, who even told the FBI that, hey, it wasn't me who did it.

22:38It was this guy over here. And if you look at her text messages that we read, they kind of, you could draw connections in her super vague theory. But the big difference is that John's claiming that her body was found. and that Kelly took this to the FBI, meaning that it's a wrap. It's all over. You know, 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 he went back to Nome, everyone would know who he was and people were still reaching out to him. And I was like, why? And they're because they think I'm involved.

23:22And 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 right a friend of mine she actually called the fbi in because she was working for the guy that killed her and she found the barrel under the house and called the FBI and the FBI had to rescue me. Under the juice house buried in a 50 gallon drum that girl is telling me about. I mean and if it is true then they never found her right or we haven't found her yet.

24:07You 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 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. And he's like, send your resume to this website, and that's how you get this job.

24:52And 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 on his mind. and when he thinks about leaving Nome, this is a part of that, right? Yeah, it's strange because like I was saying before, with the stuff he's being muddy on, it seems deliberate. It doesn't seem like he's just accidentally missing some facts. Also, again, he's bringing these facts to the table. But if you were to believe, and I'm not saying he did anything or was involved or anything like that. We have no idea.

25:33But 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.

26:21You 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 as his truth. But 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.

26:54But he will tell you a rehearsed story that he probably believes really deeply. Yeah, for Orgon, John has very little details when it comes to the most important things. The main one being, where'd she go after she left his tent? What was she doing there in the first place? Right. Those are arguably the most important things 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 bold-faced lies because we can prove that they're not true.

27:37It makes you kind of dig into the psychology of this kind of person, and why would John be compelled to say stuff like this? Black Friday savings are here at the Home Depot, which means it's time to add new cordless power to your collection. Right now, when you buy a select battery kit from one of our top brands like Ryobi or Milwaukee, you'll get a select tool from that same brand for free. Click into one of our best deals of the season and stock up on tools for all your upcoming projects. Get Black Friday savings happening now at The Home Depot. Limit one per transaction. Exclusion supply full eligible tool list in-store and online.

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29:13But 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 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. If 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 hitting them over, I'd be asking people like in tents near me, like, hey, did anyone see where she went or who she went with or what's going on?