Florence Okpealuk and Joseph Balderas: Still Missing

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2:07Welcome back to Up and Vanish Season 4 in the Midnight Sun. It's time to finish what I started. This is the first time I've ever covered two cases in the same season. Florence Okpialik and Joseph Balderas. Two names, two mysteries, and one central place. Nome, Alaska. I know it's been a while, and I want to be honest with you. The break we took wasn't because this story faded. It's because new stories came roaring back to life. Cases from earlier seasons that couldn't wait any longer. Real updates. Real consequences. And people connected to these stories who passed away, gone, before we got the full truth.

2:52I've learned that you don't just walk away from these cases. As Mark Smerling once told me, you don't get to clock out of this work like you're bagging groceries. These people stay with you forever. And even now, while recording this very episode, someone from Nome reached out to me with new information about Florence. This isn't a story I'm telling from a distance. I'm still very much in the center. In this episode, we're going to catch you back up. And we're going to listen, closely, to some of the tape we've been sitting on. Tape that, no matter how many times we play it, something keeps pulling us back in.

3:54From Tenderfoot TV in Atlanta, I'm your host Payne Lindsey, and this is Up and Vanished in the Midnight Sun.

4:08Nome, Alaska. A town where stories freeze, and then disappear. For some, it's the last stop on the edge of the earth. She had reportedly last been seen on West Beach. From that point on, we were doing updates on a daily basis as to what was happening with the search efforts. This season on Up and Vanished, Payne Lindsay arrived in Nome to investigate not one, but two missing persons cases. Both unsolved, both haunting. Her name was Florence Okpialik, a 33-year-old native Inupiaq woman. After becoming pregnant, she moved from the small village she grew up in to Nome in search of better care for her daughter.

4:56Allegedly, she was last seen near a bar on Front Street headed towards West Beach, never to return. She left behind her shoes, jacket, and a family who has never stopped looking. I feel like someone is responsible for getting rid of her, whether it was an accident and they didn't want to get in trouble for how it looked, or if it was an intentional incident, she was harmed. somebody knows something and covered it up. But when she disappeared, no one searched the way they should have. Not at first. Not seriously. Not like they would have for someone else. My reporter and I were covering this nonstop because we've seen enough instances leading up to this to know that if there's not action taken within a certain time frame, if there's not some sort of accountability with the police department, this could easily get swept under the rug.

6:00Another Alaska Native person is missing, and that is what it is, and then nothing happens. And when Payne arrived in Nome, Florence's name was barely being whispered. Then there was Joseph Balderas, 36 years old, drawn to Nome by both work and passion for the outdoors. Welcome to Alaska. This is it. This is my little piece of home here. That's open ocean out there. You can certainly feel the magnitude of the ocean when you're on this. You don't really want to fuck around out there. Gives me the heebie-jeebies just being there here. In June 2020, Joseph disappeared after a night out. His car was found on an isolated stretch of Nome Council Highway near mile marker 44.

6:56There was some fishing gear and a pair of waders in his truck, but not much else. No signs of struggle. No Joseph. Everybody was pretty consistent about what they said about Joseph. They described him as a very charismatic, smart guy who loved Alaska and had, you know, a lot of plans for the future. Had met this woman in Juneau, Megan Ryder. They were planning to get married. He had spent several years working as a law clerk to judges, and he was ready to transition from that kind of work into a law practice. So he was going to open a practice in Juneau, and he and Megan were going to get married.

7:44There was, you know, nothing negative that I found in researching Joseph, nothing that, you know, raised red flags for me. He just seemed like a super nice guy that everybody liked. a guy with a lot of plans and, you know, a lot of stuff going on. There have been suggestions from law enforcement that he was eaten by a bear or fell into a portal. But Payne didn't buy that. And neither did the people who knew him. He's talked to me about her. He was very in love with her. He would text her right away. She sent us all the messages. I mean, they're like, there is no wait time. if she messaged him he messaged her right back good morning meg i hope you have a good friday in fact i know you will i'm sure cafe international is going to be hopping today and i'm sure you're gonna have a good lunch and i'm sure you're gonna have good walks and a good hike um but i just wanted to say um also that i love you and have a great day babe bye Two people, gone, in a sparsely populated town.

8:58One, an Alaska Native mother whose case was almost invisible. The other, a man working in the court system, hoping to soon start his own law firm. Both disappeared without a trace. And the one thing they shared? No. Had she just simply walked off and died? we would have found her. That scenario that he was attacked by a bear, somehow the body was hidden, that just seemed unlikely. And so it was worth looking into. The more you look into it, the more unanswered questions and red flags there were. Noam has seen dozens of people vanish, most of them native, most of them women. and most of them ignored.

9:52When Payne started asking questions, he hit a wall of silence. Officials didn't want to talk. Locals were hesitant. And a history of distrust between indigenous communities and law enforcement loomed over everything. Please turn those videos into the department. Okay. We're scared. We're scared everywhere we go because somebody's usually following me. I understand that. We do. We're recording everything because we don't trust anybody. The police department, they neglected her. They neglected Flo in every way, shape, and form. And I'm really mad about it. They judge Native. I think that there could be human trafficking, sex trafficking, and somebody's holding a secret.

10:45And they're not telling. they're not going to tell anything.

10:53I think they killed her and they got away with it.

11:00If you know the history of Noam, there has been a lot of people missing.

11:07We all believe these people are going to do it again. But then, slowly, people started talking. And Payne realized these two disappearances weren't just parallel mysteries. They were pressure points. And something was starting to crack. Two disappearances, one town. And with each episode of Up and Vanished, a question echoed louder. Is this just coincidence? Or is Gnome hiding something deeper? her. Florence's story was the quieter one, until you really listened. She was last seen on West Beach, just outside of town, the place where her shoes were found, where the tide pulls things away. The search started late, too late.

12:03I don't want to bash anyone, but it feels like the police department priority of cases is not based on the protection of the actual people that live there. The FBI stepped in, but even then, answers didn't come. The Alaska Native community had seen this before. A woman goes missing, the family begs for help, and the silence settles in again. I started looking into Nome and long history of public complaints about mistreatment of Alaska Native people by police. Women and girls in Alaska faced four times the national average of homicides. I felt it was really underreported. Florence became part of a pattern, a painful historical one.

12:55And Payne knew if this case was going to move, it wouldn't be through official channels. It would be through whispers, through courage, through the people willing to talk. Joseph's story spiraled in a different direction. The more Payne looked into his disappearance, the more confusing it became. He was last seen allegedly near mile 44. But the details didn't add up. His car was there. But some said he returned to town afterward. Others said they saw him Sunday, after he was already considered missing. And then came Jake, Joseph's roommate, the last person who claims to have seen him. Jake's account changed.

13:45At first, he said he didn't see Joseph after Sunday. Then he said he saw him Sunday. Then, he said nothing at all. I know that the timeline doesn't make sense to you, and we know that his roommate says he saw him. People are mistaken. It could be that. It could be that he came back in, forgot his phone, there's all these theories, but I don't have the answers. Nobody does. The roommate's Sunday. Do you know what he said about that? Like, yes, I saw him. I spoke to him. I saw him driving away. Like, what level of commitment do you think? They passed each other in the home. Inside the house on Sunday.

14:19Guys, I'll be happy to go talk to Jake again. Jake wasn't just a roommate. He was also Christine's cousin. Joseph's co-worker and occasional drinking buddy. Christine is important because she's the last person that we know saw Joseph alive. So she's a really important figure.

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16:44you.

16:48Blair went down the beach to try to find her sister. This guy gives her some of Flo's clothes, but she's not there. I just know he was a cab driver in town and a lot of people didn't like him. That's when Organ John entered the picture. A mysterious man who lived on West Beach, a transient gold miner. There is no mining for gold in the winters of Nome. But during the warmer months, miners flocked to West Beach and set up camps. This was the last place Florence was seen, leaving the tent belonging to Organ John. Rumors began to spread, and eventually he had to leave town. But Payne and his team eventually got a meeting with John, disguised as someone looking for a job opportunity.

17:39They talked in a bar, and Lindsay did his best to get as much information about John's time in Nome as possible. Florence and Joseph, two names, two stories, two families still waiting. While Joseph's case grew darker, Florence's family stepped forward, stronger. They didn't want revenge. They wanted to be heard. He took a mother away from her child, sister and aunt away from her family. A daughter. He took a daughter away from her parents. The FBI investigation had stalled. No updates. No suspects. But the community was waking up. People began to remember. The women who had gone missing before.

18:34The cases that were closed without ever being solved. Florence's name was no longer a whisper. It was a rallying cry. If somebody abducts us, scratch them, pull our hair out, leave as much evidence as you can behind them, rely on the public to find them. Not the police department, because they're not capable or willing to. I've got a couple friends who were beaten up by them, but they were too scared to go forward. Then, something else happened. Payne was scheduled to fly back to Nome. But five days before the flight, his name was leaked. A private flight manifest. Confidential. Somehow, people in Nome knew he was coming.

19:20They started talking.

19:27Payne never boarded that plane. And suddenly, the story wasn't just about Florence or Joseph. It was about him, too. The message was clear. Don't come back. So where does that leave us? Florence Okpialik, Joseph Balderes. Two lives lost to mystery. Two families without answers. And one town that has learned to forget. But Up and Vanish didn't come here to forget. And the people of Nome? Some of them aren't staying quiet anymore. Because someone knows what happened. To Florence. To Joseph. and they're still out there. This is Up and Vanished in the Midnight Sun. Two disappearances, two truths, still buried, for now.

20:27Did you hear about the Sonia Ivanov case? I did. So you kind of know the background between the community and law enforcement right now and how it's been in recovery but not recovering. In Nome, grief doesn't fade. It settles. And the silence that Florence left behind is still very loud. Deila was the very first person to reach out to me about Florence. She's been the voice keeping this case alive. Nome, Alaska, if you can envision, it's the hub community for all of these smaller, remote like people fly on really small charter planes. They go to Nome all the time for medical, they go to go grocery shopping, they go for meetings and conferences and stuff, but Nome is like the Vegas of all these smaller communities surrounding Nome.

21:21So Nome is where the heavy traffic of indigenous people go. And then they either go home as planned or they don't. That's just how it is there. Doing like all of this research and trying to understand like where are the issues and like where are we lacking, where are we needing to improve and what I've noticed is that if we are not honest and if we're not speaking the truth as an indigenous woman, as a single mom, growing up in that culture, in a small community, living outside of the small community in what they say is like the real world and seeing racism firsthand, experiencing it, you know, like how everything kind of ties into really what the MMIWG statistics are today and like how, how can we really approach it?

22:18Well, one thing is like, you're not going to be honest and call the truths out then there won't, no one is going to address it. No one is going to understand it fully if you can't speak the truth and we have to speak the truth and like if anyone's willing to hear it then that is them seeing us and our concerns she had been drinking and she went to west beach and continued to i guess like party a little bit and there was a witness that had watched her go in and out of this one mining tent on West Beach. That seemed very clear as a fact and that is what the local law enforcement was also putting out there and asking for anyone to come forward with any more information.

23:08If it can happen to Flo, which everyone knew, she worked at the hospital and records, it can easily happen to one of us. So I think that is a clear example of why most do not feel safe in Gnome. So it's hard not to think of Flo for various reasons. There's no justice. Why don't we have justice? In a Native community, why don't we have that?

23:48Now back to the case of Joseph Balderas. We've talked to a lot of people in this case, but this next voice you've never heard before. Her name is Hannah, and she may have been the last person to ever see Joseph Balderas alive. She wasn't someone telling a secondhand story. She was there. She walked with him through the quiet streets of Nome that night. This is a new lead, a new piece to the puzzle that only seems to make things more confusing. I saw Joseph the night before he went missing. It was around 3 a.m. My daughter wouldn't sleep, so I took her for a walk through town. He was leaving Soap and Suds alone.

24:32He told me he had plans to go ridge running and fishing the next morning. Said he was heading about 40, 45 miles down Council Road, right around where they found his truck. We stood outside the bar for a while, talking. He crouched down, played with my daughter in her stroller. Then we started walking toward our houses. He leaned on me for a bit, just to steady himself. We split off near the gas station. I stopped to talk to some friends outside. Joseph didn't know them, so he kept walking alone toward home. We were only a few blocks from his place. And knowing him, he probably made it home. The next morning, I told my mom I'd seen him.

25:15Then Monday came, and we heard he was missing. That's when we joined the search. My grandparents had driven back from their cabin that Sunday morning. They saw Joseph's truck parked out on Council Road before 1 p.m. before anyone claims they saw him that afternoon. So when people say they saw him Saturday at the beach or Sunday at home, I don't know. And my papa, he worked dispatch for Nome PD. he told us the last outgoing message from Joseph's phone was around 9 a.m. Saturday. If he'd really been meeting up with someone, you'd think there'd be a text, right? He was our friend. He came to our house.

25:57Our cabin. He took pictures for my daughter's first birthday. And then one day, he was just gone. No sign of him. No belongings. Nothing. People disappear from Nome. It's not new. Some say it's the Ishiguks. Some say it's something worse. Me? I don't know. Maybe he fell. Maybe someone hurt him. But with everything we put into the search, someone should have found something. Anything. It's haunted me ever since. Joseph wasn't some fleeting figure. He was right next to her, laughing, talking about the wilderness. making plans to leave town the next morning. Plans he never got to finish. Joseph said he was headed 40 miles out on Council Road.

26:51That's where his truck was found. Almost too conveniently. But the problem is, his roommate Jake said he saw him at home the next day. So which version of events here is actually true? They can't both be. And then there's Hannah's grandfather. He worked dispatch for Gnome PD. He told Hannah the last text message from Joseph's phone went out around 9 a.m. on Saturday. Then, no more messages. No sign of life whatsoever. And yet, his truck was spotted early Sunday. And then there's Tom Moran. Back when Andy Clamser, the private investigator, first came to Nome, Tom was the city manager.