Someone Is Getting Away With Eunice Whitmans Killing. Alaskas Slow Justice System Let It Happen.
Marcy McDannel slid a photograph across the steel jailhouse table to the convicted killer and watched his face for a reaction.Samuel Atchak, 27 at the time, was serving 115 years for an unusual killing. One August morning in 2014, a young woman was found stabbed in the throat and chest, her body displayed nude on the tundra at the center of the coastal Alaska village of Chevak and her clothes placed nearby. Atchak pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and attempted sexual assault in Roxanne Smarts death.McDannel was interested in the death of a second young woman, less than nine months later, in another Alaska coastal community that neighbors Chevak. Eunice Whitman too was found stabbed in the throat and chest, her clothes placed nearby and her body displayed nude on the tundra in a well-trafficked area of Bethel. No one had been convicted in her death.If you dont want to see it, McDannel said gently, I wont show it to you, according to a recording she made.Atchak didnt mind looking at the pictures, he assured her. Im all right.Second of two parts.Previously: A man spends seven years in jail as the flawed evidence against him falls apart.Today: The unfinished search for justice in the murder of Eunice Whitman.McDannel recalls he did not flinch as he stared at a redacted printout of the crime scene photo.Over the course of two hours, McDannel coaxed responses from him bit by bit. He speculated that based on the position of the body, the killer likely caught the woman off guard. Maybe surprised her from behind and strangled her, he said, with a rear naked chokehold, using a martial arts term. He offered thoughts about why Whitmans body was arranged just so, what the killers motive might have been, even the height of the murderer. Could be someone around 58 judging from how the attack seemed to go down, suggested Atchak, 56.A former state prosecutor turned defense attorney, McDannel thanked him for the insight and headed home.Although she didnt ask directly, what she really wanted to know, of course, was if the man across the table had committed both killings. Atchak, one of more than a dozen people McDannel portrayed as viable suspects in court filings or in communications with state police, said in their interview that he thought he remembered passing through Bethel around the date Whitmans body was found. State troopers later told McDannel that records placed him elsewhere.Two months before the October 2022 prison visit, McDannel had helped win freedom for her former client, Justine Paul, whom police arrested in Whitmans murder. Like so much in Alaskas justice system, the victory came at a glacial pace, even after physical evidence used to link Paul to the crime fell apart. He spent seven years in jail.Though McDannels work as Pauls attorney was done, she found she couldnt let the case go.Someone had killed Whitman. If not Paul, she wondered, who?Heather Whitman shows a social media post memorializing her sister, Eunice. Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily NewsPolice questioned many people after Pauls arrest, asking about their whereabouts, sometimes requesting DNA samples, but also seeking in most cases to learn about Pauls relationship with Whitman and his movements the night she was killed.The investigation left unresolved clues, such as male DNA on Whitmans body that came from someone other than Paul. The lab found no match for him, the four men who reported finding the body or a registered sex offender captured on security video nearby.As for Atchak, records from state troopers and Bethel police do not show anyone asked him about the case during the investigation, despite striking similarities between the Smart and Whitman murders and despite media attention they each received locally.Atchak declined two requests for an interview sent through prison officials and did not respond to written questions delivered to him this month. His last known attorney also did not respond.Bethel police announced Pauls arrest to the news media the day after the body was found. The state went to the grand jury 11 days after the investigation began.McDannel said police and prosecutors could have waited until testing was done on the key physical evidence. Other attorneys said Alaskas legal system could move cases like Pauls far more swiftly to trial, where the validity of evidence can be judged.Either of these possibilities might have kept Paul from spending years in jail on an indictment that prosecutors ultimately admitted they could no longer support. It could have saved the victims family from going years without anyone being tried for her murder. It could have led investigators to pursue more leads while the case was relatively fresh.The former lead Bethel police investigator said she continues to believe Paul is guilty and defended the efforts of law enforcement. Prosecutors have said that they and the police acted properly during the investigation. The Alaska Department of Law, which oversees prosecutors, said the state changed course after new information came to light. But the department also acknowledged that the time the case took was unacceptable and said multiple factors contributed to delays, including prosecutor turnover.Today, Alaska state police are back at square one. They reopened the investigation of Whitmans death this year, three years after Pauls charges were dismissed. They said they couldnt discuss whether they have ruled out anyone as a suspect.Whitmans sister Heather said she remains firmly convinced that Paul is responsible, possibly with an accomplice.Paul could come under renewed scrutiny if police were to find new evidence thats stronger than what prosecutors showed grand jurors. In response to questions, the Law Department left open the possibility a court might allow him to be charged again. The department has noted that the dismissal of charges is not the same as a declaration of a defendants innocence.But as with any potential suspect, in any cold case, the passage of time has made the task more challenging.This is a story of a state legal system that failed every person it touched especially Eunice Whitman.Eunice WhitmanEunice Whitman was the youngest of six siblings. Her sister Heather called her the light to everyones life.She was happy, a lover of heavy metal and house parties. She grew up in Bethel, attending a local school where the Indigenous Yupik language was taught. Heather named her daughter after Eunice. Now 8, the girl reminds everyone of her namesake for her silliness.Heather Whitman and her 8-year-old daughter, Eunice. Heathers daughter never got to meet her namesake. Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily NewsOooh la la, said little Eunice, as a server placed a glass of Dr Pepper on the table of a Bethel pizza parlor one recent afternoon. She sat attentively as her mother recounted the familys history for a reporter. Eunice ordered a burger, heavy on the ketchup.Heather Whitman sat beside her, her long hair recently cut. So many split ends, she said. No one has been able to braid it as tightly as she likes since her sister died.Heather and Eunices other surviving sister, Sarah, work at a convenience store at the end of the boardwalk where Eunices body was found, a busy footpath crisscrossing a wetland at the center of town. Heather said her bedroom faces that same marshy tundra. She said she keeps the window closed and avoids the boardwalk. When the city finally placed streetlights along its wooden planks last year, she said, she hugged one of the construction workers.Eunices father declined an interview request. Sarah Whitman said she wasnt ready to talk about her sisters murder.Details of how Eunice met Justine Paul, her boyfriend of five months when she died, come from Pauls mother.Joann Paul Carl said her son had known Whitman since they were kids. The two met when Whitman visited Kipnuk, a neighboring village where Carl and Paul lived, for the Native Youth Olympics. They started dating in January 2015. Carl said her son was soon talking about proposing.The Alaska Native villages of Kipnuk and Chevak are both a short plane ride from Bethel, a regional hub of 6,000 people in southwest Alaska. Lucas Waldron/ProPublicaThe day before the murder in May 2015, Paul was visiting Bethel. A video recovered from Pauls phone would show her on the boardwalk arguing with the person behind the camera at 12:11 a.m., according to state troopers. Paul told police the couple went separate directions at 1 a.m. About three hours after that, a group of young men reported finding her body as they looked for a place to get high.The case quickly made headlines. Radio stations and newspapers ran stories quoting police saying they found Whitmans blood on Pauls clothes.As the years wore on, police and prosecutors released no updates to the public on why a case presented as open-and-shut was taking so long to reach a jury. Nothing about how the state crime lab found that the blood was consistent with DNA from Paul, not Whitman. No word on the state dropping the charges.Heather Whitman said she didnt know the reason for the dismissal until told recently by a reporter. She said she and her family feel he has gotten away with murder.The void of coverage in the local news media left an aspect of the case unknown to the general public, at least to anyone who wasnt scouring the red case folder at the Bethel courthouse. Pauls attorneys submitted court filings that listed others they said could have killed Whitman.McDannel, who took over the case in 2018, said she came to believe the police had gone after the wrong man.An Alleged ConfessionKyle Jones says he never killed anyone, including Eunice Whitman. Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily NewsIn the days after Whitmans killing in 2015, the chief investigator in the case spoke with a man named Kyle Jones, whod known the victim since childhood.Paul had told police he ran into Jones the night of the killing on the boardwalk, around 3 or 4 a.m. It was after Paul last saw Whitman, based on what Paul told police, but before dispatchers took the call reporting the body.Speaking to the lead detective, Bethel Sgt. Amy Davis, Jones confirmed Pauls account of what happened when they crossed paths. Jones said Paul told him he was out looking for his girlfriend, the investigators write-up shows.Both men were in the vicinity of the crime scene around the presumed time of Whitmans death.Davis said she treated only one, Paul, as a suspect because she saw nothing further to indicate Jones did something wrong. Paul had blood on his clothing and shoes with a tread that Davis thought resembled prints at the crime scene.In 2019, McDannel filed a court motion saying Jones had admitted to killing Eunice Whitman to another individual while crying and intoxicated. McDannel told the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica that the person was Jones aunt, whod approached her with the information. The newsrooms attempts to contact the aunt by phone and email were unsuccessful.Jones had a documented history of violence on the boardwalk by the time of the filing.In 2011, Jones was charged with felony assault in the beating of a woman he encountered on the walkway. He eventually pleaded guilty. Five years later, almost exactly a year after Whitmans death and in nearly the same spot, he was accused of stabbing a man twice in the side. Jones pleaded guilty to felony assault in that case too.In two recent interviews at an Anchorage jail, Jones admitted to prior violence like the attacks in 2011 and 2016 on the boardwalk. But he never killed anyone, including Whitman, he said.If I have a body, I will claim it, Jones said from behind thick glass.During the first interview, he was awaiting trial on charges of violating a protective order filed by his ex-wife and of illegal contact with a victim. He had pleaded not guilty. By the time of the second interview, two weeks later, hed been charged with an additional 20 counts of illegally contacting a victim. He pleaded not guilty to those charges as well.Jones said the drunken confession that Pauls attorney wrote about in court wasnt about murder at all. Jones said he told his aunt during a car ride that he felt responsible for Whitmans death. He told a reporter he believed at the time that Paul killed Whitman out of jealousy of her longtime friendship with Jones.By coincidence, Jones and Paul shared a cell in Bethels small-town jail for a few weeks in 2016. Paul was awaiting trial for Whitmans murder, Jones for the recent stabbing in the same location.Jones noticed that Paul had drawn a picture of his girlfriend and written R.I.P., which he hung in the cell. One day, as the men played cards, Paul stood up and quietly set about making coffee. There was something about the way Paul moved. The way he didnt want to fight.Jones said a realization struck him: This guy, I dont think he did it.Alaska locked up Justine Paul, Whitmans boyfriend, for seven years without trial. Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily NewsAfter McDannel filed her court motion saying Jones confessed, Bethel police reexamined the old evidence that had never been explained: the unidentified male DNA recovered from Whitmans body. The state crime lab compared it with Jones DNA. Like other samples before, it was not a match.But Jones wasnt the only person McDannel had listed as a potential suspect in court filings. (The court did not rule on the validity of the filings because the case didnt go to trial.)Police should have treated no fewer than 12 people as suspects of higher interest than Paul, according to a report written by defense witness Gregory Cooper. The founder of the Cold Case Foundation, Cooper is listed on the nonprofits website as a former acting unit chief for the FBIs behavioral science unit. All the people described in the report were seen in the vicinity or had encountered the victim earlier, he wrote.These included an ex-boyfriend Whitman had named in a restraining order the year before. He told police he had an alibi. He has since died. Another man managed the nearby convenience store and told police Whitman texted him around 2:30 a.m., which was 90 minutes before her body was reported found. He told police he overheard the couple arguing, a statement he repeated to the grand jury. He too is now dead.The defense later added one more name to the persons-of-interest list: a man who fought with Paul days before Whitmans murder. A week after she died, he had her phone in his possession and a bandage on his hand, according to police reports.The man told police his girlfriend, who was friends with Whitman, found the phone at the couples home the other day. His girlfriend corroborated finding it to the police. The man handed it over to Davis. He told her the bandage was because a dog bit him.The man did not respond to texts and phone calls from the newsrooms or to an email asking to discuss the homicide case and his interactions with police.Davis, in discussions with the Daily News and ProPublica this year, rejected the possibility that anyone other than Paul could have killed Whitman. We had the right person in jail, she said.Its the defenses job, she added later by email, to present alternative theories no matter how ridiculous they are. They want to present doubt.The Earlier KillingIn the end, Pauls defense attorneys didnt need to show a jury alternative suspects. Prosecutors allowed the charges to be dropped in 2022 after the defense noted in court that the key physical evidence had not delivered on what prosecutors promised.Yet McDannel, who said she believed in his innocence, wasnt finished. She said she wanted to clear her former clients name.Marcy McDannel, a former state prosecutor turned defense attorney, helped win freedom for her former client, Paul. Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily NewsJust two weeks after his release, an investigator working for McDannel ran across a newspaper story that stopped her cold. It described a stabbing case that involved a young woman in the village of Chevak nine months before Whitman died.The body of 19-year-old Roxanne Smart was found by a passerby the morning of Aug. 27, 2014, according to Alaska State Troopers. She had been sexually assaulted, strangled and stabbed in the groin, abdomen and throat. In addition to having her bloody clothes removed and set nearby like Whitmans, her body was also found with legs outstretched.People had seen a young man named Samuel Atchak behaving strangely near the murder scene. Troopers obtained a DNA sample from him a month later after he tried overdosing on pain pills and was placed in a jail cell for his own protection. Six months after that, on March 31, 2015, the state crime lab linked Atchaks DNA to evidence at the scene.Atchak confessed when troopers confronted him on July 24, 2015, according to their report. I surprised her from behind, he explained to the troopers. Her last words were, What the hell are you doing? and then she blacked out.McDannels investigator placed Atchaks movements on her timeline: The date of Whitmans killing in nearby Bethel came while Atchak was under investigation but still walking free. Whats more, the investigator was able to trace Atchaks whereabouts to Anchorage just five days after Whitman died, and she knew the only flight from Chevak to Anchorage stops in Bethel.The similarities seemed to have eluded police. Davis, the Bethel sergeant who led the Whitman murder investigation, told ProPublica and the Daily News she was unfamiliar with Smarts murder. State troopers declined to say whether they considered the two murders possibly connected back then.McDannels investigator told her boss about Atchak. They agreed they needed to hear from the man.The pair drove two hours to the state prison in Seward, beating the first snowstorm of 2022.McDannel took her time after Atchak walked into the room. She began by telling him about Paul and the killing he was accused of committing in Bethel. She made small talk about people Atchak knew in Bethel, how often he traveled there.The young man described his life before Smarts murder. A difficult childhood with a skin condition that made him a target for teasing. Anger at his parents.McDannel slowly steered the discussion to Whitmans murder, exploring what sounded to the attorney like echoes of Smarts killing. She asked Atchak what happened with Smart. Atchak said he thought they were going to have sex, and then she turned him down.Based on his own experience, did Atchak think Whitmans killer might have had the same motive? Was the man angry? There were so many stab wounds, including to the neck.Its the best, like quickest way to let someone die, Atchak responded. Thats what I think. Like a slit throat. Thats what Im thinking. The other stabs to the body, probably the anger that was probably in their mind.Brush moves in the wind near the place where Eunice Whitman was stabbed to death. Katie Baldwin Basile for ProPublicaAlthough McDannel never asked Atchak during the interview whether he killed Whitman, the attorney hinted at it. Atchak said he thought he remembered stopping in Bethel on May 23 or 24, which was the weekend of Whitmans death, but said he never left the airport.McDannel said she and her investigator had their doubts.They came away with an odd decision for a defense team. They approached law enforcement with the information they had obtained. They hoped it might prompt the state crime lab to check the unidentified male DNA on Whitmans body against Atchaks. Troopers thanked them for the tip.But on Dec. 11, 2023, Trooper Investigator Dugger Cook wrote McDannel to say the state had taken a look and ruled out Atchak based on search warrants for travel and medical records. Troopers didnt provide her with the documents they said supported their conclusion. The agency told the Daily News and ProPublica it cant talk about potential suspects or evidence that might exist in the case.Without seeing the records, McDannel said, she didnt believe the alibi. Atchaks own description of his travels during his interview with her put him potentially in town, at least briefly, near when Whitman was killed. But she was out of options. She was officially off the case.New Eyes on the InvestigationAnother year passed.Then, this past January, something changed.Antonia Commack, an advocate for murdered and missing Indigenous people, posted a video to TikTok and Facebook reviving questions about Whitmans unsolved murder. Viewers flooded the Bethel Police Department afterward with phone calls urging action.Sarah Whitman and her 5-year-old child, Harvie Mattie Whitman-Aliralria, stand near the place where Sarahs sister, Eunice, was found dead in 2015. Katie Baldwin Basile for ProPublicaFor many people, it wasnt about finding a new suspect. In the absence of media coverage about the reasons prosecutors dropped charges against Paul, the public wanted to know why he was walking free.In March, Bethel police asked the state troopers Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons unit to take over the investigation.The head of the unit, Lawrence Piscoya, said in a May interview that detectives had begun their work fresh. Whitmans murder was one of six cold cases the unit was working on at the time.We have to start on Page 1 and go to the end, and theres quite a bit in this case, Piscoya said. Theres a lot to understand and a lot to analyze before we begin getting boots on the ground.The Department of Public Safety wouldnt comment on past email exchanges in which McDannel urged further investigation of Atchak. The missing and murdered persons unit has not solved a cold case homicide since its creation in 2022.Davis, the former Bethel detective who investigated Whitmans homicide, now works in Fairbanks. She called it one of those cases where I will forever lose sleep about.Davis remains convinced that tests beyond those done on Pauls bloody jeans and shirt would have connected him to the victim. But there is one thing that she and Pauls defense team would agree about.It took far too long.Maybe its like no single persons fault that this happened, Davis said. But this case just sat on so many peoples desks and nobody really looked at it. The DAs office there gets so much turnover. Every time I turned around it was going to a different attorney.The state Law Department conceded in a statement that retaining experienced prosecutors, particularly in rural Alaska, has long been a significant and ongoing challenge. The agency said it is taking steps to stabilize staffing.Lawrence Piscoya, head of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons unit, which has taken over the investigation of Whitmans murder. We have to start on Page 1 and go to the end, and theres quite a bit in this case, he said in May. Theres a lot to understand and a lot to analyze before we begin getting boots on the ground. Bill Roth/Anchorage Daily NewsAsked whether officials have a system to ensure defendants dont wait years for resolution when big holes appear in the evidence, the Law Department said it continuously reevaluates every case for proof beyond reasonable doubt.It cited as an example the eventual decision to let Pauls prosecution come to an end.Heather Whitman said if troopers are actively investigating the murder again, that is news to the family. She said no one has interviewed her, Sarah or their father, George Whitman Jr., about their last conversations with Eunice.In response, the agency said in a statement: We recognize the profound loss experienced by Eunice Whitmans family and understand their desire for answers. Out of respect for the family and the integrity of the investigation, we will not publicly discuss the timing or substance of communications with family members while this investigation remains active.After Whitman died, the family left her bite-sized cupcakes at the former crime scene, Heather Whitman said. Vanilla and chocolate.Really dont want to forget you, her father wrote on her Facebook page, a day after the seventh anniversary of her death.Her birthday was Dec. 14. This year, she would have turned 34. Her daughters baked an extra chocolatey cake in her memory. Half they ate that afternoon, her sister said, and half they saved for later.Whitmans grave. Her family is still waiting for justice for her murder. Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily NewsThe post Someone Is Getting Away With Eunice Whitmans Killing. Alaskas Slow Justice System Let It Happen. appeared first on ProPublica.
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