Northernmost

“There are no roads that connect Utqiagvik with any other community. Nobody can get on the freeway and head for Fairbanks. That’s 500 miles of open tundra. So the killer was still in town.” Today, a murder case in the northernmost community in the United States. Rebecca Wright Stevens’ book is Sisters of the Midnight Sun: A Murder in Arctic Alaska. Say hello on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Sign up for our occasional newsletter. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, invitations to virtual events, special merch deals, and more. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Phoebe Judge?

  Support for Criminal comes from BetterHelp. The holidays can bring up a lot of feelings for people, and sometimes it helps to have someone to talk to. BetterHelp therapists can help. BetterHelp is now in-network, with more than 125 health plans, with copays as low as $15 for eligible members. And if you don't have eligible insurance, or live outside the US, you can still get 20% off your first month. Sign up and get 20% off at betterhelp.com/criminal. That's betterhelp.com/criminal. Hi, it's Phoebe. Very soon, I'm going on tour with a brand-new live show about me and my family.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  I went to prison. I for sure did.

• 0:46Phoebe Judge?

  How was it?

• 0:47Speaker 01

  Oh, you know, awesome. I did not like the meal plan they offered.

• 0:55Phoebe Judge?

  Get your tickets at thisiscriminal.com/live.

• 1:03Phoebe Judge?

  This episode contains references to sexual assault. Please use discretion.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  I was told never to walk out on the roads, because the bears did come in, especially if there had been a whale catch and there were whale scraps.

• 1:22Phoebe Judge?

  This is Rebecca Wright Stevens. For seven years in the 90s, she lived in the northernmost community in the United States, Utqiagvik, Alaska, population less than 5,000.

• 1:36Speaker 02

  Well, in spite of all the warnings, I just never really thought that a polar bear would actually come to my house. That just seemed fantastic. One day, one typical day, I was leaving the house for work, and I turned the deadbolt behind me, and I looked up the hill to see if the bus was coming. The bus was not coming, but a bear was crossing the road in front of my house. So I froze. And the bear, I don't think, had spotted me yet, but it was looking around. It was hungry. And then I could see that it did see me. Its eyes locked onto me.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  It was like laser lock on a gun. I wish I could say that I was brave and I did something smart, but I was absolutely and totally terrified. I couldn't even scream. I dropped my door key, and I just stood watching the bear. And the bear came closer and closer. And then, a snow machine whizzed between me and the bear. My neighbor, Clara Pea, had come out on his snow machine, and he had somebody behind him on the machine who had a rifle. A high-powered rifle, an ordinary rifle, wouldn't help much.

• 3:04Speaker 02

  They herded the bear away from me like it was a cow, yelling at it. I found out later that the elders had actually been tracking this bear. It had been seen in different parts of town. It had actually chased the mayor, Mayor Amawak, who had much better presence of mind and fleetness of foot than I did. He jumped in a dumpster to get away from it.

• 3:32Phoebe Judge?

  Rebecca had moved to Utqiagvik to take a job at the Public Defender's Office.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  Alaska is simply organized into boroughs instead of counties. The North Slope Borough is virtually, essentially, the northern tier of the state. The population of the borough is about 10,000 on the whole, but it's the size of, I believe, Wyoming. And the caseload was huge.

• 3:59Phoebe Judge?

  It wasn't out of the ordinary for Rebecca to be responsible for over 100 defendants at once. At the time, the town was known as Barrow. In 2016, residents voted to rename it Utqiagvik, its original indigenous name.

• 4:16Phoebe Judge?

  The Inupiat people have lived in the area for over 1,000 years, and make up over half of the population of Utqiagvik. Rebecca knew that as a white person who didn't grow up there, she would be an outsider in the community. Utqiagvik is on the shore of the Arctic Ocean, about 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Rebecca says when she lived there, the temperature frequently dropped to 40 below. None of the streets are paved. They would just crack every time they froze, and then thawed.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  Everything has to be on stilts of one kind or another because of the permafrost just beneath the surface. If buildings are built directly on the surface, that will cause the permafrost to melt, and the building will get out of whack and eventually implode upon itself. The little house that I rented from the Utqiagvik-Inupiat Corporation had no plumbing, so water was delivered weekly by truck. The shower had a hole in the floor where water simply drained out onto the tundra. Even in the winter, you might think that that would be cold, but when you think about

• 5:36Speaker 02

  it, cold sinks. So the cold did not rise into the hot shower, and it was a perfectly tolerable system.

• 5:46Phoebe Judge?

  Three years after Rebecca moved to Alaska in the summer of 1993, she took a vacation to visit her family.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  I had flown home to South Carolina for my birthday, for my parents' birthday. And I was standing in my mother's kitchen, looking out at the beautiful magnolia trees blooming in their yard, when the phone rang. And it was my office manager, Elizabeth Conaurek, and she told me about this new case. And when she said the Apollock sisters, I was absolutely appalled.

• 6:24Phoebe Judge?

  Elizabeth told Rebecca that Bernice and Wanda Apollock had been found strangled in their home. One of them had been raped. According to an article in the Anchorage Daily News, they'd been found on Tuesday, August 3. Bernice was 27, and Wanda was 30.

• 6:45Speaker 02

  There are no roads that connect Utqiagvik with any other community. There's no escape route. Nobody can get on the freeway and head for Fairbanks, that's 500 miles of open tundra. You can't flee by boat on the Arctic Ocean. Your body is probably never going to be found. The only practical way in and around is by air. So the killer was still in town.

• 7:15Phoebe Judge?

  I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

• 7:25Phoebe Judge?

  Utqiagvik's law enforcement officers were looking at a man named Amos Lane. He had a previous conviction for sexual assault in the first degree. Officers didn't have enough to charge him with the murders yet, but they arrested him on unrelated misdemeanor charges. Rebecca's office would be defending him for the misdemeanors, and possibly in a murder trial. Rebecca decided to fly back to Alaska earlier than planned.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  The tundra is a very different thing to fly over. It's really like no other place on earth. It's not flat like Kansas or Nebraska. It's a series of frost heaves and small ponds. From the air, it looks like nothing so much as green cake batter, just whipped in different ways. And flying over the broken sea ice, it looked like grease in a frying pan.

• 8:33Phoebe Judge?

  Rebecca Wright Stevens moved to Utqiagvik for a job with the Public Defender's Office when she was in her 40s. She was a widow, and had two children in college, in law school, and needed a way to pay for it.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  And I learned that far-off Alaska, oil-rich Alaska, paid public defenders very well, particularly if you were willing to go to one of the remote offices. So I flew to Juneau, took the Alaska bar and passed, and applied for jobs.

• 9:09Phoebe Judge?

  Rebecca had spent most of her law career, up to that point, working as a public defender in Washington State. She says in law school, the cases she found most interesting were the criminal ones.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  Each one was like a short story. You could see the pressures operating on people, driving them to whatever they did. And then you could see the system attempting to deal with it. Everyone told me, though, that I could not go into criminal law. You can't make a living at criminal law, and I didn't, I wasn't tough enough for it. When I started law school, I was what used to be called a reentry woman, having stayed at home for 10 years. I knew no other women lawyers. In fact, I knew very few women that worked outside the home. We were only about a dozen or 15 women in a class of over 100 at Champaign-Urbana.

• 10:08Speaker 02

  There was not even a ladies' room. They had to convert part of the men's locker room to give us a ladies' room.

• 10:18Phoebe Judge?

  Rebecca graduated in 1976. 13 years earlier, the Supreme Court ruled on a case, Gideon versus Wainwright, where the defendant argued that even though he couldn't afford one, he had the right to a lawyer. The court unanimously agreed, and nationwide, states developed and funded public defender systems. Rebecca knew it was exactly the kind of law she wanted to practice, even though, she says, some people didn't consider public defenders real lawyers. She remembers hearing the joke, "Please don't tell my mother I'm a public defender. She thinks I play piano in a whorehouse."

• 11:02Phoebe Judge?

  17 years later, in 1993, when Rebecca flew back to Alaska to defend Amos Lane, she went straight from the airport to the courthouse with her suitcase.

• 11:16Phoebe Judge?

  We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus.

• 11:28Phoebe Judge?

  This November, I'm going out on the road with a brand-new live show. This one is about my own family, and in part, about how when we were starting Criminal, my own sister was in prison in Iowa. I hope you'll come. We'll be in Chicago, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, DC, Raleigh, Austin, Minneapolis, Denver, LA, San Francisco, Portland, Oregon, and Seattle. You can find out more at thisiscriminal.com/live, or click the link in the show notes.

• 12:08Phoebe Judge?

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• 12:52Phoebe Judge?

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• 13:34Phoebe Judge?

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• 14:19Phoebe Judge?

  It's the best way to support the show.

• 14:25Phoebe Judge?

  Amos Lane's arraignment took place in Utkey Ogvik's courthouse on Friday, August 6, 1993.

• 14:33Speaker 02

  I was surprised when I opened the doors. Usually, the courtroom is pretty quiet and empty, especially on a Friday docket, but it was packed. The entire Apollock family was there, looking exhausted. There were a large number of community members there, some of them out of concern, young mothers and elders. And then a certain percentage of people were there because, simply because there's no movie theater and court-watching was a bit of entertainment or diversion. So I went up and I took my place beside Amos. I wish I wasn't dragging my suitcase.

• 15:18Speaker 02

  And I wished very much that I'd had a chance to talk to him before court began, because I had to make a bail argument on his behalf.

• 15:28Phoebe Judge?

  Rebecca says that even though Amos was in court for the misdemeanors unrelated to the murder of Bernice and Wanda Apollock, a lot of people suspected that he had killed them. Rebecca remembers thinking he'd been arrested on the misdemeanor charges as a way to keep him from leaving town, while investigators tried to find enough evidence to charge him with murder. What were the charges that they were holding him on?

• 15:56Speaker 02

  There was one, he was charged with assaulting a man named Harold Kilbear. Amos whispered to me that Kilbear was hitting his girlfriend, and Amos just tried to stop him. And of course, there was no way I could really argue that to the court at that time. And I asked Amos not to be whispering to me. The courtroom was packed, and everyone in the courtroom in that small town was a potential juror, so we couldn't afford to be whispering and looking like conspirators. The other case, he was charged with stealing ivory from a prolific ivory carver.

• 16:41Phoebe Judge?

  The final charge was that Amos had violated his parole conditions. After his prior rape conviction, he'd been released into a rehab facility in Utkey Ogvik. He'd been allowed out for the weekend that the Apollock sisters had been killed.

• 16:57Speaker 02

  And he had violated his parole conditions by going out and drinking, as he had done.

• 17:05Phoebe Judge?

  Amos told Rebecca that his rehab counselor was there in the courtroom. They were still waiting on the hearing to begin, so Rebecca quickly went to speak with the counselor.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  I asked him what kind of issues Amos was dealing with, and he said grief issues from the death of his mother. He said that in the community of Point Hope, which is even smaller and more remote than Utkey Ogvik, she had been dragged into a house by three men, raped and tortured to the extent that she died the following day.

• 17:52Phoebe Judge?

  Rebecca later learned that Amos had been a teenager when his mother died and started drinking at a very early age. During the bail hearing, Rebecca called the rehab counselor to the stand.

• 18:06Speaker 02

  And had him explain that, in his opinion, Amos was still in compliance with his conditions of remaining in treatment. So the upshot was, the magistrate dismissed that case and set the other two cases for trial, and Amos was allowed to return to the treatment facility.

• 18:27Phoebe Judge?

  Tell me, what were your next steps? What else did you learn about the case?

• 18:34Speaker 02

  At that time, I realized, of course, that Public Safety is under a huge amount of pressure, community pressure, to solve the case, actually pressure from the governor's office and from all over the state. So when they said they wanted to talk to me, I went over to Public Safety offices to meet with them. It was unusual that they would request the presence of the public defender. So they started to ask me what Amos had told me during arraignment. Amos told me nothing. He didn't tell me anything during arraignment. He didn't tell me anything when I went to see him at the jail. He never confided in me, never trusted me enough to tell me anything.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  But Public Safety thought that he had, and they wanted the names of his relatives and any other information I could give. And of course, I said to them that I didn't have any such information, I wouldn't give it to them if I had. And it was then that I realized that they had a running tape recorder in a drawer, and they were trying to-- that was quite illegal. They were trying to record me divulging some kind of confidence from my client. Of course, I didn't have any confidence and would not have divulged it. So I left that interview quite angry.

• 19:58Phoebe Judge?

  Rebecca started to put together a timeline of the weekend the Apollock sisters had been killed. She wanted to figure out who last saw them and when. Amos had returned to his rehab facility by Sunday night, but the sisters hadn't been found until Tuesday, so if anyone had seen them after Sunday night, Amos would have an alibi. Investigators interviewed dozens of people, but a lot of them couldn't remember exactly when things had happened that weekend. It was summer, so the sun never set.

• 20:34Speaker 02

  What if the next three days, the sun just shone continually? There's no twilight, there's no peaceful dawn, there's no noon, there's just continuous, endless, dazzling sunlight. Under those circumstances, particularly if it goes on for weeks and even months, little differences, like whether it's Friday night or Saturday morning, they don't seem to matter anymore. Time itself becomes different.

• 21:12Phoebe Judge?

  Bernice and Wanda's neighbor said that Bernice had stopped by sometime over the weekend to borrow a cigarette.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  And he remembered vividly, because he was annoyed she'd kept the pack instead of taking one or two.

• 21:27Phoebe Judge?

  But he couldn't remember if this was on Saturday, Sunday, or even Monday.

• 21:33Speaker 02

  By this time, I had quite a network of former clients, and I went to see an individual whom I had represented previously, who was a distant relative of Amos's. This fellow, his name was Nate, was reluctant to talk to me. He was fed up with the court system.

• 21:52Phoebe Judge?

  But Nate finally told Rebecca about something he'd seen the weekend Bernice and Wanda had been killed.

• 21:59Speaker 02

  He had seen Amos riding someone's three-wheeler, that Amos was very intoxicated, that Bernice and Wanda were very intoxicated, and that Amos was following the young women on his three-wheeler.

• 22:21Phoebe Judge?

  We'll be right back.

• 22:33Phoebe Judge?

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• 23:14Phoebe Judge?

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• 23:34Speaker 03

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• 23:39Phoebe Judge?

  Support for Criminal comes from Whatnot. When you're selling online, getting your products in front of the right people isn't always easy. Whatnot lets you connect directly with buyers who are ready to shop. Whatnot is the largest live shopping platform, where sellers are building real businesses around everything from beauty and collectibles to electronics, luxury fashion, and even cookies. Whether you're just starting out or already running an established business, anyone can sell on Whatnot. And you're doing more than just listing products. You're building real connections with buyers. All you have to do is go live, showcase your products in real time, and turn what you love into real income.

• 24:21Phoebe Judge?

  One of our producers tried out Whatnot as a buyer, shopping for a bandana for her dog. And she found lots of great handmade options in different kinds of colors and patterns. Download Whatnot today and get $20 off your first live purchase. Search "Whatnot," spelled W-H-A-T-N-O-T, in the App Store, sign up, and take a shopping trip. Terms apply. Rebecca Wright Stevens was expecting her client, Amos Lane, to be charged with the murder of Bernice and Wanda Apolick. As a public defender, you are defending people who are guilty, you know, those that

• 25:02Phoebe Judge?

  have been wrongly accused, but also those that are guilty. When your client might be guilty, but they still deserve defense, how do you square that?

• 25:15Speaker 02

  I was trained in due process, and it is a process. I don't think of them as guilty. I think of them as defendants. And actually, in a trial, I always file a motion that they not even be called defendants, that they be called by their name. It was never up to me to decide guilt or innocence. During the trial process or during an investigation, if it did become apparent that a guilty verdict was appropriate, there's still a lot of work to be done.

• 25:56Speaker 02

  Sometimes because of community anger, or because of definitions of crimes, a person is overcharged, and that's a serious type of unfairness, and a public defender can do something about that. Sometimes people are over-sentenced, and that's a public defender job and an appealable issue. Even the guilty are entitled to a fair process.

• 26:28Phoebe Judge?

  Rebecca says that even though law enforcement suspected Amos, they were having a hard time finding enough evidence to charge him. They started looking at other suspects. A bus driver had told inspectors that Bernice's fiance, John Adams, had been on a bus headed home late Saturday night, and that John said he and Bernice had just had a big fight. John later told investigators that Bernice had thrown her ring in his face.

• 27:00Speaker 02

  When John went home on the last bus that evening, the bus driver, who knew John, saw him looking very despondent and saw him holding the ring in his hand. At that time, the lead detective in the case was an individual with whom I had had run-ins before. I felt that many of his tactics were coercive and perhaps borderline. This detective met me in the lettuce section of the grocery store one day and told me that John Adams had confessed to this case, and so Amos was no longer a suspect.

• 27:44Speaker 02

  I was quite surprised. I was also quite dubious.

• 27:49Phoebe Judge?

  Then Rebecca heard from Amos that he'd received a subpoena from the state to testify, to back up their case against John Adams.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  They expected that Amos would testify that, yes, he had been with the sisters that night. And then the state could explain that's why John Adams flew into a rage, that's what the argument was about, that's why Bernice threw the ring at him, and that's why he flew off the handle, and the double homicide resulted.

• 28:25Phoebe Judge?

  But under the Fifth Amendment, prosecutors couldn't force Amos to say anything that might be self-incriminating, like the fact that he had been with the sisters that night. So if the state wanted him to testify to back up their story about John, Rebecca said they would have to grant him immunity.

• 28:44Speaker 02

  So that Amos could never be prosecuted in the death of Bernice and Wanda. I felt very uneasy about that deal. I felt, that's one thing about working in a small town, you know all the players so well. Knowing that detective, I felt that he probably had been coercive. I didn't really believe that John Adams had confessed. So it troubled me that Amos was being offered immunity. But that, when any client is offered immunity, that's a wonderful opportunity or deal. And so it's not a public defender role to say, no, you can't do that.

• 29:29Speaker 02

  So he got his immunity.

• 29:33Phoebe Judge?

  John Adams' trial began in July of 1994, about a year after Bernice and Wanda Apolick had been killed. John's lawyer brought in an expert in false confessions to testify.

• 29:46Speaker 02

  And this individual explained to the jury how exactly, what are the mechanics of coercing testimony from a defendant? The ways in which a defendant can be brow-beaten into saying things that he doesn't believe, or going along with things that he doesn't even remember.

• 30:12Phoebe Judge?

  The jury was shown the video of John's confession. In it, a detective asked John questions like, "You loved her, but you just lost your temper, right?" And said things like, "I sympathize with you, man. Women can drive you crazy. We all know that."

• 30:31Speaker 02

  John is sitting there, tear-streaked face, obviously exhausted, not remembering details any longer, being badgered endlessly. And I could watch the body language of the jurors. They began to cross their arms over their chest, or put their heads in their hands, and some were just deliberately looking away, trying not to follow it anymore.

• 31:03Phoebe Judge?

  Then Amos was called to the stand and was sworn in. Rebecca says at first, he seemed confident.

• 31:09Speaker 02

  But then, as the district attorney began to ask questions about the evening that Bernice and Wanda died, Amos began to grow visibly nervous and evasive. And he admitted that he was drinking, he admitted that he saw the young women. When the DA said, "And then you went over there, right?" "No, I never went over there."

• 31:39Phoebe Judge?

  But Rebecca says the prosecution's argument depended on Amos being there. In their version of events, John Adams had found out that Amos was spending time with his fiance, and that's what made John mad enough to kill the sisters. While Amos was still on the stand, the prosecutor revealed that investigators had found something tangled up in blankets at Bernice and Wanda's house, a part of a key from a three-wheeler that belonged to Amos's uncle. Amos had just testified that the weekend the sisters were killed, he'd borrowed his uncle's three-wheeler.

• 32:22Phoebe Judge?

  Then the prosecutor said that they'd found something else underneath Bernice's body. It was a card with an appointment reminder on it for the rehab facility where Amos had been staying, and it had Amos's name on it.

• 32:38Phoebe Judge?

  In the courtroom, Rebecca remembers everyone was staring at Amos on the stand. And at first, no one noticed John Adams, who had stood up from the defense table and moved towards Amos, as if to attack him. Rebecca remembers someone in the courtroom screamed. The judge had to clear the courtroom for a break.

• 33:00Speaker 02

  The fact that he was there, of course, does not in and of itself mean that he killed the young women. It could easily have been that they just watched TV, or played cards, or drank. But it did not mean that he killed them. But there was evidence that he had, in fact, been there.

• 33:22Phoebe Judge?

  A lot of this you were hearing for the first time.

• 33:25Speaker 02

  The part that truly disturbed me, and that I woke up the night after the trial, I still find this disturbing to think about. The coroner testified that the bodies were moved at some point. That kind of stuck in my head. How would that have played? Who was there later? Why would the bodies have been moved? Why don't we know who that was? And then it occurred to me to wonder, was it Amos who went back? Was he looking for the appointment card? The appointment card with his name on it?

• 34:07Speaker 02

  The one that had been found beneath the body of Bernice Apollock? Was that who had moved the bodies? And I had no answer to that question.

• 34:21Phoebe Judge?

  The jury left to deliberate at 6 o'clock later that day. And at 9:15, Rebecca heard that they'd reached a verdict. They found John Adams not guilty and cleared of all charges. John continued living in Utqiagvik, and with the support of his in-laws, raised the young daughter he'd had with Bernice. Amos Lane, who had immunity for the murders, was charged with perjury because he lied about not going to Bernice and Wanda's house. He pled no contest, but was released for time served. Rebecca stayed in Alaska for a few more years.

• 35:04Phoebe Judge?

  But in 1997, she moved to Kentucky after reconnecting with an old classmate from law school, a man named Jim. They got married and both started jobs with the Kentucky Department of Public Advocacy. She heard that Amos Lane moved to Anchorage and started an ivory carving business. In 2016, she came across a news story about him. He'd assaulted a police officer and pled guilty to felony assault. Six years later, in 2022, Amos was fatally shot by police officers after he pulled a gun at a traffic stop.

• 35:48Phoebe Judge?

  Bernice and Wanda Apollock's obituary said they left behind a big family, and that a memorial fund had been set up for them through the Utqiagvik Presbyterian Church. No one has ever been convicted for the murders. Rebecca writes Stephen's book, is Sisters of the Midnight Sun: A Murder in Arctic Alaska. We'll have a link in the show notes. Criminal is created by Lauren Spoor and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer.

• 36:32Phoebe Judge?

  Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susannah Robertson, Jackie Sajikko, Lilly Clark, and Lena Silasen. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Julianne Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com/newsletter. We hope you'll consider supporting our work by joining our membership program, Criminal Plus. You can listen to Criminal, This is Love, and Phoebe Reads a Mystery without any ads. Plus, you'll get bonus episodes. These are special episodes of me and Criminal co-creator Lauren Spoor, talking about everything

• 37:13Phoebe Judge?

  from how we make our episodes, to the crime stories that caught our attention that week, to things we've been enjoying lately. To learn more, go to patreon.com/criminal.

• 37:25Phoebe Judge?

  We're on Facebook at This is Criminal, and Instagram and TikTok at Criminal underscore Podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com/criminalpodcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

• 38:00Speaker 04

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• 38:46Speaker 05

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