International, F-22 squadrons training at Elmendorf, hunters coming and going from Lake Hood, not to mention all the wannabe pilots doing touch-and-goes at Merrill. (Here’s a story on AlaskaDispatch.com about somebody ground-looping a Super Cub on the Lake Hood strip yesterday. Like Jim says, that’s what happens when you learn on a tricycle and then buy a taildragger. Lucky nobody died.) They told me to come back in the summer to see it when it’s really hopping. Later Kate said they are always looking for new controllers, it’s a tough job and they burn out fast. I believe it.)
Anyway, the plane. Whoever was flying it didn’t file a flight plan (I know what Dad would have said about that) but the tower had the tail numbers. We tracked down the owner and he says he doesn’t know anything about the flight and that he was home asleep when it took off. Now his plane is gone. He sounded really pissed off, and said he was going to have a conversation with “those f****** airport rentacops.” He lives with his wife and two kids and everybody was home in bed at the time. Kate checked with Brendan, the guy’s had like one ticket for speeding in his whole life, so I think she kind of believes him. As much as Kate ever believes anybody.
2 P.M.—Got a text from Van, who got a text from Bobby, who heard from Auntie B on the marine band, who says there was a Myra Gordaoff born in Cordova nineteen years ago. I checked, she’s on Facebook. Her profile says she graduated from Cordova High, that she’s working for the AC, and that she’s in a relationship. One of her friends tagged her in a photo at a party, she’s sitting on some guy’s lap. He looks white, but you can’t see his face because he’s got a ball cap pulled down over his eyes.
The ball cap has an Anchorage Aces logo on it.
She hasn’t posted anything for a week and there are messages from three friends wondering where she disappeared to. I e-mailed all of them on Facebook.
7 P.M.—Heard back from one of Myra’s friends, a woman named Louise. She says Myra is engaged to be married to some guy named Chris, a cheechako who moved to Alaska last summer. He came to Cordova with a pal of his, an older man who is maybe a relative, she didn’t know for sure, both of them looking for jobs on a fishing boat.
Louise also says that Myra’s grandfather, Herman Gordaoff, is a big noise in the local Native community, one of the last surviving elders. Myra is his only grandchild, and besides both of them being shareholders in the local Native Association, Herman has a lot of money and property, including a twenty-eight-hundred-square-foot home on the slough, twenty-five acres out Hartney Bay road, a couple of gold mines, and a vacation cabin at Boswell Bay, not to mention a fifty-foot salmon seiner and a fishing permit whose area includes the Kanuyaq River flats, which even I know is probably the most lucrative permit a fisherman can own in the state. I asked Louise if Herman spoke English. She said yes. She was kind of mifty about it.
I told Kate. She looked grim. “I don’t know what’s worse,” she said, “living with ‘No dogs or Natives allowed’ signs in the store windows fifty years ago, or Native women being preyed on today because they’ve got a big fat quarterly shareholder dividend coming in.”
“You think this Chris guy wants to marry Myra so he can get his hands on her money?”
“I think he wants to marry Myra so he can get her hands on her grandfather’s money,” Kate said. “I’ll bet they came to Alaska with the intention of finding a female shareholder they could live off of. They nosed around, zeroed in on the Gordaoffs, and either followed Herman out to his cabin or kidnapped him and took him there. Herman was smart enough to play dumb, pretend he couldn’t speak English, figured to buy himself a little time so maybe he could make a break for it.
“So Chris and his buddy went to AFN looking for Eyak speakers, found Gilbert, kidnapped him, and took him to the cabin. When that didn’t work, they took him back to Anchorage and dumped him off.”
“What about Herman Gordaoff?”
Kate was already dialing her cell phone.
Thursday, October 27th, by Johnny [Reblog]
(http://www.thecordovatimes.com/) BODY OF EYAK ELDER FOUND—Acting on information received from Alaska private investigator E. I. “Kate” Shugak, authorities discovered the body of Herman Obadaiah Gordaoff at a remote cabin on his gold claim on Cheneganak Creek in Prince William Sound. Evidence at the scene indicated that Gordaoff had been physically assaulted and that he had been dead for some time before his body was found. The Alaska State Troopers say that the investigation is ongoing.
Friday, October 28th, by Johnny
We went home by way of Cordova. We met up with Myra Gordaoff at the Cordova House, who had been out at her grandfather’s cabin at Boswell Bay. She’s a quiet, pretty girl with a lot of black hair who seems younger than nineteen. We told her what we think happened.
She was, I don’t know, kind of frozen. She wouldn’t believe us about the boyfriend, but she did say she didn’t like his friend, Fred. She said Fred was a pilot, that he was older than Chris, and that they had both come to Alaska this summer, looking for work. She said that she and Chris had gone out to Boswell Bay to spend the weekend, and then Fred flew out to pick him up because he said he had a line on a couple of high-paying jobs in Prudhoe Bay. Chris told Myra he’d be right back and to wait for him. When he didn’t show up, she hitched a ride back to Cordova with a fisherman named Hank and his daughter, Annie.
I remember once Jim telling me that the worst part of being a state trooper was having to inform the victim’s family. “You never know how they’re going to react,” he said.
You sure don’t.
Thursday, December 5th, by Johnny [Reblog]
(www.ADN.com, 10am) USCG CALLS OFF SEARCH—The U.S. Coast Guard has called off the search for a small airplane missing since the end of October. The pilot, Frederick Berdoll, age 41, of Anchorage and his passenger, Christopher Mason, 37, also of Anchorage, took off in Berdoll’s Cessna 172 from Cordova, where Mason was visiting his fiancee, Myra Gordaoff.
Rescuers, including response teams from Kulis Air National Guard Base and the Civil Air Patrol, searched for weeks but found neither debris nor any sign of either Berdoll or Mason. Since much of the flight plan was over the Sound, it is assumed that the plane must have gone down in the water. “Currents and tides in Prince William Sound are pretty powerful,” NWS meteorologist Jim Kemper said. “That plane is probably halfway to Hawaii by now.”
The day after the plane failed to arrive at Lake Hood as scheduled, Myra Gordaoff said, “I waved them off from the Cordova airport. They should have been back in Anchorage later that afternoon. I watched until they were out of sight and I’m no pilot but the plane seemed okay to me.”
(www.ADN.com, 4:13pm update) The disappearance of Berdoll and Mason took an odd twist when this afternoon a spokesman for the Alaska State Troopers reported that the Cessna 172 in which the two men were flying was revealed to have been stolen from Lake Hood airstrip the week before it disappeared. The aircraft was registered to Matthew Liedholm of Airport Heights, who said he had been notified of its theft by the police. “Kinda wonder what I’m getting for my tiedown fee,” Liedholm said. He also said that to his knowledge he had never met either of the missing men.
