How one investigator unburied a 50-year-old Alaskan mystery

I love a story that takes a morsel of common knowledge and turns that small narrative on its head, expanding it into something astonishing and new. 

Last year, I listened to a podcast called “Missing in Alaska” that did just this with the 1972 disappearance of two congressmen, including legendary Louisiana Representative Hale Boggs, when their plane was lost in the Alaskan wilderness.  

I knew who Boggs was mainly through the work of his daughter, the late broadcast journalist Cokie Roberts. If you knew her work, you likely knew she came from a prominent political family in Louisiana. And if you knew that, you probably knew her father died in a plane crash. But that’s likely the limit of common knowledge about the event. I had never heard of Nick Begich, the other congressman lost in the disappearance. 

Enter a young, independent journalist without much experience who found himself learning how to conduct a complex, historical investigation on the fly because he stumbled on a strange mystery and just could not let go. If you haven’t heard “Missing in Alaska,” it’s worth your time. 

Given that the 50th anniversary of the disappearance of the plane is this weekend, I was thinking about the story again and decided to reach out to the podcaster, Jon Walczak, to see if he’d chat about the story. He graciously agreed. (I should say, I did not know Walczak and was able to contact him through the miracle of open DMs on Twitter.)

Walczak said he first became interested in the Boggs disappearance in 2011 while browsing a list of famous disappearances. He was young and had never heard of Boggs but he was intrigued.

“What shocked me is how little information was available; next to nothing,” Walczak told me. “Two congressmen vanish on a small plane in Alaska – and nobody covered it in depth? Not one book? There were only a few old articles and brief segments in cheap reality shows.”

In the end, the story wasn’t really about Boggs, who was in 1972 one of the most powerful Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives. The key to the story was the man Boggs had gone to Alaska to help–Begich, a freshman Congressman who was in a tight reelection race. 

I don’t want to spoil too much of the story, but when Walczak set out to find out what really happened, he didn’t know he’d find mobsters, a quietly conducted FBI investigation, and a bizarre marriage between a convicted bomb maker and the widow of a congressman at the end of the threads he pulled. 

One of the great intrigues of this podcast is that it has been sitting there mostly unexamined for decades. 

“Selfishly, as a journalist, the lack of easily-available information was a perk. It meant that anyone who wanted to do this story would have to work very hard. It wasn’t a Wikipedia-and-done story,” Walczak said. “I also just got lucky. How many stories exist of missing congressmen, let alone ones in which there are credible and previously-unreported claims of foul play – via a bomb? None. This is it. It’s a rare, special story.”

As an investigator and former reporter, I wanted to know how Walczak pursued leads and tips that were now 50 years old, for an event that happened long before he was born. 

“I started with the easy research; the low-hanging fruit. I dug deeper into digital newspaper archives. I filed FOIA requests. At first, it was a low-intensity side project, but the more I learned, the more it hooked me,” he said. 

Eventually, the climb got much steeper. 

“I dug through thousands of pages of archival documents. I interviewed dozens of people. I’m good at quickly scanning things and picking out the valuable tidbits. This was a story with endless rabbit holes, many of which I went down, and many of which were productive.” 

These decisions were very consequestional for a journalist who started this project on his own dime. Reporting costs money, especially when the story is in Alaska. The story sprawled into a  50-page outline with a cast of interview subjects large enough to require a spreadsheet to keep track of them. Walczak said the project almost bankrupted him in the early stages. 

Eventually, Walczak wrangled the investigation into a riveting listen. I had some ex-reporter quibbles along the way, but Walczak was transparent about what he had pinned down and what he hadn’t.

“I subjected any conflicting information to rigorous cross-referencing. I compared it to everything else I knew. Still, I had to be careful. Memories fade. Primary sources were extremely valuable; modern-day interviews, less so,” he said. “In the end, if I was uncertain about the veracity of an important claim, but suspected it to be true, I reported it, but I was transparent about my ambiguity. I explained why it made sense to me, but I didn’t try to paint it as fact.”

Although the podcast ended with plenty of unanswered questions, I expected to hear more about it soon. The dots Walczak connected between the mafia in Phoenix, the convicted bombmaker, and Nick Begich’s widow clearly deserved attention. But there’s been nothing of substance since the podcast launched in March 2021. That is a whole other discussion about political influence over local media that I won’t get into here. 

Walczak said he has “a ton of new information” and is considering another season. I’ll listen. I’m an investigator; I love a good mystery.