The Murders No One Knew Were Connected
“Vermont. New York. Alaska. Same killer. No one knew for years.”
Anchorage, Alaska. A man lived here with his daughter. Built houses. Went to coffee shops. A quiet life. He also flew out of Anchorage more than anyone could explain. Eleven flights in five years. Most of them had no clear destination and no clear reason.
“Vermont. New York. Alaska. Same killer. No one knew for years.”
The Pattern
Anchorage hub → repeated flight arcs into Lower 48 → long driving dead zones → most endpoints have NO victim pin. Gaps are the story. Pre-positioned murder kits flip the meaning of "empty" trips.
The Turn
He confessed to the FBI in pieces. He described trips he'd taken that matched no known case. Flights with no endpoint. Drives with no victim. He said there were more. He drew maps. Then, in December two thousand twelve, he killed himself in his cell. The flights without dots — nobody knows what they mean. They might mean nothing. They might mean everything.
The Trail
17 waypoints · US, 2001–2012
Every point below is dated and placed from the case record. Coordinates are WGS84 approximations of the named site.
Maupin, Oregon
Early violence
Neah Bay, Washington
Secondary anchor
Oakland → Seattle → Anchorage
First hub spoke
Seattle ↔ Salt Lake City
Gap loop — no known endpoint
Anchorage → Minneapolis → Grand Forks
Pattern widens
Phoenix → San Francisco → Seattle
Rapid cross-US jump
Seattle car rental, 626 miles
Driving cloud — no victim pin
Seattle ↔ Manchester, NH (1,047 mi)
East Coast loop
Tupper Lake, New York
Victim pin + bank robbery
Sacramento → Auburn, California
Unresolved trip
Anchorage → Chicago → Boston
Web thickens
Eagle River, Alaska (fuel purchase)
Possible kit burial site
Anchorage → Chicago → Des Plaines → SF
Arc + long drive + arc home
Essex, Vermont
Currier murders (victim pin after huge build-up)
Anchorage, Alaska
Samantha Koenig — hub becomes crime dot
Las Vegas → Wilcox AZ → Lordsburg NM → Shepherd TX → Humble TX
ATM breadcrumb chase
Lufkin, Texas
Arrested — web collapses
The Narration
What the film says
Anchorage, Alaska (home base)
Anchorage, Alaska. A man lived here with his daughter. Built houses. Went to coffee shops. A quiet life. He also flew out of Anchorage more than anyone could explain. Eleven flights in five years. Most of them had no clear destination and no clear reason.
Essex, Vermont (kit burial), 2009
Two years before he killed anyone there, he drove to a rural stretch along the Winooski River in Essex, Vermont. He buried a bucket. Inside: weapons, cash, and tools for disposing of a body. Then he flew home. And waited.
Seattle to Salt Lake City (gap loop), 2007
September two thousand seven. A rental car. Seattle to Salt Lake City and back. Six hundred miles each way. The FBI later mapped the entire trip. They found no victim, no crime scene, no witness. Just a loop on a map with nothing at the center.
Anchorage to Minneapolis to Grand Forks, 2008
October two thousand eight. Another flight. Anchorage to Minneapolis. Then a rental car to Grand Forks, North Dakota. Then Phoenix. Then San Francisco. Then Seattle. A full circuit of the western United States. One rental car logged six hundred twenty-six miles in two days. No known victim.
Tupper Lake, New York, 2009
April two thousand nine. He flew east. This time, there was a victim and a bank robbery in Tupper Lake, New York. Then he vanished back into the flight grid. One dot among dozens of empty ones.
Essex, Vermont (the return), June 2011
June two thousand eleven. He flew to Chicago, drove to Vermont, and retrieved the bucket he'd buried two years earlier. Bill and Lorraine Currier were murdered in their home that night. A crime planned across twenty-four months and two thousand miles.
Anchorage, Alaska (the hub turns red), February 2012
Then he broke his own rules. February two thousand twelve. Samantha Koenig, eighteen, was taken from a coffee stand in Anchorage. His home city. The hub of every flight. For the first time, the quiet center of the web became a crime scene.
The ATM trail (Texas), March 2012
He drove south with Koenig's debit card. Las Vegas. Wilcox, Arizona. Lordsburg, New Mexico. A small town in east Texas. Each ATM withdrawal was a breadcrumb — the first time he left a trail he didn't intend.
Lufkin, Texas, March 13 2012
March thirteenth. A routine traffic stop in Lufkin, Texas. An officer ran his plates. The rental car matched a BOLO. In his possession: Koenig's debit card, a disguise kit, and a map annotated with his own routes. The web collapsed at a traffic light.
The empty map
He confessed to the FBI in pieces. He described trips he'd taken that matched no known case. Flights with no endpoint. Drives with no victim. He said there were more. He drew maps. Then, in December two thousand twelve, he killed himself in his cell. The flights without dots — nobody knows what they mean. They might mean nothing. They might mean everything.