In May 2015, 23-year-old Bethel resident Eunice Whitman was killed. The next day, her boyfriend Justine Paul was arrested for her murder, and spent the next seven years behind bars without ever facing a trial.
Then, in 2022, Paul was released after the evidence that held up prosecutors' case against him fell apart. Now, more than ten years after Whitman's murder, someone is still getting away with it.
Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica reporter Kyle Hopkins recently wrote about Whitman's murder and Paul's release. He says the incident speaks to wider issues within Alaska's justice system, involving delayed trials, shoddy investigations and a lack of justice for rural communities.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Kyle Hopkins: I started looking at the story and was trying to understand how it would take six or seven years for someone accused of murder to get to trial. Why were there so many delays? Because you do have a right to a speedy trial. Our process is supposed to move much more quickly. And so I was trying to understand why it took so long. And the more I learned about how common it was for cases to be delayed and delayed and delayed dozens of times, sometimes five, seven, ten years, that actually led me to write a bunch of stories before this one. This story set me on a path of writing maybe six other stories before this that had nothing to do with it, that were just purely about pre-trial delay and this gridlock that we have in our Alaska courts.
Wesley Early: So who was Eunice Whitman, and how did she die?
KH: Eunice Whitman was a 23-year-old woman from Bethel, also from Mekoryuk. She had been living in Bethel, you know, long enough that she had gone to the Yup'ik immersion school there. So a child of Bethel, growing up in Bethel, now a young woman living there. She died on May 24, 2015 in what this one attorney who was familiar with the case described as kind of almost like a serial killer type of crime scene. And, you know, I don't say that lightly. I mean, the point was, it was such an unusually violent and public killing that it stood out among, even in Alaska, where we unfortunately have high rates of homicide.
WE: How was Justine Paul identified as a suspect in Whitman's murder?
KH: You know, if you're familiar with Bethel, there's the boardwalk that's kind of in the center of town, and she was found there. Her body was found there at about 4 a.m. on a Sunday morning. And then police arrive, and they rope it off and it's a crime scene throughout the day. And then that evening, Eunice's boyfriend, this guy named Justine Paul, called 911 and said that he was looking… he was aware that there was a body in the center of town, like everyone in town knew, because it was so public. And he called 911, saying that he was worried that that was his, what he called his fiance, but certainly his girlfriend. And he said, 'I'm worried it's Eunice Whitman.' And then police said at that point they had not identified the body, and they said, 'Well, why don't you come to the police department and we'll talk about it.' And so he comes to the police department about 6:30pm on that Sunday and then just doesn't leave. He's kind of behind bars for the next six or seven years.
WE: And why did it take so long for his case to be dismissed, despite what you write is kind of a lack of evidence?
KH: Some evidence was presented to this grand jury that suggested that the police said, 'Look, this is the boyfriend of the woman who died. We found a backpack at his house where he was staying, and it was full of bloody clothes. And we think those clothes, the blood on those clothes, is going to connect him to this murder.' So from the grand jury's perspective, it's a really damning case. It seems like a slam dunk of a case. But the problem was when that evidence started to be tested at the crime lab, you know, they sent that evidence down to Anchorage to be tested. Well, the blood, it didn't match her DNA. It was his own DNA. So that evidence fell apart really early. And meantime, there are other people, other potential suspects, that were not aggressively investigated. There are people, certainly in Bethel, who feel that police had the right person. The detective who led that investigation for Bethel police, she thinks he did it. The victim's family, they think he did it, right? But the problem with the way that this played out through the police investigation and the courts is that the steps were not taken to exclude and kind of close the door systematically to these other likely suspects. And so years later, the case gets thrown out and no one is served. You have a defendant who, if innocent, was kept, robbed of his freedom for seven years, and if guilty, as in the eyes of the police detective, well, that case was dismissed. So justice was served to no one.
WE: So with Paul released, you write that the case has gone back basically to square one, and the state's Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons unit has taken over. Can you describe that unit's history a bit?
KH: So that unit started in 2022 and it initially was led by Anne Sears, who was a long time Kotzebue trooper, and she was kind of a one person MMIP unit for the state in 2022. I don't know if you remember, but it was kind of a mystery when she left that job. There were stories about what happened to this MMIP unit, because there was someone there, and then there wasn't. And this isn't in the stories, but one thing that we talked about with the Department of Public Safety earlier this year was they kind of acknowledged that was a lot to ask of one person. You know, imagine being the one person that everyone in Alaska is saying you need to look at this case. And so they brought in Lonny Piscoya, who I believe was a trooper in Nome, and he now heads that unit, and now there's four investigators for that MMIP unit. So you basically have these like troopers who came out of retirement, and now you have a four-person unit, and their job is to look at specifically cold MMIP homicide cases. And they're looking at six cases right now, and Eunice Whitman's death is one of those cases, or at least it was when we talked to them earlier this year.
WE: And has the unit had much luck in solving any of these cases?
KH: You know, I have a line in the story, one of the stories, that says that they have not solved a cold case homicide, in their tenure, since they were created. So they've been around three years. They haven't made an arrest in a cold case MMIP homicide, which, you know, I was careful with that fact. I think, to be fair, to provide context, what they would say is that they've been hard at work. They said they've been working their butts off on these cases and that they've done other things, like help connect families who had, you know, lost track of someone, a family member had gone missing, and reconnected people who had been, you know, lost track of each other, and had relatives who they could no longer find. So they said, 'Look, we've had successes, but just not yet in the arena of, you know, making an arrest on one of these cases.'
WE: As you note, Eunice Whitman's case is still open. Your reporting discusses a number of other suspects in the case, some of which you name, others you don't. How have those other suspects been investigated, I guess, both by you and by law enforcement?
KH: So you know, for this type of reporting, I mean, the first thing I'll do is just make a timeline. And so I have like a 600-page timeline of this case and these events, and part of that timeline is just going through, you know, this is a dismissed case, and so really, the only documents are in Bethel at the courthouse, and there's phone books worth, because it went on for so long, there's phone books worth of cases. So we're just kind of, just kind of plugging all the records into a timeline. And one of the things that surprised me reading through the court file was the defense. So Paul's lawyer filed what's called a notice of an alternate suspect, saying 'Look, we're going to argue that this other guy did it.' They were referring to a man from Bethel, I name him in the story, his name is Kyle Jones, and he was named as a suspect. And the allegation was that he had confessed to it. And so a big part of this whole… a big question for us all along has been, wait, somebody confessed to this killing, and it wasn't the person in jail? How does… what? It just begs a lot of follow up. You just don't know what to make of that. So I went to the Anchorage Jail. So Kyle Jones had been released on some other charges. He had stabbed someone on that same boardwalk, and he did, in his interview with me, say that he did say the words that he killed Eunice Whitman. So like he doesn't deny that he said the words he killed her. What he says is that he didn't mean it literally, right, that he felt responsible for her death, but not that he, you know, committed the act of homicide. And so we talked about that at length. And then there's another young man who Paul's attorneys had asked state troopers to investigate, and the troopers did start to investigate him. And he's described in the second story, because he had been convicted, had admitted to a killing that had similarities with Eunice Whitman's stabbing, in Chevak a few months earlier. So at the time that Eunice Whitman was murdered, there was another young man who lived in a neighboring community who had committed a fairly similar stabbing, who was under investigation for that prior stabbing and had been traveling through Bethel. So that was just another thread that needed to be explored.
WE: What does this case say broadly about the justice system in Alaska?
KH: For the people who believe that police did have the right person, they're not satisfied because it never got to a trial, because there were so many problems with, frankly, the investigation and the way that the case was handled in the courts. One big takeaway for me was, I think we all assume that this process works better than it does, because we've all seen a bunch of Law and Order and we're like, 'yeah, you know, someone gets arrested and then they're gonna go to trial and if the evidence shows they didn't do it in the first 10 minutes, that person's excluded. Now we're on to the next suspect.' And like, no. I mean, you can be indicted on an assumption, and then when the lab results kind of blow up that assumption, you're not necessarily going to be released. I mean, maybe you are, if you have resources and you could pay for, like, a private attorney who's aggressive, but you know, not necessarily. You might spend years in jail until they get sorted out.
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