Reporting Highlights
- System Failure: Eunice Whitman’s boyfriend spent seven years in jail on bad evidence, and no one has stood trial in her murder.
- Lost Opportunity: Many potential suspects could have been examined more closely, defense attorneys say. Doing so gets harder each year.
- A Light Gone: Whitman’s family still visits her grave on her birthday each year. They feel embittered by the lack of justice for her killer.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
Marcy McDannel slid a photograph across the steel jailhouse table to the convicted killer and watched his face for a reaction.
Samuel Atchak, 27 at the time, was serving 115 years for an unusual killing. One August morning in 2014, a young woman was found stabbed in the throat and chest, her body displayed nude on the tundra at the center of the coastal Alaska village of Chevak and her clothes placed nearby. Atchak pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and attempted sexual assault in Roxanne Smart’s death.
McDannel was interested in the death of a second young woman, less than nine months later, in another Alaska coastal community that neighbors Chevak. Eunice Whitman too was found stabbed in the throat and chest, her clothes placed nearby and her body displayed nude on the tundra in a well-trafficked area of Bethel. No one had been convicted in her death.
“If you don’t want to see it,” McDannel said gently, “I won’t show it to you,” according to a recording she made.
Atchak didn’t mind looking at the pictures, he assured her. “I’m all right.”
McDannel recalls he did not flinch as he stared at a redacted printout of the crime scene photo.
Over the course of two hours, McDannel coaxed responses from him bit by bit. He speculated that based on the position of the body, the killer likely caught the woman off guard. Maybe surprised her from behind and strangled her, he said, with a “rear naked chokehold,” using a martial arts term. He offered thoughts about why Whitman’s body was arranged just so, what the killer’s motive might have been, even the height of the murderer. Could be someone around 5’8” judging from how the attack seemed to go down, suggested Atchak, 5’6”.
A former state prosecutor turned defense attorney, McDannel thanked him for the insight and headed home.
Although she didn’t ask directly, what she really wanted to know, of course, was if the man across the table had committed both killings. Atchak, one of more than a dozen people McDannel portrayed as viable suspects in court filings or in communications with state police, said in their interview that he thought he remembered passing through Bethel around the date Whitman’s body was found. State troopers later told McDannel that records placed him elsewhere.
Two months before the October 2022 prison visit,