Harold Henthorn calls 911 to report that his wife Toni has been gravely injured after falling off of a cliff on a remote trail. National Park Service Special Agent Beth Shott uncovers suspicious details and inconsistencies in Harold's story. Originally Aired: 12/05/24 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What happened to Samantha Koenig?
Samantha could absolutely have been anywhere. I want her home.
Keep my sister alive. Please help find my daughter.
The wilderness. Beautiful yet treacherous landscapes. These are the stories of investigators who solve murders in wild places.
Ingrid hit a new record. The most snowfall for this time of year.
Some folks haven't been able to get their cars out.
Working for days to remove all of the snow.
February in Alaska, it's dark most of the time. You wake up, it's dark, and you get off work, it's dark. There's a lot of things people do to get through our long winters. A lot of people like myself drink a lot of coffee. Coffee's an important element for the Alaskan. You'll see coffee stands and coffee shops almost on every corner. They're usually being run by young women.
A lot of times they are working alone.
Samantha Coney was working in a coffee stand She's an 18-year-old girl, mostly interested in her friends, you know, prom, school. She had a boyfriend, doing things that most teenagers do, you know, with her future and her dreams, you know, and her mind.
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Chapter 2: Who is involved in the investigation?
I just figured that she just had someone go get something out of her truck.
So I'm trying to put all this together. I have a father and boyfriend who say that a girl didn't come home. Somebody broke into her car. But they didn't call the police. That would be the most logical thing in my mind. Your girlfriend's missing. You get this weird text, and now somebody's rummaging through her truck. Why didn't you call the police?
Kind of raises red flags, like, what is going on here? Why are you reporting this? And then getting mad at me for asking you questions. So in my mind, I'm thinking, maybe she's got another boyfriend somewhere, and she didn't want to come home, and I'm leaning more towards that than I am an abduction. But I learned a long time ago in my career, be careful of your opinions and stick to facts.
I'm thinking, I don't know if this is truly an abduction, but we still have to investigate it as if it was. So at that point, I call Sergeant Markowitz.
My name is Slavomir Markowitz. I'm a retired sergeant with the English Police Department. I am originally from Poland and I have an engineering degree, but the police work was something that always fascinated me. So I applied to the English police department and I was hired. That was one of the happiest days in my life. I was at my desk in the homicide unit.
The officer told me that we have a case of a missing person, Samantha Koenig. She was supposed to get a ride home from her boyfriend. When he arrived, she wasn't there. The Anchorage Police Department were close with the FBI, and they offered their help.
I'm Kat Nelson, and I'm a special agent with the FBI. Samantha was kind of your typical teenager to me. She seemed to have a close-knit group of friends that cared a lot about her. Samantha was living at her father's house. Her boyfriend would also stay there as well.
James Koning is Samantha Koning's father. He's also known as Sonny by his closest friends. And he's a really sweet person. A biker-type fellow. Loves his Harley. In a lot of people's minds, if you're a biker guy, of course you're a bad person. Samantha was his only biological child. Samantha was his world.
I've got 100% custody of Samantha, and I have had since she was about two years old. Her mother is around. She is worried for Samantha's safety.
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Chapter 3: What evidence was found at the coffee stand?
My name is Kaylee and Samantha is my younger sister. We have the same mom. When we were younger, we did live together. She wanted to make everyone laugh. I was always like the shy one. Samantha has the confidence. So it's almost like she got me out of my bubble. She would like to write music, write poems. She was really good at it. Samantha and her dad were very close.
James Koenig said that it would be totally out of her character to just walk away and not inform him. But on the other hand, it's a coffee stand right in the center of a big commercial area. It would be very unusual for someone to, you know, disappear without anybody noticing.
From the very beginning, the police are wondering, well, how true can this be? If you're that frantic about this missing 18-year-old, you don't call the cops, like, what is going on here?
Several officers were at the scene. We searched the coffee stand collecting evidence.
I worked and worked and worked trying to find evidence of any kind inside that coffee hut. I threw fingerprint powder everywhere, and I was looking for anything and everything, not just fingerprints. I was looking for items a suspect may have left behind, items she may have left behind, and I couldn't find anything. Not only did I not find anything, there was no sign of struggle.
Now there was another barista who was supposed to come in and open up that morning, which she did, but cash was missing out of the cash drawer.
It's really abnormal to walk in and find everything, you know, not taken care of, not closed up. You know, Sammy was a diligent worker.
There was talk about whether it was really an abduction or was it a boyfriend or was it somebody that she knew and they were just stealing the money to go away somewhere.
It seems like Alaska has more than its share of missing persons cases. And a lot of that is not crime related, but just the wilderness.
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Chapter 4: How did the text message complicate the case?
Bill Burr, Drop Dead Years is streaming on Hulu March 14th.
The night that Samantha disappeared, Samantha's boyfriend got a text message on his phone from Samantha's phone.
So we're wondering, who are these friends? What's her circle look like? Is there any truth to that text message?
Samantha's dad certainly was suspicious of that text message.
The way the text was written didn't sound like Samantha Dalton.
Things just didn't seem to add up. And a little bit later, in the process of talking to everybody in this investigation, I asked about video because I saw there was video cameras there.
It's 2012. It's not like 80s or 90s where you build your cases only by fingerprints and witnesses. You know, now you look for video evidence. That's the first thing you do. Later in the afternoon, when we finally had the video, we played it in the Cybercrimes Unit office. We all wanted to see that video. the lieutenant, the captain, patrol officers, and some detectives from my unit.
We played it time and time again.
In the video, you can see Samantha is closing up for the night in the coffee stand, cleaning and wiping things down. It's late at night, so there aren't many coffee drinkers that are driving up to the stand. And then you can see somebody walking up.
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Chapter 5: What did the video footage reveal?
There are police watching this, some of whom are theorizing that this is planned and staged and that Samantha is in on it.
He seems calm and she seems calm. Do they know each other? Maybe she took the money and just wanted to have a good time somewhere. Did she leave willingly? Did she not leave willingly? Also, right next to the light switch, there's an alarm. If she was in danger, why didn't she hit the alarm? She had a perfect chance to press the alarm button. She didn't do that.
All of the investigators, both APD and FBI, were trying to really understand what the circumstances were of that video. the text message from Samantha's phone saying that she was not going to be coming home. Between that text message and the video where you can see Samantha walking out, she's not being dragged.
This is a well-traveled, well-lit area. Who would do this in the wide open stretches of, you know, Anchorage?
There was definitely debate. Did Samantha leave willingly or was this a situation where she was being forced out? My background is in psychology and forensic psychology. I applied to the Bureau and got in in 2004 and was fortunate enough to get assigned to Alaska, and I've been here ever since.
When I first started in the Bureau, Jolene was already an agent at the office. She was obviously a phenomenal agent. It was always my dream and my goal to work a case with her.
I was very happy that Katherine was going to be involved. She's just kind of got a brain and a knack for picking things up and putting pieces together.
Working in Alaska, we're working with our local and state partners all the time.
My name is Jeffrey Bell. I came up here in 1984. I worked in Prudhoe Bay in the oil fields as a operator in a refinery up there. And then I applied to be an Anchorage police officer. I worked for the Anchorage Police Department, but I was also sworn as a U.S. Marshal slash FBI investigator.
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Chapter 6: How did the community respond to Samantha's disappearance?
The response from the public was overwhelmingly supportive of the Koenig family in trying to do anything that they could to help.
Samantha's mother, Darlene, was part indigenous, and that made Samantha Koenig part indigenous. And so that rallied a lot of the community and the indigenous community here in Anchorage.
the family, James Koenig and some volunteers, started to distribute flyers about her being missing.
There's people putting flyers up that knew her, and there's just tons of them.
We haven't heard anything, and my stepdad saying that he knew something was wrong, like he had that passion to get the word out there quickly. I spent a lot of time putting flyers on cars,
You couldn't go around a street corner and not see a business that had freed up their space on their billboard to show her missing picture and information. It was everywhere. Coworkers worked to cover every inch of town with this poster.
At that point in the investigation, we learned that Samantha Koenig and Dwayne Tortolani had a joint bank account. And they both had debit cards for that bank account. And on the night of Samantha's disappearance, Duane saw a man in Samantha's truck. It looks like he was searching the vehicle, looking for something. Duane told us that nothing appeared to be missing.
But we looked at the bank records, and we saw that Samantha Penning's debit card was used. We realized that it was Samantha's debit card that was missing.
A few minutes after it was taken from the truck, the debit card was used to check the balance. The account was accessed, but no money was taken.
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Chapter 7: What clues were discovered regarding Samantha's debit card?
I think that James Koenig, he's having a really tough time trusting the cops.
I don't know if my daughter's being fed, taken care of, if she's still alive, if she's getting any sleep. Please help find my daughter.
It was just so obvious how much her father cared about Samantha and what a close relationship they had.
James was devastated that his daughter was missing and he had no idea where she was or what had happened to her. And he wanted her to come home.
I also grew up in this area. I know what it was like being a teenager in Alaska. You know, the reaction that her dad would have at her not coming home is the reaction my dad would have at me for not coming home.
It's been three days since 18-year-old Samantha Koenig disappeared from her job at Common Grounds Espresso in Midtown Anchorage.
It wasn't like a normal missing person case. We are becoming more and more concerned. So we started to expand our investigation.
One of the normal protocols would be to go and canvass the area, look for other surveillance videos.
We ultimately recovered video from the Home Depot store, which is across the street from where the kiosk was.
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