Arraignment of Amos Lane in District Court
Utqiagvik (formerly Barrow), Alaska
August 6, 1993

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 When I pushed open the heavy gray doors of the courtroom, heads turned toward me as though it were a wedding, but nobody smiled. I wished I weren’t dragging a suitcase, but I’d come straight from the airport because my office said arraignment had already begun. I stashed the suitcase in a back corner and headed up the aisle.

The courtroom usually sat empty on a Friday morning, and usually was as quiet as a church, which it resembled with its pinstriped gray carpeting and blond wood spectator pews. Instead of an altar, we had a judge’s bench and jury box. Today the place was standing room only, and it buzzed with the murmurs of impatient spectators.

“Amos Lane is his name,” Liz, our office manager, had said when she phoned me in South Carolina in the middle of my first vacation in three years. “They’re holding him on misdemeanors now, but they think he killed the Ipalook sisters.”

“The Ipalook sisters!”

Fred Ipalook Elementary School in Utqiagvik was named for the family patriarch, the first Inupiaq (formerly called Eskimo) school principal.

“Both of them strangled, one raped,” Liz said.

I was standing in my parents’ kitchen, looking through the magnolia trees blooming on their lawn, trying to register what Liz was saying.

“Listen…I know you haven’t been out in a while,” she went on. “Do you want me to have Anchorage send somebody up temporary?”

It took me a while to answer.

“No, I’ll come. It’s my territory.”

My parents’ friends had asked me why I went so far away to defend people who might be dangerous. I had two explanations. The first involved money, the second was hard to explain, so I usually tried to change the subject.

The first was that my daughter was in law school and my son had just started college. Financial aid departments were generous to a widow like me, with meager resources, but the schools were still expensive. I learned that oil-rich Alaska provided good salaries for public defenders, especially if you were willing to go to a bush office, so I sold the old farmhouse near Olympia, Washington, that had been our family home for eleven years; managed to get through the Alaska bar exam; and moved to Arctic Alaska.

The second answer was that the midnight sun and the polar night and the white owls and white bears and white foxes of the Arctic fascinated me. Especially the white owls.

Public Safety officers filled the back pews. Their presence tended to put pressure on the magistrate to set a high bail. I knew it would be part of my job today to remind the court and the prosecutor that we were only here on misdemeanors. My new client might be a suspect in these shocking murders but had not been charged with them. No one had.

I spotted Ed Ellingsworth, local lead detective, his cadaverous frame drooping over a corner of a pew. A young female reporter sat beside him, plump and giggly. I rather liked the way she never spelled the district attorney’s name right. The name was Slusser, but she always wrote Slusher. She also garbled some Inupiat words, and used k, q, and g interchangeably, but so did a lot of people. The language is not yet entirely standardized, but then, neither is English. At least she had learned that Inupiat was a noun and Inupiaq an adjective.

Words that still confused me were the names of the area. When I first arrived, I was told that historic areas in the middle of town were referred to as “Ukpeagvik,” with a “p,” and that the name meant “place where the snowy owls gather.” How lovely, I thought—both the name and the glorious creatures themselves. At the time, the town was called Barrow, a proper British name, but then the townspeople voted to return to the ancient name of Utqiagvik, or “place where roots are dug.” No doubt both names are accurate, and the difference between them perhaps neither the reporter nor I will ever fully understand, but I preferred the owls.

Two entire middle pews were occupied by members of the Ipalook family, looking stricken and exhausted. There were also many spectators who came to court out of boredom. Utqiagvik didn’t have a movie theater. In the front row, there was a group of young women in summer parkas, some with babies folded inside their front zippers.

A faint, comforting scent of seal cooking oil pervaded the room.

My new client, Amos Lane—it would have to be him—sat alone in handcuffs at the defense table, bearing the angry stares at his back. All I could see was that he was a Native man with long black hair and muscular shoulders wearing an orange jumpsuit, and that he needed some company. I passed through the pony gate in the bar and took my place beside him.

His eyes flicked sideways over me, and I saw in his glance that he lumped public defenders together with bailiffs, clerks, police, DAs, judges, and everyone else who put him and kept him in jail.

“You’re Amos Lane? My name’s Rebecca Wright. I’m the public defender for the North Slope Borough. Let’s see what we’ve got.”

Alaska is divided into boroughs rather than counties. The North Slope Borough, an area the size of Wyoming, occupies the northern tier of the state. The Inupiat control the North Slope Borough financially and politically. While many teachers, doctors, and lawyers are taniks, non-Natives, they serve at the pleasure of Native authorities—and may be, and have been, asked to leave if they don’t serve well.

Without a word, Amos passed me the mess of papers in front of him. There were two misdemeanor complaints filed yesterday, and a petition for misdemeanor probation revocation filed instanter. Now.

The first complaint declared Lane was the subject of a citizen’s arrest by one Harold Killbear, whom he had assaulted.

He whispered, “That’s bullshit. The guy was beating up his girlfriend and I stopped him, is all. I got witnesses.”

I shrugged.

What struck me about the complaint was the “citizen’s arrest” part. It signified that no law enforcement officer had witnessed Lane committing any crime. To arrest on a misdemeanor, according to Alaska law, an officer actually had to see the offense happening. Otherwise, the defendant could only be summoned to come into court at a later time. But Killbear could file his own complaint and ask for assistance in taking anyone into custody right away.

I recalled that Killbear himself had appeared in court some weeks previously on a charge of DUI. I wondered, if I ever made it so far as my office this morning, whether I would find that the case against Killbear had been opportunely dismissed.

I felt my hackles rising. It was bad enough for Lane to sit alone in a courtroom of people who wanted somebody, anybody, to be jailed for a serious crime, without Public Safety piling on fake charges. I wished I’d had a chance to read over the file or even just talk to him before the hearing. The initial stages of a case of this magnitude had to be done right.

And I would have liked to tell Mr. Lane my initial reaction to the Killbear complaint, but we couldn’t afford to appear to furtively conspire in front of the crowd. Utqiagvik was so small that each and every person in the courtroom was a potential juror.

“I’ve heard of you,” Lane muttered.

He didn’t say whether what he’d heard was good or bad.

I gave him a polite smile. “I’ve heard of you, too,” I said, “all the way to South Carolina.” Lane started to inquire what I had heard, but I held up a hand and focused on the next charge.

In this complaint, Johnny Aveoganna accused Lane of stealing some ivory from his home. Uh-huh. I knew Aveoganna. He was a talented and prolific carver of ivory, a friendly and generous man, and a heavy drinker. He sold a lot of ivory. I had bought from him myself, a classic polar bear carved from part of a walrus tusk, and a smaller gull and a seal of fossilized ivory. He also gave away a lot of his work, especially to friends who dropped by for a drink.

If Public Safety had found some ivory signed by Aveoganna in Lane’s possession, he could be accused of stealing it. At trial Aveoganna could explain the ivory was a gift. Even if Amos had, in fact, stolen the ivory, the easygoing Johnny might call it a gift, just for old times’ sake.

On the other hand, Aveoganna’s ivory was not the tourist-trinket kind that sold cheaply in Anchorage. Its real value could kick the charge up from misdemeanor into felony if Public Safety decided they really wanted Lane and couldn’t find anything else with which to hold him, at least until the grand jury met to indict someone in the murder case. Hopefully, as an ultimate last resort, an Utqiagvik trial jury of people who knew Aveoganna as Lane and I did, and Fairbanks didn’t, would make short work of the charge.

“Mr. Lane, are you on any kind of parole or probation status?”

“No. I maxed out.”

Only the hardcore went the route of serving every day of their suspended time, the time that would be held over their heads when they were released to parole. That Lane had served every day told me that he didn’t want anybody, anywhere, having a leash on him.

I picked up the remaining papers, a misdemeanor probation revocation petition, with two fingers and looked at him inquisitively.

“That was just this stupid fight write-up I caught right before I got out. The guy lied. They were going to charge it as a felony, but then we copped this deal and I pled to it as a misdemeanor. They did it mostly so they could release me into alcohol treatment instead of the street.”

My head had begun to ache. What he was saying could be true. A lot of inmate squabbles, or misunderstandings by guards, led to empty charges. On the other hand, his previous record might show that he was a dangerous drunk who tended to get violent, and that whatever parole or probation officer had tried to guide him into treatment was doing the right thing.

Beyond those considerations, I grew puzzled that nowhere in this stack of paper was there any reference to the deaths of the two sisters. I had missed a birthday celebration and flown 3,800 miles to represent Amos Lane. If Liz was right and this guy was a suspect in the case, so far no one had come up with any evidence against him. Liz was Inupiaq herself, and she and her extended family members always knew what had happened, who was accused, and who was probably guilty.

Unlike Public Safety, I might add.

I studied his face. “Mr. Lane, I don’t recall seeing you in court before. You’re not from Utqiagvik, are you.”

It was not a question.

“No way,” he said. “I’m from Point Hope.”

Utqiagvik was on the northern edge of Alaska and was in fact the northernmost community in the United States. Point Hope was home to a few hundred people on the western rim, so remote it made Utqiagvik seem like a world hub. The people of Point Hope had once successfully resisted the federal government’s plan of detonating a thermonuclear device to create a harbor on their coast.

Good for them.

Point Hope is also one of the oldest continually inhabited communities on the North American continent. Inupiat have lived there 2,500 years.

***

Excerpted from Sisters of the Midnight Sun: A Murder in Arctic Alaska. By Rebecca Wright Stevens. Copyright 2026. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

In the town where NFL Hall of Famers are immortalized each year, Kenai’s Allie Ostrander added to her own illustrious resume over the weekend by coming in fourth place at the U.S. 6K Championships in Canton, Ohio, on Saturday. The Alaska Sports and High School Sports Hall of Famer clocked in at 18 minutes, 20 seconds, which was just 12 seconds behind the top finisher and her former college teammate at Boise State, Emily Venters of Utah.

“Nothing more fun than ripping sub-5 miles down the streets of Ohio and reaching my max heart rate with over a mile to go,” Ostrander said in an Instagram post. “I felt strong and am excited about the trajectory I’ve been on this year.”

Anchorage’s Daishen Nix made his 2026 NBA Summer League debut over the weekend for the Houston Rockets and reached double figures in both minutes played and points scored in the two games he appeared. On Friday, in a 97-86 win over the Denver Nuggets, he came off the bench and logged 10 points in 25 minutes. The next day, in a 102-89 loss to the Toronto Raptors, he played one less minute but tied for the third-most points on the team with 16, which included knocking down a trio of 3-pointers.

Anchorage basketball player Isaiah Moses recorded his fourth and fifth straight games of double figures in scoring and helped propel the Perry Lakes Hawks in back-to-back wins last week in the NBL1 Australia. In a 110-88 triumph over the Rockingham Flames on Thursday, he recorded 11 points and four assists. The former Dimond star and Gatorade Player of the Year logged 20-plus points for the fourth time in his last five games with 26 points in a 104-75 win over the Goldfields Giants on Saturday. Moses went 6-of-10 from behind the arc and nearly had a double-double with nine assists.

Anchorage’s Coen Niclai recorded his team-leading fourth home run of the season for the Wareham Gatemen in the Cape Cod summer baseball league this past Thursday. In the top of the fourth inning in a 4-2 loss to the Chatham Anglers, the two-time Alaska Gatorade Player of the Year and recent Oregon State University commit sent a fly ball soaring out of the park over right center field.

Juneau’s Hunter Carte entered elite company Saturday when he led the Auke Bay Post 25 Alaska Legion baseball team to a 10-0 victory over visiting East. The recent graduate, who helped lead the Crimson Bears to a 2026 high school state title, recorded the first no-hitter in Legion baseball in two years and the seventh since the league adopted the pitch count in 2018. With the win, the team extended its six-game winning streak and remains atop the league standings as the regular season nears a close.

No one envies the Alaska Legislature being called back into a second special session on the proposed liquefied natural gas pipeline. One wonders if legislators are being held hostage to the governor’s predetermined decision. While the benefits of an LNG project are easily imagined, the economic risks of the Alaska LNG project must not be ignored.

Alaskans are not assured that Glenfarne, the company that was granted 75% of this project in an undisclosed document, won’t just flip it — sell it — to another entity after it gains billions of dollars in concessions from Alaska. Why the sudden change by Glenfarne and the Alaska Gasline Development Corporation from saying no legislative action was needed to the recent assertion that billions of dollars in property tax reductions are now necessary? It is without question that local municipalities will collectively incur hundreds of millions of dollars in direct impact costs.

Will Alaska give away another resource “farm” again? How would Alaska respond if the LNG project stalls and our resource continues to be a stranded asset? No purchaser has signed on the dotted line to actually buy fixed quantities of our gas. Are prospective purchasers interested? Yes. Have they signed binding contracts? No.

Russia has natural gas pipelines flowing into China. Russia has substantial volume to sell, having lost its natural gas sales to Europe after invading Ukraine. China currently produces 60% of its oil and natural gas needs by fracking its resources in western China. What would keep the Chinese from selling their or Russian natural gas to Alaska’s potential customers in Asia?

Natural gas prices have remained steady, which says there is plenty of it. Can Alaska’s project, including costly export facilities, be built at a cost that allows it to compete?

Legislators, please respond. But don’t sell out the interests of Alaskans. Glenfarne’s and AGDC’s lack of truthful answers raises many red flags. The correct decision is to let Glenfarne pay for its project. If it can’t or won’t, it isn’t economic.

Patrice Lee is a 49 year resident of Alaska, a retired math and science teacher, and a former elected member of the Interior Gas Utility Board of Directors. She lives in Fairbanks.

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