Alaska
The last woman in the bar: The 1961 murder of an Anchorage lounge singer
Part of a continuing weekly series on Alaska history by local historian David Reamer. Have a question about Anchorage or Alaska history or an idea for a future article? Go to the form at the bottom of this story.
The small clock on the wall revealed a somber reality of the dark, exhausting hours of the early morning. It was Nov. 20, 1961 and nearly 5 a.m., amid the last ticks of the long day at the Club 210, an Anchorage bar on East Fifth Avenue. There were four people in proper attendance, including bartender and co-owner Robert “Chick” Adams serving lounge singer Rose Dawn. The other two men were armed, eager to relieve the establishment of its cash. Three of those four principal actors survived the ensuing tragedy. Those readers familiar with either recent or distant Alaska history will be unsurprised. It was the woman who died.
Rose Dawn was a stage name, coincidentally also a popular brand of nylons back then. Rosemary Niedzwiecki was born in 1938 in San Diego and grew up there, attending Abraham Lincoln High School. She lived to sing, made it her profession, even at a young age establishing herself as a traveling act in destinations like Las Vegas. Meanwhile, as Anchorage boomed in the 1940s through 1950s, waves of new bars and clubs opened here, each viciously competing with the others for the right to raid local wallets. And one way they attracted business was by importing Lower 48 talent as B-girls, dancers and singers. As of November 1961, Rose Dawn was just 23 years old, a dark-eyed beauty working a standing gig for Leo’s Supper Club at the Forest Park Country Club. Forest Park was a golf course, just west of what is now the Westchester Lagoon, then the Chester Creek mudflats.
Club 210 opened in 1956, the name seemingly a bowling reference, as their address was 224 E. Fifth Ave. Joseph Miljas was an original co-owner. Miljas (1913-1979), also known as Papa Joe, later owned the notorious Spenard Road strip club PJ’s, hence the meaning behind those two letters. “Chick” Adams was born in Kentucky and had been in Anchorage for around a decade as of 1961. The smaller bars and clubs then took much of their personality from their owners, who were frequently the bartenders as well. So, the bar was also called “Chick n’ Joes,” or the place to drink with “Chic.” Consistent spelling was hardly a crucial step in getting drunk.
The fateful morning, Nov. 20, 1961, Dawn was unwinding after another grinding performance, verbally dancing with Adams in that expected pattern of bartender and unloading patron. She may have wondered, aloud or otherwise, about the progression or lack thereof in her career. Anchorage clubs in those days tended to pay well but weren’t the sort of prestige gigs that could advance a singer onwards and upwards. No one outside Alaska cared if you headlined the Buckaroo or Last Chance or even Leo’s Supper Club. Perhaps, just perhaps, that is why Dawn was the last woman in the last bar still open on a crisp, chilly night.
Two young men conspired at a table away from the bar, nursing drunks, both of them edgy and uncertain, eyes drifting about to soak in the details. Gerald Lee Cox and Terrance Wayne Brady were both 22 and residents at the Chinook Hotel. Nearing 5 a.m., the last customer besides themselves and Dawn left, prompting Cox and Brady to huddle around the bar. Cox stood and moved as if toward the restroom, only to turn around suddenly while holding an automatic pistol. “My friend wants to see how well you’ve done tonight,” the robber declared.
Cox guarded Dawn and Adams while Brady ransacked the cash register. It had been a solid night at the bar, producing a $250 score, roughly $2,700 in 2025, not counting the hundreds more in checks left behind. But the robbers wanted more. “You got any dough besides what’s in here?” they asked. Adams retorted, “You think I’d keep all that dough in the register if I had a safe?”
A storage room lay behind the bar, cold and drafty. Cox and Brady escorted Dawn and Adams into the back. They demanded Adams’ keys. “What for,” replied the barkeep. “So, I can lock the joint up when we leave,” replied one of the robbers. “We don’t want anybody to come stumbling in here and find you until we’ve had a chance to get away.” Adams grimaced at a sudden realization. His partner wouldn’t arrive to open the bar until 10, nearly five hours later, which should be enough time to let the criminals slip town. Still, he stared at their faces, willing their features into his memory. If given the chance, he wanted to remember them.
Seeing Dawn shiver, Adams argued, “Give the girl a break and let her have her coat. It gets damn cold back here.” One of the thieves responded ominously: “You’ll never feel it.” Then they struck the bartender over the head with a liquor bottle. He swayed toward the floor, dazed, then lost consciousness.
When Adams woke, he was gnawing on a cord wrapped around his head and pulled through his mouth. One of the bandits was trying to choke him to death. Nonetheless, he could see Dawn sprawled nearby, unmoving. As he struggled, two shots rang out in the small room. One passed through Adams’ neck. The other deflected off his skull and lodged near the junction with the spine. Of course, doctors later figured out all those specific details. As far as the robbers could tell, they’d shot Adams twice in the back of the head to massive crimson effect on the surroundings.
Adams was understandably woozy, in shock from the experience and wounds. Still, he recalled one of them talking, “Let’s get out of here. I got him right in the back of the head that time.” In one moment, they were there, standing over him, and in the next they were gone. Pained and growing cold, Adams scrabbled on the floor, moved himself by will toward a phone. With a heroic effort, he managed a single phone call for help, thereafter sinking back to the floor to await whatever came next. In his shaken daze, he had called the fire department, which dispatched an ambulance and subsequently contacted the police.
For a few minutes, Anchorage was shut down as the police sought to close off avenues of escape. They might not have bothered. Cox and Brady were arrested a few minutes later, just five blocks away from Club 210, albeit without gun or cash. They made for a rather conspicuous pair, two young men walking together around a freezing Anchorage at 5 in the morning right after two young men robbed a bar in the immediate vicinity. The officers on duty accomplished no incredible feat of policing when they put that particular two and two together. Because of fresh snow, it took a few days of searching, but the gun was eventually found tossed down an alley and the cash tucked away on a roof.
Given their age, both men had surprisingly lengthy rap sheets, but Cox in particular was well known to local law enforcement. In March 1960, he was arrested for robbing the Sears Roebuck store in Mountain View. After posting bail, he was arrested again that same day for an unconnected robbery. He faced additional charges after attempting to escape the local federal jail that May. In the summer of 1961, he robbed the Anchorage Transit System bus garage and was out on $10,000 bail at the very time he robbed Club 210.
When the ambulance arrived, Dawn was already dead. She had also been shot twice, once in the leg and again in the back of her head. Adams was alive but in serious condition. Doctors were unsure whether he would survive. A day later, he surprisingly improved and was able to identify Cox and Brady from his hospital bed.
As Adams continued to recover, establishing further clearance between himself and the grave, the outcome for the entire affair was carved deeper into stone. An injured living witness meant certainty, in the courts and for the imprisonment to come. There would be no clever legal maneuvers, no surprises. Cox, at least, understood this reality. At his arraignment, he told the judge, “Could you please appoint me (an attorney) so that I can begin proceedings and get this over with.” The waiting is the hardest part, he surely thought. Time to get on with whatever is next.
Adams indeed appeared at their preliminary hearing, pale but sure as he dramatically pointed out the killers, as if from a movie. After their indictments, Cox and Brady shaved a few visits to the courthouse off their lives and pleaded guilty. Their court-appointed attorneys — Ted Stevens represented Brady — argued for 20-year sentences, but Judge James Fitzgerald ordered life imprisonment without recommendation or parole. Fitzgerald described the murder as a “cruel and brutal killing, done with abandoned heart.”
The entire affair was featured in the April 1962 issue of “Official Detective Stories,” one of many pulpy true crime magazines then popular. “Without the Gun and the Money” appeared alongside other luridly titled articles, such as “Who Would Want to Bomb Congressman Green,” “Maybe Donna Had Too Many Friends,” “Human Bait for the Telephone Wolf,” and “I Want to Watch You Kill Me.”
Detective Earl Hibpshman worked the Club 210 case. An article on his 1974 retirement described the pulpy piece as “overdramatized, the old-timers say, and made Hibpshman and others who worked the case look like Columbo, Mike Hammer, and Sherlock Holmes rolled into one.”
Rose Dawn — Rosemary Niedzwiecki — was buried back in her hometown, at San Diego’s Holy Cross Cemetery. Alaska was her undoing, the end to any further career or fame. Or simply life. Alaska in general and Anchorage specifically are often touted as among the most dangerous places in the country for women, what with the dire rates of violence against women here. There are no trustworthy statistics for Alaska from the time of Rose Dawn’s brief tenure, but there is likewise nothing to suggest that it was a better reality. Again and again, a lesson learned, crime is no recent innovation in Anchorage.
[Trapped: The case of the 1951 Interior Alaska cabin fever murder that was solved and then retried]
[The great snoring assault of 1953 Anchorage and other snoring history]
Alaska
Alaska accuses crowdfunding websites of violating law, using charities’ names without their consent
The state of Alaska filed civil lawsuits Tuesday against six crowdfunding websites, accusing them of illegally soliciting donations for thousands of Alaska charities without consent.
In complaints filed at Anchorage Superior Court, the consumer protection unit of the Alaska Department of Law said GoFundMe, PayPal, Charity Navigator, Pledgling Technologies, JustGiving and Network For Good each violated the Alaska Charitable Solicitations Act thousands of times.
That act, in place since 1993, requires state registration for anyone who seeks donations on behalf of a charity.
The suits ask a judge to order the sites shut down the pages devoted to Alaska nonprofits and immediately disburse any donations to those nonprofits. It also asks for “separate civil penalties … of not less than $1,000 and not more than $25,000 per violation.”
According to the complaints, the six crowdfunding sites scraped IRS data to obtain the information of thousands of Alaska nonprofits, then set up donation pages for each of those nonprofits without their consent.
That scraping was part of a nationwide campaign that encompassed almost a million and a half federally registered organizations.
In some cases, the sites charged fees or encouraged “tips” to themselves during the donation process. In many cases, they poured donations into a third-party account and only released donations to charities who stepped forward to claim them, according to the complaints.
Attorney General-designee Stephen Cox said the state became aware of the issue after California reporters and state officials began investigating why GoFundMe created donation pages for 1.4 million nonprofits without their consent or knowledge.
GoFundMe later took down pages created without consent, but other crowdfunding websites did not. On Tuesday morning, donation pages were still visible on Charity Navigator, one of the defendants named in the new Alaska lawsuits. GoFundMe has kept some pages created with the consent of charities.
Earlier this week, almost two dozen state attorney generals sent a letter to GoFundMe, demanding answers to questions about its policies.
Alaska did not sign that letter, in part because officials here believed the response was too weak.
In a prepared statement, Cox said, “Alaska law is clear: if you’re going to raise money in a charity’s name, you must first get the charity’s consent. These lawsuits are about protecting donors, protecting nonprofits, and preserving the public trust that makes charitable giving possible.”
Laurie Wolf is President and CEO of the Foraker Group, which advises Alaska nonprofits and provides them with administrative support.
The Foraker Group has been issuing warnings about the issue for months, and Wolf filed an affidavit in support of the lawsuit, as did a representative of the Bethel Community Services Foundation and Bread Line Inc., which operates a food bank in Fairbanks.
By phone on Tuesday, Wolf said the issue is a matter of consent: “They are impersonating 1.2 million nonprofits across this country, they’re impersonating them without their consent or even their knowledge.”
She said the issue became particularly important last fall, when people across the United States and the world became aware of the devastation caused by ex-Typhoon Halong in Western Alaska.
Many people, not knowing local Alaska charities, simply donated via links they found on internet searches. Some of those donations may have never reached their intended recipients.
If a crowdfunding website operates independently of the charity it intends to benefit, it might interfere with the charity’s own fundraising, she explained.
Someone might never be recognized for their gift and become angry, hurting the charity’s long-term relationship with their community.
“They take away the ability for the organization to make choices for itself about how it wants to build trust and relationships with its donors, and how it wants to put its brand and its mission out in the public sphere. They’ve taken away all of our choices about that,” she said.
In addition, donations may be subject to fees or never reach a charity at all, particularly if the charity is unaware that a crowdfunding website is holding money for it to collect.
The Foraker Group went so far as to conduct an experiment and had an employee donate to the group through several of the defendants’ platforms. In multiple cases, it took weeks before the donation reached its intended recipient, and in some cases, the donor’s identity was concealed, making it impossible for the charity to properly thank them.
GoFundMe was the only defendant to respond to emailed inquiries before the Beacon’s reporting deadline on Tuesday.
“GoFundMe’s mission is to help people help each other by making it easier for donors to discover and support the causes they care about. We are committed to helping nonprofits reach new supporters by connecting them with the millions of people on our platform who want to make a difference. Nonprofit Pages were created using publicly available information to help people support nonprofit organizations, with donations going to the intended nonprofit,” said Jeff Platt, communications manager for GoFundMe.
“After hearing feedback from nonprofit leaders in October, we acted quickly to make Nonprofit Pages fully opt-in, removed and de-indexed unclaimed pages, and turned off search engine optimization by default. The immediate changes we made directly addressed the concerns of the nonprofit community, and reflect our continued commitment to transparency, accountability, and partnership with the nonprofit sector,” he said.
This week’s lawsuits in state court rely in large part on the 1993 Alaska Charitable Solicitations Act.
That bill passed the Alaska Legislature amid a surge of concern about telemarketers soliciting donations by phone.
Then-Rep. Ron Larson, a Democrat from the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, sponsored the act and told fellow lawmakers at the time that “lookalike organizations” were “ripping off” legitimate charities.
The act made no mention of donations by internet, and in state law, it’s still labeled as “Telephonic solicitations,” but it goes on to state that under any circumstances it is unlawful to use a charity’s name or symbol without their permission.
“Alaskans are generous people. But generosity depends on trust,” Cox said in his prepared statements. “GoFundMe and similar platforms used nonprofits’ good names to solicit donations without coordinating with the organizations actually doing the charitable work. That means some Alaskans may have donated thinking they were supporting a specific charity, when the charity never authorized the page and may never have received the donation — or may have received less than donors intended because of fees.”
Originally published by the Alaska Beacon, an independent, nonpartisan news organization that covers Alaska state government.
Veteran musher Jessie Holmes (bib # 7 ), of Brushkana, Alaska was the first musher to reach the McGrath checkpoint at 8:03 p.m. today with 16 dogs in harness, winning the Alaska Air Transit Spirit of Iditarod Award.
First presented in 2019 and given to the first musher to reach the McGrath checkpoint, this award is presented by Lead Dog partner, Alaska Air Transit. First introduced in 2019, this award honors the first musher to arrive at the McGrath Checkpoint. The McGrath community shares deep ties to the Iditarod, and the award reflects that connection, featuring beaver fur mushers mitts with Athabaskan beadwork on moose hide, handcrafted by Loretta Maillelle of McGrath, along with a beaver fur hat made by Rosalie Egrass of McGrath. The award was presented to Holmes by Jessica Beans-Vaeao, Charter Coordinator for Alaska Air Transit
“Our team is excited to present this Spirit of Iditarod award in McGrath again this year. The Beaded Moose Hide and Beaver Mitts were made by Loretta Maillelle of McGrath, and the hand sewn Beaver Hat was made by Rosalie Egrass of McGrath. Rosalie Egrass was able to fly home on our plane that took our crew and the award to McGrath, which made for a pretty special trip! We are proud to be providing service to McGrath, and feel that all local Air Carriers represent the spirit of Iditarod throughout Alaska on a daily basis. It is great to be a part of the air carriers that service the state with essential supplies and transportation, and to be a part of the Iditarod in a meaningful way,” said Josie Owen, owner of Alaska Air Transit.
This is Alaska Air Transit’s eighth year sponsoring the Iditarod and seventh year presenting the Spirit of Iditarod Award. Alaska Air Transit offers crucial flight support statewide via air charter and provides scheduled service to the Upper Kuskokwim communities of Nikolai, McGrath, Takotna and Tatalina as well as the Prince William Sound communities of Tatitlek and Chenega.
The 2026 Alaska high school girls basketball state championships begin this week, and High School On SI has brackets for all four classifications.
The brackets will be updated with scores and matchups throughout the week.
All four classifications will play their state championship games at Alaska Airlines Center in Anchorage.
The 1A and 2A championships run March 11-14. Classes 3A and 4A play the following week, March 18-21.
Alaska High School Girls Basketball 2026 State Championship Brackets, Matchups, Schedule – March 10
3/11 – Shaktoolik (1) vs. Arlicaq (16)
3/11 – Kake (8) vs. Tri-Valley (9)
3/11 – Fort Yukon (4) vs. Andreafski (13)
3/11 – Sand Point (5) vs. Napaaqutgmiut (12)
3/11 – Scammon Bay (2) vs. Nunamiut (15)
3/11 – Akiuk Memorial (7) vs. Newhalen (10)
3/11 – Davis-Romoth (3) vs. Cook Inlet Academy (14)
3/11 – Hoonah (6) vs. Shishmaref (11)
3/12 – Seward (1) vs. Chevak (8)
3/12 – Metlakatla (4) vs. Cordova (5)
3/12 – Craig (2) vs. Susitna Valley (7)
3/12 – Glennallen (3) vs. Degnan (6)
3/18 – Barrow (1) vs. Kotzebue (8)
3/18 – Grace Christian (4) vs. Galena (5)
3/18 – Monroe Catholic (2) vs. Delta (7)
3/18 – Mt. Edgecumbe (3) vs. Kenai Central (6)
3/18 – Mountain City Christian Academy (1) vs. North Pole (8)
3/18 – Colony (4) vs. West (5)
3/18 – Bartlett (2) vs. Juneau-Douglas (7)
3/18 – Wasilla (3) vs. Service (6)
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