September 29th, 1996: Stella's Disappearance
17-year-old Stella Anastasia Evon was last seen in Bethel, Alaska, on September 29th, 1996. It was a Sunday, with typical subarctic temperatures in the upper 30s. Stella had spent the prior evening out with friends; they then headed to a local residence. Stella departed that residence between 3 and 4 a.m. and walked to her family's home.
Upon arriving, Stella realized that the door was locked and was unable to wake her grandmother, who reportedly believed that the teen was spending the night with her friends. The Evon home, a bustling multigenerational Yup'ik household, was across from the Bethel police station, so Stella walked across the street and asked the officer on duty for assistance. When the officer also failed to rouse her grandmother, he offered Stella a ride to her older sister's nearby studio apartment. The Bethel Police Department officer then drove Stella approximately 2.5 miles to the now-defunct Bethel Native Corporation (BNC) apartment building, located in downtown Bethel. It was a familiar place; Stella often spent time at her sister's studio apartment there. The BPD officer dropped Stella off at 4:30 a.m.
Stella reportedly planned on remaining at the BNC complex until her grandmother woke. It's unclear why she decided to leave, but less than an hour later, Stella informed her older sister that she was heading home and departed the BNC complex on foot between 5 and 6 a.m. It was the last confirmed sighting of Stella Evon—a young girl walking alone into the chilly pre-dawn dark. She has never been seen or heard from again.
The Investigation
Details of the investigation into Stella's disappearance are sparse—it's unknown when she was officially reported missing, or what, if any, initial search by law enforcement took place. Her family combed the area for clues, but they were unable to turn up any trace of the teenager. We do know that Stella was never considered a runaway, and law enforcement has classified her as both endangered and missing under suspicious circumstances. Although she was rumored to be in the Bethel area or in Anchorage, Alaska, there have been no confirmed sightings of her since the morning she vanished in 1996.
The case remained stagnant for years, and in 2009, the Bethel Police Department turned it over to the Alaska State Troopers Cold Case Unit. A year later, the investigator assigned to Stella's case told Ketchikan news outlet SitNews that he believed someone—perhaps multiple individuals—in the Bethel community holds critical information pertaining to Stella's case and urged them to come forward.
Then, in 2023, a former Bethel police officer published a blog post titled 'Stella, Where Are You' detailing an apparent tip she'd received regarding the missing girl's disappearance. Anna Goemer, who worked as a BPD patrol officer from 2008-2010, states that in the winter of 2009-2010, she responded to a domestic violence call where a man informed her, unprompted, that "[Stella] is in the well." When questioned, the man stated that Stella's body could be found in a well "near Fish & Wildlife". It's possible that he was referencing the Department of Fish & Game office in Bethel. He then reportedly shut the door and refused to engage further.
Goemer says that she reported the incident to the BPD Sergeant of Investigations, questioned locals, and combed the snowy Bethel landscape in search of a well that may have held the missing girl's petite body. Goemer later contacted the AST Cold Case Unit as well as the BPD, but the blog post indicates that "nothing became of this lead".
Both investigators and Stella's loved ones have vocalized their belief that someone in Bethel knows what happened to the 17-year-old back in 1996. Nearly thirty years later, Stella's family and community remain devoted to searching for their beloved daughter, sister, and auntie—and desperate for clues as to what exactly transpired on that chilly autumn morning.
Case Context
Like many Alaskan communities, Bethel was undergoing significant cultural and socio-economic changes in the 1990s. It is the largest community in Western Alaska and remains a crucial transportation hub and jumping-off point for many smaller villages. The area still embraces a strong Yup'ik subsistence culture, and in the 90's many members of the younger generation were learning how to balance a mixture of traditional and more modern 'city' lifestyles. The population of Bethel's urban core in 1996 was just under 5,000 individuals; demographically, it was—and still is—predominantly Native Alaskan with a smaller population of white, Black, Asian, and multiracial individuals.
Stella's story is just one of hundreds of unresolved cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls across the state. Often, families of MMIW victims report feeling that their loved ones' cases are dismissed or mishandled by law enforcement. Police corruption is a long-standing issue across rural Alaska's tight-knit communities, where some governments have been found to hire criminals—including those convicted of sex offenses and domestic violence—as police officers. Bethel PD has had its own struggles with corruption and misconduct; multiple officers have faced charges related to police brutality and sexual violence.
Sexual assault and domestic violence are serious problems with an often-lackluster law enforcement response and few resources for victims. Indigenous women in Alaska face exceptionally high rates of violence and experience violence more commonly perpetrated by non-Indigenous men.
Recent efforts in the state capitol, brought forth by MMIW activists, have seen a renewed interest in Alaska's unresolved cases featuring missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls—like Angela Foxglove from Selawik, Florence Okpealuk from Nome, and of course Stella's. Someday soon, families hope that someone will come forward with a crucial detail that brings closure and justice to Stella's loved ones. In the meantime, there is only grief and unanswered questions.
Stella was last seen in Bethel, AK, on September 29th, 1996. She is of Yup'ik descent with waist-length black hair and brown eyes. At the time of her disappearance, Stella wore a dark blue hooded sweatshirt featuring the Georgetown University logo on the front, blue jeans, a brown leather jacket, and black shoes.
Alaska State Troopers are currently handling Stella's case. They can be reached at 907-269-5038.
Sources
Please note that some information, particularly contextual info regarding life in Bethel in the 90s and life in remote Alaska villages (police culture, domestic violence, etc) has been gathered from first-person accounts or my own experiences living in Alaska
https://deltadiscovery.com/stella-where-are-you/
https://www.webcenterfairbanks.com/2024/11/13/missing-north-stella-anastasia-evon/
https://www.justicefornativepeople.com/2016/01/stella-evon-missing-from-alaska-since.html
http://www.sitnews.us/0910news/092710/092710_cold_case.html
https://dps.alaska.gov/getmedia/21953c1b-d42b-4bc1-966a-d5be6810d371/Evon
https://www.doenetwork.org/cases/software/mp-main.html?id=1556dfak
Learn more about the MMIW crisis in Alaska: https://mmiwg2salaska.org/
Did her grandmother end up waking up? Did she contact anyone while at her sister’s?
I'm not sure what time her grandmother woke up and unfortunately, there is very little publicly available info regarding the finer details of this case (like if Stella made/received any calls or pages while at her sister's, what the initial search looked like, etc).
I’m curious as to why Stella just randomly left her sister’s apartment and no one knows why. Is it possible her sister knows more than she’s saying?
I wonder if it’s as simple as expecting her grandma to be awake by then. Not sure how old the grandmother was but 5-6am seems a reasonable time for an older person to wake up
Likewise, it was more than two miles between the sister's apartment and grandma's address. Would have taken the better part of an hour (close to 45 to 50 minutes) to walk that distance even in warm, clear weather. Maybe she was aiming to arrive at her grandmother's home close to the time she normally woke up.
I wonder if she was under the influence in any way. Most people arent going from house to house at those hours on a Sunday unless theres some sort of crisis.
Teens in the 90s? Yeah, I bet they were at least drinking. Nothing odd there.
Nothing odd at all, I was doing the same. Just throwing out ideas when the previous person said no one knows why.
True. But yeah, some of the "weird" actions like leaving the house relatively early in the morning can be explained easily if she had been drinking. What if she just wanted to go home around the time her grandmother woke up (yk, not to make her worry) and felt sober enough to walk? Then something happened.
I taught school on the Kuskokwim River...they drink. A lot.
I wonder about this, too. I know that if I were in the same position, I would probably still be struggling with an enormous amount of grief and regret. I feel so deeply for Stella's older sister, the last person to see her.
She could have forgotten something at her friend’s place from earlier that night and felt like it just couldn’t wait until morning.
Or got a call from someone and whatever it was she felt she had to attend to it right away. (E.g. a jealous boyfriend asking where she was and not believing she was really with her sister as opposed to another guy)
Or, a bit of a stretch, but possibly something else was going on at the sister’s apartment that made Stella uncomfortable.
I wonder if there was anyone else at the sister’s apartment that night (probably less likely since it was a studio) who can corroborate that Stella indeed informed her sister she’d be leaving.
Regardless, it was cold enough that night to run the risk of hypothermia if she wasn’t dressed for being outside in freezing temps for at least an hour. Anyone in that situation could slip on ice, hit their head hard enough to get a concussion, and then be disoriented enough to wander off into the wilderness and die from exposure.
I highly doubt she received a text as cell phones and texting weren’t being widely used in 1996.
Still the era of the beeper.
Edited my comment, so easy to forget about how relatively recent texting is
Alaska is such an eerie place. I worked on a mine for a few seasons, about a four hour dirt road drive from Nome into the middle of nowhere. We would go into town on Sundays for supplies and it just had a really strange feeling to it; I can’t really describe it other than uneasy. I found out months later that the exact area I was in has one of the highest rates of missing people reports.
There are some communities up here that just have a weird vibe, Nome is definitely one of them IMO. It's impossible to fathom how rugged and remote it is up here or how easy it would be to disappear without a trace (whether via foul play or misadventure) until you experience it in person.
I lived in AK for almost a decade and while I’ve never been to Nome there were many places in (mostly) rural AK that gave me the creeps.
Bush AK can get creepy, that goes without saying. But also those “end of the road” towns too. Towns at the end of a 40 mile long rough gravel road. Every eye on you the second you roll into town.
Manley is like that. I visited there with a bunch of friends once. The people that ran the one little hotel there had to go and roust a local guy sleeping off a hangover off inside from my hotel room before I could get in. He looked pretty upset to be bothered. They remade the bed, let me in.
We sat down at the bar and one of my friends joked to the bartender “hey this is a perfect place for a murder mystery!” Dude replied “oh yeah, we had one of those.” Proceeds to tell us the story. Back in the 80s some guy running from life in the lower 48 drove north from Fairbanks in one direction until the road ended. Found himself in Manley. Survived off the little bit he had until he ran out. So he killed a bunch of people in town. Stole their stuff. Eventually the troopers got him.
As it turns out the bartender had relatives killed that day. A great number of people in Manley have connections to people who were lost that day. Something similar happened in McCarthy in the 80s. Some guy drops out of society and runs until he can’t run any further. Ends up stuck there. Kills a bunch of people.
Fishing towns in the summer always felt a bit unsettling too. I spent a lot of time in Naknek and Kodiak. In the summer there are so many transient men moving about. You see them out and about, maybe drinking at the local bar. All the while knowing that they can disappear into the ether when they step onto their boat. Never to be seen again.
Ahh Alaska. The final frontier :)
I believe Michael Silka is the guy you're talking about in Manley—weirdly enough, someone from my tiny town used to live there and told me about him, although I believe his murder spree was before her time. And yeah, I commercial fish and there are definitely some guys on the boats who choose that line of work because they've run out of other options. One summer, the cops showed up at the boat I was working on looking for a dude who'd been fired earlier in the season; he apparently had a ton of warrants out for some pretty heinous stuff. Alaska can be pretty weird.
Dang, I grew up like 10 minutes away from where he was raised
It’s almost overwhelming to think about driving for four hours through nothing.
It was definitely an experience. No street lights, so essentially pitch black apart from the moon, the stars and your car lights.
Once October came, the state funded maintenance of the dirt road would stop, meaning no snow plowing, no pothole filling etc(the roads were packed dirt and would often get huge holes in them from heavy trucks using them). As the days passed, the roads got worse and worse. Our crew/mining company had 6 Tahoes, 4 Explorers and 4 Jeep Cherokees and a few misc trucks for the crew to use as personnel transpo vehicles. The only vehicles that made it without needing extensive repairs were the Tahoes and one Chevy Colorado.
The last time I did it, we had a grizzly bear the size of a car stalking our camp ground; think Jaws, but a bear instead of a shark. I’m talking absolutely huge. I think we mistakenly set up camp in the bear’s territory. I saw fear on the faces of the most seasoned, roughneck miners. That combined with a rock truck tire(they’re gigantic)decapitating a miner made the last trip one I could have done without.
Yiiikes. I can imagine that last trip must have been hellish. Mining is one industry up here that I absolutely would never want to work in. This past fishing season I watched a greenhorn almost get crushed by a travel lift tire (probably similar size to the rock truck's, I'd imagine) and it scared the hell out of me. Lack of accessible lifesaving medical services makes every possible emergency scenario (bears, working around heavy equipment, even just driving in super remote areas) so much more complicated and honestly sometimes scary.
It was definitely an experience. I worked bluefin tuna fishing boats off of Nova Scotia, in the Atlantic, George’s Bank and down to the Outer Banks for about 5 years prior. Not large boats, more like 35 foot Deep-V offshore boats in 12 foot swells. That was fun 😂
I taught school on the Kuskokwim......consider yourself lucky you had a road. A van with keys in it could be used anytime to travel from Upper and Lower Kalskag. Alaska is not for everybody.
I'm wondering why if they couldn't wake the grandmother , they left her alone and didn't get some kind of help. That seems like an odd reaction.
She was brought to her sisters apartment. She wasn’t left alone. Or are you talking about the grandmother being left to sleep
The grandmother sleeping . Was it a medical symptom or passed out from drinking? It just seemed a weird response to say” gramma is unresponsive so I’ll leave her alone” and the cop then just driving her to another family members.
Lots of older folks cant hear anything when they sleep if theyre not wearing their heading aids.
It's definitely plausible that the BPD officer just assumed that her grandmother was sleeping and didn't hear the door due to the early hour.
My thoughts too
It would be a weird thing for them to assume, at least in the present day, maybe it was different in the 90s? Usually if the person is elderly police/EMS will at least attempt to verify they should be home and aren’t at another logical location (work, relative’s house, ect) but if they can’t make contact they enter the premises. They do that to make sure the person isn’t dead or fallen and unable to get up. I work at a nursing home and just last week neighbors noticed that a patient’s mail had been piling up. They called for a welfare check and police kicked the door in before they were able to make contact with the family that verified the patient was safe at the nursing home after a knee surgery. On other occasions I’ve known that cops entered the property only to find no one home and someone went on vacation with out updating the family. It varies how much they try to verify the person hasn’t been heard from before entrance is made but it’s accepted that people alive and well absolutely do answer to “coo knocking” thumps of the door. They also loudly announce themselves “this is the sheriffs department”.
I worked EMS in a former life, and while I agree that it's definitely odd for them not to verify Stella's grandmother's welfare, I can also see the cop going "alright, it's 4:30 in the morning, she's probably asleep, no need to bust the door down". I also wonder if Stella's age and the fact that she was out past curfew factor into this case—if she possibly asked the cop to drive her to her sister's to avoid getting in trouble with her grandmother.
Also, and this is just my personal experience, small town/village cops up here can be very different than police in the lower 48. There's a lot that flies under the radar, gets dismissed, or is accepted as just part of life in small communities up here—one example would be someone with a known substance use problem (the "town drunk") being picked up by the cops and driven home instead of arrested or cited for public intox when they're found wandering around. I imagine this was even moreso a factor in the 90's.
My family still lives in a town where if youre just a little DUI, and you dont make it a regular thing, they'll just follow you home.
Possible she ran away?
The trouble with this theory is that there's not really anywhere to run away to. Like many communities in Alaska, Bethel is off the road system and is only accessible via air or water. She would have had to leave via plane, boat, or ATV, which all seem unlikely given the circumstances under which she disappeared.
I suppose too the fact that she came into contact with the cops trying to get IN to her grandmother’s house and then asked to go stay with her sister would make them think that she was unlikely to run away.
Considering it was such a small community it’s fairly likely that at least some of the cops actually knew her family, and possibly her.
And Stella's family lived across from the police station; given that Bethel PD was—and still is—a fairly small department in a close-knit community, the cops probably knew her by sight if not also by name.
Valid points. So eerie.
Great writeup!
How possible is it that nature got hold of her during her walk back home?
Are we CERTAIN that the officer was telling the truth about what happened, and this wasn’t Alaska’s version of a starlight tour?
Obviously the guy who said “Stella is in the well” is the first suspect, but if he turns out to have been bullshitting, that officer should be investigated, at least until some corroborating information can be found for his claim that he dropped her off downtown.
Did her sister not basically confirm that she made it to her apartment? So he wasn’t lying about that part at least
Sister was in the apartment with her. "Stella reportedly planned on remaining at the BNC complex until her grandmother woke. It's unclear why she decided to leave, but less than an hour later, Stella informed her older sister that she was heading home and departed the BNC complex on foot between 5 and 6 a.m."
If her sister saw her after the cops dropped her off at the apartment complex, then it wouldn't be unless there was a second interaction with her the police didn't report.
I wonder if the officer told her something like " i get off work in 2 hours, meet me back here, and ill take you back to your grandmas"
The write-up says her sister was the last to see her leaving the sister's apartment, which was AFTER the cop dropped her off.
Thank you for the clarification. So this cop is clear then.
IMO, I think it's definitely possible that a cop is responsible for her disappearance. There's really no way to verify the officer's version of events—it's not like there were body cameras back then, and Bethel PD has a proven track record of employing corrupt and violent officers. Not to mention a statewide history of police mistreatment of Indigenous women and girls.
But she was at her sister's house for an hour right?
According to her sister, Stella was at the apartment for between thirty minutes and an hour— it's unknown if the officer had further contact with her after she departed the BNC complex.
I'm suspicious of the cops who dropped her off. I wonder if anyone ever confirmed that he did, in fact, leave her at the apartment.
"Stella reportedly planned on remaining at the BNC complex until her grandmother woke. It's unclear why she decided to leave, but less than an hour later, Stella INFORMED HER OLDER SISTER that she was heading home and departed the BNC complex on foot between 5 and 6 a.m."
Okay, he did drop her off. I still don't trust the cops, though.
Reminds me of Mitrice Richardson's case 😕 Something off with the cops in that one too.
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Try reading it.
LOL I guess it was "too long" for them to read.
Are you trying to suggest the officer may be involved?
I may not have caught it but did her sister confirm she ever actually got inside?
Was the cop investigated because even if she did make it in he could have come back and most cops are scum, especially to Poc
Her sister was the last to see her leaving the BNC complex, so it's confirmed that Stella safely entered her sister's apartment. One possible scenario is that the same cop who dropped Stella off at her sister's apartment came across her again while she was walking back to her grandmother's house.