The Legend of Genghis Muskox
Revisiting the Death of a Minneapolis Adventurer Kickstarts a Wild Mystery in Alaska
By Syran Warner
Portions of this story first appeared in a 2019 feature published by City Pages.
EDIT IN PROGRESS
1.
Days after Genghis Muskox was found dead in a small village on the Kenai Peninsula of Alaska, an odd to-do list was found inside his primitive cabin. Among the items on the list: “Tan horse hide,” “fly” and “celestial navigation.” How Genghis planned to get his hands on a raw horse hide is a piece of trivia no one has been able to answer thus far, but the bit about celestial navigation is what sticks out most after so many interviews with people who actually knew the young man and his ambitions.
The goal of learning how to navigate the ocean by starlight reflected Genghis’ ultimate plan that started with the goal of building a sailboat out of wood from his father’s tree farm in Wisconsin. Once the boat was to be outfitted to his specifications and made water ready, the dream was to captain it through the Great Lakes, before moving between ports on his way back to California.
The skilled craftsman and sailor spent years planning this grand pursuit of liberty, but like the rest of the future Muskox had in mind when he wrote “The List,” the boat that was never built is now just a minor footnote in the story of his 27 years on earth.
What was Genghis Muskox?
In the summer of 2017, at a riverside watercraft rental facility in Cooper Landing, Alaska, a young man dragging a raft onto a trailer was asked if he’d ever heard of a guy with an unforgettable name that used to live a few miles down off the Sterling highway. The kid recognized the name instantly.
“You mean, the greatest man who ever lived?”
After talking for a bit, it turned out the young seasonal handyman had never actually met Genghis Muskox, had no idea where he came from, and didn’t know what he looked like until he was shown a picture. Some of the details he mentioned were close enough to discern he was actually talking about the real Genghis Muskox, even if they were off target. For instance, the kid liked the story about Genghis quitting his job and canoeing across the country before coming to Alaska.
The one part of the fable that turned out to be completely accurate involved Genghis crashing a party for employees at the end of the summer season in 2013 before being chased off the premises. The manager of the rental company confirmed that. It was a funny story told with a macabre respect for the dead that ruined the punchline. It was if the manager believed the event foreshadowed the future.
The quest to make sense of everything that followed Genghis’ death has been complicated by sorting myths from realities too. Some beliefs are mere projections. Stories get exaggerated. This is especially true when it comes to who Muskox was in the first place. Some people see a master of their own reality, another set sees a man prepared to murder. Some people take their own fiction seriously.
Olivia Engel, who dated Genghis as a teenager has a legitimate understanding of the person she shared years of her life with and the kind of ambition that made Muskox so memorable. She puts it simply when describing the longing for a life of excesses and variety that drove Muskox to swing between people and passions, “A sense of movement made him more content with life than any kind of place or situation. That’s just who he was.”
2.
Genghis grew up in north Minneapolis. His parents, who’ve never officially married, wanted to raise their children in a more holistic fashion than what was era-typical of urban, middle class families in the 90's, and the back-to-basics approach heavily influenced their son. The beautiful home full of crafts the kid grew up in had no video games or television, and without the usual distractions most millennials gazed into at their fingertips, he developed a love of more traditional hobbies. Genghis became obsessed with fishing as a toddler and began spinning wool at age six. He went on to make leather moccasins from deer hide just a few years later. He built bicycles piece by piece and then took them apart again to understand how everything worked. Genghis also fashioned his own knives and hunting bows from raw materials when he still lived with his parents.
One passion tended to bounce to the next, says his mother, Susan, who ran a popular organic cafe in Minneapolis while raising her children. “He would just decide that there were certain things he wanted to do, and he would get books and learn how to do them.” The blade she set on her dining room table while being interviewed looked like a piece of art. Genghis had made it after attending a knife-making program in the south around the turn of the century. You’d never guess a kid made it. “The other one is gone.”
Adds Genghis’ father, John, a carpenter: “He would accomplish something, like he made six or seven bows, then on to the next thing.”
Middle school brought overwhelming restlessness for the budding jack of all trades. By age 13, Genghis had started hitchhiking, once travelling on goodwill as far from home as Pipestone, Minnesota to quarry stone for a peace pipe on a reservation that typically turns away outsiders. Genghis was spending his nights exploring Minneapolis and beyond on his bicycle which he rode even in the most extreme conditions a Minnesota winter can offer. The restlessness solidified into a desire for total independence by his freshman year. He wanted to be an adult, and it wasn’t long before he was emancipated to pursue the kind of adventures that had been building in his imagination.
Genghis’ parents were mostly supportive of his free spirit, save for the time he wanted to grow marijuana in their home, John recalls. “Then he left home at 15 and a half and lived on his own after that. He quit school.”
Susan and John understood their son’s wanderlust — that it was no use to explain the importance of a formal education to such a strong-headed boy. In the end they surrendered to the boy’s will.
In the beginning of life under his own supervision, Genghis saved money working odd kitchen jobs, then moved to a place he’d become obsessed that he heard about on the internet. Located in south central Alaska, the village of Cooper Landing is known to be one of the best fly-fishing locales in the world, which was a hobby Genghis never grew tired of, oddly enough. He found a kitchen on the edge of town that would hire a 16-year-old called The Sunrise Inn and started to work, but the move was short-lived. Genghis contracted shingles and was forced to return home.
At 17, Muskox launched a solo kayaking adventure the length of the Mississippi River. This is perhaps the story Genghis was best known for. A teenager with a homemade paddle making such a long journey on their own sounds almost like a Twainian fantasy, but Genghis was determined to make it happen after dreaming up the idea.
Susan remembers dropping her son off at the headwaters in Itasca. “We put him in the water and watched him move away and I thought, ‘How is he going to find his way?’” Three months later the kid was in New Orleans.
“Going down the Mississippi was, fucking, the most powerful and the most beautiful part of my life to this day,” Genghis would later say this in a recording a girlfriend of his made in Oakland, California. “And there’s no way I could ever reproduce the feelings of self-discovery and the kindness of the American people I saw on that river. And I fell in love with the country.”
Genghis acquainted himself for some time in New Orleans after he paddled to its shore on the Mississippi. The kid with the kayak was popular in the neighborhood he moved into. As fate would have have it, Genghis missed Hurricane Katrina by a few weeks when he returned to Minnesota, which he felt was a missed opportunity for another grand adventure in paddling.
Back home he worked in kitchens again and saved money for his next quest: a solo bicycle trip traversing across Europe. Now legally an adult, Genghis biked from Amsterdam to Oslo. Eventually he found himself working on a sheep farm off the coast of Norway.
Muskox would later train to become a boxer (0–1 in his career) and he attempted to start a clothing company after honing his sewing skills while working for a tailor. When he got bored with boxing and making clothes, Genghis moved back to Alaska, a plan aborted when he ran out of money and couldn’t find winter work.
After the second stint in Cooper Landing, Genghis retreated to San Francisco where some of his friends had established themselves. After getting his feet wet, he found an unconventional home in the bay. Genghis lived aboard a relatively cheap but functional sailboat he was able to acquire with money from a college fund that he begged his parents to let him use on something practical. The boat turned out to be a wise investment, Genghis was able to live in one of America’s most expensive cities while paying little more than a dock fee of a few hundred dollars a month.
The handsome outsider with the funny name was a social butterfly, and when he went out he often inspired the people he met along the way to offer him a place to crash or a bottle to share for the night. There was some arrogance in his personality that rubbed certain people the wrong way, for sure, but he never actually saw himself as above others; in fact, he was quite popular with the homeless who hung out by the docks in San Francisco. It was more that the young man was just very satisfied with being Genghis Muskox.
“Above all Genghis was a people-pleaser,” says Olivia Engel. “He wanted to meet everyone. He wanted to talk to everyone. He was always really curious about people who had different lives than him.”
After a few years living on the bay, Genghis sold his boat to fund an expedition to Colombia in a move that turned out to be a misguided. He essentially followed a lover studying abroad and the trip ended with the couple seperating, a bruised ego, and no liveaboard home to return to. In hindsight, this hastily concocted adventure reflects a slippage in the Muskox magic. Money was an issue once he was out of the harbor, as it would have been for most any non-professional living without a trust fund or a dockside loophole in the Bay Area.
The root of the problem was more complicated than making money though. Genghis had a problem that was becoming an anchor in his life. After Columbia, the idealistic adventures became less frequent, and when they came about at all they didn’t happen as gracefully as they had before.
Genghis had been living hard for years, and it was starting to catch up with him by the time he turned 25. Matching his thirst for adventure was a sense that life was to be celebrated, always, and he drank heavily almost every day. He’d done so since the end of his teens when he could survive on endurace alone. While he was self-aware enough to realize he had a problem when forced to talk about it, he was reluctant to leave behind the life he’d built with his devil-may-care personality. The charm that had been his secret weapon slipped in accordance with his consumption.
“He cried to me on multiple occasions that he didn’t like being an alcoholic and he wanted to change,” says on-again, off-again partner Jenna Miller. “But he was very proud, and he didn’t want to ask for help.”
3.
Feeling stuck in a rut in by The Bay and unwilling to make the life changes needed to build by hand the liveaboard boat of his dreams, Genghis sought a familiar escape that had thwarted his twice before and once again returned to Cooper Landing at age 26. The final adventure began in the spring of 2013.
Located at the center of Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, the village Genghis considered to be his paradise is an outdoorsman’s fantasy once it thaws out. Tourists from around the world come to fish, hike, and raft around the Kenai River and surrounding bodies of water. Genghis rented a tiny dry cabin close to the shore and found work in landscaping and washing dishes in a kitchen. He convinced his former girlfriend Jenna Miller to follow him up to Cooper Landing but she relocated to a more urban location on the peninsula soon after arriving and seeing the primordial, plumbingless cabin Genghis was calling home.
It was a promising new beginning in some respects, but the adventurer’s heavy drinking became an issue quickly. It wasn’t something a change of scenery could fix. Genghis was hardly acclimated to the environment when he was arrested for a DUI and his driver's license was revoked, which robbed him of his mobility in a place where a vehicle is necessary. After that, the rest of Alaska was off limits. Sixty miles removed from Jenna and the next nearest “city” in both directions, Genghis was limited to walking backroads and the long stretch of the Kenai Spur highway that straddles Cooper Landing.
Despite the enormous setback, Genghis was determined to stick it out and overcome his predicament. According to his friend Ward, AA meetings were attended for a short stint and then given up on after he missed a ride to Seward, but there was talk about going back. The always independant Genghis was unusually homesick too, but the people he was communicating with claim he was still optimistic and happy with his decision to return to Alaska.
Taking advantage of the outsider appeal of his remote digs, Genghis invited his father and one of his best friends, Tommy Dixon, up for a visit. It was right in the middle of Alaska’s famous summer season; a time of year when the sun only sets for an hour or so at night in Cooper Landing and money from around the world populates the vacation homes in the area.
While playing tour guide for his guests, Genghis was his old, adventurous self. After a few days of fishing, drinking beer, and exchanging stories, he and Tommy set out on a canoe trip through the northern wilds. Genghis had to lie about where he was taking the rickety vessel he paid a local rate for to secure the rental. Understandable, as there’s no such thing as a canoe designed for where Muskox wanted to take it.
Dixon recalls the trip in vivid detail. “When we took off we saw some people fishing and one of the fishermen yelled from the shore, ‘Is that you Genghis? You crazy motherfucker! It was right before we entered some rapids.”
“The most beautiful thing I’ve seen in my life was on that canoe trip,” says Dixon. “It was close to midnight and the sun had just set and the full moon was rising in between the mountains. Coming around a river bank there were three grizzly bears each eating their own salmon. We were floating by silent and it was like totally going back in time to before humans kind of fucked up the world.”
4.
It was around this time that Genghis first encountered Paul Vermillion, an unemployed Iraq War veteran living in his parents’ half-million-dollar vacation home just down the road from Genghis’ cabin. Paul was a military brat who spent his formative years moving from base to base following his father, an Army surgeon who would go on to make millions in private practice.
Sources in Cooper Landing have been mixed about what Paul’s demeanor was like in the summer of 2013. Some have described him as quirky but generally friendly and polite. Others have claimed he exhibited antisocial behaviors and that he stuck out in the community on the occasions he left the property. “As I understand it his parents sort of warehoused him there,” says reporter Craig Medred. PTSD has come up in interviews from people on both sides, and it’s not much of mystery where that would have came from.
During Paul Vermillion’s deployment in Iraq, his 101st Airborne Division fought to secure a dangerous strip of land known to soldiers as the “Triangle of Death.” There are a number of incredible, harrowing stories from this unit, but the bravery of the soldiers is not typically what you hear from people who remember the platoon when they come up in conversation. By the end of the tour this incarnation of the 101st had become a notorious black eye for the military on account of the terrible decisions of a few soldiers.
Four members of the unit snuck out of base one night outside the town of Yusufiyah and committed war crimes that are impossible to reason with. Those held responsible were later convicted for the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl and the executions of most of her family. The soldier who orchestrated the operation killed himself in prison, but the rest are still serving their life sentences.
It’s important to state clearly that Paul had no role in these crimes, yet the incident reflects a level of insanity and failed leadership that orbited the platoon on a daily basis. Fellow soldier Justin Watt, the primary whistleblower in the murder cases, briefly describes how elements of that tour changed his perspective. “I’ve seen women die. I’ve seen dead kids. You name it, I saw it. Nothing was shocking to me anymore. And that goes for all of us.”
Watt claims that Paul stood up for him during the military investigation after others in the platoon turned hostile, believing his “snitching” would forever tarnish the service of the 101st. Watt also made the point of saying that Paul was a brave soldier, if reckless at times, recalling a time the young soldier manned a machine gun without protective armor when doing so was unnecessary.
John Diem, Paul’s team leader in Iraq, claims Paul could also be a bit trigger-happy in ways that were more concerning than simply fighting the enemy with reckless abandon in the field. Diem described an event where Paul ignored orders and fired into a moving vehicle without knowing anything about who was in it. Diem also said it was possible Paul didn’t hear the command to stand down. That was Paul’s story when he was confronted at least. The team leader didn’t offer the benefit of the doubt when it came to Paul’s overall disposition in the way Watt did during his interview. “There’s a point where risk aversion becomes cowardice. Then there’s a point where risk acceptance becomes stupidity, and for him it was almost pathological. He didn’t see the downside of using violence to solve problems. Even if it was outside of common sense.”
Paul would struggle to find purpose once he returned home. He became dependant on anxiety medication and alcohol. Vermillion never looked for a job and developed no meaningful relationships in Cooper Landing until he met Muskox in Cooper Landing while the adventurer was doing contract work on his father’s property.
5.
Genghis Muskox and Paul Vermillion appeared to be odd companions on the surface. There were, however, a few basic connections between the men outside of the proximity of their homes on Snug Harbor Road. They were roughly the same age. Both were outdoorsmen. They had each spent significant portions of young adulthood in California. Most important in their bond- they were both alcoholics with recent DUIs and no transportation. The two men were more or less marooned together as a consequence of their drinking in last frontier, both stubbornly stuck in their stations.
Genghis and Paul often took turns walking from the Vermillion property to the liquor store and back. The drinking buddies spent long nights together, presumably telling the stories of their lives. Genghis would occasionally sleep in the home’s guest bedroom when he was too tired or too drunk to walk the half mile home.
Throughout their friendship, Genghis sometimes lamented about heartache and not being able to see Jenna while Paul likely struggled in private with emotions that went beyond the recent consequences of his drinking.
Both men were locally known to be troublemakers after too many drinks, but over the course of the second half of 2013, Paul earned his reputation for being careless in a way that some felt indicated a problem more serious than public intoxication. One night, while very drunk, Paul obviously dropped a loaded handgun on the floor of a nearby restaurant called the Kingfisher. Paul left to walk home with the gun still on the floor as families dined around it and was confused later on when he was banned from the establishment. Gossip spread and some of it came from his only friend in town.
Sean Parsons, a Cooper Landing resident who knew Genghis from working his job at a resort on the west end of town called Gwin’s Lodge, remembers meeting and then receiving frequent texts from Paul. These were mostly requests to hunt and fish in the area. Parsons didn’t know much about the stranger who claimed to have an arsenal of firearms in his home, but Sean was wary of these invitations. “Didn’t seem like something I wanted to do, spend a whole lot of time with him. He had a strange relationship with violence, I would say. Just a different way of looking at things.”
The more Parsons and Vermillion communicated, the more Sean believed Paul was unraveling, sinking into a mental “crisis.” Even though he had something of a background in psychology, Parson’s considered Paul’s case too severe for him to be of use. “I’m only just a person,” said the former innkeeper.
Once the season changed and visits from the rest of the Vermillion family became infrequent, Paul’s drinking ratcheted up and more stories of his erratic behavior spilled out. First, he was accused of beating up his brother who apparently started an argument that turned hostile after an incident that involved Paul stripping naked and jumping into a cold lake to retrieve a bird he’d shot.
Then came the night Vermillion pulled a gun on Genghis. It was serious enough that Muskox had to flee the situation half-naked and barefoot.
“[Genghis] told me that they had been hanging out at the Vermillion house and they had drank quite a bit,” Jenna Miller would later say in court.
“They had been sitting in the hot tub, looking up at the stars, enjoying themselves and having a pleasant evening. Paul went to go inside, and Genghis stayed in the hot tub. And when Genghis went in to dry off and get dressed, Paul was standing there with a gun in his hand. Genghis said he had this look on his face like he was snarling, like he was just full of animosity. He said it was just like a switch had flipped, that Paul had gone from being a very jovial person and fun to be around to holding a gun, pointing it at Genghis and snarling, ‘Get out of my house.’”
Sean Parsons heard the same story prior to that December too. He thought Genghis, “surely had sense enough not to ever go back to that house. When someone pulls a gun on me, I consider it a divorce. I’m done. I guess maybe, you get isolated up here.”
It might seem strange that the two men patched up their friendship after such an incident with a firearm, but it’s not beyond reason considering the alternative would have likely involved the pair spending a great deal of the winter drinking alone waiting for the return of regular sunlight.
In a week it was almost like nothing happened. Things were well enough that Genghis was a guest at Thanksgiving with the Vermillion family. What the men were up to in the handful of days between the holiday and December 4th is unclear. All that’s known is that Genghis did some odd construction work and spent a few hours reconnecting with friends on his phone.
Muskox complained to Tommy Dixon that he couldn’t catch a break and thought he might be forced into looking for another cabin because of a land sale. “He just wanted to survive the winter in Alaska. He’d never done that before.”
6.
It was 22 degrees on the 4th with about six hours of sunlight wedged between another 18 of darkness. The clerk at Wildman’s, a convenience store in Cooper Landing that stays open in the off season, sold beer to Genghis when the sun was still out. Not long after that, Paul came in for whiskey. Before 9pm both men would return to Wildman’s separately for more alcohol. As usual, once they their booze the two men spent the night at the Vermillion vacation home.
If there was any animosity between Genghis and Paul before the fight, it wasn’t apparent at 10:30 p.m., when Genghis received a call from Jenna. She’d gone out for drinks and trivia in Kenai, about an hours drive west of Cooper Landing. It was a rare outgoing call to her ex to see how he was doing.
“He answered the phone and before I said anything he was chuckling…. He said, ‘I just poured beer into Paul’s mouth.’ They’re already intoxicated — that’s clear enough. And then he said, ‘I love you’ and I said ‘bye’ and hung up.”
Paul would later say the argument was about a girl, and that’s one of a few things he was likely telling the truth about when he made his statements.
What is known for sure is that there was a confrontation and something of a wrestling match broke out. In the living room furniture was knocked around. A lamp from a side table was knocked onto the floor. The larger and stronger Vermillion took control at some point, though he claims Genghis first had him in a chokehold.
Graphic Images Ahead (PG-13)
It’s likely that any threat Genghis posed to Paul Vermillion was neutralized by the time the men became untangled and retreated from each other. Genghis did carry a knife on his side at all times, but it was never taken out of its sheath.
It’s also probably safe to assume that once the trained soldier picked up the ice ax, the adventurer did not advance. Blood patterns were used to indicate that when Paul first started swinging the weapon, the thought to escape came to Genghis quickly. First, Muskox headed for the front door. That’s when the closest thing to a witness entered the picture.
The houses on Snug Harbor Road are placed a good distance from each other with forest between them. Standing in front of the Vermillion’s driveway and looking down the gravel path that leads to the James property- you’d think it would take a lot more than a scream from inside the vacation home to get their attention. Especially on a night with wind.
The story from the police is that Cheryl James woke from her sleep to the sounds of a yell. Later on, she’d attribute the sound to have been made by Genghis, whose voice she knew.
“I heard a yell… I heard a yell for help,” says James. She was quick to explain why she failed to call police, which was for personal and Alaskan reasons. “Gunshots? We hear gunshots all the time. I thought someone had a bear in their yard.”
Genghis never actually made it outside the front door, but to believe that the door or a perhaps a window elsewhere in the home were never opened during the mele, and that Cheryl James still heard Genghis yell out for help, is akin to believing in something supernatural. Surely Muskox got close to making an exit in the beginning.
After Genghis gave up on the front entrance, he turned around and the blows from the ice ax continued. It’s clear from the way the blood patterns on the floor changed at this point that the injuries to Genghis were so severe the 27-year-old could no longer stand on his feet. The original analysis indicated he was then dragged to the closest bedroom, but the report was amended to indicate he might have crawled on his own. It’s impossible to know.
What cannot be disputed: In this state Genghis was no threat to the life of Paul Vermillion, if he ever was in the first place. In crime scene photos this part of the conflict is documented in a shot from the vantage point of the entrance to the living room.
Genghis might have been fatally wounded when he made it into the bedroom, but perhaps he could have survived if Paul had chosen to call for help.
What happened next is where the scene sheds all ambiguity from the perspective of lead detective Austin McDonald. Paul dropped the ice ax and reached for a more practical weapon for his immediate purposes, following Genghis to where he stopped moving forward on the floor of the bedroom with a 12-gauge shotgun in his hands. Genghis turned towards Paul and tried to nudge the muzzle away, leaving bloody fingerprints on the end of the barrel. That’s when Paul Vermillion shot his friend point-blank in the head, killing Genghis instantly.
It’s difficult to imagine the violence escalating from here, but the evidence makes it obvious that Paul wasn’t finished. He put another shell in the chamber of the shotgun. When he attempted to fire again the gun jammed. Paul then retrieved another gun, this one a 30-aught-6, and shot Genghis in the head at least one more time.
It’s unclear how many bullets hit because Genghis was so badly disfigured it was hard to make out entry points though only a single slug was found. Austin McDonald would later testify about this subject in court. When asked why he believed Genghis could have been hit by more than the one bullet from the rifle recovered in the basement, he responded tersely: “There were more expended shell casings than that.”
After the putting down the second gun, Paul poured himself a drink of Jim Beam. He then called his mother and offered a hazy description of the incident. Paul admitted he’d killed Genghis, saying he had no choice and reacted in self-defense. He also said he couldn’t remember how it started. It would take him a full two hours to call 911 and report the incident to police.
“I killed somebody,” Paul told the dispatcher.
“What do you mean you killed somebody? What happened?”
“I was being beat up and I didn’t know what to do. The next thing I know I’m calling you guys.”
“Where is the person now?”
“They’re dead on the floor.”
Paul’s cold delivery turned into something much more animated after he hung up the phone and the dispatcher called back. He sounds incredibly emotional when he says, “I’m sorry. I killed a lot of people in combat.”
This change in tone would continue when Paul gave his statements at the scene.
When law enforcement arrived, Paul invoked military language to describe the killing. “I executed the threat…,” he told the first trooper. When the trooper probed Paul about his response and indicated that “executed” was a strong word for a case of self-defense, Paul retreated further into Army lingo. “I eliminated the target… I survived and I was ready to move on to the next mission.” The next mission?
John Diem, Paul’s team leader in Iraq, believes what happened on Snug Harbor Road may have been an inevitability all along. When asked if he was surprised to hear of what Paul had done, he stated, “No, not at all. He’s one of those people with a character flaw that just the right amount of stress and just the right amount of bad luck was going to break it open. He’s one of those people with a big crack in their moral compass just waiting for the right things to kind of align.” On Paul’s statement to the dispatcher, “He didn’t kill ‘a lot of people’ in Iraq, if he even killed anybody [over there.]”
At the scene Paul said he wasn’t drinking until after the killing because he was following the rules of his probation. He said he was beaten up but he didn’t outwardly show any wounds. He said Genghis had the shotgun first and threatened to kill him with it. Paul said a lot of things that wouldn’t hold up after the first morning of the investigation.
7.
As the dust settled in Cooper Landing, Paul was booked at a police station around 45 miles west of the scene and placed in a holding cell with a fellow arrestee named Beau Reed.
Reed would make a statement the next morning that Paul confessed to a murder while they were together. Years later Beau would recall the conversation again, “It was basically an argument. He felt threatened. He came out and killed him. Someone like that, they’re not going fight hands up and shit.”
Reed offered to testify, but later refused when a deal he was offered to lessen the sentence in own case, which involved burglary and possession of a stolen gun, was taken off the table
In the beginning, the prosecutor's office in Kenai appeared confident enough in the murder case they were building that Beau Reed wasn’t a priority. From pretrial recordings Scot Leaders, the Kenai district attorney seems to indicate that the crime scene alone would be enough to convince a jury Vermillion acted intentionally when he killed Muskox. The whole system seemed to be leaning towards a favorable resolution for the state.
“At some point the ice ax was tossed aside, and the shotgun was brought into the picture, and [Muskox] was killed,” said Judge Charles Huguelet during a hearing. “And then Mr. Vermillion got another gun, a 30-aught-6, and went in and put another round through his head. The ice ax, the shotgun, and the 30-aught-6 used in combination- bang, bang, bang- suggests rage to me.”
Paul’s bail was set at a million dollars, which his family promptly paid. Vermillion would remain free with a monitor on his ankle for the next two and a half years while his case wended its way through the court system.
The DA had charged Paul with one count of murder one, two counts of murder two, and one count of manslaughter. What observers thought was most likely to stick as the case got closer to seeing a jury was one of the murder two counts, “Murder with Extreme Indifference.”
Everything was set in early 2016. A jury was going to see the three weapons and hear the tapes from the scene. Pictures of Genghis were going to blown up so everyone could see what Paul was claiming he did to defend himself. What might have hurt the team defending Paul’s explanation of events (I eliminated the target, etc.) was that any argument that the killing was as extreme as it was couldn’t relate to PTSD. That wouldn’t have been allowed in court. The defense had a serious hill to climb.
Then, after the jury was ready to report, and mere hours before the start of a trial that Genghis’ family flew in from Minnesota to attend, Paul accepted a plea to the manslaughter charge. The deal seemed to come out of nowhere and the sentence was another surprise when the math was calculated.
In the end, Paul would serve two and a half years in prison before being released.
Many view the outcome as business as usual, but a few factors make the deal remarkable. It’s true that there’s nothing at all strange about plea bargains generally, that’s how most cases are settled, but this was a highly unexpected outcome in a case with three murder charges and such an illustrative crime scene. Who killed Genghis Muskox was, of course, never in doubt. Why Paul killed Genghis wasn’t critical to the prosecution once the two guns were introduced. The state had a decided advantage.
Perhaps what is stranger still in this particular plea bargain is that Paul was convicted of a crime he surely did not commit. Muskox couldn’t stand on his feet after being stabbed repeatedly. Gunshots made it impossible to tell how many times he’d been stabbed. Paul intentionally ended a life and then shot the deceased again. There are only two ways to explain what happened. It was either murder, or there was no crime at all because it was self-defense all along. Manslaughter implies an unintentional killing as a result of recklessness or negligence. No one could’ve looked at Genghis’ body and assumed there’d been some kind of accident. Paul Vermillion never committed manslaughter.
Prosecutor Scot Leaders declined to be interviewed for this story and has never explained publically what led to the Vermillion deal, but problems in the state’s case can be observed without a comment from his office.
Someone can be choked to the point of death without leaving obvious injuries in some instances, so the the threat Genghis posed, according to Paul, had to be taken seriously. Paul’s version of the story, that he was fighting in fear for his own life, was also the only version of the story to work from. When it came to viewing the killing as end result in pattern of crisis, any descriptions of Paul’s behavior that came from Genghis were dismissed in pretrial as hearsay. The jury likely would have been unaware there was a story about Paul pulling a gun on Genghis in the month before the killing. Jenna Miller who knew more about Genghis and Paul’s relationship than anyone, was essentially silenced for this reason. There was doubt surrounding the crime scene as well. A stable of defense attorneys cast doubt on the detectives’ version of evidence, particularly the question of whether or not Genghis was dragged into bedroom. Beau Reed’s testimony to a supposed confession obviously couldn’t be used after her refused to cooperate. Genghis’ body wasn’t held as evidence after the autopsy. That didn’t help. There were a few similar blunders from the investigation. The state, it could be argued, decided to take the sure thing with its hands tied behind its back.
Not all of the obstacles the state faced were the result rulings that favored the defense or possible miscalculations by investigators however. There was one critical piece of evidence missing from the prosecution's case that even the local reporters who covered this story regularly were unaware of and it’s not much of surprise why neither the defense or the prosecution brought it up in the discovery phase: the earwitness was missing from the roster. It’s hard to overstate the importance of what she said the morning after Muskox was killed. If she’s to believed, and she really heard a scream for help from Genghis shortly before the gunshots, the self-defense argument is practically meaningless.
On the day Paul was sentenced Judge Huguelet gave a nod to the statement by Cheryl James’ without naming her. It was when he was explaining why he accepted the plea bargain because he trusted Leaders. It was mentioned that there was a story about a cry for help attributed to Muskox, but that it was “never developed” by the state. Why would something so essential to the state’s argument be abandoned by Scot Leaders?
When interviewed almost a year after Paul was sent to Wildwood and had already served over a third of his time incarcerated, James offered her own explanation in the small office of Wildman’s in Cooper Landing. She wasn’t thrilled about being recorded but eventually agreed because “it was over.”
“I know him.” By him she means the DA, Scot Leaders. “He’s been over to my house for parties. He took one look at me and…” James didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to.
Maybe this case should’ve been handled by another prosecutor if there was a conflict of interest involving the only person with a story from December 4th that didn’t have a BAC over .3 and brain matter stuck to their skin.
For those who believed Paul was guilty and fear he might pose a danger to society, the deal came as a shock. Former Alaska prosecutor Taylor Winstead worked on the case on behalf of a victims’ rights group. “The deal wasn’t on the horizon at all,” she said. “It came about last minute on the brink of trial… As I understand it, they didn’t really follow the best protocol. While prosecutors have the discretion to charge however they wish to charge and to resolve however they wish to resolve, it seemed like a huge drop from the murder one down to manslaughter…. Somebody was killed, murdered. I was surprised, that’s all I can basically say.”
Not everyone shares the opinion that Vermillion got let off the hook. There’s a set who strongly believe Paul shouldn’t been prosecuted in the first place on account of Castle Doctrine, which is very important to acknowledge. The logic is that if Paul was attacked in his own home and feared for his life, he had every right to use lethal force to protect himself. There is a legitimate legal argument to be made for Castle, and that would have certainly been argued by the defense at trial. It remains difficult to imagine that a jury would have been able to ignore all the aggravating factors involved in the three murder counts, but it would’ve only taken one person buying into the homestead defense to create a mistrial.
“Duty to Retreat” is the legal term prosecutors tell juries to consider in situations where Castle Doctrine becomes invalid. You’re always allowed to protect yourself, but you can’t just kill people with impunity because they took a swing at you on your own turf. In Vermillion’s case he could have shot Genghis 30 times and Castle would still apply so long as his safety was on the line and the fatal shot was fired at a legitimate physical threat. However, with “Duty to Retreat,” if the threat is obviously no longer a threat, and then the neutralized person is killed after the situation is no longer dangerous, it’s murder. The introduction of the 30-aught-6 in the Vermillion case is why so many who knew Genghis and wanted to see a trial believed the risk of a jury buying into the self-defense argument wasn’t such a high risk scenario. Dead men are no threat to human life.
8.
Craig Medred, a former reporter for the Alaska Dispatch News, writes about Alaska and the role of money and politics in the state often. These topics have been the basis for some of the biggest stories in his career. Crime is another favorite subject Medred’s. As it happens, he was the first reporter to write a feature about this case and the life of Genghis Muskox, which came out about a month after the killing.
“The case clearly got handled differently and it clearly involved the fact the family had money.” Medred was light on details concerning how the wealth of the Vermillion’s might have actually impacted the case, but there’s nothing unusual about the sentiment.
Medred thinks money was a factor when it came to the states calculous in the manslaughter plea, too. He sees an issue with the high cost involved in taking cases to trial in small communities. Prosecutors, he claims, are overriding the justice system in some instances.
“The further rural you get, and Cooper Landing is right there in the middle [of the Kenai Peninsula] the more it becomes sort of like a slaughtering house. The impetus is just on settling cases. There’s a huge incentive [to settle a case.] It’s like, ‘we’ll take this deal and then move onto the next case.’ It’s like a processing plant. I’ve also seen people who I thought were probably innocent get farmed off on plea deals. They’re saying, ‘I didn’t do it,’ I didn’t do it’ and they’re basically being told to shut up.”
Craig had more to say when asked if Paul would have been hard to prosecute due to his service in a state with a strong military presence. This quickly dovetailed into strong opinions about the crime.
“I don’t think anybody would have painted him as a hero. I don’t think anyone here had any doubt that Vermillion was guilty…Vermillion is kind of really fucked up. Totally fucked up. Whether the military did that or his family did that, I don’t know. Who knows what the hell happened? The fact of the matter is we know it was a pretty horrific murder. What transpired leading up to it, I have no idea. Every sign of that murder is a guy who lost it. The behavior’s just so extreme. It’s someone emotionally disconnected and operating on things you and I can’t understand.”
When Genghis’ mother described how Scot Leaders explained the deal to her, the thing that shocked her most was his odd statement that, “trials are expensive.” Susan paused after that reflection in her first interview and continued saying, “I’m not sure if you’re aware but Alaska is facing a huge shortening.”
In the Vermillion case the state’s budget played a considerable role even if you remove any theoretical incentive the state might have had to save money by cutting a deal. The resolution happened at moment when Alaska had just introduced legislation to cut costs across the justice system state-wide with a bill known as SB-91 and the sentence handed down from Huguelet was one of the first impacted by the new furlow guidelines. That’s part of the reason Paul only served two and a half years even though it appeared on paper he was sentenced to ten. The Legislature’s cuts reduced sentencing guidelines for all non-sexual crimes below first- and second-degree murder because housing people in prison for lesser crimes was costing the state more money than it wanted to spend. The controversial law was largely a response to slumping oil prices, which Alaska heavily relies on to fund its government. Slashing the costs of its justice system offered something of a reprieve from the economic freefall. State politics were absolutely a factor in these decisions.
Taylor Winstead also brought up the role of politics and money in the Vermillion case during her interview, which was no surprise. These were very common subjects among advocates. “I was a prosecutor and money was always a concern but you don’t start cutting the murder cases. Read the bill.”
There are a few often repeated versions of the story for those who want an explanation for why the Vermillion saga ended without a trial. All of them seem to involve otherness of the state of Alaska, politics, and money to some degree. Some of the theories are simple, while others are as unique and confounding as the crime itself.
Some people believe the cash strapped state was overmatched by a formidable defense and all the resources and experts they could afford to support their version of events. Others believe Scot Leaders botched the case by way of his own hubris and had no choice but to settle; and this set have only recently heard about what happened to the earwitness. There’s also a conspiracy minded crowd that thinks a trial never happened because it would have been bad for the perception of the area.Tourists with money don’t want to hear about ugly stories in the local media during fishing season, or so the logic goes.
And again, there are the people who believe Vermillion stood his ground and was innocent all along.
It’s good to pay attention and listen to every side in story like this, no matter how ridiculous an argument might sound at first. A few people have been interviewed on multiple occasions who are entrenched in their own perspectives, and this includes one person in the ‘Vermillion is innocent camp’ who was interviewed nearly 30 times for this story. The regular phone calls with this individual create the basis for the show stopping, totally unheard of, call-your-best-friend-in-the-middle-of-the-night-to-run-through-it-once-more version of Vermillion’s road to freedom that have vast implications.
Who is the advocate for the minority opinion? And what is “undue influence?”
“Susan showed me the letter. I said, ‘that’s not ok.’”
Megan Pacer has more by-lines on the Vermillion case than any other reporter. She’s the journalist who took over the story in 2014 at the Kenai Peninsula Clarion, the only newspaper that wrote daily’s about the court proceedings. The letter she was referring to was something Genghis’ mother showed her at sentencing. It was from the news director and most popular reporter at local radio station KSRM. Inside was a plea for Susan to forgive Paul and move on. Pacer wasn’t too surprised when she found out who wrote it. “Her bias was clearly coming through in her reporting.”
By the time Pacer told the story about the letter it was known that the woman who wrote it had gotten a state senator to visit Paul Vermillion, in person. This was while Paul’s case was winding through the justice system. Pacer responds with something she hadn’t thought about for years after listening to that story. “When there was a break in court, Catie would be with them. The Vermillion’s would be talking about where they were going to go for lunch and it was obvious she was going with them. I was like, whoa. That’s not something we should be doing as reporters.”
9.
December, 2016. “You may think you’re doing one story, but I guarantee you there’s another bigger story about how it was covered up far above. You’re going the exact opposite way of justice.”
That’s Dave Heag and he wasn’t talking about the Vermillion case.
Dave was much more interested in his own experience with the justice system on the Kenai the first time he was interviewed. “It’s valuable to have someone like you on the outside because those of us on the inside, we can’t see the forest because of the trees.” Dave went on to describe a sort of conspiracy between lawmakers and newspapers in Alaska. He said he’d had an ad that told his story pulled from circulation in the ADN, the biggest newspaper in the state. He said the government was responsible. He said a lot of things. Once you get him talking he’s got a very long, very detailed story to tell that he’s been repeating for over a decade.
It can be difficult to take Haeg seriously. For starters, he has a blog called “Alaska: State of Corruption,” which may bring to mind the image of a man in camouflage waiters adjusting his tin foil hat. What was in the ad that got pulled? Was it “crazy?” Haeg once hosted a protest that looked like a sort of redneck militia on parade. He taped it for social media. There’s also a video taken not long after Dave was last consulted for this story where he was tased by bailiffs and brought to his knees in the middle of court in Anchorage while arguing his case.
If you want to dismiss Haeg, there’s also the fact that all his trouble started after shooting wolves out of a helicopter, a fact the hunting guide doesn’t deny. Starting there, he’s not the most sympathetic of characters when you hear the bullet points. Haeg argues that he had permission to kill the wolves from the state before he was convicted of a crime that destroyed his family business, and he says Scot Leaders literally redrew the zoning maps from the wolf kill to secure a victory for the state. The whole thing was about politics and public perception, according to Dave. A lot of people think he’s a nut.
This detour with Dave Haeg’s story started off as what you might call a B-plot, maybe even a C-plot. He was a backup when Leaders refused to talk and a worrisome reserve at that. The only thing that made him convincing at all was that he’d been fighting with the court so publicly, for so long. You’d think he’d have to really be out of his mind if he didn’t actually believe in his soul that he was the victim he claimed to be. That part was interesting.
In April of 2022, Dave held another protest in Kenai. It had been nearly six years since his first interview for this story and over a dozen since his crusade started.
May 9th, 2017. “What I’m saying is I don’t want my name associated with theirs. There was a baby that was buried on the beach, they wouldn’t run the story. Anything that affects the appearance of the town for tourist reasons, Morris kills the news.” Greg Skinner was the last reporter tracked down who had an important by-line about the Vermillion case in the local newspaper. He wasn’t asked a single question about his old gig in Kenai. Skinner just had a burning desire to start dunking all over Morris, the company that owns the Clarion. The interview was supposed to be about a bail hearing.
“It’s just insane.”
Greg told a story about a senator calling him up at the office to “fix” a story that was critical of legislation. He says it was early in his tenure at the Clarion.
This was the kind of corruption story that could be inserted into an episode of Scooby Doo and kids would understand it. Skinner said the request was so bald he thought it was a joke at first. “The senator rewrites the news and puts it in the paper. What else do you need to know? Why is it so shitty, why can they get away with anything?”
The next story from Skinner was about a reporter's FOIA request getting tossed out of City Hall by a mayor from Soldotna who went on to become a state senator. Greg didn’t give a name, but the politician he was talking about turned out to be Peter Micciche after some investigating.
“Those two examples are true. I’d put my hand on a bible.”
Skinner said the corruption he’d witnessed with politicians fixing the news was a two way street. Alaska was the perfect environment for something like this to occur, he said, due to the tiny media population and its dependance on the government for stories. “I’ve seen reporters out fishing with senators, fucking hanging out with the mayor. They’re not afraid to take meals. They’re not afraid to take gifts. The mayor of Juneau- the managing editor of the Juneau Empire [newspaper] taught him and his wife to dance for their wedding.”
Another former reporter talked about the same thing. Are they both crazy?
May 9th, 2017. Dave Haeg was requested for an emergency interview. His story hadn’t changed and he didn’t have any details about the newspaper ads that he hadn’t give up the first time around, but Dave offered a hell of a lead. He said there was another reporter who was interested in his story and had told him something about corruption in the case involving Vermillion. He wouldn’t name the reporter at first, but he gave it up at the end of the call. “The lady reporter I was telling you about, her name is Catie Quinn. She’s actually from Australia. We need to all work together because someone might something that’s a missing piece for someone else.”
May 10th, 2017. Sarah Koenig, host of Serial, a show that has the distinction of being the most popular crime podcast of all time, is approached about the Vermillion case in synagogue outside Minneapolis. The Peabody Award winner agrees to listen to a tape full of interviews about the killing of Genghis Muskox.
May 14th, 2017. “It sounds like you think there’s someone is pulling the strings.” Catie Quinn, the news director at KSRM with an Australian accent is interviewed for the first time. She gets riled up early on when the word “murder” comes up while discussing the Vermillion case. “Back up just one second there.” Catie sounded extremely skeptical of another story about Genghis Muskox but she stayed on the phone for hours. It turned out she had an encyclopedic knowledge of the court case and hinted she might know even more than she was leading with.
“I’m going to tell you right now that I could have a lot for you. I could have an answer to every question you’ve got, one way or another. I just need to take some time to think.”
The next morning Catie sent a text message with a private email address. Right after that she sent a text saying she knew Paul and his family. It was clear she didn’t mean she knew of Paul. She knew him beyond journalism, which was wild.
What that happened in Cooper Landing had been a huge story from the beginning at KSRM and Catie led the reporting at the station. She knew Paul?
Why would a reporter and news director living in Kenai know a prisoner who was previously marooned over an hour in the direction of nowhere? The guy drank all day and barely left his house. No one in Kenai knew who Paul Vermillion was until he was arrested.
While exchanging notes with Catie, she explained why she was a trustworthy source in the event she decided to actually become a source. She referred to herself as part of the “political elite” and despite the claim being somewhat ridiculous, she sounded convincing. Quinn gave a few more of her qualifications to illustrate how she got information no one else had. “I have a reputation around here. That helps. I’ve been in court for many of [Scot] Leaders’ hearings. That helps. I talked to [Leaders] and his boss [John Skidmore] every day, every other day, for the better part of six months. Did you listen to my interview with Leaders?”
The only other journalist to ever score an interview with Scot Leaders was a reporter from the Clarion named Jerzy Shedlock. That was way back when Leaders was confirmed as the DA. Jerzy said it was impossible to talk to the prosecutor after that. Shedlock was the same reporter who had his FOIA cancelled by Peter Micciche. Small world.
“Every day, every other day, for the better part of six months.”
Catie Quinn heard all the stories about corruption in the media and local government that came from Haeg and Skinner, and she dismissed them at first. The Australian changed her tune a bit when Sarah Koenig’s name came up. “I’ve listened to Serial,” Catie said with some surprise. The deck was shuffled and soon the focus was off the Vermillion case.
“I’ve watched a trooper and a DA talk about lying to a judge in front of the judge. I’m not kidding. I’m not exaggerating that at all. I’ve watched Leaders lie in court with him and both knowing he was lying. That happened.” Quinn said there was a big story that could be told that was more important than the one about the guy in prison. Why spend all this time on something that’s already been covered by other journalists?
“John Paulharvor was shot by a trooper when the trooper had no right to be where he was. And I was going to submit a FOIA, and I was told it wouldn’t be honored. I said, ‘that’s illegal.’ Their response was, ‘so sue us.’ What am I going to do, sue the troopers? In our court? No. If you want to go in that direction, that's a direction we could maybe talk about.”
May 17th, 2017. “I just need you to tell me what the injustice was in the original case between Muskox and Vermillion.”
There was a phone conversation with Sarah Koenig. She’d recently heard a tape of Catie Quinn talking about some wild corruption she’d seen as a reporter on the Kenai Peninsula. Koenig was skeptical. “You can’t just trust everything a reporter tells you.” Catie was a nonstarter.
“I don’t think this is something Serial would do. I mean, I’d have to move to Alaska.” Sarah did say she’d pass the story on to another producer. She may have had interest, but it was clear she thought a story that ended in a plea deal lacked the kind of drama that elevates the best true crime. Even to hear such a prominent reporter considering the details in a case such as Vermillion’s was a thrill. That she was passing didn’t spoil the moment.
Catie Quinn was called after the conversation with Koenig ended. At that point, there was still a crack in the door. Who knows? There were possibilities.
You’ll never believe who I just talked to.
May 18th, 2017. “You can do whatever you want but I will have no association with the way this company chooses to do news, and I will not put my name on another story.”
Catie Quinn recorded the meeting where she lost her job on her phone. This came less than 24 hours after confirmation that a national reporter had listened to her words on tape.
The former news director states the she “just got fired,” but “fired” is a strong word for what happened in that meeting. It’s Catie who gives the ultimatum that results in her dismissal. She refuses to work another second unless KSRM reports, “the Zimmerman story, and the Litke story.” It sounded obvious that news was being covered up because of conflicts of interest.
In less than two weeks the old story that sounded like a fairytale about an ad Dave Haeg tried to run getting pulled by a government employees turned into seriously high drama about corruption in the local media, and now it included a tape that was undeniable. The story was heavily reliant on Catie, but her credentials spoke for themselves. It seemed that way, at least.
By the end of the month Catie Quinn would be in Hawaii on a vacation that became something of a mystery when after it was clear she hadn’t purchased a ticket to return to Alaska. As happy with her decision as she was, she seemed to be in denial about her work visa being in jeopardy after the courageous act of defiance.
Interviews continued every day, every other day…
10.
Andy Pevehouse is a defense attorney in Kenai who doesn’t care much for the local district attorney. In his first interview in 2016, colorful language was used about the prosecutor in a sentence that ended with the word “wiesel.”
Things had changed. After Catie Quinn started throwing elbows at Leaders in interviews and accusing him of malpractice, it seemed wise to reach Pevehouse for his opinion. Was Scot a shitty little wiesel?
The private attorney was careful with his words. If he thought Vermillion was screwed over or if he thought justice was averted in a plea, he didn’t tip his hand. “It might have been a more favorable resolution than he would have gotten at trial, but the jury system is complicated.” That was about as firm of a statement as Pevehouse would offer.
When Andy was reminded of statements he made during his first interview and how they seemed to jive those made by an unnamed source who thought Vermillion was innocent, Pevehouse became defensive. “I’m not sure I like where you’re headed with this.” His tone changed considerably when the name of the source came out.
“Catie Quinn?”
Pevehouse responded as if the information had come from a Ouija board.
