Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:04] Speaker B: Hi, this is Leland Hale. Let's talk about Muriel File. Let me sort of introduce you to her. And the reason we're interested in her story is, of course, she was killed. Murdered.
She was working at her business, Muriel Pfeil's professional travel service. It was September. She just taken her son back to his daycare center. She had a routine. Every Thursday, every Tuesday, she would take him to this kindergarten, pre kindergarten, really, at a local church.
Pick him up midday, take him to the daycare center, which was only steps away from where they lived. On her way back to her business, she stopped. She made a little detour. Now, she was known as one of the best dressed women in Anchorage. And it wasn't conjecture. I mean, this was a vote. I mean, she was. She was. So she'd get a coat. Nordstrom had some fall coats on sale. She went and picked up the coat and then drove back to the business. And she came in and she bragged to her employee about what a beautiful coat she got. And employees said, where's the coat?
And she went out to get it, of course.
And she got to the car and she realized she didn't have her keys. So she came back. And what's curious here, what's really curious here is that we. She got the keys. Of course she got the keys.
She left behind her purse and her glasses. And the employees noted that because that's not something she would do if she were driving. So there's a sense she had no intent of driving. But she got back to her car and opened the car and put, for some reason, put the keys in the ignition and turned that key, and the car blew up.
Let's set the scene. It's September 30, 1976. It's an almost October day. Anchorage is its usual false self. The sky is a gauzy gray. The clouds, maybe the wind, maybe. Temperature is hovering near a daily high of 42 degrees.
Weather's still not sure what it wants to be, and snow is at least a month away.
Our location is the westernmost edge of downtown Anchorage.
The time is 2:10pm and in these few blocks, there's a cluster from law offices, courthouses, a hotel, a major hotel, and lots of people attached to the criminal justice system.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is also an Anchorage that's a bit unsettled. There's a lot of oil money coming in from the north, and that means a lot of churn with folks that don't really have an attachment to the place.
Some lawyers are now carrying handguns in their briefcases.
There's also a growing sense that street prostitutes are going missing, that a serial killer is on the loose. So, yes, a little bit of the Wild West. There was also something more immediate.
There was no escaping the sound of that blast, nor its repercussions. Windows were shattered. The smell of explosives lingered. Local workers, many of them attorneys, streamed out of their buildings in response to the blast.
They soon learned there was nothing they could do. The woman in that bright orange Volvo station wagon was dead.
They could only gape at the twisted wreck before them, its engine compartment a twisted map of carnage. Even the firefighters arriving at the scene took on the look of shock and despair, that they, too, were helpless. It wasn't long before two priests arrived there to perform last rites. Even though Muriel was a practicing Lutheran, they were taking no chances.
Not all of the witnesses, however, held blank stares. There was one woman who stood out, a handkerchief to her face in tears. She was one of Muriel's trusted employees, whose car was parked right next to her boss's now smoldering Volvo.
She knew all too well the issues Muriel had been facing, the hassles she'd gone through with her kid, with her ex husband, Neil Mackay.
She remembered the time when Neil Mackay came into to the office demanding to see Scotty, their child, demanding that she call her mother and get him.
Muriel was busy. She said, no, I'm sorry, I can't. I don't have time for this. Don't come into the office like this. It's my office. He screamed, "I own this building."
He tossed papers. He eventually threw the typewriter to the floor. Muriel kicked him out of the office. But it was fraught.
And one of the hardest things to face at that moment was that Muriel's life really seemed to be on the rebound. She had a new boyfriend. She seemed very happy and had plans to build a house of her own.
With Scotty?
With Scotty.
And yet.
I interviewed one of the witnesses, Doug Pope, in 2019. His law office overlooked the parking lot where the explosion occurred.
[00:06:46] Speaker A: Hello? Hello.
[00:06:47] Speaker B: Is this Doug?
[00:06:48] Speaker A: This is Doug.
[00:06:51] Speaker B: So I've started a new book, and I think you're. You were a witness.
[00:07:00] Speaker A: Wouldn't surprise me. What's it about?
[00:07:03] Speaker B: It's. It's about Neil Mackay.
[00:07:06] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Okay.
[00:07:10] Speaker B: I think you are. You were a witness to the explosion. Do you. Do you have a few minutes? Could you talk about it?
[00:07:17] Speaker A: Sure. Is this an interview?
[00:07:20] Speaker B: Sure. We can make it casual. It can make it casual. If you want these to be on Background. I can do that.
[00:07:26] Speaker A: Oh, no, it doesn't. I. I don't care anything about that. That I did witness the... The car blow up, or at least I witnessed it, be precise. I saw the hood rising off of the top of the car after I heard the explosion, because it...
So anyway, what I remember is... Is I remember I was working on this other case that ended up. It was my. One of the... Another case went to the Alaska Supreme Court. But my... My belief is, is that I was working on the Kachemak Bay case and which was involved mostly reading Supreme Court cases.
And I... Anyway, what I remember is sitting in my chair, probably it must have been a swivel chair, because I could... But I had my feet propped up on the windowsill or on the radiator beneath the windowsill. And I was on the phone.
Let's see, 76. I was on the phone with somebody and I heard this WOOF, more than a woof. And I just. So I kind of turned my gaze because I was. My window overlooked the parking lot that Muriel Pfeil's car was in.
And I saw this. The hood of. This. Of the car going up. Like. I don't know if you ever. I don't know how old are you, if you ever did this kind of stuff. When I was a kid, we used to put firecrackers in a... In a lead pipe and drop a can down into him and the firecracker go off and it shoot the can out.
[00:09:38] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[00:09:39] Speaker A: And it reminded me of that. Here was this...
And I can remember watching it. Here was this hood going up in the air and it must have gone five or six stories in the air because I just kept watching it and it was kind of slowly rotating and then it reached its peak and then it came down and. And then I looked out and there was some...
I can't remember, There was a woman down at the car and people were there already one. At least one. So I ran out to see what I could do or if there's anything and.
Okay. Your memory is a tricky thing, you know, if you're a writer. I write nonfiction. You write... You write different kinds of nonfiction. I write nonfiction stories and published a number of them. And I'm getting ready to publish a book and. And memory is a tricky thing. So I'm trying to.
I'm pretty sure if my memory is correct because it's been a long time since I thought about it. I'm pretty sure I got close enough to the car to look and see that whoever was inside was not sitting up.
[00:11:22] Speaker B: up, do you mean like slumped?
[00:11:24] Speaker A: Yeah, it's just a really, really vague, because I didn't want to get close to it because I think that it's possible there was a police officer there already then, because I remember.
But then I went back and I went back. I think I went back inside because other people were showing up and I thought, okay, I'm just going to, you know, stay out of this.
But I remember smelling the high explosive.
And I had worked construction, putting my way through college. It took me 10 years to get through college and law school, and I worked construction in Fairbanks. And one of the jobs I'd worked around was blasting riprap and rock. And so I knew the smell of high explosives.
And, and I remember being down there, and it may have been that I left and came back and there was a police officer there, and he was speculating that, oh, maybe the carburetor blew up or something. And I said, can't you smell? And I may have used cordite. Can't you smell it? I remember asking him that.
Now, you may, or if you probably looked a lot of records, you know, that I was a witness.
But later, what I learned later is that I was an early suspect because I said, can't you smell it? You know, and, and that the cops were actually looking at me for a few days, although they, they may have interviewed me. I don't remember that, but I do remember being out there looking, you know, standing maybe 20ft away from the passenger or the driver's side window, saying, I had already seen the hood go in the air and seeing that there was.
Whoever was inside was not sitting up. They were either slumped over, laying over in. I, you know, I can conjecture now that maybe she was in pieces, but I didn't think about that at the time. I just thought, well, there's nobody alive in there.
[00:13:48] Speaker B: Just as a footnote, Muriel's body was, in fact, intact.
It's also noteworthy that Volvos of that era did not have carburetors. They had a fuel injection system instead.
If you're interested in books by Doug Pope, I recommend the Way to Gaamaak cove, published in 2020 and available on Amazon.
The police officer that Doug Pope encountered was named Corporal Don Langdock. He was, in fact, the first one on the scene. Other than the witnesses who'd run down to see what was going on, he reported that he'd seen a car in the parking lot with considerable damage, saw the female driver slouched in her seat with A piece of steel driven through her chest and pinning her body to the seat.
He immediately contacted the close witnesses, learned what they'd seen, and then reported back to dispatch. He advised dispatch that There was an 1140, an explosion with a 1129 DOA, and asked for investigators to respond.
Langdoc's note about the piece of steel driven through Muriel's chest reminds me of something else that Doug Pope said. He first said it, in fact, in an interview with the Anchorage Times back in 1976, and I asked him about it. It's called a directed or targeted blast, and it's often used in mining.
So there's a quote in the Anchorage Times from you, which is, by the way, how I found you, where you said something to the effect that whoever did it must have had some expertise because the way the blast went off.
[00:16:27] Speaker A: Well, yeah. Did I say that? Really?
[00:16:29] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:16:33] Speaker A: I was probably trying to aggrandize myself.
Well, I knew enough about high explosives that you can direct a blast.
[00:16:44] Speaker B: Well, that was. Yeah. Okay. That's.
[00:16:45] Speaker A: Yeah. And. And. And so that.
But, yeah, I mean, I. I still remembering back to what I saw at the time, and, you know, I really haven't even thought about this. I remember watching the Neil Mackay case. Oh, what a... That was just so weird to watch that case unfold, those two trials that I. But I just remember at the time thinking, yeah, whoever did this knew what they were doing.
And. And that was just because of my experience around high explosives. Because, you know, when you're. When you're. When you're blasting rock, it's a targeted explosion.
And you're not trying to, you know, blow up the entire hillside. What you're trying to do is fracture it. Right.
And.
[00:17:54] Speaker B: And not be part of it.
[00:17:56] Speaker A: Yeah. And not be part of it. Right. Not yet. And so, anyway, interesting.
And that's. You know, that quote was probably another reason the cops thought, oh, maybe it's Pope. But anyway, that's. Yeah. And then I really, you know.
But, yeah, I'll always remember that hood, you know, until my dying breaths. I'll remember it going up in the air and going, oh, my God.
[00:18:32] Speaker B: But what haunts him more, I think, is the image of that distraught woman at the scene. He can't get that image out of his head. But he also can't remember when he saw her, only how much she affected him. Which, when you think about it, is, of course, how emotion works. A feeling, an image. The sequence almost irrelevant.
[00:18:57] Speaker A: But my memory was of. I have this vague memory of a woman standing with this. Her Hands up to her, you know, like her head or face or something like that.
[00:19:10] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:19:13] Speaker A: And. But that may have been after I went. Because I went like, if I remember, I was down there twice. I went down there and then I left.
When. When the authorities. But then I went back and the cop was speculating about. Or it's possible the cop was speculating that it was a carburetor that had blown up the first time I was there and I wanted. Man, I went back to say, so it's possible I looked back out to after I went down and saw, okay, this is bad.
Went back, but somebody else got, you know, a handle on it and I'm going to back out.
Then it's possible I looked down again and then I saw somebody who was horrified by what they were. So, you know, I just have this vague memory of that. But whether it was right after the thing or 30 minutes later, that I don't know.
[00:20:20] Speaker B: An ambulance and emergency personnel had reached the scene within two minutes of Langdoc's call.
Plainclothes investigators were close behind. They immediately cordoned off the area and within 30 minutes were sifting through the vehicle's remains, looking for clues on the explosive designed to kill Muriel Pfeil.
That's not all they did. As part of their protocol, they searched an entire line of cars looking for more bombs. None were found. But now a full court press from what grew to be a 15 member team was underway.
There were Anchorage Police detectives, Alaska State Troopers, FBI agents, and of course, representatives from the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Division. The bomb experts.
There were so many things to do.
See you next time.
