Episode Transcript
[00:00:09] What would you do -- what would you do if a phone call came in saying someone you love, someone close to you, Something happened to them?
[00:00:22] And it's. It's kind of vague.
[00:00:27] I asked that because some years ago, I got a phone call from the security company that held the alarm system at my mother's house.
[00:00:36] And the call came in, it was a woman, was very nice, very kind, you know, the alarm went off and at your mom's house, and you might want to go by and check.
[00:00:48] And it's like, okay, I'm busy. I'm doing something. I mean, what? What?
[00:00:58] And she understood my hesitancy and she didn't give me more details. Finally, she put on the paramedic. And the paramedic said, look, you know, there are some installers here. They're going to put in some glass. They. No one came to the door. They looked through one of the windows. They saw your mom and I'm sorry, there's. There was nothing we could do.
[00:01:19] Okay, I'm on my way.
[00:01:24] Fast forward, fast backward, whatever it is.
[00:01:30] Robert File Mario Fil's brother faced a similar situation.
[00:01:37] He got a call essentially 10 minutes after the explosion went off. A guy named Don Smith, a local politician who had an office in the same building. And he called and said there's been an explosion in the parking lot across the street. Now, by that time, they knew that the woman in that car was dead.
[00:01:58] So Bob and his wife Marianne gathered their wits and they got in the car and they drove to the scene. Sam.
[00:02:42] It was about a 13 minute drive from their lakeside house to Muriel's business on fourth Avenue. So there was plenty of time to think about everything. Muriel and her Messy divorce.
[00:02:56] Neil McKay, Scotty, her son.
[00:03:02] They had to wonder, was he in that car, too? It was not idle speculation.
[00:03:08] Tuesdays and Thursdays were the days that Muriel drove him to preschool and he was, yeah, it was Thursday.
[00:03:19] Also was not a great leap for the two of them to suspect Neil for whatever happened to Muriel.
[00:03:26] They had both seen violence in Neil McKay.
[00:03:30] Bob remembered that time when, during their divorce, McKay called him to his apartment, told him he'd pay his sister to stay with him. It was a bribe. A flat out bribe offer.
[00:03:43] Bob must have looked at McKay like he was crazy because McKay snapped. He cursed me, Bob remembered. Told me if I ever crossed him, he'd have me. And when he was through with me, I'd look like I'd been run over.
[00:04:00] And then there's that other time when McKay had slapped Muriel, left a big red mark on her face.
[00:04:09] Their mother.
[00:04:11] Yeah, she was a tiger.
[00:04:15] Called a mutual friend, a lawyer. The guy said Muriel should leave him.
[00:04:20] The plan was for Marianne to look after grandmother file while Bob navigated the crime scene.
[00:04:29] They knew it was hard to keep secrets in this town.
[00:04:33] Grandma Phylla would no doubt hear about the bombing soon enough. In fact, she may have already heard about it as far as they could tell.
[00:04:44] There were some other things that kept repeating in Bob's brains. One of them, that McKay might not have been Scotty's biological father. There was something about Muriel that I don't know. A wild streak, perhaps.
[00:05:01] And then there was Muriel's strange request. During the divorce, she'd asked him, asked her brother Bob to spend her estate down to the last nickel, to keep Neil McKay from ever getting custody of Scotty.
[00:05:19] Now, in retrospect, that felt like a premonition.
[00:05:40] The fourth Avenue scene was cordoned off. By the time Bob arrived, went to the travel agency office, learned Miro was dead.
[00:05:49] His worst fears confirmed he couldn't miss the debris from Miro's car scattered in a 250 foot radius around the lot. Or the cops crawling the scene.
[00:06:04] Yes, they had a chat too.
[00:06:08] Kind of hinted in the direction of Neil McKay.
[00:06:13] And then it was off to his childhood home where his wife and mother awaited. That little jewel box built by his late father in 1931 had already seen its share of tragedies. His father's 1954 death in a franchise freak float plane accident had shocked him this very same day, 22 years previous.
[00:06:37] That coincidence?
[00:06:38] Or was it a coincidence?
[00:06:41] The thought hit that someone might be trying to send a message, a shot across their bow.
[00:06:51] Bob didn't break down and fall into tears after all this tragic and emotional moments, being at the crime scene, meeting with murals employees, he didn't break down until he went up the stairs at his childhood home, Grandma's house, as his girls called it.
[00:07:18] Yes, indeed, someone had already called, telling Marianne to call the Alaska State troopers.
[00:07:24] So their premonitions, well, they knew. And when Bob arrived, the three of them quickly shared one thought.
[00:07:34] How could Neil McKay be so evil?
[00:08:13] For better or worse, negatives were never hard to find with that man. With that Neil McKay.
[00:08:20] Neil had sued Marianne File in 1974 for, quote, destroying the father son relationship. And try as they might, McKay never seemed interested in the family stuff.
[00:08:34] But they kept coming back to one thing.
[00:08:38] What about Scotty?
[00:08:41] What about Scotty?
[00:08:45] By 3:30, Bob and Marianne were at his daycare, only a six minute drive. It was a quiet neighborhood, nestled among trees and close to a sprawling park. They did not, however, take him to their comfortable lakeside home. They instead took him to Muriel's duplex apartment across the street, 150ft away.
[00:09:09] No, they didn't bring him home until the following day. Brought him to their comfortable lakeside home, made a bedroom for him, filled it with his toys and his clothes, and let it be known that his cousins were essentially, effectively now his sisters.
[00:09:32] That difficult conversation about his mother's death was left to Marianne.
[00:09:39] I'm quoting from her now. I told Scotty of his mother's death a day or two after I told him there was a car accident.
[00:09:47] We never told Scotty that we suspected his father.
[00:09:53] Marianne continued. He asked where his mother was.
[00:09:58] We told him she was gone.
[00:10:00] He knew his mother was gone. He'd heard of the explosion, knew something of the car.
[00:10:08] We presented it to him as gently as we could. He asked, when is Mother coming home?
[00:10:15] Then he said, mother's in heaven.
[00:10:32] That September 30, telephones were ringing elsewhere in the city. One was from an attorney named Frank Nosek, who also had an office in Muriel's building, which, of course, let's add, was owned by Neil McKay.
[00:10:52] And Nosek was a friend and business associate of McKay.
[00:10:56] And he, too, had news to share. Not with the files, no.
[00:11:04] Nosek called Neil McKay's office.
[00:11:08] Did you hear about the bombing in the parking lot? He asked. When McKay's legal secretary answered the phone, Virginia Zawacki looked around, thinking he was talking about the parking garage across the alley from their office.
[00:11:21] He wasn't.
[00:11:23] Almost at once, Nosek asked to talk to Neil McKay.
[00:11:28] In Zwocke's telling, McKay came out of his office and gave her an update. Well, she said later in the deposition, he was a little bit, I believe, flustered because he didn't. Frank didn't know for sure that it was Miro's car, that Miro was in the car herself, and Neil was worried about Scotty. Was Scotty in the car?
[00:11:54] Stop right there.
[00:11:56] They were worried about Scotty.
[00:12:31] Sometime later, Frank Nosek called again and confirmed that it was Muriel, that it was her car and she was in the car.
[00:12:41] They knew now that she was dead.
[00:12:44] They still didn't know where Scotty was.
[00:12:50] In fact, it wasn't until another call from Noser that they learned for sure that Scotty was not in the car.
[00:12:57] I may be wrong on this, salaki added. I. I'm not sure I was. I was Very confused. That day, the two of them, Virginia zwocki and Neil McKay, spent the rest of the day trying to locate Scotty.
[00:13:13] They were hampered by the fact that they didn't know the name of Scotty's babysitter. Strange. Kind of, huh?
[00:13:21] Zywocke spent a lot of time with the phone book, trying to figure out names that sounded like what they thought it was and cross checking daycare listings.
[00:13:30] Virginia also called a preschool that Scotty attended. No luck.
[00:13:35] He wasn't there.
[00:13:37] Then they called another attorney they knew, another witness to the exposure. Another dead end. And then their work day was at an end.
[00:13:47] Too many things still unresolved.
[00:13:55] It wasn't until after Virginia left for the day that, and I'm quoting here again from Zawacki. Neil was advised by one of the officers that Bob File had Scotty advised because the cops had called him in, wanted to talk to him, wanted to know his whereabouts on that fateful day.
[00:14:20] What McKay told him was he was in his office when he heard about the bomb. Except that in the middle of the day, he drove to Lyon Optical to pick up a new pair of glasses.
[00:14:30] It was 22 minutes from his office by foot, so he drove. What time?
[00:14:37] During lunch hour.
[00:14:40] As a lawyer, McKay was careful not to say much.
[00:14:44] Even whispers of conversation can be misconstrued or twisted into an incriminating stew. The cops dug deeper, specifically asking where McKay was between 12:30 and 2:30pm on Thursday, September 30th.
[00:15:04] They were already thinking about remote control bomb. And there had to be somebody in the vicinity to hit the remote, if that's what it was.
[00:15:15] And if Neil McKay was out and about.
[00:15:20] McKay said he'd left his office in the McKay building about 20 to 1 and came back about an hour later, new eyeglasses in hand.
[00:15:31] So you were back around 2 o', clock, he said 20 to 2. And then the cops asked, are you willing to take a polygraph?
[00:15:40] I'll consider it, he said, which, and the moment, meant no.
[00:15:49] The cops also talked to Virginia Zuluocki.
[00:15:53] She always seemed to know where Neil was, even when he didn't.
[00:15:59] She told the investigator that McKay left for Lionel to go at 20 minutes to 2. And that was awkward because that put Neil McKay and the neighborhood at the very same time Muriel's car was blown to pieces.
[00:16:14] Already there were questions, as in, how did someone manage to kill Muriel and not kill Scotty? He'd been in that car. Everyone knew he'd been in that car. There were, yeah, we're back at that remote Controlled scenario.
[00:16:31] There came a sudden change of mind and a retelling of the details. I, I quote from Zawacki's deposition. I had a conversation with Neil afterwards and he pointed out that I was a whole hour off. I was a whole hour off when the investigator, Clemens, I believe was his name. And after he left, I realized I was a whole hour off. And I immediately placed a call to him and I corrected my statement over the phone.
[00:16:57] So here's the question.
[00:16:58] Was Neil McKay right or was it Virginia Zulwaukee?
[00:17:36] I want to pick up for a second on this notion of Robert Pfeil and Marianne taking Scotty not to their house, but to Muriel's house. And there was a certain logic to it.
[00:17:51] Part of it was it seemed like the last place place that Neil McKay would look, or that's what they hoped.
[00:17:58] But it was more than that, of course. In fact, it was a familiar place for Scotty. It's where he'd been living with his mother. It was close by the daycare center, which was right up the street. Walking distance 150ft.
[00:18:12] And in fact, what Bob and Marianne Pfeil immediately tried to do is keep Scotty's life as normal. And I'm using air quotes here, keep it as normal as possible.
[00:18:23] That meant he still stayed at the same daycare, still went to the same preschool, still kept the same routine two days a week. Keep it routine, keep it routine.
[00:18:35] That doesn't mean Neil McKay saw things that way.
[00:18:39] From Neil McKay's point of view, this taking Scotty under their wing was a form of kidnapping.
[00:18:48] Bob File didn't have any rights to this kid. Yes, he was the uncle, and yes, there had been some conversations apparently with his sister.
[00:18:56] But McKay ended up frustrated at wits end trying to find this kid. His kid.
[00:19:11] Robert Pfeil, knowing this was probably headed his way, had already taken steps in anticipation.
[00:19:20] Almost immediately after getting Scotty, he called the attorneys, called Muriel's attorney, called Muriel's divorce attorney, and here's what he told him. We want custody of Scotty.
[00:19:35] And actually we also thinking about adopting him.
[00:19:40] And their reasons were simple. Scotty knows us. He's been around us. We see him routinely.
[00:19:45] And this also means he'll get to visit his grandmother.
[00:19:49] He's got his cousins, our daughters.
[00:19:53] Again, an extension of this notion. Keep his life as normal as possible.
[00:20:02] And the. And then there was Bob Feil with his litany of complaints.
[00:20:08] You know, the one that said Neil McKay had been an alcoholic, the ones that said Neil McKay was addicted to drugs. The one that said Robert Pfeil had gone to the hospital after Neil McKay had suffered an overdose.
[00:20:26] And the Neil McKay who wasn't really very family oriented.
[00:20:32] Yeah, he had a sister who lived in town and his mother was there in some kind of long term care facility.
[00:20:39] But we can take care of him. Robert File would say. We have a cabin down on the Kedai. We go there, we fly there, we go hiking, we go clamming, we go fishing.
[00:20:50] We can give him a real life, an Alaskan life.
[00:20:54] We can give him all the things he doesn't have now, like a real family, A real honest to goodness family.
[00:21:04] From everything Bob File could see, family was a four letter word to Neil McKay.
[00:21:11] You can imagine, of course, how Neil McKay felt about all of this.
[00:21:18] Oh, yeah.
[00:21:19] He was not passive. If there's one thing about this guy, he was not passive. They were going to hear from him. Yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
[00:21:40] See you next time.
