According to ex-Anchorage Daily News reporter Tataboline Brant, in a story filed for the ADN in early 2004, but no longer available for free on-line, when Alaska Industrial Hardware owner Josef Boehm was busted at an Anchorage crack house, he wanted to come clean:In a police station restroom in December after his arrest on a crack cocaine charge, Anchorage businessman Josef F. Boehm teased an officer with a remarkable comment: He could, he suggested, tell police something about missing women in Anchorage.
According to transcripts of court proceedings, the officer, after hearing the remark, took Boehm to FBI headquarters downtown to talk to federal authorities, where Boehm went further: He said he might have information on two female torsos that washed up on Turnagain Arm shores last year.
Anchorage and Alaska have a long history of mysteriously unsolved sex crimes involving prominent Republicans and their supporters. Robert Hansen, the Anchorage serial killer from the late 1970s through early 1980s, was a prominent skeet shooter at many high profile Alaska GOP shooting events during that period. He has not accounted for all the women he killed.In 1992, while working for Bill Weimar as the director of his Anchorage Cordova Center, I had to deal with the Department of Corrections' unwillingness to send a serial rapist back to prison, for his conduct while a resident at the Cordova Center. In the hearing, held at Anchorage's Cook Inlet Pre-Trial Facility, sitting in the shadows, intimidating the hearing officers, was Wally Hickel's cleaner/plumber, Jerry Ward.
I almost lost the hearing. I wanted this sick fuck kid back in prison forever. Ward wanted him on the street, so his grateful dad would feed more money to Wally, and possibly Ward. But, just as the hearing officers seemed to be ready to accommodate Ward, a courageous probation officer, who had a hunch on this kid, came into the hearing room, and handed a long fax to the hearing chief. He looked at it a long time.
The fax was from the King County Washington Sheriff. They were interested in this kid, based on information the probation officer and I had shared with them. The kid is still in prison.
Ward was pissed that I had won.
As I've been saying, we'll hear more about Jerry Ward soon.
images: Boehm, Hanson, Ward (the last by Ken Erickson)