Chapter 112: In Cold Blood-The Death of Dr. Eric Garcia w/ Chris Connelly

In March 2017, the quiet Alaskan town of Ketchikan was rocked by the sudden death of beloved surgeon Dr. Eric Garcia. Found in his home under suspicious circumstances, his death would devolve into a mystery that was truly stranger than fiction.
 Journalist Chris Connelly, host of Cold Blooded: Mystery in Alaska, joined me to discuss his investigation and shared what it was like to walk the streets of Ketchikan, speak with Dr. Garcia’s grieving loved ones, and sit face-to-face with the detectives who brought his killer to justice. From Alaska to Washington, Chris told me all about the twists and turns in a case that, on the surface, had seemed so straightforward, and how a remote community still grapples with the loss of one of its own.

You can hear all about the murder of Dr. Eric Garcia, including details not shared today, by listening to Cold Blooded: Mystery in Alaska every Tuesday, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Every story has a beginning, but not everyone has an ending.
In the shadows of headlines and buried police reports lay
the voices of the missing, the murdered, and the forgotten,
waiting to be heard and have their stories told. This
is The Book of the Dead, a true crime podcast

(00:22):
where we remember forgotten victims of heinous crimes, reopen cold cases,
re visit haunting disappearances, and uncover the truths buried beneath
the years of silence. I'm your host, Courtney Liso, and
every week we turn to another chapter, one victim, one mystery,

(00:44):
one step closer to justice. Brought to you by Darkass
Network Indeed Podcasts with the Twist. Hello, Hello, Welcome to

(01:11):
the next chapter in the Book of the Dead. Today
we have a special episode. In the small town of Ketchikan, Alaska,
a respected doctor, Eric Garcia, was found dead in the
home he lived in all alone, his death shaking the
tight ning community to its core. While at first doctor
Garcia's death presented as a suicide, it was quickly apparent

(01:35):
to police that things weren't adding up. The case is
as complex as it is disturbing, but at the center
of uncovering its many layers is journalist Chris Connolly. In
his new podcast, Cold Blooded Mystery in Alaska, Chris takes
listeners deep beyond the headlines of this case, speaking directly
with doctor Garcia's loved ones, the officers who worked the investigation,

(02:00):
and the locals still reeling in the aftermath. Today, he
is joining me to talk about what it was like
to walk the same streets trying to make sense of
a killing that seemed at first to have no rhyme
or reason at all. Chris, thank you so much for
joining me today. I'm very, very thrilled to have you.

Speaker 2 (02:19):
Thank you so much for talking to me, Courtney, I
appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (02:23):
Can you give us a brief overview of who doctor
Garcia was, not just professionally but personally. You know, we
know he's a doctor, he's a surgeon, but what did
you learn about him through your reporting in this case.

Speaker 2 (02:35):
Well, you start by thinking of doctor Eric Garcia as
almost a heroic figure. He's a man who comes from
Puerto Rico. He's dedicated from the very beginning to becoming
some sort of medical figure. His grandmother had a lingering
heart problem, and this evoked something strong in him growing up.
He wanted to take care of her, and so this
became kind of a guiding light for him as he

(02:57):
proceeded quite successfully through school and coming an eagle scout
and things like that, always wanting to be a doctor.
So he wound up doing a lot of his training
and stuff in Chicago, and then became a surgeon and
wound up on the Rio Grande just this side in Texas,
taking care of indigenous people down there and looking out

(03:17):
for people who didn't always have the ability to pay.
Becoming an elite surgeon in all areas, doing every kind
of surgery and really becoming kind of a key figure
as he was so good at this. But he liked
to take cruises, you know, he liked to see the world.
He traveled so much already, but he loved seeing the world.
And at one point he took a cruise up to Alaska,

(03:38):
as many people do. Out of Seattle or out of Vancouver.
Your first stop is the town of Ketchikan, about eight
thousand people. It's remote by any normal sense of the world.
You can't drive there, if you fly there, you have
to take a ferry to get to the town. But
doctor Garcia was captivated by Ketchikan is physically so beautiful,

(04:02):
the landscape, birds, the outdoors, the animals, the seals. It
takes your breath away everywhere you look, and so he
always kept it in mind. So when a recruiter happened
to call him months later and said there's an opening
for a general surgeon in ketcha Can, he thought it
was fate, and so he went up there and took

(04:23):
the job. And so here's this, here's this talented general surgeon,
one of only two in the town, coming to a
town that's so far away on the map from where
he started, right as an outsider in a place where,
you know, where people have been there for a long time.
But doctor Garcia became a beloved figure in ketcha Can,

(04:44):
not just because he was a talented surgeon, I think anyway.
You know, surgeons are amazing human beings. They do incredible things,
but sometimes they're technicians, right, Sometimes they just are really
good at, you know, the physical. But doctor Garcia was
more than that. He was seen as a wonderful diagnostician,
and he really cared about his patients. You know, when

(05:05):
you're up in Ketchiken, you're dealing with people who you know,
have everything, but from cancer surgeries to intestinal matters, to
accidents that take place in the rugged wilderness that Ketchikin,
you know, provides. So he had to do it all,
and he became a very beloved figure from his coworkers,
to his friends, to the people in town. When I

(05:28):
spoke to his brother, Saul Garcia, Saul remembers visiting his
brother Eric in Ketchikan, and he remembers a trip to
the grocery store. He said, we almost couldn't get out
of the grocery store for people stopping my brother and
thanking him for having taken care of their sister, their aunt,
their child, and he understood the cases and checked in

(05:49):
with them and all the rest of it. So he
became this key figure, very beloved again reaching out to
the indigenous community in Alaska to making sure they had
health care as well. But just someone who really created
a warm feeling around people he was with, even though
as a human being he was somewhat shy, and I

(06:10):
think that also kind of endeared him to the population there.
You know, he kept to himself a little bit emotionally,
I guess you would say, but that made him even
more lovable in a way. And so he was this
treasured figure and someone who really made a difference in
this town, and everyone he touched from a professional standpoint,

(06:30):
had a good thing to say about him. As we
discovered when we were up there.

Speaker 1 (06:34):
That's wonderful he based on my research into him, he
did just seem so profoundly kind and it's evident in
all of the people that loved him so much. So obviously, Keajukan,
as you said, is very small community's only eight thousand people.
When you arrived to cover this case initially, you know,

(06:56):
what kind of atmosphere did you encounter. How were the
people where the residents kind of reacting to what had
happened to him.

Speaker 2 (07:05):
I mean, the people are amazing. The people are so
warm and just so great. You know, so many of
them work so hard that some of them have multiple jobs.
You try to keep money coming in and stuff, and
the town exists on time on kind of two timeframes.
It's like there are the winter months, you know, where
everybody kind of bunks down and it can be a

(07:26):
challenging period I think winter in Alaska, and then there
are the summer months when the cruise ships come to
town and the cruise ships transform the city. You're talking
about tens of thousands of people stopping there and sort
of going through the town to shop or to stretch
their legs or something on an ongoing basis. So it's
an enormous economic influx to the town. And you'll notice

(07:49):
that around where the cruise ships are docked, there's the
kind of shopping opportunities you would imagine for a situation
like that, and a lot of people in the town
make their money sort of tending to those things. And
then behind that there's the town that's there all the time,
with the ruggedness and the beauty and all the rest
of it. So by the time we got there, this

(08:11):
case had gone on for some time, delayed by a
number of venue changes and the predations of COVID and
things like that. But what hadn't changed, as you allude to,
is the way that people felt about doctor Garcia. It
still burned in them like how special he was. He
had not been forgotten, and people went out of their

(08:33):
way to tell you the kind of human being he was.
From Don Hank, who was his kind of you know,
aid de camp at the hospital, but who also became
his close friend to nurses who had just worked alongside him,
to the man Bobby Jackson, who sold him that house
on the hill that he lived in alone. People couldn't
stop telling you what a swell guy he was, and

(08:55):
they wanted you to know, you know, that he was
more than someone who died, he was someone who lived there.

Speaker 1 (09:02):
When you were speaking with the locals about the case,
what was kind of your interpretation of their thoughts on it.
Were they hesitance talk about it? You know? Were they
fearful of talking about it because it you know, it
originally started out as being a perceived suicide and I
think very quickly that was realized to be not the case.

Speaker 2 (09:23):
I think they wanted people to know how special doctor
Garcia had been in their lives. You know, they really
felt like that was a message they could they could
get across. The thing that's so striking about this case,
and you've done such a wonderful job with the ones
that you've done. And I don't know if you feel
this way, but there's some cases where the twists and
turns of the evidence are amazing. Right. You have You're

(09:46):
presented with one thing and all of a sudden a
revelation comes up and it takes the investigation in a
different direction and their incredible revelations and secrets that have
been buried for years and they get you know, they
get opened, and it's just it's an amazing investigation. This
case has that. Then for me a lot, there are
the emotions of the people involved, and some cases present

(10:09):
as a sort of situation where the emotions of those
close to the deceased are very strong and powerful, and
they're what move you, you know, the sense of loss
or the way that they touched people's lives or what
their lives have been like since somebody has been gone.
This story has that too, and that makes it that
much more compelling. And then in a third sense, if

(10:32):
you follow crime fiction or if you watch Agatha Christie
movies or things, you know how that final act, whether
it's Nine Perfect Strangers or Death on the Nile, is
everybody gathered together. Right, Everybody who is somehow touched by

(10:52):
their connection to the deceased is together, and each of
them has sort of a different story, and there's drama
in what happens when they gather and what each of
them knows and isn't telling right, And that happens in
this case too, except that instead of it happening at
the end, as it does in fiction, it happens almost

(11:14):
at the beginning, and those three elements, I think make
this a really gripping story.

Speaker 1 (11:22):
Absolutely there, and I want to expand on that a
little bit, because at first glance, you know he's there.
The police come, they do a welfare check on him.
A couple of times. There are a couple of welfare checks.

Speaker 2 (11:33):
I believe they do a welfare check on the house.
There is a call that comes from out of states saying,
I was supposed to be with doctor Garcia and I
don't know where he is. I think you should go
to his house and see what's happening. Officer Devin Miller
goes to the house and he walks around, and he
doesn't see anything remarkable. He can't get all the way
around the house, but he looks in. The front door

(11:56):
is locked and the lights are on in the sort
of way that lights go on when somebody is going
away on vacation. And it turns out that doctor Garcia
has had a vacation planned. He's told people at the
hospital he's going to Las Vegas for a medical convention.
So that's what he understands. The story is about doctor
Garcia and that's why he's not at the hospital. And

(12:17):
then the other thing that Officer Miller notices is that
his pickup truck is not there, and that checks out. Also,
Ketch again, is not a place where you get an
uber to the airport. You know, you drive your car
to the lot and then you take the ferry and
you go. So the fact that his pickup truck is
in there indicates he's on vacation. He's must have driven
his pickup truck and all the rest of it have

(12:39):
done that, so it all checks out. But then these
the same person keeps calling and asking for you know,
for another welfare check. Says that he was supposed to
be with doctor Garcia and he hasn't heard anything. Says
that he's been concerned because doctor Garcia was depressed and
you know, expressing some ideas about maybe suicide or something.

(13:02):
These calls are coming in from a man named Jordan
Joplin who's in Washington State. But they're not the only
people now who are worried because don Hink, his best
friend at the hospital, has not been hearing from doctor
Garcia as she normally would during a vacation. She sent
him pictures of her son at a parade or something
and said, isn't this great? She says, usually on vacation

(13:24):
she'd hear from him twenty or thirty times, nothing, so
she's a little concerned too. Then Don gets a call
from doctor Garcia's mother, who is also concerned. So now
there is this level of concern in the town among
people who know him. Finally, this caller from out of town,
this Jordan Joplin, says, I still haven't heard from him.

(13:45):
I have keys to the house. I'm going to fly
from Washington to ketchikin and I want to go in
the house and see what's going on. He asks the police,
will you come with me? My attorney says this is
what should happen, and the police say yeses. And so
I think it's March twenty seventh, twenty seventeen. It's nine
in the morning on a Monday, and you have what

(14:07):
turns into a remarkable scene. You have two police from
the Ketchikan Police Department outside doctor Garcia's fabulous home. You
have Don Hinck, and then you have this Jordan Joplin
turning up with a young woman with him, and he's
driving doctor Garcia's car, which strikes people as a little unusual,

(14:29):
but that's all good. Then the arrangements are made to
open the door of the house, and what you will
hear on our podcast is this exclusive extended audio of
the body cam of the officers as they enter doctor
Garcia's home and begin to call out for him. Their
guns are drawn that standard procedure. They are calling out

(14:52):
doctor Garcia Ketchikan Police. You know, they're looking around on
the first floor and you hear them call calling out
to him and saying things. They're not expecting to see anything.
They told us later, they're not expecting anyone to be
in the house. But they walk up the flights of
stairs to the second story, which is a big vaulted

(15:15):
living room, and you hear them, and all of a sudden,
it gets quiet, and they stop yelling because they see
doctor Garcia on the sofa and he's dead. And you
even get the sense that it's kind of washing over them,
that this is something eerie and strange. It's not entirely unusual,

(15:37):
as I understand it, for police in Alaska to go
in on one of these welfare checks and find someone deceased.
You know, it's a it's a rugged part of the world.
You know, doctor Garcia was in his late fifties, but
they weren't expecting this. This is someone they know. For
Officer Miller, he was treated by doctor Garcia. So this
is a momentous thing. Plus they have people downstairs who

(16:00):
don't know yet that they've discovered the body of doctor Garcia,
and so it falls to one of the officers to
come downstairs. And now a couple more people are there.
I think Don Hank's husband, Will Hank is there too,
although I think we're not one hundred percent sure about that,
but Don Hank is there, Jordan Joplin is there with

(16:21):
a female friend of his, and Bobby Jackson, who sold
doctor Garcia that house, he's there now too. An Officer
Cheatham comes down and says, there's no and you'll hear this.
There's no easy way to say this, but doctor Garcia
is dead. And it's a moment of you know, heartbreak

(16:42):
and drama and what turns out to be very telling
behavior on behalf of everyone involved. And you'll hear it
all as it happened.

Speaker 1 (16:52):
Obviously, that is such a profoundly sad moment for everyone
there because they all obviously they all know him, they
all cared about him, they all loved him, and immediately,
or at least initially, they believe it to be suicide.
What were some of the things that kind of changed
the police's thinking on that.

Speaker 2 (17:12):
Well, remember, because it's not so unusual, their first thought
is that it's natural causes. When they pulled Don hinkover,
one of the first questions they ask is what kind
of situation was he medically, and she rightly says, he
had heart trouble. You know, he had a history of
heart trouble. He had been taken I think he'd been
like almost metevacked at one point Seattle for a triple bypass,

(17:35):
So there's a history of heart trouble there. At one
point in Ketchikan, he experienced some sort of chest pain
while he was in the oar and he was taken
from the oar to the er because he was dedicated
to his job by having some sort of heart trouble.
So that's the first thing they're hearing. And remember that's
kind of in keeping with something that they often see,

(17:57):
so perhaps it's natural causes. And then some unusual aspects
of what they see, as you allude to, make them
start to wonder there's an empty pill bottle next to
him for you know, the medication that we normally refer
to his valim. There's a smell in the house that

(18:17):
they immediately notice. It's a charcoal smell. And as they
get up to the second floor, they look and they
see that there is a door open, a door that
Officer Devin Millard was not able to see when he
first checked the house. It's a door and it's propped
open with a pillow. And on the deck past the
door is a charcoal grill. Why is a door propped

(18:41):
open with a charcoal grill right next to it? And
not only that, there is a charcoal briquette right next
to doctor Garcia, right next to his body. There is
a little charcoal residue, I think on his T shirt.
There's maybe another little like stain up there too. So
all that's kind of puzzling. You know, what does this mean?

(19:02):
Is this a like you say, is this a you know,
is this a suicide? Is it a heart attack? What
it could be? And then they look up, as one does,
and they see a remarkable site. They look up and
they see braces for smoke detectors. But the smoke detectors
themselves are not there. What could that mean that there

(19:26):
are all these braces for smoke detectors and the smoke
detectors aren't there. Here's the thing about doctor Garcia, wonderful
guy dedicated to his work. The least handy man in
Alaska literally had no sort of house, rugged outdoorsmen skills,

(19:46):
not a kind of guy to like build himself something
or anything like that. Not a kind of guy that
anyone had ever seen on a ladder. So that makes
people think also that grill. Nobody in Ketchikin would ever
grill to the south I guess the Southwest. I'm trying

(20:07):
to remember now because that's where the wind came from.
You'd never do that, now that you know. Was that
like a low fi version of turning the car exhaust
on in your garage? People are trying to figure out
what it is next to his body. There's a slice
of bacon, a slice of raw bacon. So you've got

(20:29):
a slice of raw bacon, that charcoal grill, that one
piece of briquette. These are odd things to be discovering.
What do they all mean? It's a puzzle that doesn't
seem to have an answer. So they go downstairs, and
as we talked about, Jordan Joplin, appears to be just
destroyed in grief. Each grabs his chest, he falls to

(20:50):
the ground. Don hink is you know, insensate with grief,
and she's sick to her stomach and she's telling police
as we mentioned that doctor Garcia had some heart trouble.
And then Bobby Jackson shows up. Remember Bobby Jackson is
the guy who sold doctor Garcia his house. Bobby Jackson
is a legend in Ketchigan. Great guy. I mean, you

(21:11):
could talk to him forever about the history of Ketchigan.
Just a wonderful, warm guy. He knows everything about the place.
But while everybody else is grieving, and certainly Bob Jackson
is too, he is agitated. He has a new energy
out there, and he is agitated, and there is something
that he wants to tell the police, and he's really
like on fire about it. And it's as I imagine

(21:34):
this scene, I think this must have been really remarkable,
you know, for these people in grief, and all of
a sudden, here's Bob going, I gotta talk to you.
So Bob pulls one of the officers aside and you'll
hear this too, because he's on the body camera and
he goes, there are thousands of dollars of valuables in
this house, thousands of dollars of valuables, sea, collected coins, liquor,

(22:03):
all this kind of material, and it was a big
deal for him to have it. Bob Jackson is inflamed
with telling the cops you have to check to see
if that stuff is there. He's got tens of thousands
of dollars worth of luxury goods in that house. And
the cops go, well, okay, I guess we will. And

(22:26):
so they turn again to Jordan Joplin, who's got keys,
because Bob Jackson goes, I know where he kept it.
He kept it in this little storeroom under the stairs.
So they turned it. Do you have keys to it? Well?

Speaker 1 (22:39):
I do.

Speaker 2 (22:40):
So the storage area is locked, right, they unlock it
with Jordan Joplin's with the keys Jordan Joplin gave them,
and they open it and it's empty. Nothing is there.
It's gone tens of thousands of dollars in twenty year
old whiskeys, and you know, prime spirits of all kinds,

(23:01):
valuable coins, actual pieces of gold, all kinds of hard
goods that doctor Garcia collected, monitored on his computer, had
a spreadsheet for them, talked about to everyone in town,
gave them away, sometimes as a gift because he was
kind of profligate that way. They're all gone. So now

(23:22):
what's going on. You have a dead person upstairs and
you have a major theft. And so now the cops
are faced with two things that they need to investigate
the death of doctor Garcia and what's happened to his goods.
You've got a major theft or is it a theft

(23:43):
because doctor Garcia gave away so much stuff. Maybe doctor
Garcia has given all this away. That's possible. Everyone in
town knew that doctor Garcia would just give you stuff.
He would give you like watches that were really expensive,
just because he did that kind of thing. Don Hings,
his husband, used to say to him, you know, Eric,
you might want to slow down with givenness. Maybe you

(24:04):
shouldn't have that piece of gold out there where the
pizza delivery guy can see it. But it made doctor
Garcia happy to give these sort of expensive gifts to people,
even as he loved collecting them. The special coins, the
pieces of gold, the luxury watches and the luxury liquors.
He liked to give them away, and not always in

(24:26):
the kind of like in way that they thought was
kind of profligate and maybe maybe endangered his life a
little bit. People knew that he had lots of stuff there,
and so there were always concerns about that. Will Hank
had even offered to kind of construct, you know, a
safer place for some of this stuff to be stored

(24:46):
in the house because they were worried about it. Bobby
Jackson had gone to the bank with doctor Garcia to
get his mortgage for this big house, and he wondered
if he could use all those coins, as you know,
as a way to pay them mortgage. So that's the
dilemma that's facing police. You've got the death of a
beloved surgeon and thousands of dollars in luxury items missing

(25:08):
from his home.

Speaker 1 (25:10):
When you spoke to the police after the fact, did
they share anything specific about like how complex this case
was for them to investigate the challenges that they may
have faced while they were working at.

Speaker 2 (25:22):
I think one of the things that Eric Mattson, the
chief investigator, said was that stuck in my mind was
we couldn't assume anything like. We couldn't assume that the
death of doctor Garcia and the theft were in any
way related. We couldn't assume it was a theft. We
couldn't assume it was a murder. You know, we had
to find We had to wait and see what everything

(25:43):
was going on. But they had essentially two investigations. There
was going to be a toxicology report on doctor Garcia
that wouldn't come in for a while, but there would
be the investigation into his passing, and then there would
be the attempt to figure out what had happened to
all these goods. And it was that second investigation that

(26:04):
seemed to be more urgent and that took immediate flight,
and that had some key developments right away, and so
Eric Matson, you know, sort of took us through what
those were and how that developed into a real race
against time to figure out what had happened to these
tens of thousands of dollars in luxury goods.

Speaker 1 (26:25):
Did they ever express doubts to you that they were
feeling during the investigation, whether it was how they were
trying to understand the case or you know, looking for suspects,
and just even in the terms of the missing goods.

Speaker 2 (26:40):
Oh gosh, look what is that bacon doing there? What
is that slice of bacon doing there? There's a grilling
but nobody there's no there's no barbecue tools out, Like,
what does that mean? That's strange? Why is the door
propped open? What is going on with those smoke detectors
and the braces involved? Everything is a p and a mystery.

(27:01):
Nothing seems to make sense. They do notice also that
the computers down on the first floor seem to be gone,
Like they notice that there are chords there, right, but
the computers and the electronic equipment seem to be gone.
So they note that as well. Why has Jordan Joplin
shown up in doctor Garcia's car? That's surprising. Also, there
is nothing but mysteries. One of my favorite mysteries, or

(27:25):
one of the details it always sticks with me, is
they look in the dishwasher and they find a red
Solo cup in the dishwasher. A red Solo cup and
a dishwasher. What does that mean? Don't you just throw
out a red Solo cup? Why would you wash it?
So they're trying to make sense out of all these details,
but it is it is a real puzzle. What holds

(27:47):
all these things together? What is this? What is this
scene telling us that will answer the questions about how
and why doctor Garcia died? And then they begin investigating
doctor Garcia's life as well. And that's the other investigation.
What do we need to know about doctor Garcia to
help find out what had happened to him? So we

(28:09):
have the investigation into the goods and then the investigation
into the life of doctor Garcia and the things people
knew about him and the things they did.

Speaker 1 (28:17):
Not when they were originally considering either natural causes or suicide.
Were the people in his life convinced that suicide could
have been a possibility at all? Was this something that
they had thought that he was considering, Was there any
inkling to that kind of thought process for him, or

(28:41):
was this something that they were adamant that was absolutely
not the case. He never would have done it.

Speaker 2 (28:46):
You make a good point, because no, they pushed back
really hard on the idea that he was in any
way suicidal or depressed that way. He had a festive
shirt on the last day he was at the office.
He was going to go to Las Veigs. I guess
and't have a wonderful time. You know, he was looking
forward to some big events in his family's sistory. I
think there was a big birthday coming up for one

(29:07):
of his parents. He had a couple of trips of
his own plan for down the road. No, in no
way did they find that he In no way did
they believe he was depressed or suicidal, and this would
become a big issue at trial, also going that far
because what he was was something else, and this was
something that his brother, Saul told me, struck him very

(29:30):
hard because after learning of his brother's death, saal Garcia
came to town and stayed in that big house where
doctor Garcia lived alone. And Saalgarcia told me, and you'll
hear him tell you as well, I just had to
be there twenty minutes and I felt how lonely it was.

(29:51):
I was overcome by how lonely it was. Remember, this
house has the most beautiful views in the most beautiful
place imaginable. Saul felt to be there alone was challenging,
like it made you feel isolated. It made you feel
kind of alone. That's not the same as suicidal or depressed,

(30:13):
but there was this sense of isolation would certainly come
to play with doctor Garcia in a big way. Throughout
the throughout the investigation, they get two big breaks right away.
One is somebody looks in the garbage can in the
kitchen and it turns out there's a receipt there from
Walmart for some big containers. Okay. And then they look

(30:35):
at that pickup truck that's doctor Garcia's but that they
saw Jordan Joplin driving, and there's a receipt in there
for a shipping company. It's called AML, and it's the
shipping company that if you want to send anything out
of Ketchikin you use. And so now they have some
places to check, and they go to the Walmart in
town and they get the surveillance footage and they see

(30:58):
Jordan Joplin buying huge amounts of container, a lot of containers.
You can see him piling the containers into one of
those carts and stuff and wheeling them out to the
pickup truck. So that's significant. And then they go down
to AML and they confirm that Jordan Joplin has shipped

(31:21):
all this stuff, two tons of stuff, maybe more than
forty four hundred pounds of stuff he's shipped to his house,
just outside Seattle and Washington. So they want to look
at the stuff. The police do and you know, the
guys at the shipping con well, you're too late. We

(31:42):
sent that out like nine or ten days ago. So
now it's a race against time. Now, some of our
investigators get on a plane and they go down to Seattle,
and they've got to try to intercept that stuff before
anybody else gets a look at it, because they want
to see what's inside. And so the investigation into the
stuff is revved up and ready to go. And so

(32:05):
a couple of our guys from Alaska, you know, fly
to Seattle, hook up with some of the local cops
there who we also talked to, and they've developed kind
of a two prong approach for what they're going to do.
When they get to Washington. They want to search Jordan
Joplin's house. You know, this friend of doctor Garcia is
that nobody knows that much about in Ketchikin, that maybe

(32:26):
had turned up in Ketchikin once or twice, but that
doctor Garcia had not really talked about burying me. And
they want to see what's inside those containers. And so
that's the first level of drama. What will happen with
things at the house, and what will happen when they
get a look inside those contained.

Speaker 1 (32:42):
So obviously police now are looking at Jordan Joplin. As
you said, no one really knows much about him in
ketchac Can What were some of the things that police
learn about him that make them more suspicious of him
and his relationship with doctor Garcia looking past these shipping

(33:05):
containers that he had sent to his home.

Speaker 2 (33:08):
They seem to have a quite a close relationship, you know,
Jordan Joplin has been to They've spent a fair amount
of time together, you know, both in Washington and in Ketchikan.
Jordan Joplin is substantially younger than doctor Garcia is, and
he has it turns out that he's had quite colorful past.

(33:28):
He's involved in a lot of things. He wants to,
you know, grow marijuana. He's been working in pornography, in
gay porn and stuff. He has a whole bunch of
various girlfriends that he's deodated more than once. He has
a he has a fiance, he has the woman that
he turned up in ketchikin with. He has other people

(33:52):
who've spent time with him, you know, and he also
works as a massewer, and this appears to be the
way that the two of them first met. Remember when
he had that triple bypass operation in Seattle. I think
it's around that time that doctor Garcia meets up with
Jordan Joplin to get a massage, and so I think

(34:13):
he finds Jordan Joplin's name on a website somewhere online
and he gets a massage. But the two stay in
touch and they seem to build a relationship. And what
seems to be clear is that to some degree, doctor
Garcia has been funding Jordan Joplin's lifestyle. He's been giving

(34:34):
him gifts of money and of objects and stuff over
the years. And as they continue to probe, it appears
that this relationship that they have is maybe more than
just friends. That there seems to be intimations of an
intimate relationship and a kind of romantic relationship between the two.

(34:55):
And so you know, this attracts obviously the attention of investigators,
and it's not something that the people in Ketchikan, although
they might have suspected know about doctor Garcia, who did
not discuss his personal life, who was very private about
his personal life, which they respected. You know, although as

(35:15):
the details about doctor Garcia's relationship with Jordan Joplin come
to light, I do think that people I talked to
who knew doctor Garcia felt a little sad that doctor
Garcia couldn't share with them, or didn't feel like he
could share with them the details of his relationship to
Jordan Joplin. You know, they hoped that they didn't. They

(35:39):
would have wanted him to know that they were supportive
of whatever relationship he might have, But I think they
worried that doctor Garcia worried that they would react, you know,
in a particular way if he shared what his relationship was.

Speaker 1 (35:57):
While the police are looking at Jordan Joplin, was there
anyone else that they were suspicious of during the investigation
or dated center solely on Jordan.

Speaker 2 (36:10):
They were still waiting for toxicology reports to see what
it was that had taken his life, and there was
you know, there were any number of possibilities on that front,
and they would determine sort of how that part of
the investigation would go right. But the key thing was
sort of finding out what was in those containers, at
least on the theft side of things, or on what

(36:31):
had happened to the stuff side of things. Let's put
it that way. They wanted to find out what was
going on with that stuff, and so they come up
with kind of a ruse because they don't want Jordan
Joplin at his home when they come to search him.
Perhaps he'll have a weapon, or perhaps he'll be in
an ill frame of mind. But Jordan Joplin is very

(36:51):
keen to get his hands on his shipment, and he's
been calling the port to ask if the stuff has
come in yet or not. So they they come up
with a way around this. They say, hey, there's been
a little snaffoo with your stuff. You have to sign something.
You have to come to Seattle and sign this. It's
you know, I think he lives in a place called

(37:11):
was it Maple Grove? Maybe an hour away. You got
to come in and sign this stuff. So he goes, okay,
So he drives to the port to what he thinks
is to sign the papers. Now they know he's out
of his house and the police have a search warrant
to search the house, which they do, surprising his fiance
who is just stepping out of the shower as they do. So,

(37:33):
so he's driving there, and so this is a momentous
time because they have gotten inside those shipments and it's
all doctor Garcia's stuff, all those luxury goods we talked about,
the coins, the gold pieces, the watches, the liqueurs, tens
of thousands of dollars worth of stuff, and not just that,

(37:55):
his passport, his cell phone in a faraday, which is
that thing that keeps the cell phone from getting any
signals from outside identification, a lot of those computers we
talked about that we're missing from the It's all there,
and so that really sets off their radar. They are

(38:17):
ready to arrest him for theft in the case of
all this stuff. So they begin to search his house
and they find more of that stuff. They find more
of his IDs and things like that around the house,
and then when he arrives at the site to what
he thinks will be a chance to sign, they arrest
him for theft. So he's in custody after that. While

(38:40):
they search his house, they find notes from doctor Garcia,
and they are very affectionate notes, you know that they exchange,
and one of them sort of stays in my mind,
and I think stayed in the mind of the investigators.
This was a high intensity relationship between two very different people,
needless to say, and I guess at one point, doctor

(39:03):
Garcia writes him a note saying, you know, I mean
essentially saying, what you know, we have this crazy relationship,
that kind of thing, and he says, you'll probably kill me.
And so they are all these texts and back and forth.
I can't wait to see you. It's going to be
so exciting. It's you know, all the rest of it
that they exchange. Doctor Garcia seems incredibly devoted to Jordan Choplin.

(39:24):
But Jordan Joplin's got a lot of stuff going on
in this personal life, two or three women at a time,
all kinds of things, and he certainly seems to be
he's been living off of a lot of this stuff
that doctor Garcia has given him, and he's begun a
career in pornography, and he works as a stripper sometimes,
and you know, he's taken steroids to try to bulk up,

(39:45):
and so he's got a rich, full past to him,
I suppose. And so all these things are going on,
and they arrest him for the theft, and eventually I
think extra item to catch again. Now you're wondering what
happened to the toxicology report. Here we have even more
of an enigma of some kind. One of the things

(40:05):
that comes up is that doctor Garcia had a very
elevated carbon monoxide count, like three or four times what
the normal human being would have. Remember that charcoal grill outside,
Remember those smoke detectors, It's like, what was going on
with those? Well, he had I guess what you would
consider it. I'm not, you know, expert in this. You know,

(40:28):
a dangerously high level of carbon monoxide, okay, but that's
not what killed him. What killed him was an overdose
of morphine. Morphine morphine. There's no morphine in the house,
there's no sign he's been injected anywhere. But he's dead

(40:50):
from a massive overdose of morphine. How did that happen?
What's the morphine from? What could it all mean? So
while they're pondering that, they take another look at those
That carbon monoxide thing is interesting on any number of levels.
Remember those smoke detectors we talked about, Remember how all

(41:13):
the braces were up on the wall. Why were the
braces up on the wall and the smoke detectors weren't there?
And nobody had ever seen doctor Garcia on a lad
or anything like that. Well, remember saw Garcia. His brother
is staying in that house. Remember he feels the loneliness
of the house, the oppressive loneliness of the house. This
is the kind of thing that only happens in real life,
because you wouldn't believe it in fiction. Saul Garcia takes

(41:36):
a walk around the neighborhood after he's kind of feels
oppressed by the loneliness and isolation. So he's going down
this hill and he's crossing across this beautiful like I
guess it's a little ravine that has kind of a
little bridge over it. You know, everything in Ketchikin is beautiful.
But he's not looking at that. He's looking at his phone.

(41:57):
So he's looking down at his phone because his phone off,
and he looks down his phone. But as he's looking
down crossing that ravine, something catches his eye. In the
ravine below the bridge, it's something white, like maybe thirty
or forty feet below. It's all these white things sort

(42:19):
of masked under the bridge somewhere, and he goes, could
those be the smoke detectors? And they are. Saul Garcia
has found the smoke detectors. The cops show up, they
collect them all. They match the serial numbers to the
braces on the wall. That's where they are. Someone has

(42:42):
dumped the smoke detectors from doctor Garcia's house into this ravine.
The mystery continues.

Speaker 1 (42:49):
It's quite literally stranger than fiction.

Speaker 2 (42:51):
It really is. Right, Saul was sure that Eric was
guiding him somehow. You know, it's as if he sort
of I mean, I think Saul at one point told
me Eric, we need we need help from you to
figure out what happened to you. So the pieces fit
together a little bit, don't they. You know, It's like
it appears that it was staged to look like a suicide.

(43:15):
There was the pillbab right, but there wasn't any appreciable
amount of valium in his system. There was the charcoal
thing that made it look like maybe he was gonna
take his own life, but although the level was high,
it was not enough to take his life. It was
that pointed all the fingers at Jordan Joplin.

Speaker 1 (43:37):
When you spoke to the police and they were kind
of telling you about the investigation, did they kind of
explain Jordan's demeanor when they spoke to him after his arrest.
You know, is there any indication that he was behind
this elaborate plot to murder doctor Garcia st his belongings,

(44:01):
because obviously it's very clear at the end of the
day that's the motive was all of these belongings. But
was there anything that he said or did or how
he behaved that kind of gave them an idea of
what was going on? How he could have come up
with all of this.

Speaker 2 (44:20):
Remember we talked about at the very beginning, like the
drama of that scene when they're outside the house and
the death of doctor Garcia is revealed. And remember we
talked about how Bobby Jackson was agitated right and mentioned
the valuables and Don Hink was sick to her stomach
and talked about the heart attack. Well, they spoke to

(44:41):
Jordan Joplin on that occasion, and you'll hear that too
on the Body Camp. And so right from the beginning,
Jordan Joplin gives contradictory answers, did you know there were
valuables in the house? And I think his first answer
is no, and then like thirty seconds later it's like,
so you know, one of the please, did you know

(45:02):
there were valuables in the house. Oh yeah, oh yeah,
I knew there were valuables in the house. And they
went said, you know, you want to tell me the truth.
Bob Jackson and Don Hink did not like the vibe
they got from Jordan Joplin, you know whatever. His gnashing
of teeth and rolling on the ground they did not like.
They distrusted him, and so right from the beginning he

(45:24):
was I guess you would say squirrelly with the cops
that way. You know, how had he come upon doctor
Garcia's car so we could drive it in from the
airport when he came to catch a him. I mean,
it all sort of, it all puzzled them in many ways,
and so there was always this kind of level of
unease and suspicion connected with him a little bit. But

(45:46):
I think the fundamental thing that really kind of broke
the heart of the people who cared about doctor Garcia,
and I think we can all understand this. Every day
of his professional life in the operating room, doctor Eric
Garcia showed great judgment and saved lives. That's why people
loved him. But in his personal life, well let's call

(46:09):
it his private life, did his perhaps his lack of
judgment put his own life at risk. I think that's
the fundamental heartbreaking thing. He'd had so little experience in data,
nobody could remember really like someone special in his life
of any kind, and by not talking about this, he

(46:32):
didn't have anybody sort of to tell him, oh, this
young person, this may not be, you know, someone you
really want to like get involved with. Somehow, he was
on his own on this. He was conducting this pretty
much in secret, and so they worried his naivete, his inexperience,
and that loneliness. We talked about that sense of isolation,

(46:53):
that need to connect this man who was so beloved
by this town, but who wanted, like we all knew,
someone special. Could that have led him to endanger his
life in a way that maybe other people could have
warned him about but didn't have the opportunity.

Speaker 1 (47:10):
Absolutely, because it's it is. It's incredibly heartbreaking that it
could have very easily been this profound loneliness that led
him to overlook some of the warning signs that I'm
sure Jordan Joplin was displaying.

Speaker 2 (47:26):
And he looked great, you know, and he had this
kind of charisma that really did kind of put people
in the red zone. You know, we talked to people
who dated him and who knew him, and your first
few meetings with Jordan Joplin could really like, you really thought,
this is quite a guy. He'd worked at a food
bank where one of his future girlfriends had worked, and
he was doing all the good work. He was taken.

(47:47):
You know, he was looking out for kids and doing so.
He had qualities that really like drew you to him.
But he also had this, I guess, this dark side,
and obviously he was not he was not engaged in
the same relationship to Garcia was engaged with with him.

Speaker 1 (48:02):
When you were speaking with the locals, especially as the
trials going on and the aftermath of learning what happened
to doctor Garcia, what was your impression of the locals
do you think that were they I don't want to
say happy with the outcome, because obviously there's there's no
happiness in that. But were they okay with how the

(48:26):
investigation panned out? Were they accepting of the resolution of
the case.

Speaker 2 (48:34):
Well, they know these cops, you know, they're parts of
the community. Everybody knows everybody there. Because of the change
of venue, I think the trial took place in Anchorage,
which is a long ways away. However you get there.
We are from Ketchikan. The trial itself took place quite
a ways away, you know, because so many people knew

(48:54):
and cared about, you know, Eric Garcia. In Ketchikan, they
decided to change a venue. I think it was a
very juno and then they moved it to Anchorage, and
then there was COVID and so years and years are passing,
so you can imagine there's some frustration in the amount
of time it's taking to get justice for doctor Garcia.
But significantly after the verdict, after Jordan Joplin was found guilty,

(49:17):
the sentencing returned to Ketchikhin so that the victim impacts
statements came from the people in the community, And as
you point out, or as you suggest, that was the
moving moment for them, the chance to stand up in
court and to literally put their eyes on Jordan Joplin

(49:37):
and to tell the court what Eric Garcia meant to
them and what they felt of the man who had
taken his life. And so I think they were satisfied
with the way that the legal system played itself out.
But I think that was kind of an emotional climax
for them, you know, and for Saul Garcia. As he
told me and as you'll hear him say, he got

(49:59):
to stand up and tell Jordan Joplin what he thought
of him. He used the metaphor of a gambler to
talk about all the things that Jordan Choplin had gambled
away kind of and it's a powerful thing. It really
kind of sticks in your mind.

Speaker 1 (50:13):
You know.

Speaker 2 (50:13):
They are not like fulesomely emotional, but it's very strong.
And so they got to say exactly what they thought,
and that was a big moment for them.

Speaker 1 (50:23):
I'm sure I was getting to to look him in
the eye and say how terrible this impact had been
on the community, and how he could have done something
so terrible for something so selfish, or for a reason
so selfish.

Speaker 2 (50:39):
That's the one of the great enigmas of this. It's like,
you know, if you were if you were an associate
of Jordan Joplins, you could say, why are you killing
the Golden Goops? But you had a pretty much going
your way, didn't you. You had these you had gotten
this guy to provide you with with hard goods and
financial support. Why did you need to take his life

(51:01):
and take all of it in a way that in
retrospect was fairly self evident to see. I think in
court where he testified on his own behalf significantly, he
tried to claim that doctor Garcia was playing to retire
to Washington State, that he was helping him move his
stuff down for retirement, that you know that some of
these were gifts. If you looked at the situation, you

(51:23):
would go, well, why did this have to happen at all?

Speaker 1 (51:28):
Absolutely, And I think people that experienced this like high
level of greed. It's there's a lot of allure to that,
and you need or you want more and more. And
I think that was part of the problem, was that
allure of the nice things that Eric Garcia had, it
was he I at least in my opinion, I don't
think he could ignore the draw of that, or Jordan

(51:50):
couldn't ignore the draw of that.

Speaker 2 (51:52):
Here was somebody, you know, here was Jordan Joplin, just
scrambling to make a living, like with lots of different
things going on with the law once or twice, all
these kind of side hustles, multiple intimate relationships. It was
a chaotic kind of life. And here was this guy
who was settled as settled could be in a lot

(52:13):
of ways. Who was making very good money, no question
about that, and who put that money into specific hard
goods and travel, but like you know, didn't have dependence
or anything, so really had sort of done that. But
everybody knew Eric Carsia's heart. And that relationship that he
had with Don Hink I always think is a really

(52:35):
special one. It's that special kind of work relationship where
you feel understood by somebody. It's not romantic, it's not inappropriate.
It's just like they get you, you know, they get
you for your flaws and they get you for your strengths.
And there was such a connection between these two, like
she looked up to him as a kind of father figure.

(52:55):
She took care of everything in his life. You know,
he was not the handy guy. All Garcia said once
if his house was burning down, he would call you
and go, can you call the fire department? Because I
think my house is burning down. They're just things he
couldn't do. But they were perfectly suited in a work
relationship for them. And one of the most dramatic moments
for me is Don who is worried sick about doctor

(53:16):
Garcia and is there the moment when Jordan Joplin hands
the keys to the house to one of the officers
and the officer opens the house. Because Don looks at
the keys, Jordan Joplin says he has a set of
keys that doctor Garcia has given him. When that key
passover happens outside the house in March of twenty seventeen,

(53:40):
Don takes a look. It's the key ring that she
gave doctor Garcia from her honeymoon. He would never give
that to Jordan Joplin. She knew at that moment that
something terrible was going to happen. It comes over her
just in that moment. I know doctor Garcia, and he

(54:02):
would never give that away to somebody. And it takes
your breath away.

Speaker 1 (54:07):
Oh, it absolutely does. That's chilling her having almost like
that almost like that premonition that she needs.

Speaker 2 (54:13):
It's like an epiphany.

Speaker 1 (54:15):
Exactly, Yes, an epiphany, having that epiphany that's something terrible
was going to happen when they open that door, just
based on that keychain, and you know, based on how
well she knew him. If you could go back, now
that the case is done, he's been convicted, the sentence
has been passed. If you could go back and just
ask one person one last question, or visit a moment

(54:38):
in this investigation.

Speaker 2 (54:40):
What would it be you would love to tell doctor Garcia.
These people love you in a way that maybe you
can't even appreciate. You can tell them what's going on
in your life and they'll want to help you. One
of the most touching things I remember, because again it
kind of reserved guy, but he loved dogs. Bob Jackson
had a dog, and he said, when I want to
think of doctor Garcia, I remember him literally getting down

(55:02):
on the floor with my dog, just rolling around the
floor with my dog and getting the hair all over
him and laughing and laughing and laughing. When I want
to summon up one image of doctor Eric Garcia, that's
the image I get. I wish we still had that
person among us.

Speaker 1 (55:18):
That's beautiful. That's a beautiful moment. What do you hope
listeners take away from listening to the podcast? You know,
what is the one thing that you hope they take
from it?

Speaker 2 (55:28):
Well, it's a gripping story, and you get a census
to the complexity of the investigation and how what looks
like an unsolvable puzzle presenting itself to investigators, winds up
being solved in a number of different and unusual ways.
And we also take you inside the trial in a
way that we weren't able to do so on television,

(55:48):
and you really get to hear the drama of what
the testimony back and forth was like. But I think
what you'll leave with is the sense of, you know,
a man from a different part of the world who
came to town and was welcomed both for what he
did and for who he was.

Speaker 1 (56:07):
Chris, thank you so much for joining me today. It's
been a pleasure having you Gordeon.

Speaker 2 (56:11):
It's been great to talk to you. Thanks for you
and continued success.

Speaker 1 (56:14):
Thank you. The murder of doctor Eric Garcia had a
profound impact on his loved ones, his family, his friends,
as well as Ketchikan as a community. A lot of
mystery and questions surrounded this case from the very beginning,
but now finally the story behind the headlines is being told.

(56:37):
You can hear all about the murder of doctor Eric Garcia,
including information and details and not covered here today, by
listening to Cold Blooded Mystery in Alaska, which is available
every Tuesday wherever you get your podcasts. To you, guys,
Thank you so much for listening, and I hope you
have a wonderful week. As always, I will see you

(57:02):
in the next chapter. Bye, guys, Another page closed. But
the story isn't over for the families left behind, the
pain doesn't end when the headline's fade. And for the victims,
we owe them more than silence for our on solved cases.
If you have any information, please reach out to local

(57:24):
authorities or visit our show notes for links and resources.
Someone out there knows something, maybe it's you. Thank you
for listening to the Book of the Dead. If this
story moved or spoke to you in some way, talk
about it, share it, keep their names alive. Until next time,

(57:45):
I'm Courtney Liso. Stay safe, stay curious, and stay vigilant,
and remember the dead may be gone, but their stories
will not be forgotten. A