AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
In the northernmost town in the United States, summer is one long stretch of daylight. The sun rises in early May and doesn't set until August - more than 80 days of bright light. Locals in Utqiagvik call it the midnight sun. During one summer in 1993, two sisters from a prominent family in town were found dead, brutally killed.
REBECCA WRIGHT STEVENS: (Reading) Bernice and Wanda had been murdered in daylight in a small, isolated village where everyone knew everyone. Even natives didn't attempt the 500-mile trip to Fairbanks over the roadless tundra, which meant that, in all likelihood, the killer was somewhere among us.
RASCOE: That's Rebecca Wright Stevens reading from her new nonfiction book, "Sisters Of The Midnight Sun." She was the public defender in Utqiagvik at the time of the murders. Thank you so much for being with us.
WRIGHT STEVENS: I'm happy to be here. Thank you.
RASCOE: So tell us a bit more about this town at the top of the world, Utqiagvik, formerly known as Barrow. What was it like moving there?
WRIGHT STEVENS: Well, it only has a few thousand residents. It's the leading town in the North Slope Borough, which is the size of the state of Utah, but there are only about 10,000 people in the whole borough. The tundra is like no other place in the world. The typical winter temperature was 40 below. When I first went there - it's funny to remember this - I had gone to Seattle to the REI bargain basement. And I had bought leftover emergency responder's parka, which was cobalt blue and covered with reflective tape. And I thought, sure, I'll be warm in this. It was like wearing Kleenex.
RASCOE: You get to this town, and you are adjusting to this new place. And you're an outsider, right? You are a public defender, and then there comes this big case - the Ipalook sisters. Tell me about that case of the Ipalook sisters.
WRIGHT STEVENS: It kept me up at night. I couldn't understand why - since these sisters had been murdered in broad daylight in this town that has no roads connecting it with any other town, why could we not find out who had committed the crime? The first suspect in the case, Amos Lane, was only suspected because he had a record and happened to be in town. There was no evidence against him. That's one reason I'm a public defender, is to defend people like that who are unfairly suspected.
RASCOE: Well, talk to me about Amos Lane, because his life had been marred by tragedy. And he actually spoke about this on a podcast called "Coffee & Quaq."
(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "COFFEE & QUAQ")
AMOS LANE: My mom was brutally tortured for many, many hours - pretty close to maybe eight or nine hours - by three men in my grandma's house.
RASCOE: How do you think that horrible event impacted Amos?
WRIGHT STEVENS: At another place in that recording, he says that that event set him on a lifelong self-destructive streak that he struggled against. His father eventually committed suicide. He's asked in that same podcast what he would like to do for a memorial to his mother, and his response is that he would like to move his father's grave next to his mother's. In other words, he was trying to put back together the family that he tragically lost at the age of 14.
RASCOE: We talked about Amos Lane and the brutal attack and murder of his mother, and then, of course, these Ipalook sisters who were brutally raped and murdered. This is a story that - unfortunately, it's a tragedy that happens to many Native women - this facing of sexual violence. Can you talk about the challenges that are facing women in that part of the U.S.?
WRIGHT STEVENS: Exactly. Last year, in 2025, there were 5,000 Indigenous women in Alaska and elsewhere that went missing, were murdered, never found or accounted for. There was one shocking case that occurred among my colleagues. One day, a social worker, a Native lady, came in the office to tell me that she was not going to be able to participate in an upcoming hearing. She had to go to Anchorage. Her daughter, who had been missing, was just found in a shallow grave where whoever had hurt her had dumped her when he was through with her. Somehow, she had survived. I had not known this young woman was missing. It should have been in all the media.
RASCOE: The very heart of this story is, like, that tension between modern Anglo justice system that you're a part of, you're representing, and this very ancient one. And at one point, a witness tells you, quote, "we should go back to the old ways, our own justice. The village always knows what happened." Like, what did he mean by that?
WRIGHT STEVENS: What he meant was that that is the Inupiat system of justice - the community knowledge. It's a small town. Everyone knows everyone, is related to everyone. They know what has happened. It's a very - extremely unusual case that they would not know. So then the next step is community accountability. And one remedy that often is applied is ostracism or shunning, but in the Inupiat version, it actually means casting out of town so that the person would not be welcome anywhere. They would be isolated, out on the tundra all alone.
RASCOE: You were an outsider in this close-knit community. You're a white woman, a tanik. Were you hesitant at all to be the one to write this story?
WRIGHT STEVENS: I did hesitate about that. I feared that people thought that I was exploiting it or that any kind of borderline was crossed as an attorney. Everything in the book is a matter of public record, so I feel that in writing a book of this sort and bringing some of these issues to public attention, that it's a useful effort.
RASCOE: What do you hope readers will learn about this place that a lot of us will probably never get to visit?
WRIGHT STEVENS: One thing I would particularly like to make known - sometimes when people think of, quote, a minority, they immediately think, well, that must be some downtrodden, marginalized person. But the Inupiat - they have not only survived, but they have thrived. They're even thriving with the corporate system that has been imposed upon them since oil was discovered on the North Slope in 1968. They have managed to maintain and defend their subsistence lifestyle.
RASCOE: That's Rebecca Wright Stevens. Her new book, "Sisters Of The Midnight Sun," is out now. Thank you so much for joining us.
WRIGHT STEVENS: Thank you, ma'am. I really enjoyed it.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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