Ep. 45 - A Bomb in Anchorage

Muriel C. Pfeil (File) is buried in the Anchorage Memorial Park Cemetery next to her husband Emil, who preceded her in death by 47 years and her namesake daughter who died 25 years prior. That daughter had been the victim of domestic violence and a bitter divorce and custody battle ended with her blown to bits in downtown Anchorage, Alaska. It was a shocking murder and so it is no wonder that Muriel's spirit is at unrest.

Anchorage is the most populous city in the state of Alaska and while it is an economic powerhouse and a very modern city now, its beginnings were very different. Captain James Cook was one of the first Europeans to explore along Alaska as he searched for the Northwest Passage. One of the places that he ended up anchoring his ship, he named Anchor Point. That name eventually became Anchorage. The Russians brought trading posts in the 19th century and small pox, which decimated the indigenous population. In 1912, Alaska became a United States territory and at the time it was just a muddy tent city that was mostly used for railroad construction. The city would have an important place in the establishment of the Alaska Railroad and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. When Prohibition was passed, bootlegging started. And through it all, Anchorage has been a dangerous place to live, even today, and especially for women. In 2022, it was reported that the state of Alaska had the highest rate of women killed by men in the nation for the seventh year in a row, especially for indigenous women. The past was just as dangerous and for one woman in particular, her murder would send shock waves across the state and throughout the nation. And to this day, no one has been charged.

The Pfeil family was well known in Anchorage and highly respected. The Patriarch, Emil Pfeil, had been born in Seisen, Germany in 1886 and came to the United States in 1912 at the age of twenty-six. He landed in New York and joined the Navy, sailing to various ports around the world. In 1920, he heard about the prospecting opportunities in Alaska and headed for Anchorage. He worked as a miner at the Chickaloon coal mine until it closed and then he worked for the Alaskan Engineering Commission (AEC) as a tie cutter in Sutton. With all the railroad construction in Anchorage, blacksmithing was needed and Emil was hired as the first blacksmith and he worked for the railroad until his retirement in May 1941. After that, he invested in real estate and built apartments and he served on the City Council and Board of Directors of the Anchorage Chamber of Commerce. Emil married Muriel Caroline Anderson in 1929 and they had three children: Robert, Caroline and their youngest was named for Muriel, Muriel Adele. Emil died in a plane crash in 1954 and his wife Muriel would live to be 102, dying in 2001. She would endure the tragic death of her namesake daughter in 1976.

Muriel Pfeil, Jr. was born in 1935 and she was considered a pioneer business woman in Anchorage when she opened the first travel agency in the city. She named it Professional Travel and it did very well. In 1968, she married a man named Neil Mackay. Mackay had been previously married to a woman named Barbara. He and Barbara had moved to Anchorage in 1951, after he had served as a pilot during World War II and completed law school. The first job he got in the city was as a vice president for the First National Bank of Anchorage. The bank put him in charge of mortgages and he used information that he received to invest in properties in such a way that will eventually get him in trouble. Once he passed the Alaska Bar in 1954, he was off and running with a major focus on these real estate dealings. He quit the bank and opened up a law office in the back of a mortuary that he also ran. An undertaking lawyer...something just doesn't seem right about that. 

Mackay was also a man who loved his drink and he was soon an alcoholic. His business sense was also ruthless. Business associates and his wife encouraged him to get treatment and he was able to give up the alcohol. What he did was trade it in for drugs. In 1961, the Alaska Supreme Court suspended his law license for a year. Mackay had been busted for stealing from an older neighbor who was also his client. This whole situation ends up getting very complicated because the Alaska Supreme Court and the Alaska Bar Association got into a battle over this. Alaska Supreme Court Justice Buell Nesbett was interviewed in July of 1982. Here he is explaining how Neil Mackay came to be disbarred. (Justice Buell on Mackay) This is transcript [The dispute arose over the disbarment of Neil Mackay, a lawyer in Anchorage. Neil Mackay had an undertaking parlor and he used to practice law out of that undertaking parlor and he got a few cases like probate cases and people dying and the divorce cases and whatnot. And he got one property case, at least, of an elderly Finn lady who lived right out close to where his undertaking parlor was. She drank a lot and she came into him -- came to his office for advice on something in connection with a piece of property that was very valuable. It's right at the corner of Sixth and Gambell, I think, now. Bank of Alaska has a bank there now. She needed some money and all the facts don’t come clearly to me, but in essence what he did was tell her look I’ll give you $150 a month for the rest of your life if you give me that property. She did that, but he didn’t live up to his end of and, of course, an attorney has no right to do that anyway with a client and take advantage of them. Well that became a discipline case before the bar association and he had a number of attorneys on his side, including Stan McCutcheon. By that time, I was in court then and Wendell Kay and (inaudible) and I don't know who all and they, according to the transcript that we later reviewed in the Supreme Court, they were circulating around amongst the Board of Governors at the time they were considering the recommendation of the trial committee. The bar trial committee went all through it and held a trial and recommended that he be disbarred.]

Now get this. That Supreme Court Justice you just heard was on Mackay's target list. A little while later, a criminal went to his parole officer and told him that an Anchorage lawyer had offered him $7,500 to off Justice Buell Nesbett. The criminal was hoping his parole officer would thank him for the information by letting him leave Alaska. I don't know if that happened, but Nesbett received police protection for a few weeks after that and in that interview that I just played an excerpt from, Nesbett said, "If it was a lawyer, it could have been nobody else but Mackay." So that's who Neil Mackay was. He and his wife Barbara separated in 1965. Their divorce would take three years to complete becaue Mackay didn't want Barbara to have anything. He fought the divorce tooth and nail. Then he met Muriel and proposed and the couple married on New Year’s Eve in 1968. The couple were both quick to anger and fought a lot, many times with it getting physical. Muriel would claim that Neil beat her. Muriel gave birth to a son named Scotty in 1973. (I want to throw in a little weird synchronicity here. As I was researching, i searched Muriel Mackay burial to see if I could find out when Scotty was born. The first thing that came up was for Muriel McKay who was kidnapped in December of 1969. She was never found and presumed dead. Her killers later confessed to burying her near a farm in Hertfordshire.) After two-and-a-half years of marriage and only two months after the birth of Scotty, Neil and Muriel separated. Their divorce trial that started in 1974 would be legendary and the legal fight they had even led to a physical altercation in the court. The presiding judge ordered both to undergo psychiatric evaluations.

Muriel was awarded full custody of Scotty with Neil getting visitation rights limited to part of a weekend, once a month. He wasn't having any of this and fought for expanded access to Scotty and he also hatched a plan - allegedly -with devastating effectiveness. It was almost two o'clock in the afternoon on September 30, 1976 when Muriel ran out to her Volvo station wagon parked in a downtown Anchorage lot at the intersection of L Street and Fourth Avenue that was across the street from her travel agency. She wanted to get a coat she had left in the car to show to her employees. Muriel opened the car door, leaned in, and a bomb that was planted under the hood of the car exploded. The explosion shook the local businesses and sent pieces of the Volvo flying over a 100 feet in the air. Parts of the car ended up as far as 250 feet away. People ran to the wreckage and found twisted steel and a very dead 41-year-old Muriel Pfeil. The custody battle over Scotty would not end here. Muriel's brother Robert Pfeil and his wife, Marianne, took up the mantel and fought for custody of Scotty. There was an order that Scotty had to stay in Alaska and Neil ignored that and flew with Scotty to Hawaii and from there they continued to the tiny island of Likiep that is part of the Marshall Islands in the western Pacific Ocean. On June 30, 1978, the custody litigation was terminated by a consent order and decree and Mackay got custody of his son despite the clear fact that he had basically kidnapped his son. 

But the fight between the Pfeils and Mackay wasn't over because there was still Muriel's estate hanging in the balance and Scotty was the sole heir. Robert Pfeil was the estate's represenatative so he sued Mackay for damages and attorney costs because he had to pay detectives to find Scotty and then he had to pay to return him to Alaska from Likiep Island. The Pfeils won and Mackay had to pay them nearly $142,000. And yet, the battle continued. On June 29, 1983, a default judgment was entered and filed a diversity action in federal court, rather than appealing the decision. This is something done when the parties of a lawsuit are citizens of different states. Neil wanted  injunctive and declaratory relief, which was basically asking that there be no future damaging actions. Robert Pfeil moved for summary judgment, which was granted on April 14, 1985. Mackay appealed and there was more action at the Ninth Circuit level and finally on September 4, 1987, it was all over and the original $142,000 judgement against Mackay was back in place. So the Pfeils and Mackay had fought for over 10 years in the courts. Mackay had had the final say though. Because before this final judgement was in place, Robert Pfeil was dead.  

On October 12, 1985, Robert Pfeil was driving home from work when a vehicle pulled up beside his car and five shots were fired. Three hit Robert and he was rushed to Providence Hospital where he told police, "The son of a bitch finally got me." Robert fought for his life for a month before succumbing a blood clot  that formed in his lungs during surgery on November 11, 1985. The people in the car from which the shot came were driver Robert Betts and passenger John Bright. The car driven was a Lincoln Continental that Bright had borrowed from his roommate Larry Gentry. Bright was the shooter and he used a .45 caliber pistol that the driver, Robert Betts, had gotten from his friend Tyoga Clossen. Tyoga had stolen the gun from a house where his girlfriend was house-sitting. All of these people were on drugs and soon started talking about the murder, which got Anchorage police to haul in Tyoga for questioning. Tyoga admitted that he stole the gun and he said that it had been used in the Pfeil murder. Robert Betts eventually agreed to cooperate with police and he was arrested and charged with murder, along with John Bright. Betts implicated a man named Gilbert “Junior” Pauole who was also arrested in December of 1985. Junior agreed to become a prosecution witness and he wore a wire tap to try to capture a confession from Neil Mackay. 

Junior knew Mackay because he ran a strip club in a building owned by Mackay. It should be noted that the owner of this strip club was a Seattle mobster named Frank Colacurcio. Junior claimed that Mackay had offered him $10,000 to find someone to kill Robert Pfeil. The first trial in this case ended in a mistria and here's why. You listeners are probably all wondering, hey, what happened with the whole Muriel getting blown up? Wasn't Mackay indicted for this? The answer is no. There wasn't enough apparently to go to trial, but there was enough to create a very thick file of material in regards to Muriel's murder and somehow, that file ended up in the room during jury deliberations April of 1986. So a second trial was held in February of 1988 in Fairbanks and that jury acquitted Neil Mackay because they didn't believe Junior's testimony. Some think Junior set up the murder himself to blackmail Neil Mackay. 

So in the end Neil Mackay was never convicted of his ex-wife Muriel's murder or the murder of her brother. On September 24, 1994, he was found dead in his condominium at the Ilikai in Waikikiki. If there is any justice, he laid dead in his condo for four days because nobody cared about the man. Scotty Mackay was living in Anchorage through the 1990s, but it is unclear where he resides now. The shooter of Robert Pfeil, John Bright, is still serving a 99 year prison sentence and made an appearance in 2008 on MSNBC's "Lockup Raw: Spring Creek, Alaska." He apparently bit off the finger of another prisoner and routinely attempts to gouge out the eyes of other inmates, so he is quite the violent guy. Muriel's case went cold and has remained that way with no witnesses and no real evidence. The only thing the combined efforts of the Anchorage Police Department, Alaska State Troopers, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the FBI were able to find is that the bomb was placed in the car sometime between 12:30 and 2 p.m. 

In 2014, local domestic violence advocate named Liz Meredith wrote, "Time and time again, battered women I met with indicated that Muriel’s death was used by their partners as a means to maintain control. ‘Leave me and you’ll go down like Muriel did.’" Since Muriel didn't receive justice, there are those that claim her spirit is at unrest. The Snow City Cafe is located at 1034 W. 4th Avenue in Anchorage. The downtown brunch spot opened in 1998 and is very popular. The building had once housed Muriel's office and it is here that her spirit seems to have returned. Staff claim that her spirit is most active at night. She likes to mess with the water in sinks. One longtime employee was often responsible for closing up and he would reprimand “Ms. Muriel” for playing with the water in the kitchen and bathroom. He told her that he didn't like her creating more work for him. Muriel also likes to turn the lights on and off. Another employee came in really early one morning for her shift and she was the only one in the restaurant. She heard the disembodied laughter of a woman and heard a cabinet closing. The laughter sounded like another employee, so she called her on the phone and awakened her from slumber. That employee told her that she wasn't anywhere near the cafe and that she had just been sleeping in bed. 

Muriel Pfeil seems be another statistic to add to the countless battered women that ultimately end up dead at the hands of their spouses - at least allegedly. There was no justice for her and she was ripped from this world in one single instantaneous explosion. It is no wonder that her spirit seems locked into this earthly plane. Does Muriel Pfeil haunt the Snow City Cafe? That is for you to decide!