Missing Myth -- Alaska Buzzes With Theories On Maverick's Fate

FAIRBANKS, Alaska - No doubt, a lot of people wished Joe Vogler dead. The question is, who would go to all the trouble?

Federal government? State government? Big Oil? Global powers? Traitorous friends? An improbable list of suspects is circulating through Alaska.

Of course, it could be no one cared enough to kill him. But for more than two months, Vogler - the 80-year-old founder of the radical Alaskan Independence Party and prime force behind the state's secessionist movement - has been missing.

There is no hint to his whereabouts. Only a suggestion that, late one spring evening, he left his cabin overlooking Fairbanks intending to return.

Vogler's fate has become a statewide obsession. At a riverside bar in Fairbanks, a muscle-bound guy who's been boring a blonde with snapshots of his trophy-winning grizzly kill finally gets her undivided attention with the line, "So, whadda you think happened to Joe?"

Mythic malcontent

Joe Vogler is more myth than man.

Tall and rangy, his strong features have aged and weathered well. After a lifetime of staring down the enemy, Vogler's clear blue eyes are set in a permanent squint beneath his fedora.

He is often described as "feisty," but that's being polite. Vogler can be a mean cuss. But he can also be generous and charming.

Until 1990, Vogler's extreme political ideas - specifically, his desire that Alaska secede - kept his party on the fringes. Then, in a dramatic upset Walter Hickel was elected governor on the Alaskan Independence Party ticket (although he has, in the eyes of some party members, abandoned it since).

"Vogler got Hickel to run," says Edgar Paul Boyco, newly elected AIP chairman pro tem. "And then, Vogler got Hickel the votes."

Where Vogler is now, what has happened to Alaska's infamous part-time politician/full-time malcontent, is all guesswork.

These are the only facts:

On May 30, AIP member Al Rowe forced open the door to Vogler's cabin.

Inside the cabin, Rowe found Vogler's wallet and heart medication on the kitchen table. All five of Vogler's dogs were inside and a blanket was draped over the cage of his pet goose. Missing were Vogler's .32-caliber "belly pistol" and gray fedora - things he wouldn't leave behind on a walk to the mailbox.

Rowe called police, then party officials, and in no time people were tramping all over the place. Friends, volunteers, police, search-and-rescue teams, trained dogs, reporters and photographers. Planes with spotters circled overhead.

For 10 days "we stomped all over the woods looking for that man," says Alaska State Trooper Mike Corkill. "But we didn't find a thing - not a smoking gun or a bloody trail. Not a single piece of evidence indicating a violent crime had taken place."

Officially, the disappearance is a missing person's case. Unofficially, his mysterious absence is considered by many Alaskan Independence Party members a confirmation of their darkest suspicion: Freedom is an illusion; Big Government is watching and waiting.

A wealth of theories

There are at least a dozen theories explaining Vogler's disappearance. Most of them, forwarded by the AIP, accuse the U.S. government of conspiring to murder the populist hell-raiser.

"Everybody knows we've got to genuflect to the powers that be. But Joe refused to bow and scrape," says Lynette Clark, party secretary. "And for that he was labeled Public Enemy No. 1."

Theory No. 1: Joe Vogler was annihilated by a shadowy government force, composed of agents from the CIA, FBI and Department of the Interior.

Vogler arrived in Alaska in 1944. Even back then, he was fed up with federal government. He'd been fired from Dow Chemical in Texas for repeatedly calling President Franklin Roosevelt a "dirty rotten son of a bitch of a Communist traitor" but still wasn't making any apologies. The way he figured, Roosevelt's New Deal was going to turn America into a nation of addle-brained welfare bums craving security instead of opportunity.

Moving to the Last Frontier, Vogler expected to escape "interfering government swine." Instead, he ran smack up against Uncle Sam and his agents.

In 1958, after the statehood vote, Vogler began his long crusade for a sovereign Alaska. Hurling epithets at Washington, D.C., Vogler charged Congress with "fixing" the election by allowing military personnel to vote.

"God, I hate those sons of bitches," he'd say, year after year. "If I ever get a revolution going, I'm going to import a bunch of guillotines and lop off their lying heads."

At the top of his list: employees of the National Park Service.

Theory No. 2: Joe Vogler was assassinated by a National Park Service SWAT team, in retaliation for defying rules and refusing to turn over his lands to "posy-sniffing environmentalists."

For Vogler, a gold miner and zealous advocate of resource development, nothing was better than a day spent riding a "hunk of yellow scrap iron" - a bulldozer.

"God, I love to move dirt with a Cat," he'd say, before launching into a tirade against the Park Service.

"They've got no business tying up the land. They just set on it, making jobs for bureaucrats. I swear, they're going to destroy private ownership in Alaska."

Nearly 55 million acres - or two-thirds of all national park lands - are in Alaska.

Bulldozing trails across federal land, Vogler would thumb his nose at the Park Service and shout taunts at the Bureau of Land Management. Confrontations were frequent, but the violence was verbal and the differences were resolved in court.

Vogler accepted the judgments against him but continued to reject the Park Service. "God, I hate those people," he'd say. "There's nobody I hate more."

With one possible exception: "those SOBs from Big Oil."

Theory No. 3: Joe Vogler was abducted by a high-profile, international security company acting on the instructions of oil companies.

"Joe and I were in agreement, those G.D. oil companies are robbing Alaska," says Carla Von RonCeilier, Fairbanks regional party chair.

Vogler believed the oil companies were cheating the state of billions of dollars in revenues, with accounting sleight of hand and legal tricks. Most Alaskans agreed with him, and former Govs. Jay Hammond and Bill Sheffield pressed a major lawsuit against Big Oil.

"I'm absolutely certain oil had something to do with Joe's disappearance," says Frenchy DeRushe, a friend of 40 years. "He was definitely onto something the oil companies didn't want let out. And it was right after a big meeting Joe attended in Juneau with a bunch of oil people that he started talking in whispers and looking over his shoulder."

Theory No. 4: Joe Vogler is being held hostage in Hawaii by the Clinton administration in order to win United Nations support of a U.S.-led air strike against the Serbs in Bosnia.

"Vogler, through his representatives, was pressing a complaint before the U.N. Human Rights Commission charging the U.S. with human-rights abuses in Alaska. The administration probably figured that if word got around, the U.N. and NATO would back out of the Bosnia deal," says AIP member John "Sourdough Jack" Alleman, a longtime friend.

Not surprisingly, authorities reject nearly all these conspiracy theories.

"If we don't go kidnap someone like Saddam Hussein, we're certainly not going to go after Joe Vogler," said FBI special agent Rick Kelley.

Likewise, some AIP members believe there is a simpler explanation.

Theory No. 5: Joe Vogler was abducted by a power-crazed friend who wanted to take control of the party. He was shot and dumped in a mine shaft.

There were no signs of struggle at Vogler's home. However, two of his dogs tested positive for barbiturates.

"I think the motive was simple as robbery - nobody knew how much gold he had stashed around the house," says Donna Gilbert, who all but grew up at Vogler's knee.

Boyco, an Anchorage attorney known as the "snow tiger," says a list of "at least 20 people with access to Vogler and motive to do him harm" is being drawn up. Recently elected AIP chairman pro tem, Boyco says he's hired a private investigator and Oregon psychic to help unravel the mystery of Vogler's whereabouts.

Party members and friends refuse to believe Vogler may have simply stumbled and accidentally fallen into one of the many mine shafts near his home. And they bridle at the suggestion that Vogler - suffering a heart condition and grieving for his wife, Doris, who died last year - may have taken his own life.

"He wasn't some senile old coot. He wasn't despondent. And the last thing Joe would do is allow his body to rot in U.S. soil," says Alleman. "He was always telling me, `Whatever happens, don't let 'em bury me in America.' "

A cartoon and a legend

With his bulldozers and bluster, Vogler made himself into a caricature of the Last Frontier. But his supporters, detractors and the media made him a cartoon, recalling with relish all the bizarre twists and odd lurches of his public persona and steadfastly refusing to call his bluff.

Alaskans accept responsibility for Vogler's exaggerated image, because it makes them part of the his legend. And because, more often than most care to admit, they can identify with him.

Many Alaskans deeply resent federal government's omnipresence, and Vogler's righteous outrage and incessant railing against "bureaucrats and other swine" resonates within them.

Even those who think of Vogler as a vociferous old kook grant him a nod of deference. At the very least, they say, he loved the land and cared passionately about the future of Alaska.

"He was a misfit, a nut and sometimes the most honest man around," says Dave Granger, a construction worker in Fairbanks.

"I hope he shows up tomorrow, but if he don't. . .I won't cry. Joe Vogler's three-fourths myth and that part can't never die."