Surveillance video reveals a young woman abducted nearly a week ago in Anchorage appeared frightened by the man who took her, a detective supervising the investigation said Tuesday.
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In an interview Tuesday, police said the alarmed reaction by Samantha Koenig, 18, to a man who approached the Midtown coffee hut where she was working indicates the abductor was carrying a weapon. Police continued to reveal little else about a video or collection of videos that captured the apparent abduction.
Authorities have refused to make the clips or still photos from them public, saying doing so would compromise the investigation and would not reveal enough to help people identify the abductor.
Lt. Michelle Bucher, who leads the unit in charge of the investigation, defended the decision Tuesday.
“Believe me, I understand how concerned her family is. How concerned the public is about this,” Bucher said. “But we also have to be concerned about the integrity of the investigation. And if we felt that the video showed enough information … If we felt that we could gain more, in terms of getting Samantha back right now, we would be releasing (it). We would have released it by now.”
Anchorage police have asked for the FBI’s help in solving the disappearance, a department spokesman said on Tuesday.
Hundreds of volunteers, a private investigator — even psychics — are now involved in the hunt. Police say an armed man kidnapped Koenig last Wednesday evening from her workplace.
Detectives say surveillance video from multiple cameras shows the man, wearing a dark, hooded sweatshirt, walk up to the Common Grounds coffee shack in the parking lot of the Alaska Club at 630 E. Tudor Road. The footage is too dark to tell what color hoodie the man wore, police said.
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It was just before 8 p.m., near closing time. The taller man somehow entered the coffee stand and forced the 5-foot-5, 140-pound Koenig to leave with him. The video shows the pair walk out of frame, headed west, police say.
Earlier police reports that they walked east were incorrect, police spokesman Lt. Dave Parker said Tuesday, adding there was no getaway vehicle seen in the video.
Koenig’s boyfriend says he arrived later to pick her up after getting delayed at work. When he arrived, Koenig was gone. Her boss said cash was missing from the stand, and though Koenig — who had been working there less than a month — seemed to have locked up as usual, the stand was messy. There were coffee drinks left out on the counter and the security alarm was not set, according to another barista and the stand’s owner.
The next day, about noon, Common Grounds notified police that Koenig was missing and that nobody — not her family, her friends nor her co-workers — had heard from her. Officers met Koenig’s father, James Koenig, at the stand. It wasn’t until another 24 hours, once detectives were able to watch the surveillance video, that Koenig’s disappearance was upgraded from a “suspicious missing person” case to an abduction, Parker said.
In the meantime, the coffee hut remained open for business, with vehicles and people passing through the crime scene. More than a foot of snow fell on Anchorage on Friday, likely obscuring any footprints, the same day police determined the case was an abduction. And now, a week since Koenig walked out of the cameras’ view, no one has reported seeing her. Police have made no arrests, named any suspects or publicly identified any persons of interest in the case.
That includes a man Koenig named in a protective order application three months ago, Parker said. The man, Christopher Bird, was not charged with a crime after the November incident and is not considered a suspect in Koenig’s disappearance, Parker said.
While police have not cleared Bird as a potential suspect in the abduction, it doesn’t do any good to accuse him if he’s not involved, Parker said.
“This is not a one-hour, TV cop drama. This is real life. And it takes time to work through these things,” Parker said.
Police are not saying if they think the abductor was a stranger or someone Koenig knew.
“We don’t know one way or the other whether she knew this person or she didn’t know this person,” Parker said.
“But if you think about it, once again, from the perspective of what her job is, she’s going to have contact with hundreds of people a day. And she might know people just by recognizing them,” he said. “They may have stopped for coffee once or twice. We don’t know.”
Bucher declined to comment on many aspects of the search for Koenig and her kidnapper, including the quality of the surveillance video or whether it shows what type of weapon the man carried.
“Samantha appears to be frightened for some reason. That’s what’s most apparent,” Bucher said. Certain details in the video would only be known by the abductor and police, Bucher said. If those details are public knowledge, a suspect might gain an advantage, she said.
Tips from the public have been flooding in — including from at least two conflicting psychics — and a team of “dozens” of detectives and specialized police officers continue to work around the clock, Bucher said. Investigators have collected video from surveillance cameras at businesses near the coffee stand and are looking for more, Bucher said.
Police entered Koenig’s name and photos into a federal missing persons database, which means agents at airports and the U.S. border are aware of her disappearance, said Parker, the police spokesman. The FBI has also been assisting since the early stages of the investigation, Parker said.
“That may expand as the need arises,” he said. “They have specialized equipment that we don’t have.”
Parker said he could not comment further on the agency’s efforts. An FBI spokesman declined to comment.
Volunteer searchers scoured the area around the coffee stand for clues Monday. An RV was parked near the stand Tuesday to aid in the search, supporters said. The concerned friends and family members have plastered Anchorage with fliers and are handing out green ribbons with Koenig’s picture. On Tuesday, the group asked for help from cross-country skiers to scan the city’s trails.
James Koenig, the father, said he hasn’t slept much in the last week. His phone had been ringing nonstop and he said the volunteers were interested in more searches.
“That’s about it,” he said. “Keep getting the word out there and keep looking. Starting to look between every nook and cranny.”
James Koenig has said he believes his daughter knew the kidnapper but declined to elaborate. He has not said if he thinks Christopher Bird, the man in the November protective order filing, is responsible.
Bird’s lawyer, Rex Butler, says Bird isn’t involved in any way. Bird was at home with his family the night Samantha Koenig vanished, Butler said.
“The world’s going to have to beat on somebody else,” Butler said.
Bird is a local rapper with ties to North Carolina and Florida and performs, as seen in YouTube videos, under the name “Whyte Tyson.”
Meanwhile, at House of Harley in Spenard on Tuesday, employees Heather Cartwright and Aimee Matteson reminisced about Koenig, their former co-worker.
Koenig worked at House of Harley as a cashier for about six months last summer and fall.
Co-workers remember working with a tomboy who loved the Pittsburgh Steelers and her pit bull and formed tight relationships with her customers and co-workers.
She seemed to have many friends, they said, but tended to stick close to home, just around the corner, where she lived with her father and sometimes her boyfriend.
“I think her dad was real protective of her,” Cartwright said. “I think her friends usually ended up at her house.”
Cartwright said that Koenig had struggled with “regular teenage” problems in the past but seemed steady.
“She made a couple wrong choices,” she said. “When she was here she’d gotten past that.”
She wouldn’t elaborate.
They described a young woman who could be both happily the center of attention and at times unsure of herself.
“A beautiful girl that didn’t really know she was beautiful,” Cartwright said. “I think she had a lot of insecurities.”
Cartwright said she immediately felt Koenig had been taken against her will. For one, she said, she would never leave her beloved dog. And the Koenig she knew couldn’t stand to see her father in pain, she said.
“She wouldn’t let her dad anguish like this on purpose,” she said
