Eklutna stash ranges from cars to kitsch

01 April, 2010 by doug

Story Last modified at 11:19 a.m. on Thursday, April 1, 2010

Some of the strange collection of items appear to be stolen

BY ZAZ HOLLANDER
Alaska Star

A longtime problem with car dumping and other criminal activity in the woods near Eklutna came to a head last week with the discovery of a massive and bizarre cache at the old Eklutna Lodge.

Anchorage police discovered dozens of cars, firearms, a trove of Asian gift items, and a massive sports card collection in lodge buildings and on surrounding property.

Police detectives say they still don't know how the 40 to 50 cars got there – or, for that matter, the 5,000 sports cards, weapons, and several hundred pieces of Japanese décor most likely from Chugiak's Fuji Gifts, a popular store on the Old Glenn Highway that's now closed.

The case started in December, when a person walking "way back in the woods" north of Glacier Loop Road spotted a Dodge pickup with license plates removed that turned out to be stolen from Anchorage, said Anchorage police Detective Helen Haverty. Police discovered another pickup, a white Ford stolen out of Soldotna, on the other side of the road where the lodge buildings are located, Haverty said.

Police arrested a man living on the lodge property, 37-year-old John Wayne Morris, and charged him with theft and vehicle theft, according to a state courts database.

Morris could not be located for this story. He bailed out of jail in December.

Last week, about 20 detectives and a SWAT team descended on the property – with the help of a helicopter – to look for items stolen from the trucks, Haverty said.

The cars, spotted from the air, were scattered through the woods on the lodge property but also north on Eklutna Inc. lands, she said. But the really weird stuff turned up in the motel rooms at the lodge that in the 1970s also housed a café and liquor store, and a dance hall.

Detectives found the sports cards, the weapons – rifles and handguns – and the "very different" Japanese décor: vases, brass items, "stuff you associated" with Fuji, Haverty said. The owners had reported a burglary in 2008, but she still needs to look into the circumstances of that report, she said.

"I was so busy between Wednesday and Friday, I don't even know where to begin," Haverty said. "There's so many angles to this."

Located just south of the Glenn Highway, the 10-acre lodge property belongs to a Utah car dealer named Harry Johnson, previously an officer at Elmendorf Air Force Base.

Johnson bought the land in 1999 but zoning issues quashed his plans for a car lot, he said.

Morris started living in a three-bedroom house on the property about three years ago, Johnson said. His nephew, an acquaintance, gave him permission.

Johnson said he visited the property two years ago to find Morris wasn't paying rent but had rented out half the motel and was pocketing about $1,000 a month from the unauthorized tenants. He said he also saw a half-dozen marijuana plants that Morris later removed when he asked him to.

He said he tried to evict Morris but was told he couldn't because his nephew had given Morris permission to stay there. A family member tried to keep tabs on the situation but stopped due to personal problems, Johnson said.

Johnson said he at one point counted 40 cars scattered around the property, including a Mustang dragged into the trees down a chainsaw-cleared path through the alders, and several stripped vehicles. He wasn't shocked by the activities first discovered in December.

"I'm absolutely mortified it was being used for that but there wasn't much of anything I could do," he said.

More broadly, the Eklutna area is familiar to law enforcement. Palmer detective Sgt. Kelly Turney said several years ago he started hearing informants and others call the area around Eklutna "the halfway point" for its location between Anchorage and the Valley, and saying the area was known as a place to trade and sell stolen goods.

A land manager at Eklutna Inc. said people have used Eklutna lands as a trash and vehicle dump for years. Eklutna calls itself the largest private landowner in Anchorage, owning 90,000 acres within the municipality.

People dump cars – often burned, their ID numbers destroyed - on Eklutna property in Birchwood and Chugiak as well as Eklutna, said Jim Arnesen, land manager for Eklutna Inc. They also dump refrigerators, washers, dryers, televisions sets and garbage.

A few years ago, he said, the village corporation spent nearly $50,000 towing cars off its lands.

"It's a social problem and we get victimized a lot because we own so much land," Arnesen said. "We gave (police) permission to search our property. Anything we can do to help slow this phenomenon down."



This article published in The Alaska Star on Thursday, April 1, 2010.