by Kyle Hopkins, Anchorage Daily News

This story details allegations of violence against Indigenous women.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Anchorage Daily News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

The police department in Kotzebue, Alaska, says it will not reopen its investigation into a woman’s death on the property of a former Northwest Arctic Borough mayor. The case had been the subject of an Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica investigation into the 2018 death of Jennifer Kirk and the death of another woman, who was found strangled on the same property two years later.

Kirk, 25, died May 23, 2018, at a home owned by then-Mayor Clement Richards Sr. According to police reports, the Alaska medical examiner’s office initially told a city police investigator that “signs of strangulation” had been found on Kirk’s body. The man who said he found her body — Anthony Richards, one of the mayor’s sons — had previously been charged with strangling Kirk and pleaded guilty to assaulting her, though he said he was not involved in her death.

Police eventually closed the case as a suicide. In an open letter to Kotzebue residents last week, police Chief Roger Rouse said neither the city nor state have plans to reopen the investigation. Rouse wrote that the Alaska Bureau of Investigation reviewed the case and told Kirk’s family that “nothing in the investigation as it stands would change the sad conclusions of the incident.”

The city posted the letter on Facebook. A spokesperson for the state Department of Public Safety said in an email that two state investigators reviewed the Kotzebue police investigation into Kirk’s death and found no leads........

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