A Michigan man who phoned in an anonymous tip claiming responsibility for a 1993 killing in Fairbanks, Alaska, now faces two counts of second-degree murder after investigators traced the confession back to him and recovered human remains stuffed inside a barrel off a remote highway.
Christopher Popps, 54, was arrested near Kalamazoo, Michigan, on July 16 by Michigan State Police. A Fairbanks grand jury had indicted him three weeks earlier, on June 25, and a warrant went out the same day. He sits in the Kalamazoo County jail awaiting extradition to Alaska, more than 30 years after his former co-worker, Patrick Orville Dearth, vanished without a trace.
The case is a grim reminder that some crimes refuse to stay buried, even when the killer bets on Alaska’s vast wilderness to keep them hidden. It also raises a question investigators have not yet answered: why would a man who apparently got away with murder start calling law enforcement to confess decades later?
Dearth was 34 years old when he was reported missing to the Fairbanks Police Department in November 1993. For years, investigators had few answers. No body. No suspect. No resolution for anyone who knew him.
That changed on January 22, 2025, when Alaska State Troopers received an anonymous tip from someone claiming to have committed a murder in the Fairbanks area in 1993. The Alaska Bureau of Investigation’s Cold Case Investigation Unit took over the case, but conditions in interior Alaska made an immediate search impossible. Snow blanketed the ground, and daylight was scarce.
Investigators returned in May 2025 and found what the tipster had described: human remains inside a barrel, down a steep embankment near Mile 47 of the Steese Highway, a remote stretch northeast of Fairbanks. The Alaska State Medical Examiner’s Office identified the remains as Dearth and ruled his death a homicide.
Cold cases that stretch across decades often hinge on a single break. In recent years, confessions and new forensic techniques have cracked cases that once seemed permanently stalled, including an Ohio case where a son confessed to dismembering his father after DNA evidence surfaced 27 years later.
The twist that separates this case from most cold-case breakthroughs is that the suspect himself apparently provided the tip. Alaska State Troopers spokesperson Austin McDaniel told Alaska Public Media that Popps had made multiple anonymous tips to different Alaska law enforcement agencies claiming responsibility for Dearth’s death.
Investigators eventually identified the anonymous tipster as Popps. The specific methods they used to unmask him have not been disclosed.
McDaniel described the alleged crime in direct terms:
“Based on our investigation, we determined there was an altercation at an auto shop, which led Popps to shoot Dearth.”
The auto shop was in Fairbanks, where both men had worked together. What sparked the altercation remains unclear. Investigators have not detailed the nature of the dispute or the broader relationship between the two men beyond their status as co-workers.
Tipster-driven breaks in long-dormant disappearance cases are not unheard of. A private investigator in Iowa recently claimed a tipster revealed a confession in the decades-old disappearance of news anchor Jodi Huisentruit. But in the Alaska case, the tipster and the suspect turned out to be the same person.
On June 25, 2026, a Fairbanks grand jury indicted Popps on two counts of second-degree murder. An arrest warrant followed the same day. Three weeks later, Michigan State Police picked him up near Kalamazoo.
As of the most recent reporting, no attorney was listed for Popps in Alaska court records, and no future hearings had been scheduled. Fox News Digital reached out to both Alaska State Troopers and Michigan State Police for additional comment.
The extradition timeline remains uncertain. Popps must be transported from Michigan back to Alaska, a logistical process that can take weeks depending on interstate coordination and legal proceedings in the holding state.
The case carries echoes of other long-delayed murder charges. In one notable parallel, a North Carolina stepmother was charged with murder after a teenager’s 11-year disappearance ended with the discovery of remains. And the Supreme Court recently reinstated a conviction in the 1979 Etan Patz murder case, decades after the boy’s disappearance in New York.
Several questions hang over the case. The most striking: why did Popps allegedly begin confessing more than three decades after the killing? Investigators have not offered an explanation. Guilt, illness, a desire for notoriety, any motive is speculation at this point.
Equally unclear is why Popps contacted multiple agencies rather than just one. That pattern suggests something more deliberate than a single moment of remorse. Whether those earlier tips were investigated and dismissed, or whether they simply failed to gain traction in separate bureaucracies, has not been addressed publicly.
The statutory basis for the two counts of second-degree murder has not been detailed in available court records. Alaska law distinguishes between intentional and unintentional second-degree murder, and the charging language could signal how prosecutors view the altercation at the auto shop.
Dearth’s family has not spoken publicly. For more than 30 years, they lived without knowing what happened to him. Now they know, because the man accused of killing him apparently could not stop talking about it.
Mile 47 of the Steese Highway is not a place most people visit on purpose. It is remote, steep, and, for more than 30 years, it kept its secret. A barrel with a man’s remains sat at the bottom of an embankment while Alaska’s winters came and went, while investigators in Fairbanks filed Dearth’s case among the unsolved, and while Popps moved to Michigan and lived his life.
The case underscores a simple truth that cold-case detectives understand better than anyone: time does not erase a crime. It only delays the reckoning. And sometimes the person who delays it longest is the same one who ends it.
Thirty years is a long time to carry a secret. Apparently, it was long enough.
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