Michael Allison Fire Island

Do you know who murdered Michael Allen Beavers?
In late November 1979, Michael Allison Beavers left his home in Chugiak, Alaska, for a business trip. The 40-year-old White male, a heavy equipment operator who owned his own excavation company, told his wife he was driving to Seattle to meet a business associate. He never arrived. In January 1980, his spouse reported him missing to the Anchorage Police Department. With no leads, the investigation was closed in 1982, and a decade later, Michael Beavers was declared legally deceased.

Nearly ten years after Beavers vanished, on July 24, 1989, human remains in an advanced state of decomposition were discovered on the northwest shore of Fire Island, an uninhabited island just west of Anchorage. An autopsy determined the remains belonged to a Caucasian man between 35 and 50 years old. Evidence found with the remains indicated that the man’s death was a homicide, and an anthropologist estimated the body had been exposed on the beach for at least a year. With no way to identify him, the unknown man was interred at the Anchorage Municipal Cemetery.

For decades, the disappearance of Michael Beavers and the discovery of the unidentified man on Fire Island were two separate cold cases. The first attempt to connect the remains to a name came in 2003, when hair and tissue samples were sent to an FBI laboratory. A mitochondrial DNA profile was developed and entered into the national missing persons database, but it returned no matches. The case went cold once more.

The breakthrough came in 2021, when the Alaska Bureau of Investigation's Cold Case Investigation Unit reopened the file. Investigators sent bone samples to a private laboratory, which used forensic-grade genome sequencing to develop a comprehensive DNA profile. The profile was uploaded into a genealogy database and linked to several people, some with ties to Alaska.

Following the new leads, investigators and genealogists soon suspected the victim might be Michael Beavers. They contacted a close blood relative, who provided a DNA sample for comparison. The test was a match, confirming that the remains found on Fire Island in 1989 were those of the man who had vanished in 1979. After more than 32 years, the unidentified victim had his name back.

As of the identification in December 2021, the death of Michael Beavers is an active and ongoing homicide investigation. No arrests have been made, and no suspects have been publicly identified. The Alaska Bureau of Investigation’s Cold Case Investigation Unit is asking anyone with information regarding the disappearance and murder of Michael Beavers to contact them at (907) 375-7728 or the main ABI number at (907) 269-5611.