Kendall Rae

Now,

Investigators, at first, they were not buying this at all.

They were pretty confident that forensic testing was going to show that the blood was actually Sonja's, not a random animal.

But shockingly, Kunik was telling the truth.

All of that blood was confirmed to be animal blood.

And investigators even went to the area and they were able to find the carcass of the porcupine.

And as for the tire impressions that were found at the scene, it turns out that they had nothing to do with the murder.

A random couple had driven down the road after Sonia was murdered

and they had no idea that they had driven past her or that her blood was on their tires.

So now that Kunick was cleared, investigators were back at square one, and at this point, Nome PD had two officers assigned to the case, Byron Redburn and Brian Wayavana.

But it really wasn't a good setup because they could really barely work together because they had completely opposite shifts, which makes no sense.

Plus, Officer Wayavana felt like Officer Redburn wasn't really communicating anything that he was investigating, which is obviously not helpful at all.

Now, Officer Wayavana was actually friends with Sonia's sister and brother-in-law, so he was very committed to solving the case.

And he just felt like there wasn't enough movement happening in the case.

So he decided to go through the case file again and see if there was anything that was missed.

And thankfully, he did.

It always just blows my mind when there are cases like this where someone decides to take a second look at the case file and they find something huge.

His second look led to...

a very significant piece of information being found and it would actually break the case wide open in the files he found a witness report that it seemed no one had bothered to follow up with it turns out that a local woman named florence reported seeing sonia the night that she disappeared

So, Hueyavana went to talk to her, and she had quite a story.