Crime & Safety

After nearly 50 years, DNA testing and genealogy research reveals what happened to CNY man missing in Alaska

Updated: Feb. 05, 2023, 10:11 p.m. | Published: Feb. 05, 2023, 7:58 p.m.

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By Catie O'Toole | cotoole@syracuse.com

Brewerton, N.Y. — Nearly 50 years ago, Gary Frank Sotherden disappeared while trapping in a remote area of Alaska. His loved ones back in Central New York never knew for sure what happened to the 25-year-old man.

Now, cold case investigators with the Alaska State Police have identified the missing man from Clay using DNA and genealogy research. A DNA sample from his brother back in Brewerton helped solve the case.

Gary Sotherden grew up in the town of Clay, graduated in 1969 from Cicero High School, and traveled to rural areas throughout the United States and Canada after school. He was working on the trans-Alaska pipeline before he decided to go on a trapping trip north of the Arctic Circle. ... It was around that time, the fall of 1976, when Gary went missing near the Porcupine River in northeastern Alaska. ... “You always have hope,” his brother, Steve Sotherden, of Brewerton, said in an interview with Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard Sunday, “but we now know what happened to him...”

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Twenty-one years after Gary went missing, a hunter found a human skull on July 23, 1997 along the Porcupine River, eight miles west of the Canadian border. But Alaska state troopers could not find the rest of the remains, state police said in a news release last week. ... The state Medical Examiner’s Office suspected the man had been mauled by a bear, they said. Steve later learned the skull had bear teeth marks in it. ... Police, however, could not identify the person killed from the skull alone.

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It wasn’t until the Alaska Crime Lab extracted DNA from the skull last April that cold case investigators had any idea who the remains might belong to. Genetic testing and genealogy research tentatively pointed to Gary Sotherden, state police said.

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