Anchorage Daily News

WASILLA -- Nancy Taylor yanked open the front door one morning last June to holler at the goats she heard tromping on the porch.

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Brian Wade Allison is a white male adult, 6 tall, weighing 200 pounds, brown hair, and brown eyes. His whereabouts are currently unknown.

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A thin man with dark hair and a scraggly beard gaped back at her.

A man she'd never seen before.

"He jumped as much as I did. We were both kind of standing there," Taylor said. "I could tell that both of us were trying to figure out, does the other one have a gun?"

After Taylor walked him away from her remote Chickaloon cabin, the stranger rejoined a three-man ring accused of dozens of break-ins from Sutton to Glacier View.

Though more unsettling than most, Taylor's front-porch meeting became one of many stories emerging from the latest crime wave in the Mat-Su -- not meth or murder but burglary.

Authorities say they're contending with a growing number of break-ins around the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, a wave that's alarming home and business owners but also forcing law enforcement and prosecutors to shift priorities.

Burglary -- unlawful entry into a building -- topped the crime list in the Mat-Su in 2008, at least by the numbers. Alaska State Troopers in the Valley logged more reports on break-ins than anything else, followed closely by assaults.

The Palmer district attorney's office answered the public's rising level of concern with a new priority for home burglaries. District Attorney Roman Kalytiak issued a directive last February: no plea bargains reducing charges without written approval.

The alarm is understandable, agencies involved say. Burglary messes with your sense of security along with your stuff.

"It hits you right in the heartstrings of where you hope things are the safest," said trooper Capt. Dennis Casanovas, Palmer post commander. "You feel violated when you come home and find the front door open and people have gone through your personal items."

GUNS, CAMERAS AND T-SHIRTS?

The rise in burglaries doesn't extend south of the Mat-Su. In Anchorage, reports of break-ins dropped in 2008 compared to 2007.

And even here, the numbers aren't exactly eye-popping. Troopers in the Mat-Su say they logged 397 burglary reports through November, 2008. That's up from the 382 reported in all of 2007 but not shockingly so.

Instead, authorities say, the extent and seriousness of the crimes are what's really getting public attention. Reports from north of Talkeetna to Glennallen and Valdez included some high-profile cases.

In November, a federal grand jury indicted Justin Anderson and two other men for possession of stolen firearms -- charges related to 17 weapons stolen from Mat-Su homes in 2007 and then pawned.

A Palmer grand jury a month earlier indicted Anderson on charges related to break-ins last summer at six homes in Palmer and Wasilla.

One Palmer homeowner caught Anderson at his front door and confronted him, troopers said. Anderson said he was looking for somebody named Shirley. Nobody by that name here, the homeowner replied. Anderson fled, but the homeowner gave chase and phoned 911 to report his license plate number. Turned out the Shirley-seeker had pawned his haul from area homes in Anchorage.

Don Dodds, a 35-year-old bachelor who works at the Cook Inlet Pipe Line Co.'s Drift River terminal, was one of Anderson's alleged victims.

A .45-caliber pistol and digital camera sat in plain view on a desk but the burglar honed in on coins, an Xbox -- and a rack of black T-shirts. Maybe somebody just needed a new stealth wardrobe?

"There was a section of my closet, a foot, foot and a half, that was empty," Dodds said. "I had to laugh."

Other victims, however, suffered more serious losses.

One woman robbed of $6,000 worth of family jewelry didn't want to talk about the crime. The break-in was the second at her home. She was afraid the invader might come back again.

MOTIVE AND METHOD

Chainsaws and generators. Flat screen TVs and prescription meds. Ammo and firearms -- lots of firearms.

What's driving people to steal such a range of loot?

Law enforcement agencies point to drugs as the prime motive for break-ins: many burglars steal stuff to buy the drugs of choice in the Valley right now -- heroin or pills like Oxycontin.

Stolen goods often get sold to friends. Sometimes victims spot their missing items on craigslist or eBay.

Prowlers seem to target spoils that can be readily pawned, such as guns and electronics, though both can carry serial numbers that have helped investigators.

"Earlier this summer, we learned people from Anchorage were bringing them here to pawn, and ours were taking them to Anchorage," said Wasilla's deputy police chief, Greg Wood.

A woman who said she was selling Kirby vacuum cleaners came to Kenneth Tandecki's Wasilla home in mid-December.

Tandecki, 58, said the woman gave him a free demonstration.

"Then two days later, my house got robbed," Tandecki said.

Whoever broke in --- nobody's found them or proved a Kirby connection -- kicked in the front door and stole only Tandecki's gun collection, including a semiautomatic Chinese assault rifle and German Mauser bolt-action rifle he got for Christmas when he was 13.

"They bypassed a lot of stuff. They didn't open closets or look," Tandecki said. "They missed many, many kinds of stuff-- a Nikon camera, laptops ... they walked by everything and just took the weapons."

TOUGH TO CLEAR

Taking a burglary report is easy. Arresting suspects is harder.

The troopers will probably make arrests in -- or clear -- 5 percent to 10 percent of the burglaries reported in 2008, Casanovas said. Wasilla police cleared six of 38 burglaries reported by December, with 10 people charged, Wood said.

Investigators get to the scene of the break-in after the fact, sometimes days later. By then, they're often working with scant evidence.

Still, keep those calls coming, Casanovas said. Reports on burglaries help troopers compile evidence, break-in methods and descriptions of stolen items, all helpful in catching bad guys.

"We wish we could solve more than we do," he said. "I want the public to know we're trying."

Pawn shops sometimes call in suspicious items or people at their counters. Occasionally, investigators find a stash, like they did in 2007 in Talkeetna when troopers arrested two men after finding items stolen from at least five empty cabins in a pickup used as part of the Halloween holdup of seven young trick-or-treaters.

Even if they find the stash, however, investigators trying for burglary convictions still need to work backward from the goods to the people who had them last, and get those people to fess up not just to having the stolen items but to breaking into a home to get them.

Of course, a few make catching easy.

A woman called Wasilla police at 3 a.m. last month. A man was peering in her windows.

Officer Ken Conn arrived to find 26-year-old Big Lake resident Dylan Cabot Tuel stuck in a nearby ditch. Tuel told the officer he forayed onto the woman's property for sand to get unstuck, according to an affidavit Conn filed in Palmer court.

Then the officer spotted two busted-open sheds and a winch dragged out. And inside Tuel's car: two hunting bows and a metal detector stolen from the sheds, according to the affidavit.

Tuel was arrested that day.

WANTED

Brian Allison -- whom Taylor says was the man on her porch -- remains at large and suspected in more recent burglaries.

But troopers in October arrested two other Sterling residents suspected in the Chickaloon ring on charges of burglary and theft, as well as meth possession or manufacture.

They got help from Frank Kirk -- now called the "Sheriff of Packsaddle County" by friends after a local peak and his single-minded pursuit of the guys wreaking havoc along his Glenn Highway neighborhood.

Kirk, tipped by a relative, tracked 43-year-old Aaron McDowell and Allison to an abandoned hunting cabin on an island down by the Matanuska Glacier and approached them carrying his .30-06 hunting rifle.

The men ran for what troopers say was a stolen pickup and fled, but not before Kirk talked McDowell into temporarily handing over his driver's license. Kirk called troopers with the ID.

Troopers found the pickup stuck near Sutton. They impounded the truck but released both men pending more investigation.

In October, troopers arrested McDowell and another man, Eric Carlson, 41, on charges they stole copper wire, power tools, weapons and vehicles, according to an affidavit filed at the Palmer courthouse by troopers Investigator Robert Lawson. Troopers found meth in the stolen pickup too.

The men inadvertently taped themselves talking about going north to pick up the "mother lode," Lawson said during a bail hearing. They discussed using fake names if stopped by police.

"They wanted to make sure they had their guns with them," he said.

Meanwhile, Allison is still out there with a felony warrant for his arrest. Crime Stoppers recently posted a wanted poster around Sutton and Chickaloon.

A new rash of burglaries reported in the area has locals on high alert.

Strangers might want to be careful about pulling into somebody's driveway unannounced, as did a borough property tax assessor who encountered several armed residents on a recent visit, Taylor said.

"Hey, we were terrorized out here," she said. "It completely overpowered everything you did, every waking moment ... every thing you did depended on what's going to happen -- are they going to slip in five minutes after I leave?"

Find Zaz Hollander online at adn.com/contact/zhollander or call her in Wasilla at 1-907-352-6711.

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