Two roommates, one disappearance and no answers.
During an exclusive sneak peek at Oxygen's new true crime docu-series Fatal Frontier: Evil in Alaska, airing Sunday, Nov. 14, a former Alaska police officer breaks down what really happened for a missing persons case 18 years later. The special two-episode premiere kicks off with revisiting a report that a young Indigenous woman named Timayre Towarak filed in August 2003.
"Nome is a small town in Alaska," retired police officer of Nome P.D. Byron Redburn starts to explain. "It's a place to go party. Some people have been reported missing in Nome have not been located. And this have been going on for years."
The state of Alaska ranks fourth in the nation for murdered and missing Indigenous woman, according to the National Crime Information Center. There are currently over 5,712 cases of murdered and missing Indigenous women in the U.S.
Nome is situated at the end of the Iditarod trails, and as one resident adds, the town "has a bad reputation of people from the surrounding villages coming into the community and end up missing."
As officer Redburn recalls, on Aug. 12, 2003, Timayre came to the Nome police department to report that her roommate Sonya Ivanoff had not returned home for a couple of days.
"She was quite concerned and she came in to file a missing persons report," Redburn says.
"Timayre told me that on the night of August 10, they went out to a friend of hers for a beer, but Sonya was not feeling well at all. She was going to walk home and so she left Timayre at about one in the morning, and that was the last time Timayre saw Sonya."
And, per the "Blood in the Snow" episode description, cops discover a body with single gunshot wound to the back of the head. Could a rogue police officer be behind the murder?
Fatal Frontier: Evil in Alaska explores the unique circumstances of solving missing persons cases in an isolated state with extreme weather, challenging terrain and a low population.
Fatal Frontiers: Evil in Alaska premieres with two back-to-back episodes on Saturday, Nov. 14 at 7 p.m. on Oxygen.
(E! and Oxygen are both part of the NBCUniversal family.)