Albert Moulton Hagen, Jr. was a male, age 27, Alaska Native, back in Manley Hot Springs in May 1984, visiting his parents in the tiny river village at the end of the road. By the evening of May 17, 1984, the quiet settlement had become the backdrop for a vanishing that would be tied to a wider tragedy unfolding along the Tanana River.
That morning and afternoon he helped clear brush around the family place, then headed to the river. He did not return. Accounts gathered later describe him going toward the boat landing and simply never being seen again. Investigators would list him as missing and, ultimately, a suspected homicide victim; his body was never found and is believed to have been put into the Tanana River near Manley Hot Springs.
As the day wore on, others from Manley Hot Springs also disappeared or were killed, a cluster of losses that stunned the sparsely populated Interior. Names that surfaced in the aftermath included neighbors and visitors who had gone down to the landing and did not come back, tightening the focus on the riverfront as the scene of violence.
The suspect who emerged was Michael Silka, a transient hunter and drifter newly arrived in the Interior that spring. Authorities linked him to the killings around Manley Hot Springs and to earlier violence near Fairbanks. Two days after Hagen vanished, troopers tracked Silka to the Zitziana River; an attempt to take him into custody ended in a firefight in which Silka was shot and killed, and Alaska State Trooper Troy Duncan was also killed. With the suspect dead, no arrest was ever made.
In the records that remain—missing-person files and memorial notices—Albert Moulton Hagen, Jr., male and age 27, is fixed to that date, May 17, 1984, and to the river that likely carried him away. Official listings still mark his case as a suspected homicide tied to Silka's spree, his body unrecovered; community remembrances and memorials note his loss to gun violence in Manley Hot Springs.
