Skull found in Alaska is linked to New York man missing since 1976

In 1976, Gary Frank Sotherden’s appetite for adventure and the outdoors led him to the Arctic Circle, where he and a friend planned to walk on opposite sides of the Porcupine River in northeastern Alaska, reuniting when the cold set in and the river froze, his brother said.

The friend made it out, but Sotherden was never heard from again.

Planes flew above the remote, winding river in search of Sotherden, who was from Clay, New York, which is about a dozen miles northwest of Syracuse. Police and mountain guides also searched on land, but their efforts were unsuccessful.

What happened to Sotherden was a mystery that endured for nearly 50 years — until Thursday.

Relying on genetic testing and genealogy research, state troopers in Alaska confirmed that a skull found by the Porcupine River in 1997 was that of Sotherden. Troopers said in a news release that the suspected cause of death was a bear mauling, but they did not elaborate.

Troopers contacted Sotherden’s older brother, Stephen, in mid-December to ask if he could help confirm a lead in the investigation.

It was the first time since 1977 that investigators had come across new information about what had happened, Stephen Sotherden, 76, said in a phone interview Saturday from his home in Brewerton, New York.

“We’ve been working on it for 45 years, and it’s nice that things came to a conclusion,” said Sotherden. “It was a little more brutal than I was hoping for.”

He said that after his brother was last seen, aerial searches failed to turn up any clues. Their parents hired a mountain guide, who searched for Gary Sotherden by canoeing up the Porcupine River in 1977.

“He did find my brother’s site,” Sotherden said. “He found his broken glasses. He found identification.”

Sotherden said his family assumed that his brother had died, around the age of 25, because of the severe weather in the area. The family put a tombstone in the family cemetery plot engraved with his name, Sotherden said. “Lost in Alaska in the 1970s,” it read.

Sotherden said his brother was a “free spirit” who had traveled across the United States and Canada after high school and ended up in Alaska in 1972. Gary Sotherden worked on the TransAlaska Pipeline System for a few years before embarking on the hunting trip from which he never returned.

Stephen Sotherden did not know it at the time, but there was a break in the case in April 2022, when investigators extracted DNA from a human skull that had been found 25 years earlier, Alaskan troopers said.

In July 1997, a hunter found the skull along the Porcupine River — about 8 miles from the Canadian border, near where Sotherden went missing — and turned it over to the police, troopers said.