The Confession No One Asked For: Inside the Alaska Cold Case That Ended in a Battle Creek, Michigan Arrest

Christopher Popps is accused of shooting a coworker outside Fairbanks in 1993, then living free for three decades. He was arrested in Battle Creek this month after allegedly confessing to police himself, repeatedly, before anyone was looking for him. The record shows exactly how a cold case actually breaks open, and why MSP’s role here looked nothing like the agency’s forensic lab record Clutch Justice has documented elsewhere.

The Case at a Glance

Before the analysis, the record. Every fact below is drawn from Alaska law enforcement statements, Michigan State Police reporting, and Fairbanks court filings as covered in the sources listed at the end of this piece.

A Body in a Barrel, Thirty-Two Years Later

In November 1993, Patrick Orville Dearth’s family reported him missing to the Fairbanks Police Department. He was 34. According to Alaska State Troopers, Dearth and Christopher Popps worked together, and investigators now allege the two men were involved in an altercation at an auto shop that ended with Popps shooting Dearth. Rather than reporting the death, Popps allegedly hid the body inside a barrel and left it down a steep embankment off the Steese Highway, in the remote Chatanika area north of the city. No arrest followed. No indictment followed.

For more than three decades, Dearth’s case sat exactly where most cold cases sit: unresolved, unstaffed beyond periodic review, waiting on either new evidence or a break that no detective can manufacture on demand. No body. No forensic match. No witness willing or able to come forward. Just a missing persons report from 1993, and a family that kept waiting on an answer no one could give them.

The Tip That Named Itself

On January 22, 2025, someone contacted Alaska State Troopers anonymously and said they had killed a man near Fairbanks in 1993. The Alaska Bureau of Investigation’s Cold Case Investigation Unit took the case. Investigators could not immediately act on the location the tipster described. The area was buried in snow, and daylight in interior Alaska in late January runs only a few hours. They waited for spring.

In May 2025, investigators searched near Mile 47 of the Steese Highway. Down a steep embankment, they found a barrel. Inside were human remains. According to Alaska Public Media, Alaska Department of Public Safety spokesperson Austin McDaniel said troopers “were able to locate a barrel with human remains in it.” The Alaska State Medical Examiner’s Office identified the remains as Dearth’s and ruled the death a homicide.

What happened next separates this case from almost every other cold case break Clutch Justice has documented. Investigators did not identify Popps through DNA, a genetic genealogy match, or a witness finally coming forward decades later. They identified him because he kept calling. According to reporting on the Alaska State Troopers’ account, Popps sent multiple anonymous tips to different Alaska law enforcement agencies before investigators traced the calls back to him. Officials have said plainly that they do not know why. McDaniel told Alaska Public Media investigators have not determined why Popps allegedly began confessing more than three decades after Dearth’s death.

From Tip to Indictment: How Alaska Built the Case

A confession, even a voluntary and repeated one, is not itself a criminal charge. Alaska prosecutors still had to build a case a grand jury would indict on: a body, a cause of death, a location tying the confession to physical evidence, and enough corroboration that the confession was not the invention of someone seeking attention or in psychological crisis. That work took time. McDaniel told Alaska Public Media that identifying and interviewing witnesses from more than three decades earlier required more time than investigators had planned on.

On June 25, 2026, a Fairbanks grand jury indicted Popps on two counts of second-degree murder. The two-page indictment alleges Popps knowingly engaged in conduct resulting in Dearth’s death, under circumstances the document describes as showing “extreme indifference to the value of human life.” A Fairbanks court set bail at one million dollars and barred Popps’ release until a judge approves a third-party custodian or specific release conditions. He was assigned a public defender.

Two Michigan State Polices

The agency that arrested Popps deserves its own scrutiny, not because anything went wrong here, but because of what Clutch Justice’s own reporting shows when MSP’s broader institutional record gets examined closely.

MSP’s role in the Popps case ran through the Fifth District Fugitive Team, a unit operating out of the district that covers Allegan, Barry, Van Buren, Kalamazoo, Calhoun, Berrien, Cass, St. Joseph, and Branch counties. When Alaska’s Cold Case Investigation Unit asked for assistance locating a man on an active warrant, the Fifth District Fugitive Team found Popps in Battle Creek and arrested him without incident. Nothing in the public record suggests any procedural problem with that arrest.

That second record belongs to a different division of the same state agency. MSP’s Forensic Science Division, not its Fugitive Team, is what Clutch Justice has documented extensively in the Michigan Murders Files series: a crime laboratory that inherited more than 11,000 untested rape kits when the Detroit Police Department’s lab closed in 2008, a case backlog that exceeded 19,000 at its peak alongside a documented accreditation lapse, and a 2002 DNA analysis in the decades-old Jane Mixer case that produced a chain-of-custody dispute still cited in the record today.

Why Cold Cases Actually Break Open

Most cold cases do not break because of a breakthrough. They break because of a bureaucratic accident. A genetic genealogy database gets a new relative. A retiring detective reopens a box. A prisoner talks to negotiate a transfer. What almost never happens is what happened here: the person allegedly responsible calling the police, more than once, unprompted, about a case no one was actively working.

That does not make the confession self-authenticating. Cold case investigators know unsolicited confessions are common enough that agencies build in verification steps before treating one as real: comparing details in the confession against facts never released publicly, requiring the confessor to lead investigators to something they could not otherwise find, and corroborating the account against physical evidence. Alaska’s investigation followed that structure. Popps allegedly described where the body was left. Investigators found a body where he said it would be. That corroboration, more than the confession alone, is what a grand jury indicted on.

What the Record Doesn’t Yet Answer

Several questions remain open, and Clutch Justice is not going to fill them with speculation. Investigators have not said why Popps allegedly waited more than 30 years to come forward. They have not detailed what, if anything, changed in his life in the months before January 2025. They have not said whether a psychological evaluation is planned or expected as part of his defense. None of that is unusual at this stage of a case, and none of it should be treated as settled until the record actually settles it.

What is settled, for now: Popps is in the Kalamazoo County Jail awaiting extradition to Alaska. He has not entered a plea. A Fairbanks court has not scheduled his first appearance. The presumption of innocence applies to him the same as it would to anyone else facing an indictment rather than a conviction.