ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Alaska state police officials have announced for the second time in six weeks that DNA and genetic genealogy have helped identify a murder victim whose name has long been unknown.

Troopers said Wednesday that a man found slain in 1989 on Fire Island, west of Anchorage, has been identified as Michael Allison Beavers, a missing Chugiak man last seen alive in November 1979. Beavers, 40, was reported missing by his wife in January 1980 after he failed to come back from a business trip.

Beavers’ identification comes on the heels of the identification in October of Robin Pelkey, 19, who vanished in the early 1980s while living in Anchorage.

Pelkey was previously known only as “Horseshoe Harriet,” one of at least 17 women notorious serial killer Robert Hansen admitted to killing between 1971 and 1983, when he was arrested. Hansen, an Anchorage bakery owner who became known as the “Butcher Baker,” confessed to raping and torturing his victims before releasing them in the woods and hunting them down like prey.

Hansen also admitted to raping more than 30 other women over the years. He was sentenced in 1984 to life plus 461 years in prison, where he died of natural causes in 2014.

A fateful business trip

Beavers, a heavy equipment operator, owned an excavation business in Chugiak, a rural community about 20 miles outside of downtown Anchorage. According to troopers, his wife told authorities he left home in late November 1979 for a 2,300-mile drive to Seattle, where he was planning to meet with a business associate.

“Beavers never arrived in Seattle,” an Alaska State Troopers news release said. “No information was developed to indicate what had become of Beavers, and the investigation was closed in 1982.”

Beavers was declared dead in 1992.

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