Diesel Fuel and a Fabricated Hospital Stay: The Killing of John William McClelland

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

August 4, 2026

John William McClelland, known to people who knew him as Johnny, was sixty one years old in August 2020, living in North Pole, Alaska, a small city just outside Fairbanks. He stood six foot one and weighed around two hundred forty pounds, with graying brown hair and green eyes, scars on both wrists and forearms, and tattoos on his upper right arm and inner left forearm. He worked for a local property management company, a job he had held for roughly two and a half years, doing building maintenance, painting houses, and general odd jobs around the properties the company managed. He was on probation and parole at the time, living with a roommate named Aaron Mitchell Hague, who happened to work for the same property management company. John kept a boat, a red GMC truck, equipment for his work, and a dog, the ordinary accumulated belongings of a man settled into a working life in interior Alaska.

On August 14, 2020, John's debit card was used to buy diesel fuel for his truck at a Fairbanks gas station at 5:43 in the evening. It would turn out to be the last confirmed activity anyone could ever attach definitively to him. In the days that followed, he missed work. He missed the check-ins required by his parole. His boat sat unused, his truck eventually turned up abandoned south of North Pole on August 24, and his dog was left without the man who had been caring for it, all while nobody outside his immediate circle seemed to notice anything was seriously wrong.

A Story That Didn't Hold Up

What raised the alarm was not John's absence itself but a series of text messages his brother began receiving from John's phone. The messages described John as hospitalized, suffering from serious cardiac issues, and in urgent need of money, at one point requesting as much as eight thousand dollars be sent to help cover the situation. John's brother, growing suspicious of the messages rather than reassured by them, began calling around to local hospitals and urgent care facilities to check on his brother's condition directly. None of them had any record of John McClelland as a patient. No hospital anywhere in the area had ever admitted him.

That discrepancy was enough to bring Alaska State Troopers into the case. As investigators started looking more closely at Aaron Hague, the roommate who had been the last person known to be living alongside John and who, it would later become clear, had been the one actually sending those fraudulent text messages, a very different picture began to emerge. Financial records showed that Hague had used John's bank card extensively between August 14 and August 16, spending close to three thousand dollars in total, including a single purchase of about fourteen hundred sixty dollars in gaming equipment at a Fairbanks Walmart. Hague had also opened a GCI internet account and filed a fraudulent unemployment claim, both under John's name and identity, and had begun asserting that he had sole ownership of John's truck and boat.

A Suspect Who Ran

Once investigators turned their full attention toward him, Aaron Hague did not stay to answer questions. He fled North Pole for Anchorage, effectively vanishing from the investigation for roughly seven months, a period during which the case against him could gather evidence and build momentum but could not move forward toward any arrest. During that stretch, Hague reportedly assumed a false identity, using stolen identification documents to avoid being identified as he moved further from Alaska entirely, eventually landing in Oregon.

While in Oregon, prosecutors would later allege, Hague befriended a twenty eight year old man named Anthony Alcorn at a homeless shelter in Anchorage's Sullivan Arena before the two of them ended up in Gresham, Oregon together. In March 2021, Alcorn was killed, and prosecutors allege Hague was responsible, theorizing that Hague killed him specifically to prevent Alcorn from discovering or exposing the false identity Hague had been living under since fleeing Alaska. When authorities eventually arrested Hague in Oregon, they found identification documents belonging to both Hague himself and to Anthony Alcorn in his possession, evidence investigators would later connect directly to the identity theft scheme that had also been used, in a different form, to manipulate John McClelland's brother back in Alaska.

A Jury Rules Without a Body

In November 2021, more than a year after John disappeared, an Alaska court formally declared him presumed dead due to homicide, a legal designation that allowed the investigation and eventual prosecution to proceed even without his remains ever having been located. In May 2022, a Fairbanks grand jury indicted Aaron Hague, by then already facing a separate murder charge in Oregon for Anthony Alcorn's death, for John's killing as well, along with identity theft and related charges connected to the fraudulent unemployment claims and bank card use.

The case against Hague in Alaska eventually went to trial as what prosecutors and reporters described as a no body homicide prosecution, a case built entirely on financial records, digital evidence, witness testimony, and the physical evidence tampering investigators believed Hague had engaged in, rather than on any recovered remains. Prosecutors called forty two witnesses over the course of the trial to lay out Hague's financial motive in detail, walking the jury through the debit card purchases, the false unemployment claims, and the fabricated hospitalization story sent to John's own brother.

During the trial itself, Hague took the stand and offered an account that had never previously been part of the public record: he testified that he had shot John McClelland, but claimed the shooting had been in self defense, framing it as the result of a relationship between the two roommates that had deteriorated badly before that August day in 2020. The jury did not accept that account. On April 8, 2026, nearly six years after John vanished, a Fairbanks Superior Court jury found Aaron Hague guilty of manslaughter, second degree theft, and tampering with physical evidence. He was acquitted of the more serious charge of first degree murder, the jury apparently persuaded that the killing itself, whatever its exact circumstances, did not meet the legal threshold for murder even as they rejected the idea that it had been justified self defense.

Awaiting Sentencing, and a Second Trial Still Ahead

Aaron Hague, now thirty seven years old, remains in custody without bail as of this writing, with sentencing in the Alaska case scheduled for August 11, 2026. Under the charges he was convicted of, he faces a maximum of twenty years in prison for the manslaughter conviction alone, with up to five additional years possible on each of the remaining felony counts. Once his Alaska sentencing concludes, Hague is expected to be transported to Oregon, where he still faces a first degree murder charge and an identity theft charge in connection with Anthony Alcorn's death, a case prosecutors have indicated they intend to bring to trial later in 2026.

Despite the conviction, despite the trial testimony, and despite nearly six years of investigation spanning two states and two homicide cases, John William McClelland's body has never been recovered. His truck was found abandoned. His boat sat unused. His dog was left behind. And the only account anyone has ever given of his final moments came from the mouth of the man a jury has now held responsible for killing him, offered years later, on a witness stand, as a claim of self defense that twelve jurors ultimately did not believe.

Anyone with information about the case, or about the location of John McClelland's remains, is asked to contact the Alaska State Troopers at 907-269-5511.

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