Editor’s note: This story includes descriptions of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, call or text 988, the U.S. suicide and crisis lifeline, or access an online chat at 988lifeline.org.
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Relatives and friends of Luke Whaley, a Wasilla man who died in 2023, say state Sen. Cathy Tilton began a sexual relationship with him when he was a teenager working in her home. Several said the relationship was an open secret in the Mat-Su for years.
A video and website published anonymously last week include recorded interviews in which two of Whaley’s siblings make those accusations. Separately, in interviews with the Anchorage Daily News, people who knew Whaley described a relationship that lasted roughly two decades.
Tilton was elected to the Alaska House in 2014 and served as speaker for two years. Gov. Mike Dunleavy appointed her to the state Senate last year, and she is now running for a full Senate term. The video describes events that took place before Tilton first ran for public office. It was released less than one month before Election Day.
The people behind the website and video have refused to identify themselves.In the video, Whaley’s sister Amanda describes how Luke began working for Tilton at age 14, when Tilton was in her late 20s, leading to a yearslong relationship that scarred Luke and their family.
A man identified as Whaley’s brother Stephen, who goes by Stevie, describes witnessing Tilton engaged in sexual activity with Luke and another individual. He did not say what year this took place.
Stevie Whaley did not respond to interview requests. But Amanda Whaley, and a friend of Luke Whaley who shared her recollections in the video, repeated their allegations in interviews with a reporter last week. “It absolutely tore my family apart,” Amanda Whaley said in an interview the day after the video was posted online. “It’s been very, very, very difficult.”
Luke Whaley died by suicide at age 47.
Tilton, now 64, did not respond to multiple phone calls, text messages and emails seeking her response to the allegations. On Tuesday, she attended a rally for President Donald Trump held in Wasilla and, when approached by reporters, declined to answer questions about the allegations.
Around the time when Whaley’s friends and family say the relationship began, the age of consent in Alaska was generally 16. Under an Alaska law enacted in 1990, it was illegal for an adult to have sex with a 16- or 17-year-old whom he or she employed. Whaley described himself as having had a “dating or sexual relationship” with Tilton in a 2010 request for a restraining order filed against her husband, Berkley Tilton. (Whaley later withdrew the request.)
Multiple people interviewed by the Daily News for this story, including several who didn’t participate in the video published last week, said that they had long known about a relationship between Cathy Tilton and Whaley, and said it had an adverse effect on Whaley before his death. They said Whaley spoke openly about the relationship with friends and family members, who described witnessing interactions between Whaley and Tilton that began when he was in high school and continued for around 20 years.
Several said they had previously considered coming forward with the allegations. Some said they were concerned about ramifications for themselves and for the Whaley family, in part because of Tilton’s political connections and personal wealth.“I feel a lot of guilt that I didn’t report when we were younger. We were kids, and I didn’t really know what to do,” said Melissa Faustino, who went to high school with Whaley and attended the same church as he did growing up. “But I’ve always felt that I should have done more to help him when we were kids, because it really, really affected his life, and I feel like it mentally just destroyed him.”
Accusations that Tilton had an inappropriate relationship with Whaley circulated on social media as early as April of this year, when Brenden Strom of Palmer posted a widely shared Facebook video in which he alleged that Tilton, who was then in her late 20s, had sex with Whaley when he was a teenager, and urged viewers to call her. In a phone conversation with a reporter in the spring, Strom said he grew up with Tilton’s children. He said at the time that he had been collecting “documentary-style information” about Tilton from Whaley’s brother.
But Strom later said he was not involved in the website that published last week, justiceforlukewhaley.com. The page was registered Oct. 6 through a Lithuania-based web-hosting company, according to publicly available records. The operators of the website declined to identify themselves in an email to the Daily News.“
The individuals behind the Justice for Luke Whaley website wish to remain anonymous due to concerns about potential retaliation from Cathy and Berkley Tilton,” the group wrote in a statement signed, “Justice for Luke Whaley Team.”
Strom, who describes himself online as a former federal inmate — he was convicted in 2017 of possessing and distributing drugs — and as the owner of a septic tank cleaning and pumping business in the Mat-Su, posted a Facebook video Thursday morning saying he had no connection to the website. “I put that on my skin and my soul, I had nothing to do with that site,” Strom said. “It sucks that so many people got to relive it, but that’s all part of being held accountable now.”
Tamara Ashburn, who went to school with Whaley and his siblings, and Amanda Whaley, who both agreed to be interviewed by the Daily News the day after the website went live with their testimony, declined to name who recorded them for the website.
Among the questions that Tilton did not respond to was whether she had a sexual relationship with Whaley and, if so, when it began.
Janice Maestas, 39, met Whaley in adulthood and considered him her closest friend. She told the Daily News that he talked about Tilton constantly as an adult, up until his death, and thought of her as his lifelong romantic partner. She said he told her they first had sex when he was in his teens. The Alaska Legislature earlier this year passed a law raising the age of consent from 16 to 18. Tilton, a Republican, co-sponsored the bill and advocatedfor its passage.
‘Since I was a child’
The Whaley family lived close enough to the Tilton family that you could throw a football from one yard to another, Amanda Whaley described in an interview. Luke Whaley, born in 1975, was one of five siblings. He began working for the Tilton family as a teenager, according to his siblings Stevie and Amanda. His jobs included mowing the lawn and taking care of Cathy Tilton’s three sons. Whaley’s cousin, Stephanie Caple, said he told her he had a relationship with Tilton several times over the years. She said the sexual relationship, as he described it, began around 1990. “Luke did tell me where it happened, the first time. What she was wearing,” Caple said. She said he told her Tilton was wearing a “one-piece jumper” with a zipper, and that the encounter took place in an airplane hangar on the Tilton property.“This has always been a family secret,” she said.
Several people interviewed by the Daily News said that the relationship between Whaley and Tilton began when Whaley was in high school and continued after his graduation. He eventually moved to Utah — where he studied to become a licensed massage therapist — in part to get away from Tilton, they said. Faustino, Whaley’s former classmate, said he confided to her that he was in a sexual relationship with Tilton, after Faustino saw them sitting very close together in a truck when he and Faustino were in high school. “It looked inappropriate to me from a teenage perspective,” she said.
“He expressed even then that he felt like it was wrong and she had taken advantage of him, but he’d also fallen in love during that time period,” said Faustino. “He was like, ‘I know it’s wrong, but I just can’t stop.’”Faustino said Whaley told her Tilton “definitely has control over me because I’m so much younger than her.”
Faustino and Whaley reconnected in Utah in 2003. Faustino said Whaley told her he had left Alaska “to break up with Cathy, get away from her, because it was ruining his life.”Faustino said one day, she drove to Whaley’s home and saw Tilton was there. “He came outside to talk to me, and said she was trying to talk him into moving back to Alaska,” said Faustino. Whaley returned to Alaska and rekindled his relationship with Tilton after graduating from his massage program, said Faustino, who remained in touch with Whaley until his death. Amber Rose is another former high school classmate of Whaley’s. She said in an interview that she dated one of Luke’s close friends after high school. She said that one night in 2004, after Whaley returned to Alaska, he showed up at their home after midnight. “Luke showed up, all distraught,” said Rose. “He was losing his mind over Cathy.”“He didn’t even want to see her. He was so done,” Rose added.Then, Rose said, Tilton “tracked him down” to her home.“She showed up, and he wanted nothing to do with her. He wanted to hide from her,” Rose said. “For hours she sat there, convincing him to come back with her, and pretty much manipulating him to come back with her, and he ended up leaving and going back with her that night.”
Whaley wrote in a request for a restraining order that Tilton’s husband threatened to kill him in 2004. He made the claim in paperwork filed in state court in January 2010, asking for a 20-day protective order against Tilton and her husband. He crossed out Tilton’s name before submitting it, according to a copy of the order obtained by the Daily News.
Tilton’s husband, Berkley Tilton, did not respond to attempts to reach him by phone and email. On the form, Whaley checked a box saying that the order involves “a person with whom I have or previously had a dating or sexual relationship.”
In the request, Whaley said Cathy Tilton’s husband had tried to “rip me out of my bed” in his room within the Tiltons’ home in December 2009.“He said, ‘Quality Moving is here, get your shit and get the FUCK out.’ Then two men from Quality Moving began to rush past me grabbing at my stuff.
Also a maid who claimed she was an instrument of God, told her to cast me out of the house as she grabbed me and tried to get me out of the house all the while, over and over, I said ‘NO,’” Whaley wrote.
Whaley withdrew the request for a restraining order soon after filing it with the court.
Connie Sumrall is Whaley’s aunt and spoke with him about his relationship with Tilton after his mother, Jo Ellen, died in 2008. Her obituary included a line saying she was survived by “Luke Austin Whaley and friend Cathy.”
Sumrall said Whaley told her that he lived with the Tiltons and had a joint bank account with Cathy Tilton. In the 2010 restraining order request, Whaley indicated that he had been “completely” supported financially by the Tiltons since 1997.
Sumrall said her mother — Whaley’s grandmother — stopped speaking with him because of his relationship with Tilton.
After Jo Ellen’s death, Sumrall said, Whaley was admitted to the Alaska Psychiatric Institute at the urging of his father.
Whaley was raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and still identified with the faith as an adult, Maestas said. The screensaver on his phone was a cross emitting beams of gold and white light.
“He was the kindest and most giving person I have ever had the honor to have in my life,” Maestas said of Whaley.
He died Feb. 18, 2023. A woman who had been renting an upstairs bedroom to him in Wasilla found his body and called troopers, who — according to a death investigation obtained through a public records request — determined he had died by suicide. On his bed was an open notebook and a short message that said in part: “It is meant to end all of the pain I have felt. I own nothing. I have no children, and I am ending my suffering. I am in so much pain. I have been since I was a child.”
After Whaley’s death, family members contacted Alaska State Troopers and asked them to investigate the relationship between him and Tilton. Caple, Whaley’s cousin, said she visited the trooper office in Palmer and spoke to a trooper on the phone about the case. Troopers declined to answer questions from the Daily News about whether there had been a criminal investigation of Tilton and her alleged relationship with Whaley. A Department of Public Safety spokesman said the agency can only confirm investigations closed by arrest, indictment or criminal charges filed in court.Family members and acquaintances said they were compelled to share publicly what had happened to Luke Whaley after information began coming out in social media posts, including ones made by Strom.
But they said they remained worried about retribution from the Tilton family, whom they described as wealthy and influential. “No one wants any backlash. They’ve got a lot of money. The Tiltons have a lot of money,” said Ashburn. On April 26, after almost two months of occasional Facebook posts mentioning Tilton and Whaley, Strom posted a seven-minute video about area crime and Tilton specifically.
“I think we should start calling Cathy and asking her, like … what is your position on grooming? … What happened between you and Luke? What age did it allegedly start? Did it happen?” he says in the video.
Ashburn also said that Strom’s social media posts were “part of the kickstart to this whole thing.”Amanda Whaley said that she didn’t know about the planned website before it was made public. “I was asked to meet somewhere, and I went in there not even knowing that there was gonna be a camera. So it was actually kind of nerve-wracking,” said Amanda.
“There was the camera, and they said, ‘This, you know, we’ll support you, and we want justice for Luke.’ So that was — that’s kind of how it all unfolded.”
Tilton did not respond to requests for an interview, including phone calls, emails and a visit to the Wasilla-area home where the Tilton family has lived and Whaley’s family said he worked as a teenage babysitter in the 1990s.
Attempts to call and email her adult children — whom Whaley claimed to help raise, in his request for a restraining order against Tilton’s husband — were unsuccessful. One of the candidates running against Tilton for the Mat-Su Senate seat she holds, Republican Zane Vrvilo, did not respond to requests for comment.
Democratic candidate Pat Chesbro said she was principal of Palmer High School at the time that Luke Whaley was a student, but she was not aware of the allegations.“I just found out what everybody else did, so I knew nothing about it,” Chesbro said. “If the teachers had known anything, we would have reported it at that point.”
Ryan Berry, a Republican running against Tilton, said last week that he has “nothing to do with” the website detailing the allegations against Tilton. “I didn’t fund it. I didn’t have a part of it. I don’t know who did it. Honestly, I have no clue,” Berry said. “I literally got a text message this morning saying, ‘Have you seen the internet?’ And then got a text message to the video.”
Berry declined to comment on the allegations in the video. “It’s a small town. I grew up here, went to high school here. There were rumors. But I don’t have any facts or anything like that,” said Berry.
The Daily News’ Zaz Hollander contributed reporting from Palmer.
