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Speaker 3: This was assigned to Homicide Bureau Missing Persons Unit. They
Speaker 3: were the ones who had to make the decision that
Speaker 3: this was a suicide.
Speaker 4: They said, well, we think he might have sat on
Speaker 4: the edge of one of those minds and blown himself
Speaker 4: into the mind. I think, okay, we are really stretching
Speaker 4: now for an explanation as to why we can't find it.
Speaker 5: I would hope the Sheriff's department would investigate this.
Speaker 6: I just still want John to be found or his remains.
Speaker 4: They told our search teams on day one, John may
Speaker 4: have stumbled into a meth lab by accident, and what
Speaker 4: happened to that idea?
Speaker 3: Let's see Bato, Biker's Coffee, Black Beauty Blade Chalk. I
Speaker 3: made this list from the Internet of all the names
Speaker 3: that were used to describe crystal meth, chicken feed, crank.
Speaker 7: Christy, lengthy in handwritten by my boer.
Speaker 3: Go fast, meth, Lee's quick, methless.
Speaker 1: Meth Le's quick.
Speaker 3: That's cute, TikTok fan.
Speaker 7: There's a reason this almost eighty year old retired cop
Speaker 7: is trying to expand his drug vocabulary.
Speaker 3: I began to understand that the world of trying to
Speaker 3: find John A. J In balb crystal math. That's why
Speaker 3: I made.
Speaker 7: This list, because Bauer keeps hearing whispers of foul play.
Speaker 8: The ruler around the drug scene was at a deputy
Speaker 8: stumbled onto something he's shouldning of.
Speaker 4: The first thing I had heard was he had was
Speaker 4: running in the punch bowl and came upon.
Speaker 1: A meth lamb, a meth lab, a meth lab.
Speaker 8: Then it was said he tried to be a hero
Speaker 8: and that's when he was taken care of.
Speaker 7: When Deputy John aj disappeared in nineteen ninety eight, there
Speaker 7: was a meth epidemic ravaging the Antelope Valley. It was
Speaker 7: a vortex of addiction and crime.
Speaker 1: I think Neth has destroyed this community. I think they
Speaker 1: need to take a bomb and blow it up. It's
Speaker 1: that bad.
Speaker 7: Neth is a powerful stimulant that hijacks the central nervous
Speaker 7: system and causes people to stay awake for days.
Speaker 1: On end after the euphoria.
Speaker 9: Experts said longtime users suffer mind twisting crashes, jagged nerves,
Speaker 9: desperation to sleep, a spooky paranoia, and too often unpredictable rage,
Speaker 9: often homicidal.
Speaker 7: The drug can trick the brain into thinking there's a
Speaker 7: boogeyman around every corner.
Speaker 10: I've had a patient come back to me after two
Speaker 10: years of not using it, saying that he was sorry
Speaker 10: that he hit his wife so hard, but he still
Speaker 10: convinced that she was having an affair with the extraterrestrials.
Speaker 7: Maybe that's how the meth lab rumors got started as
Speaker 7: a drug fueled conspiracy theory, and there were a lot
Speaker 7: of conspiracy theories following Auja's disappearance, that he was kidnapped
Speaker 7: by the CIA, and another that he'd started a new
Speaker 7: life in Alaska. While the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department
Speaker 7: dismisses the leads as rumors spread by a hopped up
Speaker 7: game of telephone, but we discover a small detail buried
Speaker 7: in the missing person's report that suggests the rumors have
Speaker 7: more weight than that. Following Auja's disappearance, multiple informants came
Speaker 7: forward with information about a deputy who was murdered while
Speaker 7: jogging in the Devil's Punch Bowl. Missing Persons detectives said
Speaker 7: these informants can't be trusted, and they opted not to
Speaker 7: follow up on the leads because the meth lab story
Speaker 7: was just smoke and mirrors. But where there's smoke, there
Speaker 7: is sometimes fire. Bower tells us about a homicide detective
Speaker 7: who followed the rumors to their source to find out
Speaker 7: if there was anything to them, and he says, we
Speaker 7: need to hear this story straight from the horses mouth.
Speaker 3: You should go have a drink with Larry Brandenberg at
Speaker 3: his bar and ask him what do you think?
Speaker 1: Larry?
Speaker 3: I have a few questions for you and see what
Speaker 3: he says.
Speaker 7: And that's exactly what we do. We don't often get
Speaker 7: to do interviews in people's home bars, such a cool space,
Speaker 7: and we ask him what do you think, Larry about
Speaker 7: those tips that came in from local drug informants?
Speaker 1: You're not going to get a boy scout or a girl
Speaker 1: scout that's gonna have information about the murder of a
Speaker 1: Deathy Shah. How would they know? So you got to
Speaker 1: talk to these people, and then it's your job to
Speaker 1: figure out who's telling the truth who's lying.
Speaker 7: So we try to figure out who is telling the
Speaker 7: truth and who's lying.
Speaker 2: I'm Betsy Shepherd, I'm Haley Fox and miss His Valley
Speaker 2: of Shadows, Episode three, Tweaker Talk.
Speaker 7: Okay, let's see what you got here, mister Brandenburg.
Speaker 1: Do you go by detected?
Speaker 8: Okay?
Speaker 7: Can you come show us some of your sheriff's men Rebulia.
Speaker 2: Betsy and I are at the home of retired lasd
Speaker 2: homicide detective Larry Brandenburg, poking around his basement bar that
Speaker 2: doubles as a type of trophy room.
Speaker 1: Well, that was a bag one of my old partners.
Speaker 1: You got me?
Speaker 7: What does it say on there?
Speaker 1: I think it says the best partner a copkitab or
Speaker 1: something like that.
Speaker 2: Brandenburg's humility stands in contrast to his career highlights displayed
Speaker 2: on the wall. There's his Marine Corps uniform, A photo
Speaker 2: from an appearance on the TV show forty eight hours
Speaker 2: an LASD Service Award, and nearby there's a jukebox, a
Speaker 2: big screen TV, and a pool table with the giant
Speaker 2: logo of his Sheriff's badge on it.
Speaker 7: Do you have a name for this room?
Speaker 1: We just call it the Brandonburg Family Game Room. I
Speaker 1: try to get the kids go over games, and we're
Speaker 1: all Dodger fans, so revetsed the Dodgers.
Speaker 2: Brandenburg is a grampa. Now goes by Papa, and he
Speaker 2: has a shock of gray hair to prove it, but
Speaker 2: he still looks a bit like a detective with his
Speaker 2: slicked back hair and steely gaze. For more than twenty years,
Speaker 2: Brandenburg was a bulldog. That was the nickname given to
Speaker 2: investigators at the LASD Homicide Bureau.
Speaker 1: It was a La Tanji course said, yeah. The Sheriff's
Speaker 1: onmicide detectors are like bulltoks. Once they put their teeth
Speaker 1: to something and they never let go. Name stuck.
Speaker 2: The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department oversees crime in the
Speaker 2: unincorporated areas of LA County. It's a massive space, four
Speaker 2: thousand square miles, which is about the size of Connecticut,
Speaker 2: covering that much ground. Requires a huge workforce. With its
Speaker 2: eighteen thousand employees, LASD is the largest sheriff's department in
Speaker 2: the country. Homicide cops like Larry Brandenburg work out of
Speaker 2: a bureau located near downtown La, so when they catch
Speaker 2: a case, they hoof it to whatever part of the county.
Speaker 2: The homicide occurred in. The Antelope Valley or AV as
Speaker 2: it's sometimes called, was a particularly distant outpost. That's because
Speaker 2: it's cut off from the city by a mountain range,
Speaker 2: and Brandenburg thinks that's part of why the Auja case
Speaker 2: was handled so poorly.
Speaker 1: I think some of it was lack of interest motivation.
Speaker 1: I can't explain any other way.
Speaker 2: Because the AV was quite the hall from the homicide
Speaker 2: bureau hour and a half drive time.
Speaker 1: Nobody from down in La one to come up here
Speaker 1: at work because they didn't live up here. Hey see
Speaker 1: why the drive sucks.
Speaker 2: LA deputies didn't want to move to the desert either,
Speaker 2: so the department had to recruit lovocals to run their
Speaker 2: AV stations, and that created a schism within the LASD.
Speaker 1: They thought they could do their own thing and they
Speaker 1: didn't need anybody from down in LA tell them what
Speaker 1: to do. Hey, this is our valley. We know everybody
Speaker 1: up here, we grew up here, we live here, will
Speaker 1: handle this shit. But at the same time, department never
Speaker 1: dedicated the resources to this valley that they should have.
Speaker 2: Brandenburg has two sons who are now LASD deputies in
Speaker 2: the Annelo Valley, and it's become a running joke in
Speaker 2: the family.
Speaker 1: You know, I say, ah, you freaking deputies work up here.
Speaker 1: You guys are stupid, he'd laugh. You guys from down
Speaker 1: Belore a bunch of assholes. You come up here and
Speaker 1: think you know everything. But that was for a long
Speaker 1: time kind of the feeling.
Speaker 7: Brandenburg had heard that Auj went missing, but he didn't
Speaker 7: know him or the specifics of what happened, and it
Speaker 7: wasn't a murder investigation. It was a missing person's case,
Speaker 7: so it was outside his domain. But then a colleague
Speaker 7: from the Anela Valley reaches out with an especially persuasive tip.
Speaker 1: He said, Hey, Larry, I'm hearing shit on the street man,
Speaker 1: and Auj wasn't. He didn't commit suicide. He was murdered.
Speaker 1: He came across a math lab and you know, he
Speaker 1: tried to be a hero. He goes, I'm hearing from
Speaker 1: more than one person.
Speaker 7: And there are other details about the Auj case that
Speaker 7: don't sit right with him. How many years were you
Speaker 7: a homicide detective?
Speaker 1: A little over twenty.
Speaker 7: In not twenty years? Did you ever have a case
Speaker 7: like this.
Speaker 1: Where nobody a suicide? Never think about how would you
Speaker 1: do that?
Speaker 7: So Brandenburg asks to review the Auj case file.
Speaker 1: I went to the Captain Frank Merriman, who was the
Speaker 1: lieutenant in charge of Missing persons who handled the initial investigation,
Speaker 1: and I said, hey, Frank, I'm getting some information about
Speaker 1: Auja that you know we need to follow up on.
Speaker 1: He's what, He goes, that's a suicide. You're wasting your time.
Speaker 7: But Brandenburg continues to press this. He's a bulldog, after all,
Speaker 7: and his persistence pays off. In early two thousand, he
Speaker 7: gets permission to look through the missing person's report and
Speaker 7: finds out new details about the deputy's disappearance from a
Speaker 7: year and a half earlier. He discovers that the department
Speaker 7: had received numerous tips that Auja was murdered, and that
Speaker 7: some of those tips came in just three days after
Speaker 7: the deputy went missing, while searchers were still out looking
Speaker 7: for him. And potential evidence was still fresh. If there
Speaker 7: is some suggestion of possible foul play, multiple people are
Speaker 7: claiming there's a murder, what typically would happen.
Speaker 1: It would be assigned to a murder team, people that
Speaker 1: are on call for new murders.
Speaker 7: But that didn't happen because the missing person's team dismissed
Speaker 7: the tips. What would you say is the main difference
Speaker 7: between a missing person's investigator and a murder team or
Speaker 7: homicide detective.
Speaker 1: Well, missing persons they handle a large volume. I mean,
Speaker 1: there are so many people report of missing La County
Speaker 1: every day, let alone every month every year, so they're
Speaker 1: making phone calls, try to find relatives. So they're busy
Speaker 1: doing that stuff. But a lot of it is handled
Speaker 1: at their desk, on the phone. Or you don't handle
Speaker 1: a murder like that, at least, I ope not.
Speaker 7: Brander Murg thinks these detectives drop the ball big time,
Speaker 7: and he's not the only one. Internal documents from the
Speaker 7: LASD show that one lieutenant discussed the AJ case in
Speaker 7: terms of Murphy's law, which basically means anything that can
Speaker 7: go wrong will go wrong. We've reached out to the
Speaker 7: missing person's team, but they declined to talk to us.
Speaker 7: So all we know about their decision to not refer
Speaker 7: the case to a homicide detective is the one sentence
Speaker 7: explanation in their report. The reads, due to inconsistencies in
Speaker 7: their statements, it was determined they were not credible and
Speaker 7: otherly were pursued.
Speaker 1: Well, shouldn't you maybe looked into that a little more?
Speaker 1: I mean, that's just my thought, and that's why I
Speaker 1: started looking at it.
Speaker 7: Brandenburg does what he thinks should have happened back in
Speaker 7: nineteen ninety eight. He treats Aujay's disappearance like a homicide case,
Speaker 7: and he starts by tracking down two of the names
Speaker 7: in the missing person's report so he can reinterview the informants.
Speaker 7: To protect their identities, we're going to call them Sue
Speaker 7: and Mike. At the time, Sue was in custody on
Speaker 7: burglary charges, so Brandenburg and his partner head to the
Speaker 7: jail where she's being held. Sue tells them that after
Speaker 7: Aujay disappeared, her boyfriend Mike, went to score drugs from
Speaker 7: a guy living near the Devil's Punch Bowl, a local
Speaker 7: dealer named Tom Hinkle. What was he known for in
Speaker 7: the area?
Speaker 1: Miss doing it? Or he did it, he sold it,
Speaker 1: he cooked it, and he did all of it.
Speaker 7: Everyone in the area. Hinkle he was the Kevin Bacon
Speaker 7: and his community's six degrees of separation. He was only
Speaker 7: in his fifties when a J disappeared, but Hinkl was
Speaker 7: already known around town as old man. He had wild
Speaker 7: gray facial hair and was described by a local sheriff's
Speaker 7: deputy as bearded meta clause. He lived in a large
Speaker 7: a frame house up on a hill six miles from
Speaker 7: the punch bowl, and his property was a hive of
Speaker 7: drug activity. Sue, the informant, tells Brandon Burg that when
Speaker 7: Mike arrived at Hinkle's home, he led him into a
Speaker 7: back room where Hinkle kept his knife collection.
Speaker 6: Heinkel was showing him knife collection two miles beyond, kind
Speaker 6: of like showing off a little bit.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 7: This is an actual recording of Sue's conversation with Brandenburg.
Speaker 5: I'll bendy bring it up the hop gath Henkler, Yeah, Okay, Tom,
Speaker 5: Heinkel brings it up to My boyfriend tells them basically
Speaker 5: what happened to.
Speaker 6: The man that RJ was on a job, ran across
Speaker 6: that picking shit. That ran across and he had to
Speaker 6: be taken care of, meaning she was killed.
Speaker 7: Sue goes on to say that, according to Hinkle, Auj
Speaker 7: stumbled on a meth lab and tried to be a
Speaker 7: hero with slight variations. The story is repeated by Mike
Speaker 7: in a separate interview and then in second hand accounts
Speaker 7: from a handful of other informants that Hinkle and or
Speaker 7: one of his associates had Auj taken care of. According
Speaker 7: to Sue and Mike, Hinkle pantomimed what he meant by
Speaker 7: taking care of.
Speaker 6: He made the motion like this.
Speaker 1: He made a hand gesture like a gun with his
Speaker 1: finger out, and then opened his hand like he was dropped.
Speaker 7: The moment plays like a movie scene in my head.
Speaker 7: Meta clause is surrounded by a bloom of meth smoke
Speaker 7: and sharp shiny knives. He mentions the missing deputy with
Speaker 7: a knowing look. He draws his hand into a finger
Speaker 7: gun and then releases his fingers, displaying them out, And
Speaker 7: just like that, John A. J. Disappears down a mind
Speaker 7: shaft or some other hole out in the desert where
Speaker 7: people go to bury their secrets.
Speaker 2: We're back at the Devil's punch Bowl. And this time
Speaker 2: we've come for a hike. Oh I love these. This
Speaker 2: is where you write your name and the time that
Speaker 2: you leave, so that in case you go missing, people
Speaker 2: know that we should do that. So dat, Betsy and
Speaker 2: I write our names down on a sign and sheet
Speaker 2: at the main trailhead and enter the park.
Speaker 7: Why why are we doing Why are we doing this again?
Speaker 2: I honestly, I just really had to get eyes on
Speaker 2: the punch bowl. I am having a really hard time
Speaker 2: seeing how someone could set up a meth lab in
Speaker 2: La County Park.
Speaker 7: It just feels implausible to you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, it just seems like you would be
Speaker 2: kind of asking to get.
Speaker 7: Caught, not to mention, like meth labs are like not discreen, discreet.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, let's let's check it out.
Speaker 2: Let's check it out. As we start to descend down
Speaker 2: into the center of the punch bowl, Betsy loses her
Speaker 2: footing on the steep dusty trail. Okay, do you want
Speaker 2: me to go in front of you or hold your backpack.
Speaker 7: So you can break my fall? Yeah? Holding my backpack
Speaker 7: like I'm a child method is a working freak.
Speaker 2: Yeah, here, I got you. But we keep moving, snaking
Speaker 2: through the switchbacks in a slow zigzag motion.
Speaker 7: How hot do you think it is right now? So
Speaker 7: one hundred? Did it break one hundreds today?
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 2: It's definitely close. It's pushing one hundred for sure. Being
Speaker 2: out here, we realize this public park is much less
Speaker 2: public than most.
Speaker 7: It feels like we are on another planet and we
Speaker 7: are like the last living human beings. So I mean
Speaker 7: in terms of discreetness, like it's open, but it's also
Speaker 7: like out.
Speaker 1: In the middle of nowhere. It's on the fringes.
Speaker 2: We don't see any other hikers or rangers, and I
Speaker 2: find myself playing out the lab scenario in my head.
Speaker 2: You know, we know that Jonathan oj saw uh Classic
Speaker 2: kids on a field trip here, but then we also
Speaker 2: know that he went totally off trail and off roading,
Speaker 2: and to me, that would be the place where he
Speaker 2: could stumble upon the meth lab because there is all
Speaker 2: this land that is not accessible by trail. As we
Speaker 2: wind our way down the gorge with our phones on
Speaker 2: SOS mode, the idea of shady things happening out here
Speaker 2: seems like a real possibility. Hey, dude, I think I
Speaker 2: feel like maybe we shouldn't hit it. It's We're getting
Speaker 2: like pretty far out in the middle of nowhere here,
Speaker 2: and no one knows we're out here.
Speaker 7: I was thinking, I didn't want to say anything. I
Speaker 7: didn't want to be the weaning of the group. Let's
Speaker 7: les let go, Let's not beat around the bush, let's
Speaker 7: get out of the bush. The second Haley gives me
Speaker 7: an out, I pretty much take off running because I'm
Speaker 7: always thinking of worst case scenarios, falling off a cliff,
Speaker 7: getting attacked by a bear. Now I have to worry
Speaker 7: about stumbling on a meth lab. I don't have to,
Speaker 7: but I will, because that's just who I am. A
Speaker 7: firm believer in Murphy's law. That's why I didn't have
Speaker 7: any trouble buying into the whole meth lab scenario. What
Speaker 7: I want to know is how this area became a
Speaker 7: meth hotspot in the first place. We don't have stats
Speaker 7: specific to the Analov Valley, but here in the early
Speaker 7: two thousands, a large scale drug syndicate was busted. Nearly
Speaker 7: three hundred people were arrested, most classified as career criminals.
Speaker 7: I grew up in a rural area where there was
Speaker 7: a lot of drug activity hiding in plain sight, so
Speaker 7: I know the av's remoteness is a factor, but it
Speaker 7: turns out so are its big open skies. Since the
Speaker 7: nineteen thirties, the US government and military contractors have been
Speaker 7: testing planes, rockets, and explosives over the Annalov Valley. The
Speaker 7: Edwards Air Force Base was built, defense plants moved in,
Speaker 7: and it turned the area into an aeronautical frontier.
Speaker 4: In October nineteen forty seven, at Nila Desert Test Center
Speaker 4: in California, history is made by this aircraft and its pilot, Captain.
Speaker 7: Vieger, and it was over this part of the Anilo
Speaker 7: Valley where Air Force pilot Chuck Yaeger pushed his plane
Speaker 7: up to seven hundred miles per hour and broke the
Speaker 7: sound barrier.
Speaker 1: For at time a man has blown an airplane. Not
Speaker 1: there than the fiel of God.
Speaker 7: These military experiments over the AV are actually where the
Speaker 7: principle of Murphy's law comes from. Because these space cowboys
Speaker 7: got so banged up while pushing their bodies to the
Speaker 7: limit resisting the forces of gravity and physics that an
Speaker 7: engineer on the project, a guy named Edward Murphy, said
Speaker 7: something along the lines of anything that can go wrong
Speaker 7: will go wrong. It be long before things would start
Speaker 7: to go wrong across the Antelote Valley. The av had
Speaker 7: a legacy of record breaking speed, and its residents developed
Speaker 7: an appetite for the drug version of rocket fuel meth anthetamine.
Speaker 7: Meth just made life easier out there. Factory workers took
Speaker 7: the drug to power through long shifts at defense contractor plants.
Speaker 7: Construction workers used it to keep up with the area's
Speaker 7: housing boom, and commuters relied on meth to stay awake
Speaker 7: during the brutal drive to and from Los Angeles. But
Speaker 7: moderate matthews turned into a full blown epidemic in the
Speaker 7: early nineties as the Cold War came to an abrupt end.
Speaker 9: The aerospace cutback soon created a domino effect across the
Speaker 9: Antalope Valley, and the munce thriving economy began to evaporate, like.
Speaker 3: So much water in the hot desert sun.
Speaker 7: The meth trade became an easy option for unemployed residents
Speaker 7: to make some cash.
Speaker 8: At the time, the Anlope Valley was a sesspool. It
Speaker 8: was a desert. It was known for manufacturing met the amphetamine,
Speaker 8: so people were getting busted left and right.
Speaker 7: This is Chris Turk.
Speaker 8: My dad calls me Christine when I'm in trouble, but
Speaker 8: most couldn't call me Chris.
Speaker 7: Chris Turk is originally from Massachusetts, but she got stationed
Speaker 7: in the Antelope Valley while working for the US Army.
Speaker 7: She left the military after a few years, had a family,
Speaker 7: and then found work with a local attorney. Because when
Speaker 7: Matthew skyrocketed, so did the need for criminal defense. What
Speaker 7: was your position with him?
Speaker 8: At first it was just apparently ago, and then it
Speaker 8: was investigative. I would go out on the streets and
Speaker 8: I would talk to the people. I would talk to
Speaker 8: some cops. I would join Everett to defend the client.
Speaker 7: Turk discovered she had a real knack for it.
Speaker 8: All the lawyers started asking my boss if I could
Speaker 8: work on some of their cases.
Speaker 7: She was good at getting people to open up me.
Speaker 8: I was more on their level. They would all talk
Speaker 8: to me. My ex husband is the half brother of
Speaker 8: these other two guys that were involved in a lot
Speaker 8: of the drug scene.
Speaker 7: And she had a last name that carried weight with
Speaker 7: drug users.
Speaker 8: Even though it was your marriage. A lot of them
Speaker 8: would just assume I was part of that family. They
Speaker 8: were really easy to get information, sometimes too easy.
Speaker 7: The attorney Turk worked for had a meth habit of
Speaker 7: his own, so his law firm was well connected with
Speaker 7: the drug scene, and over time Turk learned a lot
Speaker 7: about the criminal ecosystem in the valley, who the big
Speaker 7: dealers were, where their laps were located, and which cops
Speaker 7: were making the busts. And she started to notice a
Speaker 7: trend that it was just the low level offenders who
Speaker 7: were getting picked up over and over again, but none
Speaker 7: of the heavyweights who were supplying the drugs, people like
Speaker 7: Tom Hinkle. Hinkle spent decades working in a manufacturing and
Speaker 7: testing site for explosives. Just a few years before Auj
Speaker 7: went missing, a woman was killed in the desert by
Speaker 7: a homemade bomb near Hinkle's house. According to LSD reports,
Speaker 7: tire tracks led directly from the explosion to Hinkle's place,
Speaker 7: yet he was never arrested or charged in the case.
Speaker 7: This would become a theme for Hinkle. He seemed untouchable.
Speaker 8: He would have been one of the first people I invested,
Speaker 8: yet he ever was ever that one's never even touched.
Speaker 7: By the late nineties, Hinkle had a day job working
Speaker 7: at a gas station a long pair Blossom Highway near
Speaker 7: the punch Bowl that's where he'd meet with a range
Speaker 7: of characters, including local sheriff's deputies.
Speaker 8: He became the guy on the hill, and he became idolized.
Speaker 7: And then something seemed to elevate Hinkle from a dealer
Speaker 7: to something more mythic.
Speaker 8: Everybody would call him God because he had that power.
Speaker 1: Before Aj, he was just Hinkle.
Speaker 4: Jay.
Speaker 8: He was God.
Speaker 7: He didn't start calling himself God until after the aj disappearance.
Speaker 1: Yep, yep.
Speaker 7: There are plenty of people with a God complex, but
Speaker 7: few are so brazen to actually call themselves God. So
Speaker 7: when Hinkle takes on the title, Turk is floored. And
Speaker 7: then she hears about Hinkle's possible connection to Auji's disappearance.
Speaker 7: She hears it from Sue and Mike, who were clients
Speaker 7: of the lawyer she worked for.
Speaker 6: Tom Hinkl's the one who told all the information about
Speaker 6: the cop who ran across something.
Speaker 4: He shouldn't have.
Speaker 6: Everybody called them God. He untouchable.
Speaker 2: Turk notifies the authorities because this isn't a low level
Speaker 2: drug offense, this is a possible homicide, and she goes
Speaker 2: straight to the top, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which
Speaker 2: has a field office in the area.
Speaker 8: And I talked to these two federal agents about what
Speaker 8: was going on.
Speaker 2: Turk offers to introduce the FBI agents to Mike, but
Speaker 2: she says the meeting didn't go so well because when
Speaker 2: she and one of the agents show up to talk
Speaker 2: to Mike, he's hitting a meth pipe.
Speaker 8: I mean, I'm talking a clouded smoke when we opened
Speaker 8: the door and the FBI agent and I just looked
Speaker 8: at each other.
Speaker 2: We reached out to the FBI to ask about their
Speaker 2: involvement in the AUJ case, but they give us their
Speaker 2: standard line that they can neither confirm nor deny the
Speaker 2: existence of an investigation. So we don't know what came
Speaker 2: of Turk's tip to the Feds, but the info eventually
Speaker 2: makes its way to homicide Detective Larry Brandenburg, who does
Speaker 2: follow up on it.
Speaker 1: Chris Turk was involved in the whole myth drug culture world,
Speaker 1: so I'd talked to her. If I could get information
Speaker 1: from her, I'll take it, you know, And if it's oh, crap,
Speaker 1: I just discarded.
Speaker 2: Determining the credibility of informant statements is a complicated art.
Speaker 2: There are plenty of reasons that Sue and Mike and
Speaker 2: others related to the Aujay case may be untrustworthy. Informants
Speaker 2: are often longtime drug users with fuzzy memories, lengthy criminal histories,
Speaker 2: and ulterior motives, so Brandenburg says you have to listen
Speaker 2: to them and suss out their claims accordingly.
Speaker 1: If you just just treaded everybody and you don't follow
Speaker 1: up on none of it, you're gonna buy anything out.
Speaker 2: Brandenburg was skeptical going into his interviews with Sue and Mike,
Speaker 2: but by the end he believed the couple because they
Speaker 2: had little to gain. Sue already had a release date
Speaker 2: for her burglary charge and a lot to lose. Brandenburg
Speaker 2: says it would be incredibly shortsighted for them to lie
Speaker 2: about a man who had a reputation for being a
Speaker 2: cold hearted killer.
Speaker 1: That's a pretty dangerous thing to do if you just
Speaker 1: make it up stories. I mean, that's really dumb. I
Speaker 1: was sure wouldn't consider doing it because if it gets
Speaker 1: back that you're snitching, or even if you're making this
Speaker 1: shit up, you're going to pay for it.
Speaker 2: He also says that Sue and Mike and others would
Speaker 2: go on to tell the story many times, and the
Speaker 2: stories were similar and remained largely consistent.
Speaker 1: The little details might change, but the main theme of
Speaker 1: it shouldn't if you're telling the truth.
Speaker 2: And one hyper specific detail that never varied was the
Speaker 2: description of Hinkle's hand gesture, the one where he made
Speaker 2: a finger gun. That detail sticks with Brandenburg because there'd
Speaker 2: been talk of a gunshot from another source. In June
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety eight, a witness reported to Missing Persons detectives
Speaker 2: that he heard the sound of a firearm discharged around
Speaker 2: sunset the night au Jay disappeared.
Speaker 1: We had talked about someone saying they heard a gunshot.
Speaker 2: Devil's punch Bowl Park ranger Jack Farley remembers hearing this
Speaker 2: detail during to search for auj You.
Speaker 4: Can't see the house from here, but it's like a
Speaker 4: half mile below the trail up there where the people
Speaker 4: lived that said they.
Speaker 2: Heard that, And paralegal Chris Turk says the gunshot was
Speaker 2: discussed around town.
Speaker 8: There was one shot like that, one witness said, because
Speaker 8: that's when I heard on the street.
Speaker 2: Brandenburg tries to track down the witness using the name
Speaker 2: listed in the Missing Person's book.
Speaker 1: That guy wouldn't talk to me. I tried more than
Speaker 1: once to go talk to him. I think he worked
Speaker 1: at the punch bowl or he lived right by it.
Speaker 1: So the gunshots heard near the punch bowl a single gunshot.
Speaker 2: These details keep adding up, and Brandenburg starts to see
Speaker 2: how the scenario might have played out. Auj was running
Speaker 2: past one of Hinkle's meth labs.
Speaker 1: He saw a bunch of streakers hanging out there, and
Speaker 1: then they're all sitting there with their hands in the
Speaker 1: cookie jard. Oh what the fuck we do now? Gee,
Speaker 1: we can't let this guy leave. He never left.
Speaker 2: Brandenburg decides it's time to send the information up the
Speaker 2: flagpole to the homicide captain. Tell him what he's hearing
Speaker 2: from informants. But the captain blows him off.
Speaker 1: Oh that's just tweaker talk. Tweaker talk, that's all it is.
Speaker 2: Brandenburg says that term tweaker talk was used to discredit
Speaker 2: informants like Sue and Mike and undermine the theory that
Speaker 2: Aujy was murdered.
Speaker 1: Well, tweakers do talks best e when they get high,
Speaker 1: they talk amongst each other. Yeah, some of it's embellis,
Speaker 1: some of it's changed. But if you had a main theme,
Speaker 1: it's keep getting repeated. There could be something to that.
Speaker 2: Tweaker talk is a term Chris Turk is also familiar
Speaker 2: with because it was used to discredit many of the
Speaker 2: clients she worked with. She doesn't deny that meth users
Speaker 2: are often sleep deprived and paranoid, but that doesn't mean
Speaker 2: they don't have valuable information, especially when it comes to
Speaker 2: a subject they know.
Speaker 8: The same tweakers that they said were not reliable. You
Speaker 8: couldn't get information from him, well, the same ones that
Speaker 8: they used information forwards to bust other people. So you
Speaker 8: can't listen to him on one hand and not listen
Speaker 8: to him on the other hand.
Speaker 2: When an informant provides leads that pan out for law enforcement,
Speaker 2: their status changes to a confidential, reliable informant, and one
Speaker 2: of the best ways for investigators to determine if these
Speaker 2: leads are legit is to keep investigating see if the
Speaker 2: intel can be corroborated.
Speaker 1: To me, that needs to be looked at real hard
Speaker 1: and seriously. Not Ah, she's a freaking tweaker. I don't
Speaker 1: believe the things she says, especially when it's already coming
Speaker 1: from some other sources.
Speaker 2: But Brandenburg says he couldn't really do that because his
Speaker 2: captain undermined him at every turn, called him names, and
Speaker 2: tried to strong arm him into folding his investigation.
Speaker 1: And I told him this bullshit. I don't agree with it.
Speaker 5: We heard from you.
Speaker 7: Why you're so passionate about it?
Speaker 2: Why do you think he had such reaction?
Speaker 1: I don't know. That's the question I can't answer.
Speaker 2: Brandenburg is taken aback by homicide Captain Frank Merryman's aggressive
Speaker 2: attempts to put the AUJ matter to bed, especially after
Speaker 2: he finds a note in the missing person's file from
Speaker 2: Merryman which shows that Captain may have had his own
Speaker 2: doubts about the case.
Speaker 1: I found a little posted when I was looking through
Speaker 1: the original file. When I first got it, yell will
Speaker 1: post it, and it was Frank's handwriting and his initials,
Speaker 1: and it said should this go to a murder team?
Speaker 2: To me, this feels like a no brainer. It should
Speaker 2: have gone to a murder team to thoroughly vet the tips,
Speaker 2: to prove or disprove them. That should have happened three
Speaker 2: days after Auj went missing, when the tips first started
Speaker 2: coming in. If not, then it should have happened as
Speaker 2: more and more informants came forward, and it definitely should
Speaker 2: have been investigated in May of nineteen ninety nine, when
Speaker 2: a large scale meth lab was discovered near the punch
Speaker 2: Bowl where AUJ disappeared.
Speaker 7: A few weeks into Detective Brandenburg's investigation, he gets a
Speaker 7: new lead from an LSD sergeant working narcotics in the
Speaker 7: Annealo Valley. He tells Brandenburg about a property they searched
Speaker 7: the year before, a meth lab that was located right
Speaker 7: down the road from the Devil's Punch Bowl.
Speaker 1: Okay, let me get him a barry to this, Matt.
Speaker 1: Here's the punch bowl right here. This is how close
Speaker 1: it was, and hinkled it right over here too.
Speaker 7: There was a meth lab near where AUJ disappeared. It
Speaker 7: wasn't in the punch Bowl technically, but it was close by,
Speaker 7: just two miles up the road that leads to the
Speaker 7: Punch Bowl parking lot.
Speaker 1: The searcht was served at Devil's punch Bowl Road, Para Blossom, California,
Speaker 1: a forty acre parcel land located immediately northwest of Devil's
Speaker 1: punch Bowl County Park. During the search warrant, a major
Speaker 1: myth ampatami lab was discovered.
Speaker 7: Brandenburg's reading the search warrant from May of nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 7: That's when the LASD and other law enforcement agencies busted
Speaker 7: the lab. Brandenburg connects it to the AUJ case in
Speaker 7: early two thousand and So were you the first person
Speaker 7: to make the connection between what some of these informants
Speaker 7: were reporting and the lab that was found near the
Speaker 7: punch Bowl?
Speaker 1: I think so, because I don't read any of it
Speaker 1: in these reports earlier on about that.
Speaker 7: For Brandenburg, this was outside conference that the informant statements
Speaker 7: weren't just.
Speaker 1: Tweak or talk.
Speaker 7: The lab was located down the road from the Devil's
Speaker 7: Punch Bowl, a straight shot from the park.
Speaker 1: But that's not all.
Speaker 7: It was owned by a good friend of Tom Hankles,
Speaker 7: a guy named Rick Carroll. Carroll operated the lab on
Speaker 7: his property and he let other people cook there. It
Speaker 7: was a kind of meth making co op and a
Speaker 7: hangout spot for all sorts of local drug users. The
Speaker 7: lab had already been dismantled by the time Brandenburg enters
Speaker 7: the scene, but he sets out to learn everything he
Speaker 7: can from reports. The day of the lab bust, about
Speaker 7: two dozen law enforcement officers fan out across the property.
Speaker 7: They're led by an LA County Sheriff's deputy who lives
Speaker 7: and works in Pair Blossom, where the punch bowl and
Speaker 7: the lab are located.
Speaker 1: Rick ingkles it was a resident deputy. I will sorry
Speaker 1: the area he lived in. He knew this area probably
Speaker 1: better than anybody.
Speaker 7: Deputy Angles also knows the players in the drug scene
Speaker 7: and how to navigate the desert terrain. So as he
Speaker 7: and others search the Carroll property, they discover an assortment
Speaker 7: of trailers, cars, and storage containers. Law enforcement uses the
Speaker 7: steel probe to check the ground for buried objects because
Speaker 7: meth users are known to get creative when hiding their stash.
Speaker 7: In this case, searchers find something much bigger. The probe
Speaker 7: strikes metal, and law enforcement uncovers a hatch that opens
Speaker 7: up into an underground room.
Speaker 1: It was extensive at underground tunnels. They had underground rooms,
Speaker 1: They had all the hardware, the glassware. These is a
Speaker 1: pretty big operation.
Speaker 7: There is all sorts of stuff down there, a propane stove, flasks,
Speaker 7: and telltale blood like stains created by red phosphorus, one
Speaker 7: of the major chemicals used to make meth. Something deputies
Speaker 7: didn't find was meth. It appears to have been cleared
Speaker 7: out before the raid, but the lab likely would have
Speaker 7: been active in nineteen ninety eight when Aujy disappeared.
Speaker 1: The lab equipment recovered was capable of producing hundreds of
Speaker 1: pounds of mess amfetamine. In addition, there was an operational
Speaker 1: back hole on the property also recovered as one shot
Speaker 1: got along with hundreds of additional pieces of evidence.
Speaker 7: And there was another notable discovery at the compound.
Speaker 1: The southeast portion of the meth lab, which have been
Speaker 1: on this side of it, drops right down into the
Speaker 1: punch bowl and that's where the shooting range was that
Speaker 1: they had, and they had silhouettes of cops at that
Speaker 1: shooting range. Can you say that again?
Speaker 7: There were silhouettes of cops that the people that were
Speaker 7: at this math lab would.
Speaker 1: Take shots at yeah, target practice, So these guys don't
Speaker 1: want like cops too much.
Speaker 2: Brandenburg wants to better understand the proximity of the lab
Speaker 2: to the punch bowl, something best seen from an aerial view,
Speaker 2: so he calls up a colleague who flies helicopters for
Speaker 2: the Sheriff's Department. He's a pilot from the Special Enforcement Bureau,
Speaker 2: the same bureau auj worked for. They take off and
Speaker 2: circle over the Carroll property.
Speaker 1: You see right over here is this property and you
Speaker 1: can see the outbuildings and the trailers where the meth
Speaker 1: lab was, and all these trails.
Speaker 2: Then the pilot makes an offhand comment about Auja that
Speaker 2: causes things to click into place.
Speaker 1: For Brandenburg, he goes, yeah, I used to run some
Speaker 1: of those trails right there with.
Speaker 7: Aujiy oh wow, So he knew some of the routes
Speaker 7: that he would take.
Speaker 2: So this lab was located right next to a trail
Speaker 2: that auj had run before, and it was just two
Speaker 2: miles from Raje's truck was discovered, which is almost the
Speaker 2: finish line in ultra marathon terms. At this point, a
Speaker 2: lot begins to gel for Brandenburg. He's more convinced than
Speaker 2: ever by what the informants have told him.
Speaker 1: All that stuff just started adding up all the time
Speaker 1: of the investigator. I tell people this, even younger guys,
Speaker 1: This cop stuff is not like TV. You go with
Speaker 1: what makes common sense. Everything looks like this. Well usually
Speaker 1: if it looks like that, that's what it is.
Speaker 2: So we go to see what it looks like for ourselves.
Speaker 2: As we approached the property where the Carroll lab was located,
Speaker 2: it looks a lot like I imagined it did back
Speaker 2: in nineteen ninety nine. It's sprawling, dotted with structures and
Speaker 2: shipping containers, and has a fence around the perimeter.
Speaker 7: Seeing how close we are to where Aujay's truck was found,
Speaker 7: and that there is like a little road here that
Speaker 7: leads up to the mountains, it certainly seems possible that
Speaker 7: he could have stumbled on this like as he was
Speaker 7: trying to return to the park.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that theory is starting to hold the more water
Speaker 2: to me. It's after we leave the property that we
Speaker 2: discover a new detail about the care Carrel lab that
Speaker 2: it's close to another key location, in this case, driving
Speaker 2: away from the Carroll property, we just happened to spot
Speaker 2: a mailbox with an address of someone we've been trying
Speaker 2: to reach for months. It turns out the witness who
Speaker 2: reported hearing a gun shot at sunset the day All
Speaker 2: Day went missing was Rick Carroll's closest neighbor. After coming
Speaker 2: forward with the information, this witness stopped cooperating with law enforcement.
Speaker 2: He won't return any of our calls either, and we
Speaker 2: can't door knock him because his house is behind a
Speaker 2: large security fence. But just seeing where he lived is
Speaker 2: helpful because his home is just about a half mile
Speaker 2: from the Carrol Lab in the direction of the punch bowl,
Speaker 2: and that would be well within earshot of a gun going.
Speaker 1: Off, which is Perry Mason.
Speaker 4: This shit.
Speaker 2: This changes my whole way of thinking about that theory.
Speaker 7: How had the Sheriff's department not made any of these
Speaker 7: connections before? For why when the Carol Lab was rated
Speaker 7: in nineteen ninety nine, didn't someone think, huh, this seems
Speaker 7: like a pretty big coincidence given all the rumors we've
Speaker 7: heard about auj being killed. And that brings us back
Speaker 7: to Murphy's law, which has come to mean that anything
Speaker 7: that can go wrong will, But it's important to note
Speaker 7: that's a slight mischaracterization of what space engineer Edward Murphy
Speaker 7: actually said about the flight tests over the Antelope Valley.
Speaker 7: What he said was, if there's anything they can do wrong,
Speaker 7: they will. It's a small but important difference. The engineer
Speaker 7: wasn't saying the world is powerless against the forces of
Speaker 7: chaos and disaster. He was saying that humans are error prone,
Speaker 7: and he said it as a way of explaining why
Speaker 7: organizations need to have rigorous safeguards to catch their mistakes
Speaker 7: due diligence, oversight, quality control so that the things that
Speaker 7: can go wrong don't. In the Sheriff's Department's handling of
Speaker 7: the AUJ case, it seems like a lot went wrong,
Speaker 7: a series of system wide failures and a breakdown of
Speaker 7: accountability with.
Speaker 8: The AUJ thing that was too much of the same
Speaker 8: thing being said, how many times do you have to
Speaker 8: share it and not investigate with There's something more going
Speaker 8: on here.
Speaker 7: Brandenburg keeps investigating, but it's hard working in a vacuum,
Speaker 7: and the Sheriff's Department isn't making things any easier for him.
Speaker 7: The detective pushes on, though, and he discovers Auj's disappearance
Speaker 7: may be connected to a bigger criminal enterprise, and as
Speaker 7: the scope of his investigation expands, so does the pool
Speaker 7: of suspects.
Speaker 1: So the more I looked, you know, the more I
Speaker 1: started document shit. It in a short time started snowballing,
Speaker 1: and then the DEA got involved to try to tackle
Speaker 1: this massive meth amphetamine problem in Animal Valley, you know,
Speaker 1: the mostly white bikers that were cooking this stuff.
Speaker 7: Next time on Valley of Shadows, the.
Speaker 1: Outlaw bikers were big out there. If you crossed them,
Speaker 1: there was a guaranteed death that was going to be murdered.
Speaker 1: She said that there was a guy in the Bottles
Speaker 1: motorcycle gang and she said he was involved in this
Speaker 1: burder for the deputy and that she had been shown
Speaker 1: where he was buried.
Speaker 3: A body was found out in the remote.
Speaker 4: Area, duct taped, bloodied. You could see it like that
Speaker 4: imprint of a boot, a motorcycle boot on his face.
Speaker 2: If you have any information or tips related to the
Speaker 2: disappearance of John Aujay, please call two one three two
Speaker 2: six two nine eight eight nine or email Shadows at
Speaker 2: Pushkin dot FM. Valley of Shadows is reported, written and
Speaker 2: produced by us Haley Fox and Betsy Sheppard. Our editor
Speaker 2: is Diane Hodson. Our executive producers are Jacob Smith and
Speaker 2: Alexandra Garreton. Original music by Jake Gorsky, Ray Lynch, Mike Jersich,
Speaker 2: and Hayden Gardner. Sound designed by Jake Gorsky, fact checking
Speaker 2: by Onica Robbins. Additional production support by Sonya girl Away
Speaker 2: and Our show art was designed by Sean Carney and
Speaker 2: Betsy Shepherd. Special thanks to Nick White for show art photography.
Speaker 2: Valley of Shadows is a production of Pushkin Industries. To
Speaker 2: find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 2: or wherever you listen to podcasts. From type to Fun,
Speaker 2: We're Haley and Betsy. See you next week.