Speaker 1: Push can.
Speaker 2: Hey listeners, Betsy Shepherd here, I'm dropping into your feed
Speaker 2: to bring you a preview of my new podcast, Valley
Speaker 2: of Shadows. It's about an LA County Sheriff's deputy named
Speaker 2: John Aujay, who went missing in the Majave Desert back
Speaker 2: in nineteen ninety eight. Nearly thirty years later. The Sheriff's
Speaker 2: department says that Auja's disappearance is still a mystery. The
Speaker 2: whistleblowers say the sheriff's department is covering up what happened
Speaker 2: to the deputy, that he was murdered in the desert,
Speaker 2: which is a place where meth labs, outlaw biker gangs,
Speaker 2: and dirty cops go unchecked. The show's got it all,
Speaker 2: and I think you're gonna dig it. Find a Valley
Speaker 2: of Shadows wherever you get your podcasts. Pushkin Plus subscribers
Speaker 2: can binge the entire season right now ad free. Sign
Speaker 2: up on the Valley of Shadows show page on Apple
Speaker 2: Podcasts or at pushkin dot Fm, slash Plus.
Speaker 3: This series includes content that may not be suitable for
Speaker 3: all listeners. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 1: So it's okay, yeah.
Speaker 4: I'll turn it down just a little bit because sometimes
Speaker 4: you get animated.
Speaker 5: I get pissed off, pissed off old cop.
Speaker 1: This pissed off old cop is Mike Bauer.
Speaker 6: Okay, my name is Mike Bauer, retired Captain LA Sheriff.
Speaker 6: I retired in two thousand and two. My last assignment
Speaker 6: was Major Crimes Bureau, Detective Division, LA Sheriff.
Speaker 2: Bower spent thirty three years climbing the ranks of the
Speaker 2: Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. And he looks the part
Speaker 2: of a retired captain. His white hair and mustache are
Speaker 2: neatly groomed, and his eyes are permanently fixed and a
Speaker 2: look that says, do not fuck up on my watch.
Speaker 2: And he's pissed off because of something that happened to
Speaker 2: one of his guys on his squad back.
Speaker 1: In the summer of nineteen ninety eight.
Speaker 2: June eleventh started off like a normal day in Los Angeles,
Speaker 2: June gloom and bad traffic.
Speaker 6: I got up early out of Long Beach and headed
Speaker 6: up the six ZHO five and into East LA.
Speaker 5: Our office in East LA.
Speaker 2: Bauer was doing paperwork when a call came into the
Speaker 2: front desk. The receptionist answered.
Speaker 6: Then she hung up and she comes down to get
Speaker 6: a cup of coffee across the hall and I said, hey,
Speaker 6: who was that. It was John Aujay.
Speaker 2: John Aj was a thirty eight year old canine cop
Speaker 2: and he was calling to inquire about an upcoming job assignment.
Speaker 6: I said, well, I've been trying to get hold of him,
Speaker 6: and she says, oh, well, maybe he'll call back.
Speaker 7: He never called back.
Speaker 2: John Aj was working for the unit Bower headed up
Speaker 2: at the time, the Special Enforcement Bureau or SEB for short.
Speaker 6: Which consists of seven or eight SWAT teams, and the
Speaker 6: SWAT teams were involved in tactical responses to high risk
Speaker 6: situations in the field.
Speaker 2: SEB handled things like active shooter situations, hostage negotiations, search
Speaker 2: and rescue. It was a job that attracted adrenaline junkies
Speaker 2: like Auj. He was an Army paratrooper and a survivalist,
Speaker 2: and those military skills, along with his buzz cut and
Speaker 2: square build, made him a shoe in for the Sheriff's Department.
Speaker 6: He was in the Army in Special Forces. He was
Speaker 6: working at the elite unit of the department. I have
Speaker 6: to call him a loaner, but he was an elite loaner.
Speaker 6: Because the guy was doing fifty mile runs. He was
Speaker 6: an animal.
Speaker 2: Auj got his kicks by going on long runs through
Speaker 2: California's backcountry. He go out deep into the wilderness to
Speaker 2: conquer the only obstacle course that still challenged him. And
Speaker 2: that's how Auja was spending his day off. On June eleventh,
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety eight, he woke up, put on his running
Speaker 2: gear and drove to one of his favorite parks, the
Speaker 2: Devil's Punch Bowl. It's a rugged canyon where the Angelus
Speaker 2: National Forest, the San Gabriel Mountains, and the Mojave Desert
Speaker 2: all converge. Auj entered the park just before noon, used
Speaker 2: a payphone to call into the sheriff's department, and then
Speaker 2: he took off running. He never listened to any music,
Speaker 2: just the sounds of nature as he jogged along a
Speaker 2: maze of switchbacks and up a nearly ten thousand foot mountain.
Speaker 2: By early evening, he looped back towards the parking lot,
Speaker 2: but as the sun began to set, the shadows of
Speaker 2: trees and rocks grew until night engulfed the park.
Speaker 6: That evening, I got a phone call saying that w
Speaker 6: Oj is missing, that he didn't come back to his
Speaker 6: vehicle and that they were going to start some more
Speaker 6: extensive searching for him.
Speaker 8: It's an all out manhunt for John Auj. Every search
Speaker 8: and rescue team in La County has been called in
Speaker 8: to help the thirty eight year old when hiking Thursday
Speaker 8: in a rugged section of the Angels National Forest known
Speaker 8: as Devil Punch Bowls Park. It's a beautiful but dangerous area,
Speaker 8: an area where it may be extremely difficult to find
Speaker 8: all Jay.
Speaker 1: It's a pretty unique situation.
Speaker 2: The Sheriff's department is called in to look for a
Speaker 2: missing hiker who's one of their own. So the search
Speaker 2: and rescue team sent out to look for Auj consists
Speaker 2: of his friends and colleagues.
Speaker 9: We took our teams out and deployed in two man
Speaker 9: teams over the edges of the trails, into the little
Speaker 9: nooks and crannies and the gullies that he could have
Speaker 9: slipped and fallen into.
Speaker 2: But searchers find no trace of Ajay. It was as
Speaker 2: if he just vanished into thin air. And now, nearly
Speaker 2: thirty years later, the deputy is still missing.
Speaker 6: I guess I'll open a box.
Speaker 2: All that remains from Auj's life is packed into five
Speaker 2: cardboard boxes. The items are wrapped in plastic and Bower
Speaker 2: wears gloves as he combs through them.
Speaker 10: This is John's work jacket, and it's an SEB jacket
Speaker 10: with his name embroidered on it, and Boss Goo his dog.
Speaker 2: Now Bower's preserving Auja's belongings for future developments in the case.
Speaker 10: Okay, so here's his running shoes with his name on
Speaker 10: the back.
Speaker 6: Those should have some.
Speaker 1: DNA in him.
Speaker 2: The artifacts also tell us who Auja was. There's a
Speaker 2: photocollage full of happy memories him and his high school
Speaker 2: sweetheart Dub on their wedding day, a birthday party for
Speaker 2: their daughter Chloe, who was just five when he disappeared,
Speaker 2: and puppy picks of Bosco Auj's department issued canine. And
Speaker 2: next to these snapshots of domestic life, there's a steel
Speaker 2: ballistics helmet intended to stop rifle rounds, trophies for marksmanship,
Speaker 2: army fatigues, you know, tough guy stuff. Auj moved at
Speaker 2: a fast clip, trying to balance the competing demands of
Speaker 2: home and work, but his life came to an abrupt
Speaker 2: and puzzling end.
Speaker 6: A death certificate says cause, a death, unknown manner, a
Speaker 6: death unknown no body.
Speaker 2: The deputy's body has never been found, which raises a
Speaker 2: lot of questions for Mike Bauer and a survivalist getting
Speaker 2: lost in the woods another big question mark. Over time,
Speaker 2: the miss of it all has turned into something else,
Speaker 2: deep and unsettling, suspicion about the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.
Speaker 6: The only law enforcement agency in this country that I
Speaker 6: know of, and I've looked around, who has a missing
Speaker 6: deputy sheriff and doesn't seem to care? What the hell happened?
Speaker 6: What's the answer? Who's motivated to find the answer?
Speaker 1: And that's my cue.
Speaker 2: When Mike Bouer first told me about au Jay, I
Speaker 2: thought an unsolved disappearance involving a cop, that's unusual. But
Speaker 2: when he started talking about the Sheriff's Department, his department,
Speaker 2: that's when I locked in. Because you'd expect the LA
Speaker 2: County Sheriff's Department to turn over every stone to find
Speaker 2: their guy. So the claim that the LASD may have
Speaker 2: an interest in not solving the case, now that's a story.
Speaker 2: So I called up my friend Hailey Fox like me,
Speaker 2: she's an investigative journalist, and she knows a lot about
Speaker 2: the sheriff's department because she's reported on it for many years.
Speaker 1: Hey, Betsy, Hey do.
Speaker 11: I'm good?
Speaker 3: I'm ready.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I go to do this.
Speaker 3: It's about time. I'm a little road t adventure all right,
Speaker 3: let's do it.
Speaker 2: We've teamed up on stories before and decided to get
Speaker 2: the band back together to finanswers about this missing deputy
Speaker 2: and to take on the largest sheriff's department in the country.
Speaker 12: There's a code of silence in law enforcement. You break
Speaker 12: that code of silence, you're done.
Speaker 1: Hey, if don't fucking kill a Copponberry, what they gonna
Speaker 1: do to me?
Speaker 6: It's an obstruction of justice of a very large scale.
Speaker 1: I'm Betsy Shepherd.
Speaker 3: I'm Haley Fowx, And this is Valley of Shadows, a
Speaker 3: show about crime and corruption in California's high Desert. Episode one,
Speaker 3: the Devil's Punch Bowl. Betsy and I are making the
Speaker 3: trek from downtown Los Angeles to the Anaelote Valley that's
Speaker 3: the desert area north of la where Deputy Auja disappeared.
Speaker 3: The drives about sixty miles, but takes an hour and
Speaker 3: a half to two hours because of the mountainous terrain.
Speaker 1: See you actually have to take We gotta go.
Speaker 3: North, Yeah, we're gonna go north, but this is La Dude.
Speaker 1: We gotta go south.
Speaker 3: One in south five north fourteen and then I think
Speaker 3: there's a one thirty eighth throat in there, but nothing's
Speaker 3: a street.
Speaker 1: Shod spoken like a true Agelino.
Speaker 3: I was born and raised in La County, Go Dodgers,
Speaker 3: but this part of it feels worlds away. The Antelope Valley,
Speaker 3: or the AV as it's sometimes called, is a three
Speaker 3: thousand square mile stretch of the Mojave, but this part
Speaker 3: of the high desert doesn't have the same allure and
Speaker 3: vibingess as places like Joshua Tree. Instead, the Avy is
Speaker 3: mostly empty space, dotted with defence plants, bedroom communities, and
Speaker 3: tumbleweed towns.
Speaker 1: So a lot of just like.
Speaker 2: Trailers kind of just parked out in the desert.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean power lines and scrub rush. Our story
Speaker 3: takes place in and around Pair Blossom, California. It has
Speaker 3: a population of fifteen hundred and it's where the Devil's
Speaker 3: Punch bowls located. Driving through it, Betsy gets a case
Speaker 3: of deja vu.
Speaker 1: He g had anxiety coming to places like this because
Speaker 1: it reminds me of like.
Speaker 4: A town that it grew up and there's just just
Speaker 4: like I feel the oppressive weight of boredom.
Speaker 11: Oh really.
Speaker 2: I moved to La several years ago from South Louisiana.
Speaker 2: Had never been to Anela Valley before, but it was
Speaker 2: immediately familiar to me. Because if you were to replace
Speaker 2: desert with swamp, this region would look a lot like
Speaker 2: the small town I'm from. It's rural and kind of
Speaker 2: run down. There's more landscape than real estate, lots of
Speaker 2: pickup trucks in town.
Speaker 1: Life seems like a thing of the past.
Speaker 5: We got.
Speaker 2: An abandoned motel, what's this, Oh like an abandoned old
Speaker 2: restaurant and wreck hall and people getting gas to presumably
Speaker 2: be all their way.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I think the three gas stations in
Speaker 3: a row tell the story.
Speaker 2: But the closer we get to the Devil's punch Bowl,
Speaker 2: where auj was last spotted, and other worldly landscape appears,
Speaker 2: full of spiky Joshua trees and sandstone columns.
Speaker 3: It's actually really beautiful out here.
Speaker 1: It's not expected to land.
Speaker 3: Are you looking at these huge rocks jutting out of
Speaker 3: the ground and like they're making all those crazy shadows.
Speaker 1: Seen anything like them?
Speaker 3: I haven't either.
Speaker 4: I feel like I've been an old Western movie, you know,
Speaker 4: like we're just got this like wide ethic landscape shots.
Speaker 3: Total endless horizons, totally endless horizons.
Speaker 1: I can see why John A j. Liked to come
Speaker 1: out here. It's pretty pretty, not big.
Speaker 3: Okay, we are pulling into the Devil's punch Bowl County
Speaker 3: Park parking lot.
Speaker 13: Here we are.
Speaker 3: We've come here to retrace John Aujay's last known steps
Speaker 3: and to meet with ranger Jack Farley. He was working
Speaker 3: on the punch Bowl the day the deputy disappeared.
Speaker 5: Hi are you?
Speaker 1: But are you Jack Farley?
Speaker 6: By chance?
Speaker 1: This is my reporting partner, Haley.
Speaker 3: Thank you for meeting us out here. Yes, Jock Farley's
Speaker 3: retired now, but for thirty five years he was assigned
Speaker 3: to work the punch Bowl.
Speaker 1: What a cool job.
Speaker 7: Great for me?
Speaker 11: Yeah, it was awesome, good job.
Speaker 3: It was Farley's job to keep an eye on things,
Speaker 3: to tend the grounds and patrol the area. So he
Speaker 3: noticed when AJ became a regular at the punch Bowl
Speaker 3: and he clocked Auj's regular parking space, the one closest
Speaker 3: to the trailhead.
Speaker 4: So I can.
Speaker 11: Remember seeing him sitting in the back of his truck
Speaker 11: when you get done with a run in the mountains.
Speaker 11: So when I'd walk out into the parking lot, I'd
Speaker 11: see him sitting out there and ask him about his run.
Speaker 3: Farley remembers that the day Auj disappeared, his white Ford
Speaker 3: F one to fifty truck was parked in that very
Speaker 3: same spot, surrounded on all sides by wilderness.
Speaker 4: One thing that impresses us so much about this area
Speaker 4: is that you have a desert landscape on one side,
Speaker 4: you have a mountain, it's in forests on the other,
Speaker 4: and then in between it's these really cool rock formations.
Speaker 11: Right, it's all uplifted from earthquake activity. Oh wow, that's
Speaker 11: a punch bowl fault and that runs parallel with the mountains.
Speaker 11: And then when you came up to hear you cross
Speaker 11: the San Andreas Fault, which of course the big one
Speaker 11: that runs through California, several faults in the area. It
Speaker 11: took all this sand that was laid down flat by
Speaker 11: streams and tilted up into vertical relief.
Speaker 3: And it creates a bowl shape.
Speaker 11: You can see a definite bowl shape coming around like
Speaker 11: this so that's where it got the punch bowl name.
Speaker 3: We're not totally sure about the devil part of it, though,
Speaker 3: according to local lore, early homesteaders saw grinning devil in
Speaker 3: the rock formations. We didn't see Satan in the rock face,
Speaker 3: but we did see something else thanks to a county
Speaker 3: park employee named Dave Numar.
Speaker 1: See the shadow ends.
Speaker 6: There's that big rock kind of all by itself.
Speaker 4: If you look, it's like a forehead is facing us
Speaker 4: and there's a nose pointing street.
Speaker 1: It looks like George Washington.
Speaker 14: Yeah, it's a natural not rest more cool.
Speaker 5: So there's all kinds of faces out here because it's like,
Speaker 5: oh if our brains are programmed to see patterns.
Speaker 3: Pattern recognition is why we see gods and goddesses in
Speaker 3: the stars and the man in the moon. It's also
Speaker 3: a key part of criminal investigations, a way to turn
Speaker 3: information into a story. And that's why we've come to
Speaker 3: the Devil's Punch Bowl to see if we can make
Speaker 3: sense of what happened on June eleventh, nineteen ninety eight.
Speaker 3: So we pull out a map we printed from the internet.
Speaker 3: Because we're prepared journalists and elder millennials and we present
Speaker 3: it to Ranger Farland, let me show you what.
Speaker 1: It looks like.
Speaker 11: Yeah, line will definitely.
Speaker 3: Be definitely get us lost in the wilderness. Farley proves
Speaker 3: his outdoor prowess by whipping out some real maps of
Speaker 3: the area to help orient us to our surroundings.
Speaker 13: Okay, here's the Devil's Okay, and there's Burkhart Trail right there,
Speaker 13: goes over toward Devil's Chairs, so that'd be just to
Speaker 13: the east, goes to South Fork.
Speaker 3: One witness reported seeing Auj near the picnic tables at
Speaker 3: the main trailhead sometime before noon. This witness was a
Speaker 3: local teacher there on a field trip with a bunch
Speaker 3: of elementary school kids. Auj stopped to talk to him.
Speaker 3: He pointed to a jagon mountain in the distance, Mount
Speaker 3: Baden Powell, and said that's where he was headed.
Speaker 11: So the high mountain behind the telephone pole over there, Yeah,
Speaker 11: that's Baden Powell and that's where he would go sometimes.
Speaker 3: How tall is the mountain?
Speaker 11: Jeez, that is one of the higher ones. Let me
Speaker 11: think ten ten, I mean in this range.
Speaker 1: And he would run from here to that mountain all
Speaker 1: the way over there and then.
Speaker 11: Run up it. Yeah, he'd run over there and then
Speaker 11: they're switchbacks all the way to the top of that mountain.
Speaker 3: Aujy was spotted again later in the day, when multiple
Speaker 3: witnesses say they saw him jogging through a campground just
Speaker 3: north of the mountain in the direction of the punch
Speaker 3: Bowl parking lot. But when Farley left his post at
Speaker 3: five PM, Auj's truck was still parked in the lot,
Speaker 3: and it stayed parked there as the evening bloomed over
Speaker 3: the desert, and then close to midnight, Aujy's wife called
Speaker 3: the sheriff's station to report him missing.
Speaker 2: As June eleventh, nineteen ninety eight years It's end, Debbie
Speaker 2: auj becomes increasingly panicked because her husband, Deputy John A.
Speaker 2: J told her he'd be home around dark and by
Speaker 2: now he's several hours late. So she dials up one
Speaker 2: of the share of stations where Auja worked.
Speaker 15: The call comes into the desk and it's from Debbie
Speaker 15: and it says, hey, my husband, who's a deputy, he
Speaker 15: went for a run and he didn't come home.
Speaker 2: Vince Burton was a sergeant in the Antelope Valley. He
Speaker 2: was also Aujay's colleague and friend, so he gets on
Speaker 2: the phone with Debbie.
Speaker 15: She was just upset.
Speaker 7: She was crying. She was obviously very concerned.
Speaker 15: I just I said, okay, Debbie, we're sending people up there,
Speaker 15: you know, keep you posted.
Speaker 2: Patrol deputies high tail it to the punch bowl where
Speaker 2: they find Aujay's truck.
Speaker 1: But no, they think maybe.
Speaker 2: He got injured, slipped and fell for how to run
Speaker 2: in with some wildlife. So Burton dispatches Search and Rescue
Speaker 2: to the site and he calls in their coordinator, Dave Soer,
Speaker 2: to discuss Auj's likely route.
Speaker 15: And Dave comes in and we pull up a map
Speaker 15: of the area. And I told him at that time,
Speaker 15: I said, you know, John's a runner, and he goes, yeah,
Speaker 15: and I said, no, he's a long distance runner. He's
Speaker 15: an ultra marathoner. He's like what.
Speaker 2: Ultra marathoners are running extremists who power through long distances.
Speaker 2: In fact, Auj was scheduled to compete in a one
Speaker 2: hundred mile run the week after he went missing, so
Speaker 2: responders have a hard time wrapping their heads around the
Speaker 2: scale of the search.
Speaker 7: I gave him the best information I could give him.
Speaker 7: You know, don't start your grid pattern so small.
Speaker 2: This is Randy Meggerdley. He was a patrol deputy for
Speaker 2: the Share Department and one of Auj's running buddies. He
Speaker 2: reiterates to the command post that Auj was a beast.
Speaker 7: You're running goat trails is basically what I categorized them as.
Speaker 1: What do you mean by that goat trails?
Speaker 7: Well, they're just megshift trails. Sometimes they'll be covered with snow,
Speaker 7: sometimes they'll be covered with mud, crossing rivers. I mean,
Speaker 7: it's crazy what kind of stuff that we were doing.
Speaker 7: There was one that we did. It was hand over
Speaker 7: foot trying to get up this mountain.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: And so part of the activity was figuring out how
Speaker 2: to get to.
Speaker 1: The end of it.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and one piece.
Speaker 2: Hearing Meggerdy talk about ultra marathoners, it sounds like they
Speaker 2: have no off switch. So maybe Auj just overdid it.
Speaker 7: Your brain does some wonky stuff when you're dehydrated, and
Speaker 7: they thought maybe he got on a trail and he
Speaker 7: was doing the forest gump, just kept running.
Speaker 2: That's a theory that Auj was doing the forest gump
Speaker 2: and just kept running and got himself into a tailspin
Speaker 2: of dehydration. Responders take note and fan out across the
Speaker 2: search grid.
Speaker 11: I was nice to him. I said, do you know
Speaker 11: I know the area pretty well?
Speaker 1: If you guys want help, Ranger Jack Farley again, the.
Speaker 11: Guy goes, no, we're search and rescue. We pretty much
Speaker 11: know what we're doing, you know. So I go okay, okay.
Speaker 2: But it doesn't take long for the pros realize they're
Speaker 2: in over their heads.
Speaker 11: So then they're going, hey, are you the guy that
Speaker 11: knows the area? You know, maybe you could give us
Speaker 11: a little help.
Speaker 2: So Farley leads a few groups of deputies and bloodhounds
Speaker 2: down the local trails.
Speaker 11: At one time thought they caught a scent and it
Speaker 11: went up on the trail going toward the Burckhart Trail,
Speaker 11: And we had talked about someone saying they heard a gunshot.
Speaker 11: You can't see the house from here, but it's like
Speaker 11: a half mile below the trail up there where the
Speaker 11: people lived that said.
Speaker 2: They heard that the dogs pick up a scent, possibly Aujay's,
Speaker 2: on a trail that's near a local resident. That guy
Speaker 2: reported to searchers that he heard a single gunshot at
Speaker 2: sunset the day Auja vanished. It's a detail the Sheriff's
Speaker 2: Department registers as a potential clue.
Speaker 11: So I took a group of deputies over there and
Speaker 11: we went that really rugged, wooded canyon.
Speaker 2: They didn't find anything, but searchers do spot some footprints
Speaker 2: on the mountain where Auj told people he was going.
Speaker 2: So Aujay's captain, Mike Bauer, takes to the skies to
Speaker 2: see where they lead.
Speaker 6: And that was the first time I ever stepped out
Speaker 6: of a huge helicopter on the side of a mountain
Speaker 6: with one skid touching, And then that helicopter flew off
Speaker 6: while we examined the openings the Big Horn Mine to
Speaker 6: see whether or not it had been broken into.
Speaker 2: Corn is a mine on top of the mountain leftover
Speaker 2: from the gold rush days. Its entrance has been welded
Speaker 2: shut to keep out hikers, and when the helicopter lands,
Speaker 2: nineties action movie style Bowers crew finds no signs of
Speaker 2: a break in. Auj's reported missing late Thursday night.
Speaker 1: By the end of the.
Speaker 2: Day Sunday, the Sheriff's department kicks things into high gear.
Speaker 2: They call in the US Army and Air Force along
Speaker 2: with the LASD heavy hitters. It's a specialized squad called
Speaker 2: Emergency Services Detail or ESD.
Speaker 5: They do search and rescue, underwater search and recovery, and
Speaker 5: they support the special weapons team with medical skills.
Speaker 2: Dave Rathbin was one of the ESD members sent out
Speaker 2: to search for Auj.
Speaker 5: And the adrenaline that you get from ESD is different
Speaker 5: from any other adrenaline.
Speaker 2: ESD deputies are equipped to handle all types of a
Speaker 2: emergency scenarios. But it wasn't just the rocky ledges and
Speaker 2: wild animals they.
Speaker 1: Had to worry about here.
Speaker 2: The area was full of all kinds of criminal activity.
Speaker 5: One of the things they told our search teams on
Speaker 5: day one was John may have stumbled into a meth
Speaker 5: lab by accident. So that was told to us when
Speaker 5: we were out searching. And the reason they told us
Speaker 5: is they recommend that we take weapons.
Speaker 2: Rathman and his team of searchers come to the punch
Speaker 2: Bowl armed and ready for action because maybe Auj isn't
Speaker 2: lost or injured or running for the hills. Maybe he's
Speaker 2: the victim of foul play. The command post doesn't expand
Speaker 2: on why they thought Aj may have been taken out
Speaker 2: by meth related violence, but to Rathbun, this theory doesn't
Speaker 2: sound too far fetched because the Anelo Valley is isolated
Speaker 2: outlawsh and on account of its size, difficult to police.
Speaker 5: There are a lot of people who just don't want
Speaker 5: to be around other human beings out there, which makes
Speaker 5: them sometimes dangerous. There's people cooking meth.
Speaker 14: Ah.
Speaker 5: It was a little bit like the Old West in
Speaker 5: a way. I mean, this is a very unusual, strange place.
Speaker 2: And remember that abandoned mind searcher scoped out. Well, it
Speaker 2: turns out they're everywhere and they are a prime location
Speaker 2: for body dumping.
Speaker 5: One of the things ESD did was recover dead bodies
Speaker 5: from minds.
Speaker 2: And it wasn't just the mines. Corpses turn up all
Speaker 2: over these parts.
Speaker 5: You know, if all the dead bodies that were up
Speaker 5: there from being deliberately disposed of, stood up and once
Speaker 5: they'd be shoulder to shoulder.
Speaker 2: It's a chilling image of the area's darker side. AJ
Speaker 2: would jog from the Devil's Punch Bowl into the Angelus
Speaker 2: National Forest, which has been called the most dangerous national
Speaker 2: forest in America. Around the time of Auj's disappearance, it's
Speaker 2: estimated that two to three dozen corpses turned up in
Speaker 2: the forest every year, and those were just the ones
Speaker 2: that were found. So Rathman understands the danger he faces,
Speaker 2: but pushes on. In search of footprints, you have to.
Speaker 5: Look at the ground and look at bushes that have
Speaker 5: been pushed in. We walked and walked, and walked and walked,
Speaker 5: and walked and walked.
Speaker 3: The search is taxing for Rathban physically and emotionally, because
Speaker 3: he and Auj were friends and back in the early
Speaker 3: nineties they were even partners.
Speaker 5: If it was me that needed cover, he'd be there.
Speaker 5: Didn't even think about it. Someone you could definitely depend on.
Speaker 3: Rathban and Auj spent a lot of time driving around together,
Speaker 3: but they didn't sit around riffing like partners in a
Speaker 3: Buddy Coock movie.
Speaker 5: He was laconic, didn't have a lot to say unless
Speaker 5: you worked on him, and he was always kind of
Speaker 5: severe serious.
Speaker 3: Auj was hardly two dimensional, though he used his dead
Speaker 3: pan personality to mess with people.
Speaker 5: He had this secret sense of humor, but it was
Speaker 5: really hard to tell which CARDI was playing, the funny
Speaker 5: card or the I'm John and I'm dead serious card.
Speaker 3: One time, Rathbin and Auj had to chase down a suspect.
Speaker 3: Rathbn was driving and he ends up reversing down a
Speaker 3: one way street. They got the guy, but Auj looked.
Speaker 5: Pissed, and he added that Dave, I need to talk
Speaker 5: to you.
Speaker 3: Rathven's gotten pretty good and impersonating John Auj's baritone voice,
Speaker 3: he says he sounded a lot like Lurch from the
Speaker 3: Adams family.
Speaker 5: What you just did was a violent in California state law,
Speaker 5: and if you do something like that again, I'll have
Speaker 5: to write you up.
Speaker 2: John.
Speaker 5: We were chasing a suspect, and we are law enforcement
Speaker 5: officers and so we get exemptions during those things that
Speaker 5: may be true, but it was illegal. Is this John
Speaker 5: being funny? You would not know, and he will never
Speaker 5: let you know.
Speaker 3: Auj was hard to read. In fact, there's even confusion
Speaker 3: over the pronunciation of his last name. His family says Oj,
Speaker 3: but to his friends.
Speaker 5: It was Auj, and he never corrected us. And he's
Speaker 5: not very bashful.
Speaker 3: We'll never know why he didn't tell people how to
Speaker 3: pronounce his name, but it seems fitting for someone who
Speaker 3: remains a mystery to so many. Auj was an enigma
Speaker 3: to just about everyone around him, so when he disappeared,
Speaker 3: he became an easy target for conspiracy theories. Stories begin
Speaker 3: to circulate that Auj's alive and well living in Alaska.
Speaker 3: Others say Mexico. Some say he was recruited by a
Speaker 3: mercenary group or join the CIA. These theories were fueled
Speaker 3: by weird comments Auj had made to friends like Dave Rathbun.
Speaker 5: Dave, Yes, you guys think you can find people with
Speaker 5: your searches, and you think you're pretty good at it. Right.
Speaker 5: I could go on the mountains and you'd never find me.
Speaker 5: And I said, there are people who want to be
Speaker 5: found that we can't find. So I'm not really impressed
Speaker 5: with your with your declaration there. If you don't want
Speaker 5: to be found, I oh, pretty sure I wouldn't be
Speaker 5: able to find you.
Speaker 14: So I agree.
Speaker 3: And of course that conversation takes on extra meaning a
Speaker 3: searchers keep coming up empty handed.
Speaker 5: I participated in that search until my feet were bloody,
Speaker 5: as did several of my peers. But day six they said, well,
Speaker 5: shut it down. What do you mean shut it down?
Speaker 5: Who said that? Who gave that order and shut the
Speaker 5: thing down? What are you talking about?
Speaker 3: Day six, the Sheriff's department folds the search after six
Speaker 3: days and gives a statement to the press Sergeant Sower,
Speaker 3: one of the deputies overseeing the operation, says, quote, a
Speaker 3: good analogy would be someone coming up to you and
Speaker 3: giving you two to three pieces of a five hundred
Speaker 3: piece puzzle and asking you to guess what the picture is.
Speaker 3: Throw into that a few pieces of an entirely different puzzle,
Speaker 3: and that is what we work with. We might never
Speaker 3: get it right.
Speaker 1: End quote.
Speaker 5: You want to trust the department that they're doing the
Speaker 5: right thing, But no one asked us if we should
Speaker 5: shut it down. If I'm the search and rescue guy,
Speaker 5: and my partners are search and rescue guys, and the
Speaker 5: helicopter pilots have been on hundreds of searches, why are
Speaker 5: we asking them what they think and their input.
Speaker 3: Rathmin says searches for missing hikers typically last seven to
Speaker 3: fourteen days, depending on the viability of the person. Auj
Speaker 3: was not your typical hiker, and given his personal and
Speaker 3: professional connection to the Sheriff's Department, it seems like the
Speaker 3: LASD would go the extra mile to find it.
Speaker 5: So it's six days you cancel a search for somebody
Speaker 5: who can run fifty or one hundred miles in the
Speaker 5: wilderness really knows the wilderness is good or better than
Speaker 5: anybody in ESD. They've set it down. Why are you
Speaker 5: shutting it down?
Speaker 3: The Sheriff's Department tells the public that Auj disappeared without
Speaker 3: a trace and that they're ending the search because they're
Speaker 3: just spinning their wheels. But behind the scenes, they're telling
Speaker 3: a very different story.
Speaker 5: Well. They say that they decided he committed suicide.
Speaker 2: Internal LASD reports claimed that Auj was distraught over his
Speaker 2: failing marriage and took his own life in the punch bowl.
Speaker 2: That gunshot the area resident heard that could have been
Speaker 2: the sound of Auj just putting an end to it all.
Speaker 2: But the Sheriff's Department makes that determination without a body.
Speaker 2: They don't find any remains, blood, bullets, or a suicide note.
Speaker 1: Nothing.
Speaker 2: The only thing they think they may have found of
Speaker 2: Aujay's was an energy bar wrapper left on one of
Speaker 2: the trails. From what we can tell, there's not a
Speaker 2: lot pointing to suicide, so we reach out to Aujay's
Speaker 2: colleagues and friends to get their thoughts.
Speaker 14: He was obviously down, he was obviously upset, but was
Speaker 14: it enough to commit suicide.
Speaker 2: Sergeant Vince Burden is still on the fence on the
Speaker 2: one hand, a Jay did appear torn up over his
Speaker 2: marital problems. On the other he seemed to be coping.
Speaker 14: Would you be telling me about your ultra marathon if
Speaker 14: you were just going to end it all? Would you
Speaker 14: even be planning to go run at the punch Bowl,
Speaker 14: which is an ugly area anyway?
Speaker 2: For fact checking purposes, we want to make clear the
Speaker 2: punch Bowl is not ugly.
Speaker 14: But go on, Vince, None of that made sense to me.
Speaker 14: With the suicide.
Speaker 2: Fraday's running buddy, Randy Meggerdley, there's no question.
Speaker 7: Plain and simple. I think he killed himself. That's the
Speaker 7: only way I can explain, because he.
Speaker 2: Says Aujay was acting strangely, even more strangely than usual
Speaker 2: in the weeks before his disappearance.
Speaker 7: He says, you know, there's a bunch of caves and
Speaker 7: stuff out here, you can very much disappear I think
Speaker 7: was the word that he used, and nobody would ever
Speaker 7: find yet.
Speaker 2: Auj said similar things to Dave Rathbin, but he didn't
Speaker 2: put a lot of stock into any of the statements
Speaker 2: because he says Aujay is just a weird guy.
Speaker 5: Our unit was next to a big giant duck pond,
Speaker 5: and one of the ways we used to make jokes
Speaker 5: about each other is kind of like, where do you
Speaker 5: fit in the in the duck pond? John was an
Speaker 5: I don't malign him, but he was one of the
Speaker 5: oddest ducks in the pond, which is good, right, you
Speaker 5: need him, you don't want everybody swim in the.
Speaker 2: Same Initially, Rathbin was open to the possibility of suicide,
Speaker 2: but he's become increasingly skeptical over time because if Aja
Speaker 2: had killed himself, he thinks his body or some trace
Speaker 2: of him would have turned up by now. So Auji's
Speaker 2: colleagues are divided on what happened to him. It's kind
Speaker 2: of like those faces seen in the rocks at the
Speaker 2: Devil's punch Bowl. Same details, but interpreted in different ways.
Speaker 2: And that makes sense because we feel conflicted about it too.
Speaker 2: Aujay did say some eerie things about disappearing, but this
Speaker 2: disappearing act would be pretty hard to pull off. I mean,
Speaker 2: how could he have buried himself and stay buried for
Speaker 2: almost three decades. Rathmin asked the Sheriff's department to explain
Speaker 2: that one.
Speaker 5: They said, well, we think he might have sat on
Speaker 5: the edge of one of those minds and blown himself
Speaker 5: into the mind figure. Okay, we are really stretching now
Speaker 5: for an explanation as to why we can't find him.
Speaker 6: I didn't accept it. Just common sense told me you
Speaker 6: probably ought to see whether there's any evidence of self.
Speaker 3: Infliction, pissed off Old Capp. Mike Bauer is evangelical in
Speaker 3: his belief that the suicide theory bullshit, because he says
Speaker 3: the Sheriff's Department didn't arrive at this conclusion, they led
Speaker 3: with it, and that poisoned the investigation from the start.
Speaker 3: Bower says that as early as day three, an LASD
Speaker 3: official was pushing the suicide narrative during search team briefings.
Speaker 3: To Bauer, this was equivalent to telling searchers to let up.
Speaker 6: I took that person outside, and I said, what and
Speaker 6: the hell did you say that for? How could you
Speaker 6: possibly know that at this point? How could you possibly
Speaker 6: discourage them to search for somebody that worked for you?
Speaker 3: The Sheriff's Department was even sharing this theory with the press.
Speaker 9: We haven't ruled out the possibility of suicide, but we
Speaker 9: don't have any evidence to support that that's what he
Speaker 9: came here to do.
Speaker 3: Bower thinks it's irresponsible to promote the suicide theory without
Speaker 3: a high degree of certainty, so he prodded the department
Speaker 3: to keep investigating.
Speaker 6: I kept contacting homicide and saying, something's wrong.
Speaker 5: I'm telling you there's a problem.
Speaker 3: But he says, the apartment ignored the case to such
Speaker 3: an extent. But he began to question their motives.
Speaker 6: Nobody was in charge of it, and nobody wanted any
Speaker 6: of it once they saw how stinky it was getting.
Speaker 2: Randy meggerdly represents the other end of the spectrum, so
Speaker 2: we ask him what he thinks about the possibility of
Speaker 2: foul play.
Speaker 7: I referred to myself as a mushroom. They just feed
Speaker 7: me a little bit of poop every once in a while.
Speaker 7: I wasn't in the know on that whole thing.
Speaker 1: I've never heard the mushroom poop batafore before.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, oh, you seed you a little bit of poop,
Speaker 7: et you grow a little bit.
Speaker 2: At first, the mushroom poop analogy went way over my head.
Speaker 2: It sounded like a Southern expression. My mom just forgot
Speaker 2: to teach me.
Speaker 1: But then it clicked.
Speaker 2: While I was watching The Departed, the Martin Score Seats movie,
Speaker 2: about corruption within the Boston Police Department.
Speaker 12: My theory, Unfeeds is they're like mushrooms, feed him shit
Speaker 12: and keep them in the dock.
Speaker 2: I think what Megerdley is saying is that he doesn't
Speaker 2: ask a lot of questions because he prefers to be
Speaker 2: kept in the dark about things that don't concern him
Speaker 2: and who can really blame him? I mean, law enforcement
Speaker 2: agencies are not exactly known for their culture of transparency.
Speaker 5: That file. You'd have to get special, special permission to
Speaker 5: touch that file.
Speaker 2: Dave Rathman, Auj's former partner, says, the Sheriff's department is
Speaker 2: unusually protective of the AUJ case file, and they.
Speaker 5: Don't even like to hear you talking about it. Well,
Speaker 5: to me, that's what you would call a red flag.
Speaker 2: So Rathman asked his buddy, a retired detective working cold
Speaker 2: cases for the Sheriff's apartment to review the AUJ case.
Speaker 5: Could you maybe grab that case file? And he went,
Speaker 5: oh no. I said, what do you mean, Oh no,
Speaker 5: Why wouldn't you want to take a look at it?
Speaker 5: He said, no, that's a hot potato. No one's allowed
Speaker 5: to touch that. If I start poking around that case
Speaker 5: they'd let me go. I said, well, that's interesting. Why
Speaker 5: it's a suicide. He said, I don't know. I just
Speaker 5: know that that case can't be touched.
Speaker 2: Those red flags are another reason Rappit and others just
Speaker 2: can't get behind the party line.
Speaker 5: As my father would say, God bless him. There's some
Speaker 5: rotten in the woodpile and it stinks and I can
Speaker 5: smell it, and.
Speaker 1: That brings us back to the poop mushroom.
Speaker 2: It might thrive in darkness, but to me, that's not
Speaker 2: an ideal environment for policing. I mean, the whole concept
Speaker 2: behind law enforcement is it watchful eyed, deter crime. Right
Speaker 2: who is watching the police? There's very little oversight of
Speaker 2: law enforcement agencies, and it's hard to hold them accountable
Speaker 2: since they control the collection and release of information about
Speaker 2: internal problems.
Speaker 6: The philosophy of the Sheriff's department is to hide it,
Speaker 6: and the philosophy of government in a lot of respects
Speaker 6: is that way. Now, with the terrible way they handle
Speaker 6: public records requests and stuff, they just basically stonewall you.
Speaker 6: They gave you the middle finger. If you're asking for
Speaker 6: something that the public has a right to know.
Speaker 3: Tell me about it. Bauer. We tried with those public
Speaker 3: records requests and got the proverbial middle finger. Without access
Speaker 3: to the information, it's hard for us to know how
Speaker 3: the Sheriff's department handled the Auj case, and we'd remain
Speaker 3: in the dark if it weren't for Mike Bauer and
Speaker 3: other deputies coming forward. Bauer retired in two thousand and
Speaker 3: two and has spent the better part of his retirement
Speaker 3: investigating Auj's disappearance, and he's uncovered what looks like some
Speaker 3: pretty damning information about the Sheriff's department.
Speaker 5: They lied to me.
Speaker 16: They lied to me as a fucking captain of the
Speaker 16: fucking Sheriff's department with thirty three years on the job.
Speaker 16: They fucking lie to me while I'm in charge of
Speaker 16: Sheriff's intelligence. They're fucking lying to me about what they're
Speaker 16: doing at homicide to shut this thing up.
Speaker 6: They don't want me involved in it.
Speaker 16: Oh imagine that's how fancy that is.
Speaker 3: We know that law enforcement has its problems, but they're
Speaker 3: not usually laid out for us by dyed in the
Speaker 3: wool cops, people who know this world from the inside
Speaker 3: and can show us where the bodies are buried. Figuratively speaking,
Speaker 3: we tell Bauer, we want to do a deep dive
Speaker 3: on the Aujay case, beginning with his investigation.
Speaker 6: You guys have stumbled into a cluster of shit.
Speaker 3: But he's not as encouraging as we expect him to be,
Speaker 3: and for good reason.
Speaker 2: Any advice for us while looking into this disappearance.
Speaker 6: I wouldn't do it alone. In the event somebody did
Speaker 6: decide that you were getting too close to something, you
Speaker 6: will not be found killed. You will simply disappear.
Speaker 3: This season on Valley of Shadows.
Speaker 5: Early on, I let the suicide theory sit at fifty
Speaker 5: to fifty. As I've learned more and more, I'm at
Speaker 5: about murder five to ten percent suicide.
Speaker 1: They ruler around the drug scene, was that a deputy
Speaker 1: stumbled onto something he shouldn't have and he was taken
Speaker 1: care of. I'm here, it's shit on the street minute.
Speaker 5: I he didn't kid suicide, he was murdered.
Speaker 1: I'm here for more than one person.
Speaker 12: And I started hearing some rumors that there.
Speaker 15: Was and yet there's no indication that gun was ever
Speaker 15: booked into evidence.
Speaker 12: If you're at it or they thought you were gonna rat,
Speaker 12: there wasn't. Hey don't do that ever again, you're done.
Speaker 12: They got rid of you. So that's where the murders
Speaker 12: came in.
Speaker 8: He was describing with his hands and his arms and
Speaker 8: his whole body where this cop was buried at.
Speaker 6: In other words, it's not safe not because of criminals,
Speaker 6: it's not safe because of law enforcement. And there's nothing
Speaker 6: worse than that.
Speaker 3: Hey, dude, we're getting like pretty far out in the
Speaker 3: middle of nowhere and no one knows where out here.
Speaker 5: You've got to be careful where you go and who
Speaker 5: you talk to.
Speaker 3: If you have any information or tips to the disappearance
Speaker 3: of John Aujay, please call two one three two six
Speaker 3: two nine eight eight nine for email Shadows at pushkin
Speaker 3: dot FM. Valley of Shadows is reported, written and produced
Speaker 3: by us Haley Fox and Betsy Shepherd. Our editor is
Speaker 3: Diane Hodson. Our executive producers are Jacob Smith and Alexandra Garreton.
Speaker 3: Original music by Jake Gorsky, Ray Lynch, Mike Jersich, and
Speaker 3: Hayden Gardner. Sound designed by Jake Gorsky, fact checking by
Speaker 3: Onica Robbins, additional production support by Sonya Gurwitt and Our
Speaker 3: show art was designed by Sean Karney and Betsy Sheppard
Speaker 3: Special thanks to Nick White for show art photography. Additional
Speaker 3: thanks to Jeremy Tabb. Vallely of Shadows is a production
Speaker 3: of Pushkin Industries. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on
Speaker 3: the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
Speaker 3: podcasts from Type two Fun, We're Haley and Betsy. See
Speaker 3: you next week.