Speaker 1: Pushkin. Dark Canyon is a narrow slot canyon that cuts
Speaker 1: a jagged line from the top of Payuma Road down
Speaker 1: toward Montanito. It's choked with poison oak and brush and
Speaker 1: surrounded on three sides by canyon walls at least a
Speaker 1: thousand feet high. The terrain all around it is sunny,
Speaker 1: breezy scrubland, but the canyon itself is cold and dark
Speaker 1: and almost impenetrable. So how did my trees get to
Speaker 1: where she was found in Dark Canyon? Here are some possibilities.
Speaker 1: My trees entered Dark Canyon from the bottom, My trees
Speaker 1: entered Dark Canyon from the top. My trees entered Dark
Speaker 1: Canyon from the Porn ranch. My trees was alone. My
Speaker 1: treees was not alone. My treese was alive, my treece
Speaker 1: was not. If we're going to figure this out, it'll
Speaker 1: be by process of elimination. We tried going up Dark
Speaker 1: Canyon from the bottom a few different times. The remain
Speaker 1: site is not even a mile up from the entry
Speaker 1: point on the Backbone trail, but it is incredibly slow going.
Speaker 2: It's hours of hiking and traversing this stream bed back
Speaker 2: and forth and things to.
Speaker 1: Get up to where she was when I went. It
Speaker 1: was after a winter of heavy rain and the water
Speaker 1: was gushing.
Speaker 2: Even if it was mostly dry in the actual drainage,
Speaker 2: you would be scrambling over boulders and rocks, and you'd
Speaker 2: have to be really motivated to do that, Like, why
Speaker 2: would you do that?
Speaker 3: Let me go that night.
Speaker 1: Hayley, my reporting partner, made another attempt during the dry
Speaker 1: month of July. She bush whacked up the creek bed
Speaker 1: for two and a half hours before hitting a sheer
Speaker 1: rock face, at which point she was forced to turn around.
Speaker 1: We don't think it's likely my teres walked into Dark
Speaker 1: Canyon from the bottom, and if she did, it doesn't
Speaker 1: seem possible that she was alone. I'm Dana Goodyear and
Speaker 1: this is Lost Hills, episode seven in the shit, So
Speaker 1: how else could my trees have gotten into Dark Canyon?
Speaker 1: On Google Maps, it looks like you can access the
Speaker 1: canyon from higher up on Payuma Road. There are trails
Speaker 1: that disappear under a canopy of green brush. We checked
Speaker 1: various turnoffs, sidestepping locked gates and trying to stick to
Speaker 1: public land. One day, we were crashing around in the
Speaker 1: bushes at one of these seeming access points, getting increasingly discouraged.
Speaker 1: When we heard the sound of a radio and a hammer.
Speaker 1: It was a guy in a bandana building a greenhouse.
Speaker 4: My name's Ed. We're up in the hills here in
Speaker 4: the Santa Manca Mountains, and.
Speaker 5: I live in the most beautiful spot in the world.
Speaker 4: And I'm the only one in Malibu who has an undergroundhouse,
Speaker 4: and it's like being in heaven.
Speaker 1: Ed didn't want us to use his last name. He's
Speaker 1: had a few scrapes with the law, and even though
Speaker 1: he's changed his ways, he likes to be under the radar.
Speaker 1: But as it turns out, we're not the first people
Speaker 1: to come around asking about my trees. The Sheriff's department
Speaker 1: had been to see him too, after her remains were found.
Speaker 1: They had information about an access point leading into the
Speaker 1: canyon near his property.
Speaker 4: And then one of them was like grilling me, like, oh,
Speaker 4: what do you And one of the other guys came
Speaker 4: up and said, what do you know about my trees?
Speaker 4: I was thinking, maybe you guys should tell me what
Speaker 4: you know about her, you know, but I didn't. There
Speaker 4: was nothing I could really say.
Speaker 1: Ed takes us into his underground house. We follow him
Speaker 1: through a curtain of camo netting and down a ramp
Speaker 1: to a heavy wooden.
Speaker 5: Door and we're inside. We got the fridge over here. Oh.
Speaker 5: This in the interior is thirty two feet by sixteen
Speaker 5: feet on the inside eight feet tall, and there's a
Speaker 5: I use wood beams, just purely ornamental.
Speaker 1: It's dimly lit and crammed with slimy terrariums holding rare
Speaker 1: botanical specimens, carnivorous plants, miniature bogonias, mosses. He sells them
Speaker 1: on eBay, along with some fancy millipedes he calls pink dragons.
Speaker 5: And then I'm selling this pogonias and this is super rare.
Speaker 5: This one. It's a grass pogonia from Madagascar, Pogonia bognariai,
Speaker 5: and it's pretty spectacular.
Speaker 1: Before he was growing bogonias, he was a marijuana farmer.
Speaker 4: I've been through the whole all the wars. I've been
Speaker 4: arrested bunch of times and almost done a bunch of
Speaker 4: time in prison, and the whole thing.
Speaker 1: Ed says he used to grow in Dark Canyon.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's going.
Speaker 4: Back to from two thousand and one to about two
Speaker 4: thousand and four, and they were about three hundred plants.
Speaker 4: Here three hundred plants.
Speaker 1: Yeah, back before legals, this area was riddled with illegal grows,
Speaker 1: some amateur operations, others run by drug cartels. Ed says
Speaker 1: Dark Canyon was a great place to grow weed.
Speaker 4: The plants were so big. You know, there was this
Speaker 4: one spot I was telling you about called Queen's where
Speaker 4: the plants were like, you know, twelve feet tall. Well,
Speaker 4: once it gets above that, now you're exposed. Now you
Speaker 4: have a problem.
Speaker 1: One day Ed's grow got spotted.
Speaker 4: There was a helicopter that flew over and they flew
Speaker 4: over here, and they went into Dark Canyon and they
Speaker 4: circled around, but kind of far away, and I go,
Speaker 4: did they see because they flew right over the plant.
Speaker 4: I go, I think they did, but I wasn't sure.
Speaker 4: But they were sneaky about it because they didn't just
Speaker 4: circle directly overhead. And so about two weeks later, I
Speaker 4: harvested everything. I did, the whole thing. Three hundred plants
Speaker 4: was a huge amount. Then all of a sudden, I'm
Speaker 4: sitting here, I'm doing something, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 4: the helicopters and they're ten feet above the ground and
Speaker 4: they're sitting right on top of me, and I run
Speaker 4: down into that. I had this whole tunnel area underneath
Speaker 4: the shrubs, like a like a trail that was underneath,
Speaker 4: so it was like a tunnel. And so I went,
Speaker 4: I went running down into there, and these guys were
Speaker 4: like ten feet above the you know. At one time,
Speaker 4: I could actually I was in this little crevice area.
Speaker 4: I could actually feel the rotor wash like this, like
Speaker 4: fifty mile an hour wind just blowing through this little
Speaker 4: dry canyon that I was in, you know, under the brush.
Speaker 4: And I'm telling you it was it was live. It
Speaker 4: was intense.
Speaker 1: Ed says that twenty years ago, a friend of his
Speaker 1: hiking deep into Dark Canyon had come across a big
Speaker 1: industrial pot. Grow Ed thinks if his friend got down there,
Speaker 1: maybe we can too. He warns us, We're gonna have
Speaker 1: to do a little bushwhacking. We check our watches. It's
Speaker 1: eleven am. Do you want to do more torn or
Speaker 1: you want to go down get get hiking.
Speaker 6: Yeah, maybe let's let's go back to your car and olds.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we'll get my heat and then we can come
Speaker 4: back and talk. Yeah, let's get let's get let's get on.
Speaker 7: The Yeah, I like it.
Speaker 1: We go over the lip of the canyon into the
Speaker 1: dense brush. Head's in front, clipping. We're behind him, crawling
Speaker 1: on our hands and knees.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you made a good path here.
Speaker 7: I hope.
Speaker 5: So you want to get one of those cloudy trails.
Speaker 1: If you can't, we pick our way along a ridge,
Speaker 1: then drop into the creek bed. It's filled with massive
Speaker 1: boulders and six foot tall saplings. There's poison oak everywhere.
Speaker 3: How long.
Speaker 1: I think we've been hiking for two hours? But hike
Speaker 1: it crawling, That's what.
Speaker 8: I would call it, too, Crawling, sliding on our butts.
Speaker 1: Haley keeps checking the GPS app on her phone, which
Speaker 1: is loaded with the coordinates of the remain site. The
Speaker 1: little arrow representing our position is still ridiculously far away.
Speaker 1: We press on, but it's starting to seem like we
Speaker 1: might never get there. Ed's been saying just two hundred
Speaker 1: more yards for what feels like hours.
Speaker 4: I also, I could say, no one's been here for
Speaker 4: real life. That's I've never even been this far down myself,
Speaker 4: So probably no one's been here in thirty forty years
Speaker 4: at least, maybe even longer.
Speaker 1: By now, the canyon is engulfed in shadow. It's two
Speaker 1: thirty less than three hours till the sun goes down.
Speaker 1: We're not going to make it to the remain spot,
Speaker 1: not even close. We have to turn around. We haul
Speaker 1: ourselves out of the creek bed and up to where
Speaker 1: we have a vantage point. I can see the porn
Speaker 1: ranch through my binoculars. Everything between here and there is
Speaker 1: trackless wilderness. How would you describe that terrado on there?
Speaker 4: Oh you're in Shia, Yeah, you're in living hell.
Speaker 1: Bed pulls out a loaf of bread and takes a
Speaker 1: few bites you.
Speaker 4: Itself is another three So it's about an eight hundred
Speaker 4: foot canyon in there. It's very very intense. I have
Speaker 4: been down in there, and I'm telling you it's you
Speaker 4: feel like a little teeny tiny bug down there. You
Speaker 4: look up at this massive cliff, you know, and yes,
Speaker 4: the earth, Yes, the Earth's crust has been lifted up
Speaker 4: out of the ground and you've just seen the side
Speaker 4: of the earth. So it's just spectacular.
Speaker 8: I don't remember if we actually got around to saying
Speaker 8: at our turnaround point that I mean, we've been going
Speaker 8: for two hours and we were like a fifth of
Speaker 8: the way that we needed more than two hours to
Speaker 8: where my trees remains worse. So there's just no way
Speaker 8: on earth she hiked in from the top.
Speaker 1: There's there's no way on earth. There's no way on
Speaker 1: earth that somebody brought her body in from the top.
Speaker 5: No, there's no way, no, no, it's impossible.
Speaker 1: He finishes as bread and we drink the rest of
Speaker 1: our water. It takes us another couple of hours to
Speaker 1: get back to Ed's place, beat her way out of
Speaker 1: the brush, just as the sun slips below the horizon.
Speaker 1: So did my tree center dark canyon from the bottom?
Speaker 1: Probably not. Did you go down from the top? No way,
Speaker 1: But we do know there's another way in through the
Speaker 1: porn ranch. Sues Randall, aka the porn Queen of Montanito,
Speaker 1: lives in a big, white Spanish style house surrounded by
Speaker 1: horse corrals and stables. She's in her seventies, feisty and petite,
Speaker 1: with white pixie cut hair.
Speaker 3: We are the upper class. Some men come on, Oh,
Speaker 3: we started upper class and worked our way slowly down.
Speaker 3: But with an English accent you can get away with Filth.
Speaker 1: Had a huge career as a photographer of high end
Speaker 1: adult content. Back in her heyday, porn was classy by
Speaker 1: comparison to what's out there today, I think lush highly
Speaker 1: produced images of Stormy Daniels in a lacy white bra
Speaker 1: beside a donkey. But Sus is retired now.
Speaker 3: I got kicked in the face by one of my
Speaker 3: horses in lust and I so that was a good excuse.
Speaker 3: But also when we shoot, we'd spent two or three
Speaker 3: days getting ready. I'm going I'm not going to go
Speaker 3: and just shoot. You know, it's going to be prepared
Speaker 3: allah Playboy kind of drapie pape, all that crappy whapye.
Speaker 1: Sus came to America in the seventies courtesy of Hugh Hefner,
Speaker 1: who hired her as a photographer at Playboy and then
Speaker 1: later at Hustler. She shot herself using a cable release
Speaker 1: and a mirror.
Speaker 3: Male photographers wanted to shoot me. Oh no, no, no,
Speaker 3: I'll shoot myself. It's much more relaxing instead of having
Speaker 3: to do what some guy tells you. You get stiff
Speaker 3: and your shoulders raised, and you like this. It's like dancing.
Speaker 3: You've got to be on a flow. It was.
Speaker 1: It was cool.
Speaker 3: I'm glad I did it because I certainly don't look
Speaker 3: like that now.
Speaker 1: At the dawn of internet porn, sus became a business tycoon,
Speaker 1: minting money on her site sus dot.
Speaker 3: Net, instead of being lockstock and boo. You know, I
Speaker 3: would do what I wanted to do. I would go
Speaker 3: and party with them and then do what I wanted
Speaker 3: to do, and they'd get mad, and I'd say up yours,
Speaker 3: and I'd get fired, and then I'd go work for
Speaker 3: somebody else, and then the same thing hefna Flint. I
Speaker 3: fought with all of them, but it meant that I
Speaker 3: ended up shooting for myself independently and owning all my pictures,
Speaker 3: so that when the Internet came, I was the only
Speaker 3: photographer who owned her own pictures.
Speaker 1: Susan's house is up the hill from Montanito, at the
Speaker 1: end of a long driveway.
Speaker 3: Oh, the history of this house is quite interesting. It's
Speaker 3: been here since like the forties. Has been ranches here,
Speaker 3: and Bishop Raley had a chapel down there for the
Speaker 3: Church of Antioch, and this house in the seventies burnt down,
Speaker 3: and the guy who owned it rebuilt it, and he
Speaker 3: did all these arches and everything, but he rebuilt it
Speaker 3: around the bar so he could party with lee ages
Speaker 3: and then they got so drunk he'd be sober an
Speaker 3: hour a day. So he lost the ranch. But he
Speaker 3: was up here drunk with a gun, and nobody come
Speaker 3: and see him except I used to ride up on
Speaker 3: my horse and chit chat him up.
Speaker 1: Because you had designs on this property.
Speaker 3: And he knew I wanted it. It took three years,
Speaker 3: and he knew I'd look after it.
Speaker 1: She says. Montanito was a great place to ride horses
Speaker 1: and raise a family.
Speaker 3: We moved to this area because we were looking for
Speaker 3: a good school district for the kids. Kids do that
Speaker 3: for you. Your life revolves around them. I mean work
Speaker 3: was work, but it was not our social life. There's
Speaker 3: nothing more boring than a bunch of pornographers, I'll tell you.
Speaker 1: But the ranch was also the perfect porn location, first
Speaker 1: for Sues and then for her daughter, Holly, who followed
Speaker 1: her mom into the business.
Speaker 9: I grew up in what I like to say, kind
Speaker 9: of the Sue's bubble. Everything that we shot was very beautiful,
Speaker 9: very high end.
Speaker 1: Holly has occasionally used the ranch for shoots as well,
Speaker 1: though it's been years at this point.
Speaker 9: It's a great property. I mean it's big, it's lots
Speaker 9: of parking, there's lots of different areas to shoot.
Speaker 5: It's super private, yeah, but you don't.
Speaker 3: Get them screaming through the gullies. You don't get echoing.
Speaker 1: Holly said that one time a shoot of hers had
Speaker 1: been interrupted by a pop bust in Dark Canyon.
Speaker 9: We had a huge, like illegal weed patch up the
Speaker 9: canyon and I was actually shooting when they were harvey it. Well,
Speaker 9: when I say harvesting it, when they were possessing it.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 9: The police had come and they these police helicopters and
Speaker 9: they had all this weed that they put in these
Speaker 9: huge nets and then the airlifted it directly over our ranch.
Speaker 9: And I just remember being here and my whole crew
Speaker 9: was here and the models were like, I hope they
Speaker 9: drop some so yeah, but that was the only like
Speaker 9: big weed bus that we saw.
Speaker 3: And they got to it from Upper Payuma and we didn't
Speaker 3: even know. We never saw anybody going down then until
Speaker 3: still the cops turned up. We didn't know, otherwise we'd
Speaker 3: have been up there taking.
Speaker 1: Some SU's agreed to give me a tour of the property.
Speaker 1: We got in a quad and she drove me around.
Speaker 1: I asked her about my trees. She told me that
Speaker 1: when she learned of my Teresa's disappearance. She organized a
Speaker 1: search party.
Speaker 3: I mean, we spent days looking for her on horseback
Speaker 3: when she went missing, riding these things.
Speaker 1: And then but then people started to speculate that Sus
Speaker 1: might somehow be involved in my Teresa's death. My Terce
Speaker 1: was young and beautiful, and her body was found on
Speaker 1: public land bordering SUS's ranch. That would obviously make for
Speaker 1: a compelling narrative. But like so many elements of the
Speaker 1: my Teres Richardson story that have taken hold in the
Speaker 1: public imagination, I've seen no evidence to support this theory,
Speaker 1: none whatsoever.
Speaker 3: Yeah, people were accusing me of having done s and
Speaker 3: m or something unmurdered.
Speaker 1: Sorry, yeah, I just don't want.
Speaker 3: To go there. That's bullshit. Come on, Yeah, if I'm
Speaker 3: going to murder anybody, it's going to be a cop.
Speaker 1: We drove up SUS's driveway and stopped the quad at
Speaker 1: an overlook at the edge of Dark Canyon. It was
Speaker 1: a sheer drop to the creek bed. My Teresa's remains
Speaker 1: were found down there and about a quarter mile east
Speaker 1: of where we stood.
Speaker 3: I'll call it Matries Canyon just to myself, but I'm
Speaker 3: really trying to.
Speaker 1: The twenty twelve report from the Office of Independent Review
Speaker 1: included only a few details about the discovery of my
Speaker 1: Teresa's remains. One of these details was that the rangers
Speaker 1: had hiked into the site from quote, a property located
Speaker 1: on Payuma Road that would be SUS's property, the Porn Ranch.
Speaker 1: The report also said that after Malibu Search and Rescue
Speaker 1: and the homicide detectives arrived by helicopter, the rangers hiked
Speaker 1: out the way they'd come in. The report notes that
Speaker 1: it took them about a half an hour to get
Speaker 1: back to their starting point at the Porn Ranch. So,
Speaker 1: according to official documents, there's a way in from SUS's life.
Speaker 1: Sue's is extremely private and she takes the security of
Speaker 1: her property very seriously. There are big dogs and the
Speaker 1: place is crawling with groundskeepers. That means you can't just
Speaker 1: show up there and knock on the door. It literally
Speaker 1: took years to convince her to let Haley and me
Speaker 1: come back and poke around a bit. We were hopeful
Speaker 1: that we could find that elusive trail, the one used
Speaker 1: by the rangers that would take us to the remain
Speaker 1: site in half an hour. Sue's had arranged for a chaperone.
Speaker 6: Travis local guide, Montonita resident.
Speaker 1: Travis shows us the staging area that was used by
Speaker 1: law enforcement during the recovery of my Teresa's remains.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean, it's a really short little cut across here,
Speaker 6: but I think honestly that they probably entered down there.
Speaker 6: I don't know where she entered, but that's definitely where
Speaker 6: the police entered.
Speaker 1: We start walking through thick green grasses on a narrow
Speaker 1: horse trail that quickly turns into an even narrower game trail.
Speaker 6: But yeah, this whole area hasn't for in a long time.
Speaker 6: The flight's overgrown so beautiful.
Speaker 1: Love that safe smell too.
Speaker 6: It's the ball into a game trail because nobody really
Speaker 6: goes this way anymore. But yeah, it's just deer, deer
Speaker 6: and deer and coyotes, probably mountain lines.
Speaker 1: I can tell. We're somewhere above the creek bed. I'm
Speaker 1: thinking this is the shortcut we've been looking for, and
Speaker 1: I can't help it. I'm getting really excited. It's where
Speaker 1: we go from here. Down here go where the coyotes go.
Speaker 1: We get down low, limboing under a tangle of branches.
Speaker 6: You know, this is kind of like the tree because
Speaker 6: it looks stable, but it'll actually just break. So watch
Speaker 6: over the scene and DESI it's probably has it overgrown.
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh yeah, there is a trail down here. But then,
Speaker 1: to our indescribable disappointment, we find ourselves on the backbone trail,
Speaker 1: a few yards from the point of which you turn
Speaker 1: up into the creek bed, the place We've been so
Speaker 1: many times before. I feel like I'm being pranked. We
Speaker 1: convince Travis to take us back to the overlook, the
Speaker 1: place Sus calls my Trees Canyon. In the years since
Speaker 1: I was last there, I've tried many times to picture
Speaker 1: it precisely to test mentally. Anyway, if there could be
Speaker 1: a hidden trail, it would be the most direct route in.
Speaker 1: And another thing is you wouldn't have to walk up
Speaker 1: SUS's driveway to get there. There's a fire road with
Speaker 1: an outlet higher up on Payuma Road that leads right
Speaker 1: to the overlook. It's gated and probably guarded, but still
Speaker 1: someone could have slipped through there in the dead of night.
Speaker 1: Back at the staging area, we get in the quad
Speaker 1: and head to the overlook.
Speaker 6: Okay, so the fire road entrance is over there. Yep,
Speaker 6: this is the road coming down. That's the start of
Speaker 6: the canyon.
Speaker 1: We're standing by a wooden horse fence looking down over
Speaker 1: a precipice into the canyon.
Speaker 6: It's a sheer drop off. That's probably i'd take close
Speaker 6: to three hundred feet I mean to the to the
Speaker 6: base of the creek, which you can kind of see.
Speaker 6: I mean, I don't even know that could even be
Speaker 6: four stories high. And then from the GPS, I'm guessing
Speaker 6: she's probably about a quarter mile that way, so we're
Speaker 6: not even i mean, let's say about we're probably about
Speaker 6: a two thirds of the way in to where she
Speaker 6: would be.
Speaker 1: So you'd have to drop down four stories and then
Speaker 1: hike up a quarter mile to get back in there.
Speaker 6: It would take a very very skilled bushwhacking guide to
Speaker 6: get back in there, because it's impassible, and there's so
Speaker 6: much poison oak down there, and it's mature poison oak,
Speaker 6: so you can't really even bushwhack it. You just got
Speaker 6: to go through it. And that's what the amount of
Speaker 6: search and rescue said, and that's why the reason the
Speaker 6: helicopter to get back in there, because it's it's impassable.
Speaker 1: We stand there quietly, just looking out over the Canyon
Speaker 1: with its dozen shades of green.
Speaker 6: Everything in Montanedo proper is pretty rustic and kind of
Speaker 6: just you know, it's unrefined. I think that that most
Speaker 6: of these mountain communities back in the Santa Monica Mountains
Speaker 6: are people like, you know, living kind of you know, rustically.
Speaker 6: But you know, you can go into Calabasas and hang
Speaker 6: out with Kanye and the Kardashians if you want, because
Speaker 6: this is technically Calabasas, but this ain't Calabasas. You know,
Speaker 6: it's thousand miles away from you know, the Calabasas Commons
Speaker 6: and justin Bieber, this is raw California, you know, this
Speaker 6: is this is as Rasa gets. Nobody's ever lived here.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 6: Local chew have told me stories about this area that
Speaker 6: you know that they still believe they're up there, you know,
Speaker 6: artifacts and stuff. So this is all untouched wilderness. You
Speaker 6: know a lot of people don't think Ella has wilderness,
Speaker 6: but this is as wild as it gets.
Speaker 1: When we leave the Porn Ranch, Haley and I are stumped.
Speaker 1: It seems like we may have exhausted all our possibilities.
Speaker 1: We think my trees couldn't and wouldn't have gone in
Speaker 1: from the bottom top or the porn ranch on her own.
Speaker 1: We think someone must have taken her in, but who
Speaker 1: There's just one more source of information we can think of,
Speaker 1: a person who boasts about having detailed knowledge of Dark Canyon.
Speaker 1: We've asked so many people how to access the part
Speaker 1: Dark Canyon where my rise was found. Everyone says, yes,
Speaker 1: of course, there are lots of ways in, but when
Speaker 1: we ask for details, the certainty fades away and we're
Speaker 1: back where we started. Except for one source. He seems
Speaker 1: to know everything. It's the guy in the video we
Speaker 1: found online, the Montanito Lifer interviewed by Raven Masterson. Did
Speaker 1: you hear being on the door talking at the door
Speaker 1: like they just.
Speaker 7: Shut it on her or something.
Speaker 1: He was the person who claimed he'd seen my Terse
Speaker 1: at four thirty am on the day of her disappearance,
Speaker 1: shouting in front of the Tennis court House.
Speaker 7: It's just screaming at something now, and it was pretty loud.
Speaker 7: I'm thinking, God, it's for three in the morning.
Speaker 1: But he also talks a lot about the part of
Speaker 1: Dark Canyon where they found my Terce's remains, what it's
Speaker 1: like there, and how to get there. He says that
Speaker 1: after he'd spotted her at the Tennis court house. She
Speaker 1: must have walked up Payuma Road.
Speaker 7: That road it's very you know, like a lot of
Speaker 7: twists and turnsent for her to walk. It's close to
Speaker 7: two miles to where it's turned off the Dark Creek,
Speaker 7: you know, from the top. Well, the only way she
Speaker 7: could have gotten in there. There's no way she could
Speaker 7: have hiked up from the lock. I mean, that's like
Speaker 7: ticks me and everything I have hyped up it.
Speaker 1: He thinks maybe my trees walking along the mountain ridge
Speaker 1: in the dark fell down in a ditch.
Speaker 10: Is it really dark.
Speaker 7: That night?
Speaker 5: It would have been pitched flat.
Speaker 1: It isn't clear how he's envisioning this ditch in relation
Speaker 1: to the spot and Dark Canyon where her remains were found,
Speaker 1: but he sounds extremely familiar both with the canyon and
Speaker 1: the remain site.
Speaker 7: Yeah, Dark Creek, it's pretty, Uh, it's overgrown with huge
Speaker 7: oakes and you know a lot of rocks. But you know,
Speaker 7: I hadn't been down in this one spot for a
Speaker 7: lot of years because the friend of mine's parentry on
Speaker 7: that property.
Speaker 1: He says, the place where my trese was found was
Speaker 1: a hangout spot, a place locals knew.
Speaker 7: Well, we stood down there when we were younger.
Speaker 1: He shown me on there, and just like Haley and me,
Speaker 1: he's thought a lot about how my treece would have
Speaker 1: gotten in there.
Speaker 10: Do you think that a car could have gone up there?
Speaker 7: And no way a car could have gone right, ware Will?
Speaker 11: We had took three people, you know what I'm saying, right.
Speaker 7: Two people would have gotten too tired. And she was
Speaker 7: a big girl.
Speaker 1: In fact, my ruse was not actually all that big,
Speaker 1: five feet six, one hundred and twenty five pounds. But
Speaker 1: can I just say his description is so specific, so concrete,
Speaker 1: it almost sounds like he's recalling a lived experience.
Speaker 10: Do you think somebody could have taken her?
Speaker 11: Or you know what, if somebody took her, it did,
Speaker 11: whatever they did, I think they would have had to
Speaker 11: have come back. It's more than one person to drag
Speaker 11: that body down to where it was.
Speaker 1: He offers to take Raven, who incidentally is a young
Speaker 1: black woman, to the site.
Speaker 7: And she's two miles up on them. Man, you want
Speaker 7: to go up there right now?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 7: Sure, I can take you. Aware of what I know.
Speaker 1: The video cuts now they're driving through Montanito, past the
Speaker 1: tennis courthouse.
Speaker 10: So what house is this?
Speaker 7: This is the house where she was where I heard her.
Speaker 7: I came down off the cross the street right there
Speaker 7: as Woodluff, who's here yelling it? I came down. Then
Speaker 7: I watched crush and I sit right here. But see
Speaker 7: I couldn't see the front door because of all these cars.
Speaker 1: Another cut. Now the camera's looking out over Dark Canyon
Speaker 1: from somewhere above.
Speaker 8: Well, they've had people were able to get down there
Speaker 8: on that bluff.
Speaker 7: Right and then that start creek going down there, and
Speaker 7: I think that's where they found her, right down. I
Speaker 7: think that was some hootgers place.
Speaker 1: Another cut, Oh, everybody, what's happening?
Speaker 10: Is your girl?
Speaker 1: And now Raven is on a hike. She could be
Speaker 1: down in the canyon.
Speaker 10: I'm just getting to where my trees, Richardson's barley was found.
Speaker 10: I'm carrying.
Speaker 1: Then another cut and she's walking by some odd fencings.
Speaker 1: Then the video just stops. We had a million questions
Speaker 1: for Raven. Had she actually found a way into Dark
Speaker 1: Canyon from higher up on Payuma Road, had the Montanito
Speaker 1: lifer guided her to the remain site? Did she have
Speaker 1: video of all that? We set up a meet with her,
Speaker 1: Raven wasn't what I expected. She has a big personality
Speaker 1: online as a topless rights activist and a shaman who
Speaker 1: sells hexes on Etsy. In person, though she's surprisingly quiet
Speaker 1: and mild mannered. She doesn't have a fixed address and
Speaker 1: asked us to meet her at a Popeye's in South LA.
Speaker 1: We ended up sitting in my car to talk.
Speaker 4: She says.
Speaker 1: She was very disturbed by my Teresa's disappearance and the
Speaker 1: lack of resolution to her story.
Speaker 2: So you started going out to Malibu to kind of
Speaker 2: interview people to learn more about the Mitrees case.
Speaker 1: Yes, she says, she stumbled on the Montanito guy a
Speaker 1: year or two after my Teresa's remains were found.
Speaker 10: I found him totally by accident.
Speaker 1: She tells us. She liked him even though he was
Speaker 1: in someone's basement. He saw himself as a mountain man
Speaker 1: living at his spot. She got that he was essentially homeless.
Speaker 10: He was a very very nice person from what I recall.
Speaker 10: I remember him giving me beers. He was very very
Speaker 10: down the herb. He didn't mean any harm. He didn't
Speaker 10: come off to me as anybody malicious.
Speaker 1: Unfortunately, Raven says she can't really remember much about the
Speaker 1: trip into Dark Canyon, and she can't find the video
Speaker 1: she made about it, but she does remember that the
Speaker 1: guy showed her his spot on the mountain. It was
Speaker 1: in the woods off Payouma Road, passed the driveway to
Speaker 1: the porn ranch, but before you hit the property's fire road.
Speaker 5: He had a little dugout.
Speaker 10: It looked like a very earthy hovel. But he had
Speaker 10: it set up very very nice. I mean, I think
Speaker 10: he might have had a fridge, a little refrigerator that
Speaker 10: was a propane stove. I think he had like a
Speaker 10: separate room. He had it set up very very nice.
Speaker 1: When she went back to find him a short time later,
Speaker 1: he was gone. Sergeant Wright always told me he thought
Speaker 1: my Trees had wandered into the canyon and died as
Speaker 1: a result of her mental illness. This was the consensus
Speaker 1: view of law enforcement, supported by the fact that the
Speaker 1: coroner had not been able to determine a cause of death.
Speaker 1: But then, after we'd known each other for three years,
Speaker 1: he told me he didn't actually see the case as
Speaker 1: quite that cut and dried. He was well into his
Speaker 1: retirement and he was supposed to be relaxing and spending
Speaker 1: time with his family and having coffee with other retired deputies.
Speaker 10: But he was.
Speaker 1: Ruminating on this old case. Of course, it bothered him
Speaker 1: that he hadn't found my trees alive, but also some
Speaker 1: of the specifics were nagging at him. He didn't really
Speaker 1: buy the hypothermia theory or the dehydration theory. It just
Speaker 1: wasn't that cold in September of two thousand and nine,
Speaker 1: and there was water in the creek, So what did
Speaker 1: she just will herself to death? How many days would
Speaker 1: that take? That's when he told me something new, something
Speaker 1: law enforcement hasn't shared publicly. He told me the Sheriff's
Speaker 1: Department did investigate someone. It was the guy with the
Speaker 1: fort with the deer ribcage and the women's IDAs, but
Speaker 1: they never named him publicly and there was no arrest.
Speaker 1: Sergeant Wright thought that guy might hold the answer to
Speaker 1: the Miteres Richardson case. But Sergeant Wright wasn't a homicide
Speaker 1: detective and he was out of law enforcement anyway, so
Speaker 1: there was nothing he could do about it except give
Speaker 1: me his name next time on Lost Hills?
Speaker 7: Do you know.
Speaker 1: Anything about that girl?
Speaker 10: Rick?
Speaker 1: And he's like, what girl, Laura, what girl?
Speaker 6: You know?
Speaker 7: He had a raspy voyage.
Speaker 1: She's like the girl, the girl.
Speaker 6: You know, the girl that fucking the girl.
Speaker 1: Is dead, the girl that they found that's next in
Speaker 1: episode eight, Rick Trouble. Lost Hills is written and hosted
Speaker 1: by Me Dana Goodyear. It was reported by me and
Speaker 1: Hayley Fox, our senior producer. The show was created by
Speaker 1: me and Benadere. Lost Hills is a production of Western
Speaker 1: Sound and Pushkin Industries. Subscribe to Pushkin Plus and you
Speaker 1: can binge the whole season right now ad free. Find
Speaker 1: Pushkin Plus on the Lost Hills show page in Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or at pushkin dot fm, slash plus