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