11. The Suitcase | Lost Hills

0:15Speaker 1:Pushkin.

0:24Speaker 2:Haley and I have been operating under an assumption that if Rick was involved with Mitrice's death, he would have told someone. We've reconstructed his universe person by person, cold calling and emailing something like a hundred people. And when that didn't work, driving to their last known address. in burned-out mobile homes and tidy trailer parks and remote stretches of the suburban desert where they were hoping never to be found. And that's how we found Jill Walski, sitting outside her double-wide in Oxnard, surrounded by plants and antiques from her parents' old home in Montanito.

1:02Speaker 3:I know.

1:04Speaker 4:God.

1:06Speaker 5:All right, honey, well, I've got company, so I'll call you later.

1:09Speaker 1:All right, sweetheart, love you.

1:10Speaker 5:Thank you.

1:11Speaker 4:Bye-bye, honey.

1:15Speaker 2:Jill's the den mother of the Montanito boys.

1:18Speaker 5:Jill is a straight shooter, totally unclouded by visions of Rick in all his blonde, water-skiing glory.

1:24Speaker 2:Of all the Montanito boys, she says.

1:25Speaker 1:Rick had fallen the farthest.

1:41Speaker 2:From golden boy status to addiction, prison, and homelessness.

1:46Speaker 5:He had been arrested several times. And he also wasn't mentally there because he had, you know, head on into a tree, hit by a car on a motorcycle.

1:59Speaker 2:Jill is the person the Montanito boys go to with their problems. And in 2012, Rick came to her with a very big problem. The police were after him.

2:09Speaker 4:Again.

2:10Speaker 2:Again. She was at home in Montanito.

2:14Speaker 5:Knocks on the door. Comes in. He says, Jill, do you have a beer or something or a shot of something? And so I gave him something to drink and sitting outside and he's just like, I just got interrogated by the police. I did a lie detector test.

2:35Speaker 2:The police had asked him what he knew about the death of Mitrice Richardson.

2:40Speaker 5:He's like, Yeah, I don't know how they got my name. And he just kept putting his head down. And he just sat there probably for about 45 minutes and just kept pacing and putting his head down.

2:57Speaker 2:By the time Rick left her house that day, Jill had no doubt that Rick had information about Mitrice's death.

3:06Speaker 5:He knows something. And I don't think it was on purpose. But he knows something, and he had something to do with it.

3:24Speaker 2:I'm Dana Goodyear, and this is Lost Hills.

3:28Speaker 1:Lost Hills.

3:53Speaker 2:Episode 11, The Suitcase. Jill says when Rick arrived at her house after his polygraph, he was anxious and sweaty, and he kept asking for more alcohol. She could tell he needed to get something off his chest.

4:12Speaker 5:Because he had his head down and he kept rubbing through his hair, he wanted to tell me something. And I'm like, Rick... Please, I really don't want to hear this because then I would feel obligated to have to say something.

4:29Speaker 2:But before she shut him down completely, Rick did manage to tell her something crucial, something that has never been reported before.

4:38Speaker 5:And he said, he goes, I picked her up, but I didn't do anything to her.

4:47Speaker 2:This is a bombshell piece of information. Rick didn't just see or hear Mitrice on the day of her disappearance, as he says in the video. He picked her up. Jill says from the way Rick was acting at her house, she strongly believes something else happened between him and Mitrice. Something Rick couldn't tell the cops.

5:13Speaker 5:But why Rick doesn't say, yes, I picked her up, I brought her up. He was afraid of going back to prison. Bottom line.

5:21Speaker 2:He had just gotten out.

5:22Speaker 4:Yeah.

5:23Speaker 5:So, you know, and he, just his mannerisms at the house. I know, I know he brought her up to his place.

5:33Speaker 2:She would like to think Mitrice's death was unintentional.

5:38Speaker 5:And that's my belief is that it was an accident. But in my opinion, according to him, and he was sweating bullets, um, is that I think that she either slipped and fell, and he freaked out, or I cannot see Rick raping somebody. Did they ever do a kit?

6:02Speaker 6:It was too long after she disappeared. She'd been up in that canyon for 11 months, and there was no soft tissue left. It was bones, so you can't do a rape kit on bones. I tell her what we've heard from other friends of Rick's. that he wouldn't have been sexually interested in Mitrice because she was black.

6:23Speaker 5:Meth changes people's minds, you know what I mean? And if you're up for a few days, look, I don't think he'd even think that way. I know he made the comment. I was surprised there was a black person in Montanito. I didn't know they lived there, you know. You know. I hate to use the term, but pussy's pussy. You know, and I don't know, he may have given her drugs, too. And then she started to wander, and then he didn't want her to tell anybody anything.

7:05Speaker 2:Jill knows Rick's violent history and his drug history, and she's no fool. As we talk, she starts to wrestle with the possibility that Rick could have harmed Mitrice.

7:17Speaker 5:So he then may have gone after her. I don't think... He was strong. I don't think that he, in his right mind, would ever kill somebody. But when you're on that drug, and you've been up for a few days, and you go off and say, if she tried to take something of his, you know, he may have pushed her, he may have grabbed her by her neck, and realized, oh, shit.

7:47Speaker 2:Jill brings up the video of Rick talking about his encounter with Mitrice. She's especially unnerved by the part about the vultures circling over Dark Canyon.

7:57Speaker 5:And then when I watched the video, the thing with the birds and the way he was laughing, you know, kind of like, oh, you know, just his mannerisms. He knew exactly where she was, which gives me the chills. But if He pushed her. She hit her head. He panicked. She didn't wake up. He would move that body. And in the video, he said, you know, he had heard about it and saw the vultures there. He had seen them before. You know, remember he said like three days after? So, and he knew exactly where the spot was.

8:39Speaker 2:Jill is filled with regret when she thinks back to that conversation with Rick after the polygraph. She wishes she hadn't stopped him from saying whatever was on his mind.

8:49Speaker 5:But he did pick her up. And he wanted to tell me something. I mean, if he was still alive, I would go visit him and ask him flat out. So, unfortunately, yeah, I think it was Rick.

9:12Speaker 3:Yeah. Which sucks.

9:19Speaker 2:Jill's given us new information. Rick admitted to her that he picked Mitrice up on his motorcycle. And for what it's worth, Jill feels sure he took her to his spot on the mountain. It feels like all the scattered fragments of this story are finally starting to come together. Jill refused to hear a full confession from Rick, but she did hear and share with us a crucial piece. Leaving Jill's place, Haley and I decide we need to go back to Rick's fort. Rick took a lot of women to his fort. He took care McKellar there. He took Lisa Lepore there. He took Raven there. Did he take Mitrice there, too? Rick had a special name for his fort. He called it Chateau Shangri-La. It was a spooky place, with animal bones and carcasses from Rick's mountain man activities. There was a big old oak tree. From its branches, Rick hung ladies' lingerie. After months of playing hard to get, Rick's friend, Art Davis, calls me up, totally unexpectedly. He's the guy we met by surprise at Cherie's house when we knocked on the door there one day.

10:56Speaker 2:Art invites us to his friend's place, just down the street from the house Rick grew up in. in the lower part of Montanito that's known as Malibu Meadows. We sit in a grove of oak trees by a rushing creek.

11:10Speaker 7:You try to figure out when to arrive.

11:13Speaker 2:Art's been thinking a lot about Rick, pretty much nonstop since we last met.

11:18Speaker 7:And all of a sudden you show up, you know. When you show up, I'm going like, wow. This is a conduit to connecting the dots.

11:31Speaker 2:He tells us people in Montanito are afraid of the questions we're asking about Rick.

11:37Speaker 7:They're afraid of you because they're kind of like letting them go, you know. I just don't want to say anything really, you know, bad about Rick. Because, I mean, there's so many memories. When I come down this creek, going to the bus stop, there's so many memories. Walking through this yard. you know, on early growth of these trees. And then when you come back to this place, it's like the paradise that you left behind. You took it for granted back then.

12:12Speaker 2:Art wants to help us get to the bottom of what, if anything, happened between Rick and my trees. But he always emphasizes that his intention is to persuade us that Rick, the Rick he knew, is innocent.

12:26Speaker 7:I'm going to give you breadcrumbs, you know.

12:29Speaker 2:Art tells us he never went to Rick's fort. It kind of depressed him that his friend was living like that. He just remembers seeing a photo of Rick at the fort, sitting on his motorcycle.

12:40Speaker 7:He was always telling me about it. Come up there. No, I don't want to do that because I don't want to identify with the fact that you want to live off the grid. I just don't want to. Go ahead and do that, but I'll hook up with you somewhere else, like at work, and then we'll go out to eat and we'll be civilized.

12:57Speaker 2:Haley and I had been planning to head to the fort after our visit with Art. Haley's never seen it. But Art isn't ready to say goodbye. He wants to show us all these other spots up Paiuma Road. His little breadcrumbs, I guess. So we make a split-second decision and invite him to come with us to Rick's fort.

13:17Speaker 1:All right.

13:18Speaker 2:You up for that? Let's do it.

13:20Speaker 7:Do you like windy roads?

13:22Speaker 3:No.

13:22Speaker 2:No, but I brought my Sour Patch Kids. I'm the one who gets carsick. We all pile into my car.

13:29Speaker 7:You're driving just fine.

13:31Speaker 1:Thank you.

13:32Speaker 7:What will happen to Dana and Art in the next exciting adventure?

13:37Speaker 2:We pull the car over in a turnout and head into the brush. There's so much more vegetation now because of all the rain. We get to a marker I remember from when I was here three years ago and make a sharp left.

13:50Speaker 7:I could have brought a machete.

13:51Speaker 6:Okay, so this is so overgrown, but we've got to get crouched down, get low.

13:56Speaker 7:I don't know if I want to go in there. How low can you go?

13:59Speaker 2:As we move deeper into the woods, Art starts to hesitate.

14:03Speaker 7:We don't have to do this, you know. We can do it another time.

14:07Speaker 5:We're here.

14:08Speaker 1:Let's do it.

14:10Speaker 2:After a couple of minutes, we see the trash. First, it's just a little pile of sun-faded Budweiser cans.

14:19Speaker 7:Yeah, well, that's... Budweiser's Rick.

14:21Speaker 5:I was going to say, is that his beer of choice?

14:26Speaker 1:Yep.

14:27Speaker 2:Then, as we get closer to the big tree that marks Rick's camp, we see more trash mixed into a mound of loose, churned-up, leafy soil. There's an empty jug of Sunny Delight, bread bags, yogurt cups, a Sharpie, a toothbrush, a blue plastic razor. Look at that.

14:46Speaker 7:That would have been DNA up the wing-wing right there.

14:49Speaker 6:Razor.

14:55Speaker 2:I'm so confused by what I'm seeing. I was here in 2021, and none of this was here then. We've had two seasons of historic rainfall in Los Angeles County. Is it possible that all this stuff was buried underground and the flash floods and storms and atmospheric rivers unearthed it? If this is Rick's garbage heap, that means there could be something of Mitrice's here. We don't say that out loud. We don't have to. Haley and I start poking through the trash with sticks and a blue plastic hanger we find lying in the dirt. We're not touching anything with our bare hands. It's disgusting. But also, who knows? We could find something that has value as evidence. Something that would link Mitrice to this site. and finally get the attention of law enforcement. Several pieces of Mitrice's clothing were not found at the Remain site in Dark Canyon. Her vans, her Bob Marley t-shirt, the brown hat she had with her when she left the station. And then there's her ID.

16:09Speaker 2:They're all I can think of while we dig.

16:11Speaker 5:Art looks like he.

16:13Speaker 7:Wishes he'd stayed back in Montanito.

16:19Speaker 2:And he is actively trying to manage us. He thinks we're being hysterical.

16:24Speaker 3:Look in that hole, Art.

16:27Speaker 1:In there?

16:27Speaker 2:Yeah.

16:28Speaker 7:What's that thing to the right?

16:30Speaker 2:There's another pipe. That big thing, is that a pipe?

16:35Speaker 7:It's maple syrup.

16:36Speaker 1:This thing.

16:37Speaker 7:No, that thing.

16:38Speaker 3:What the fuck?

16:40Speaker 7:Oh, come on. Don't overreact.

16:42Speaker 5:I'm overreacting.

16:43Speaker 7:You're in.

16:46Speaker 2:And then we see it. It's a suitcase. Plain black, carry-on size, with a.

16:48Speaker 4:Brand tag on it.

16:49Speaker 2:The suitcase is stained with mud and mold.

16:51Speaker 7:Little bright green plants are growing through it.

17:13Speaker 2:But Art recognizes it. He says it's the kind Rick would use. So this looks familiar. This looks like it belonged to Rick. Art pries open the main compartment. It's empty. But there are pockets. Art, if you're feeling continually brave, will you just unzip that front pocket? Oh, lucky you, Art. There's two pockets.

17:46Speaker 3:Oh, my God.

17:47Speaker 2:Inside is a mass of disintegrating women's lingerie. Bras, thongs, stockings, a small black nightie with spaghetti straps, a mesh romper. I catch Haley's eye. I can tell we're thinking the same thing. We know the bras don't belong to my trees. Her bra was found in Dark Canyon. But her underpants were never found.

18:14Speaker 4:Is that a lady's underwear?

18:15Speaker 2:This is a lady's bra with roses on it. It's a surreal experience. It's like this stuff just materialized. A whole suitcase of it. And just to add to the bizarreness, while we're trying to process what's happening, Art is frantically downplaying the whole thing.

18:35Speaker 1:These are tights. Those are his.

18:39Speaker 6:Those are his?

18:40Speaker 7:Are those tights?

18:41Speaker 2:Yeah, these are tights.

18:42Speaker 3:To stay warm?

18:44Speaker 2:Well, maybe at friends. They're small. I don't think these would fit him. Let's do a little inventory. Ladies' small stockings. Black underpants. Beige underpants. Art starts making noises like he wants to get out of the woods, which is great because we want him out of our hair. We need to get some gloves and some garbage bags and remove as much of this stuff as we can before the sun goes down. It's a long shot, but we're wondering if there could be DNA evidence that would definitively connect Rick and Mitrice. We drop Art in Montanito, drive to the nearest grocery store, and fill a shopping cart with supplies.

19:29Speaker 2:Yard stockings?

19:30Speaker 4:Yeah.

19:33Speaker 2:We settle for a box cutter instead of a knife and a kitty litter scooper for a shovel. They'll have to do. We return to the fort with one goal. To bring back the contents of that suitcase and any other potential evidence we can find. Back at the fort, the suitcase is just where we left it. And now we notice there's another pocket. which we didn't open with Art. The zipper's jammed, but... Okay, so now we've got a purple, like, string bra.

20:16Speaker 4:Whatever you call that. Oh, my God.

20:20Speaker 1:I don't know what this stuff is.

20:22Speaker 2:Just some massive.

20:23Speaker 4:Ladies' garments.

20:25Speaker 2:The underwear is wet and moldy and falling apart. I hold open a garbage bag, and Haley deposits it piece by piece.

20:35Speaker 1:Yeah, let's just start here.

20:36Speaker 2:Let's just bag up the ladies' underwear first. We'll do a full accounting later, but even now, in the moment, it's obvious that this collection does not connect to just one woman. They're all different sizes. Small, medium, extra large. And the styles are eclectic. Solid black. Patterns. Thongs. Granny panties. It makes sense that some of these things would have belonged to Darian. She's the dead girlfriend whose thong Rick liked to put on. And we've heard he kept a lot of her undergarments here. But still, it's pretty obvious that they're not all hers. Now that we have gloves, we dig through the mound of dirt around the suitcase a bit more. Haley pulls up Rick's headlamp. It's bright yellow.

21:31Speaker 2:And I don't know why, but it feels so personal. Like a representation of Rick. It makes me think of him, up here, in the dark. It's not an image I want to sit with. Here's some more clothing. We find more pieces of fabric in the mound, long, lacy strands that disappear deep into the earth, intertwining with the roots. We pull on them, and I feel my guts turn over, nauseatingly, like I'm tugging on my own entrails. This looks like a little kid.

22:08Speaker 6:The kid's leotard.

22:12Speaker 2:I spot something bright, purply pink and shiny. It's a kid's nightgown, like a toddler would wear. It's a Barbie princess. Or, I mean, Disney princess, that's what I mean. I have no clue what to make of that. It goes in the bag. All I can think about are my Teresa's missing things. Her shoes, her t-shirt, her underpants, if she was wearing them. to find one little sign of her. If she was here, she was here for like one day.

22:55Speaker 4:I know.

22:58Speaker 7:Or he just brought back something, you know?

23:03Speaker 1:Yeah, that too.

23:06Speaker 2:I look over the mound of dirt again and notice a long, narrow piece of green, net-like fabric. I've always been stumped by the description of the material that was found during Mitrice's second autopsy. The criminalist who collected it described it as, quote, loose, green, fuzz-like hair-slash-fibers located near the legs. Could this green fabric at the fort be connected to that green fuzz found near Mitrice's legs? I think we should get out of here. We put it in the bag. And then we get out of there.

23:41Speaker 2:with a big garbage bag full of molding underwear. Well, what are we going to do with it? I don't know. It does feel like we can't leave it. We can't leave it. I think we have to figure out what we're going.

23:55Speaker 1:To do with it. Yeah.

23:57Speaker 2:And maybe, like, talk to some other people about it.

24:00Speaker 5:Yeah.

24:01Speaker 2:We don't know exactly what to do with this stuff. We just know we can't leave it out here, or some friend of Rick's who gets wind of it could come and move it. It might be our only potential way of connecting my trees to the fort through physical evidence. That night, it pours rain again, and there's another flash flood warning. My mind goes to Rick's fort. Maybe it would all be gone, buried again, or washed away, except for what we rescued, in a garbage bag that's now locked in Haley's office, while we formulate a plan. We don't know why law enforcement stopped pursuing Rick after the polygraph.

24:59Speaker 2:Maybe they learned something that excluded him. But we asked, and not one of the detectives we spoke to said Rick had definitively been ruled out. Maybe it was just he passed the polygraph. But even if law enforcement had wanted to keep interrogating him, it would have been extremely difficult. Because not long after he was interviewed... he sustained yet another traumatic brain injury. He had a long history of those. Art Davis again.

25:31Speaker 7:I mean, he ran right into an 80-year-old eucalyptus tree.

25:37Speaker 5:Like that.

25:38Speaker 2:In 2001, Rick, driving drunk, had smashed into a tree on Topanga Canyon Boulevard.

25:44Speaker 7:Exploded his, you know, all his teeth, and they put all his teeth back in. He busted both knees, broke his neck. You know, his back, his leg, all kinds of stuff. I mean, they took the jaws alive, man.

25:59Speaker 2:Got him out of there. Then, in the fall of 2012, not long after he took the polygraph and beat up Lisa Lepore, Rick was riding his motorcycle down Paiuma when he collided with a Toyota Highlander at the intersection with Cold Canyon Road.

26:16Speaker 4:So he was on a motorcycle. And he told my mom, OK, I'm going to go feed the dogs really fast at his mom's house.

26:23Speaker 2:This is Cherie Amick again. When the accident happened, Rick was back living at Cherie's parents' house.

26:30Speaker 4:And when I pulled up, my mom was standing outside. And I knew there was something wrong. I just knew right away because there was a chopper.

26:41Speaker 2:Rick wasn't wearing a helmet.

26:43Speaker 4:Rick was in a coma again. And this time again. You know, everyone just said, Rick's going to die. And I was like, no, he's not.

26:51Speaker 2:No, he's not. Rick didn't die. He emerged from his coma. And the first thing he did was to attack the hospital staff. But he was probably no longer mentally capable of being interrogated. And the detectives may have had no new leads to pursue about him anyway. Over the next decade, Rick had more accidents as his cognitive abilities declined.

27:16Speaker 4:So his heart is telling him, like, you know, he always used to be, you know, very athletic and could do anything. Superman, I'm making it up those stairs. Well, you know, off balance, no, you're not.

27:27Speaker 2:He spent his final years in a nursing home.

27:31Speaker 4:I went to go see Rick. Rick couldn't talk. He couldn't speak. He could understand me. He understood everything. And they had him heavily drugged, very heavily sedated. You know, because he's going to try to get up. He's just going to try to get up and do things his body can't do anymore.

28:00Speaker 2:Most of Rick's old friends stayed away. Even Cherie found it almost intolerable to see him so diminished. He was only in his 60s, but he was unable to speak or walk. It felt to her like Everything was catching up with Rick.

28:17Speaker 4:Rick is alive, but this is like, oh shit, now he's going to pay for all, you know, the times he didn't listen. You know, like a little kid, just didn't listen. Did what he wanted to do.

28:33Speaker 2:Reckless, fun Rick. When Rick died in December 2019, he had a picture of his son Ricky taped above his bed. No one had told him Ricky had died two years earlier, at the age of 22. Rick didn't make formal amends for his mistakes in life. That person Haley and I were hoping to find, someone he might have confessed to about Mitrice, what he knew or what he may have done, we never found that person. But we did find Rick's poems. Yes, it turns out Rick wrote poetry. In the fall of 2010, about two months after Mitrice's remains were found, Rick started a blog, Prose of a Khan. He published a number of poems, most of them centered on themes of drug addiction, deception, regret, and the hope for forgiveness in the afterlife. For example, quote, As I lost my integrity, the truth all but dies, and when it all comes forth, I'm caught In the poems, Rick writes a lot about finding solitude. through God. And for spiritual guidance, he turned to his former girlfriend, Karen McKellar.

29:55Speaker 2:She'd gotten away from drugs and into God and spent her adult life counseling female addicts as part of a Christian ministry. Karen says that for about a year after Rick took her up to the fort and put on the thong, He reached out to her obsessively, and it was always about the same thing.

30:15Speaker 1:He called me, and he was asking me questions about Christ.

30:20Speaker 2:It seemed like Rick was seeking absolution for the life he'd lived.

30:26Speaker 1:And then I told him, you know, Jesus is the only way, Rick. You know, you really need to surrender to him. And so I was trying to, you know, help him. And on the phone only because I would not come back there. But he always would call me, you know, interrupt me in my life. And so then it was kind of like a client and a sad soul that I was trying to help get saved. And he told me, he goes, yeah, well, I prayed to the tree and I said, Rick, the tree isn't going to save you.

30:59Speaker 2:Rick was praying to the big tree at his fort, the one where he hung the bras.

31:04Speaker 1:I told him you need to confess all your whatever it is that you're going through because he was so troubled. So when he told me that he prayed to the tree, I was like, I'm this is just a waste of time. And I ended up blocking him off my phone because I couldn't take the, you know, calls all the time. And I was praying for him, you know, because it was sad, very sad. He was not mentally stable, so yes, I think for sure he was looking for salvation. And I pray he found it.

31:46Speaker 2:Back at the office, Haley goes through the contents of the garbage bag. She makes a catalog, and we go through it, marking the items that seem like they could potentially connect to my trace. Black thong with lace down the front. Rampage, size medium. Black thong, badly degraded. Zanana outfitters, size medium. Two black thongs, no labels. And the piece of green net fabric. We contact a private forensic lab. The DNA expert there tells us that even though these items have been moldering, possibly underground, for more than a decade, it's entirely possible they'll be able to identify a DNA signature.

32:30Speaker 2:This clothing might have nothing to do with Mitrice, but we've got to see this through. Before we send it to a lab, though, we have to go see her dad, Michael. We need to return Mitrice's journals, and we're hoping he might have something more to share with us. Next time on Lost Hills.

32:53Speaker 3:It's in a Ziploc bag, and, um, Something just told me never get rid of it, and I couldn't do it if I wanted to. I just always felt like someday, somehow, we're going to need them. We're going to need them. Yeah, so let me know when you're ready.

33:10Speaker 2:That's next in Episode 12, Dig Two Graves, the final episode of Season 4 of Lost Hills. Lost Hills is written and hosted by me, Dana Goodyear. It was reported by me and Haley Fox, our senior producer. The show was created by me and Ben Adair. Lost Hills is a production of Western Sound and Pushkin Industries. Subscribe to Pushkin Plus and you can binge the whole season right now ad-free. Find Pushkin Plus on the Lost Hills show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus.