6. Reconnaissance | Lost Hills

0:15Speaker 1:Pushkin. Four or five months before Mitrice disappeared, her girlfriend Desiree began to have a recurring dream. There's a blanket of thick fog covering everything, so she can't see. But she can hear Mitrice calling her name over and over.

0:42Speaker 2:But I can't find her. And so I'm running through the fog to where I think she's at. And when I think I find her, it's just the fog clears and nothing's there.

0:57Speaker 1:Desiree was so affected by this dream that she did something totally out of character. She got a tattoo.

1:06Speaker 2:So it's really abstract of a face kind of coming through the fog.

1:15Speaker 1:The tattoo stretches from Desiree's ribs to her navel. It's Mitrice's face. One almond-shaped eye, a pair of bright red lips, partially obscured by swirls of fog and stars. Underneath Mitrice's lips is the word princess. That was one of Desiree's nicknames for her. Was she flattered?

1:37Speaker 2:She was. I think that she was still a little disappointed that it wasn't her Name? Just because, I mean, she had a little ego about her. And I call her princess, but it was, like, two-handed.

1:59Speaker 1:In retrospect, the dream seems like a premonition. Mitrice, alone in Dark Canyon, staring up at the night sky. And the tattoo's there to remind Desiree, every day.

2:13Speaker 2:And I had no idea that it was going to mean what it means to me now.

2:27Speaker 1:Matrice was found on August 9, 2010. She'd been missing for 11 months. People had been searching for her all over the Santa Monica Mountains and as far away as Las Vegas. But the way she was found was entirely unexpected. Here's the story as law enforcement told it. There was a known illegal marijuana grow in Dark Canyon. It had been discovered in 2009, before Mitrice went missing. A marijuana enforcement team, including state park rangers and rangers from the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority, had come across plants and irrigation lines, which they destroyed. The following summer, some of these rangers returned. to see if the operation had resumed.

3:15Speaker 1:They were hiking through the creek's drainage when one of the rangers saw a skull and a leg bone, partially submerged in the heavy leaf litter of the canyon floor. Attached to the skull was a hank of hair, identifiable as a black woman's. One ranger believed they might have found Mitrice Richardson. What happened next was a communication meltdown that turned into a PR catastrophe. The remains were removed from the canyon before the coroner had a chance to examine them on site. That led to a public dispute between the sheriff's department and the coroner, an internal inquiry, and a whole new reason for Mitrice's friends and family to be suspicious of law enforcement. But while so much attention was trained on how her remains got out of the canyon, the focus shifted away from the most important question.

4:14Speaker 1:How she got in there in the first place. I'm Dana Goodyear, and this is Lost Hills.

4:22Speaker 2:Lost Hills.

4:48Speaker 1:Episode 6, Reconnaissance.

5:00Speaker 4:So now we're heading back pretty much over Malibu Canyon, and we'll go back towards, I'll show you the Montanito area.

5:10Speaker 1:Five years ago, when I started looking into Mitrice's case, I took a helicopter ride with Sergeant Tui Wright from Malibu Search and Rescue.

5:18Speaker 4:Yeah, this is Montanito area down here.

5:21Speaker 1:This is Dark Canyon that we're flying over.

5:23Speaker 4:Yeah, we're flying over Dark Canyon right now, and of course, that's where Matrice Richardson's remains were found.

5:30Speaker 1:The sides of the canyon fell away beneath us at a steep pitch.

5:34Speaker 4:I keep going this way and bank a little to the left. So Matrice was last seen down here, near these streets down here. But Dark Canyon goes up there, and here's where it gets real steep.

5:47Speaker 1:On one wall of the canyon, the rock face was marked with vertical lines, like a layer cake turned on its side. How far up the canyon was she found?

5:56Speaker 4:I'll show you. See the middle area there with the most trees? The shadow cuts right through it?

6:04Speaker 5:Yep.

6:05Speaker 4:Right in there, underneath the canopy of some of those trees.

6:12Speaker 1:Tshaka Starwell, who'd been helping Mitrice's family with their searches, told Dr. Rhonda Hampton that human remains had been found in Montanito.

6:20Speaker 6:I got a text message from him saying, hey, there was a partially mummified skeletal remains, naked, found in Montanito. So I think you guys should head out there.

6:33Speaker 1:She let the family know. Mitrice's aunt called Lieutenant Rawson, one of the homicide detectives.

6:40Speaker 6:She called the detective to say, hey, this is what we are hearing, that there's, you know, partially mummified remains. And she spoke to Lieutenant Rawson, who said, no, no, no, there's just a couple of bones. It's not complete. There's just a few bones. We don't even know. You guys don't need to come out, which alerted us to come out.

7:00Speaker 1:Now that there was a body in the Sheriff's Department's jurisdiction, they took over from the LAPD. the sheriff set up a command post at a large ranch overlooking Dark Canyon. It's known as the Porn Ranch because they shoot a lot of porn out there. It has a long driveway that runs along one side of Dark Canyon.

7:21Speaker 6:So we get out there. The media's there. It's like a media frenzy. Like, clearly something has been found.

7:30Speaker 1:But they couldn't get access to the site.

7:33Speaker 6:Like, they only let us go so far, so we didn't know where... her remains were. We just know it was somewhere around there. And eventually they told us, you know, after a few hours, it's getting dark. You guys should just go home. We're probably just going to lift her remains in the morning and you guys can just leave. I felt like they were waiting us out because we just wouldn't leave.

7:53Speaker 1:Finally, as the sun was setting, they saw a helicopter leaving Dark Canyon and heading for Lost Hill Station. Apparently there'd been a change of plans.

8:02Speaker 6:And then to shock us, looked up and said, hey, look, I bet you that's her.

8:06Speaker 1:When they got to the station, there was a briefing.

8:09Speaker 6:And they told us, we don't know if it's male or female. We don't know the race of the person. We don't know that much details about anything. And that's all they would actually tell us.

8:24Speaker 1:Two days later, the assistant chief coroner, Ed Winter, called to confirm that the remains belonged to Mitrice.

8:31Speaker 6:So we were kind of just waiting for the phone call And we knew it was her. I mean, the way that they were acting, we believed that they knew who it was.

8:44Speaker 1:This was the horrible news Mitrice's friends and family had been waiting for. They'd looked everywhere for her. But all along, she'd been in Dark Canyon, about a mile from where she was last seen at the tennis courthouse on Cold Canyon Road. Now, presumably, a new investigation would begin. this time led by the sheriff's department. And presumably, someone would be held accountable for Mitrice's death. But that's not what happened.

9:13Speaker 6:So then they had a press conference and said it was her and proceeded to say we're not likely to ever know what happened to her during that press conference.

9:23Speaker 4:It's likely that we can never find out exactly how she got there, but they're going to do their very best to figure it out.

9:28Speaker 1:This attitude... We'll never know what happened. It's impossible to find out. It's not what the public expects from investigators responsible for solving crimes. But the autopsy, conducted on August 11th, two days after the remains were found, had discovered no trauma. Mitrice's cause of death was ruled undetermined. And because it was not ruled a homicide, the Sheriff's Department apparently settled on the only explanation that made sense to them, that Mitrice, in the midst of a bipolar episode, had walked into the canyon on her own and died. But for many reasons, her friends and family had a hard time believing that.

10:15Speaker 1:They didn't believe the autopsy. They didn't think the coroner had the full picture. They thought the sheriff's department had intentionally botched the recovery of Mitrice's remains so that the case could not be solved. They didn't even believe the story of how the remains were discovered, because no one would tell them who these rangers were who had stumbled across my trees. We thought that was curious, too. The information released about the discovery was so minimal. We filed Public Records Act's requests with California State Parks and the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority, the two agencies listed in the report whose rangers made the discovery. And we got a very strange reply. Both agencies claim to have no records related to the discovery. Nothing connected to the search words Mitrice Richardson, remains, cannabis, or Dark Canyon. No records at all of the operation in which they originally disrupted the grow in July 2009. And no records of what happened when they went back to check it on August 9, 2010 and unexpectedly discovered human remains. and they refused to make anyone available for an interview to explain how such

11:33Speaker 1:a lapse was possible. But that bizarre and inexplicable lack of information about the circumstances of the discovery, it would be lost in the chaos that was about to engulf the Mitrice-Richardson investigation. Michael Richardson, Mitrice's father, was 300 miles away when Mitrice's remains were found. He was attending a press conference about recent alleged sightings of Mitrice in Las Vegas, Nevada. And he does not think that was a coincidence.

12:16Speaker 5:I just knew it was a deviation plot to get us out to Vegas so they can do what they did.

12:22Speaker 1:He thinks law enforcement deliberately sent him to Las Vegas so he'd be out of the way when they purposely contaminated the evidence scene.

12:31Speaker 5:So they, you know, Lee Baca said, well, it was getting dark and we had officers out there and they have wildlife. And so we had to hurry up and clean up the crime scene and leave. They did a botched up job anyway by sweeping her remains in a plastic bag, flying it out before the coroner got there to make the call, which contaminated the crime scene. And by them tampering with it, we don't know if Mike Treese was killed elsewhere and dumped there because they botched up the crime scene.

13:07Speaker 1:If this seems like an elaborate conspiracy theory, I get it. I'm not convinced by Michael's version of events. But considering everything that happened with Mitrice's remains, I understand how he arrived at it. According to an official timeline, Mitrice's remains were discovered by the Rangers at 1 p.m. A few hours later, LASD homicide detectives Dan McElderry and Kevin Acevedo, along with Sergeant Tui Wright and other Malibu search and rescue personnel, were lowered by helicopter to the spot. One detective observed the skull, a leg, and a pelvic bone in a depression covered in leaves. The detectives also saw the clothing, which the rangers had found, a few hundred feet down the drainage. Then the rangers hiked out, and everyone else waited for the coroner's team to arrive. They waited and waited, but the coroner's team never came, because the helicopter that was supposed to bring them in was diverted twice. both times to rescue stranded teenage hikers. The helicopter had just enough fuel to extract the teen that was already on the ground, and just enough time. The sun was setting, and it was too dangerous to attempt

14:24Speaker 1:an extraction in the dark. The deputies at the site were faced with a dilemma. Leave the remains for the coroner to examine in place the next day, or bring them out on the last helicopter flight of the day. No one was prepared to stay overnight in Dark Canyon guarding the bones. The site was infested with fire ants, venomous spiders, and poison oak. And they had no supplies.

14:50Speaker 4:And, you know, it was a remote area.

14:53Speaker 1:Sergeant Tui Wright.

14:55Speaker 4:There was no way to sleep there. And no way to be prepared to stand up, stand all night. And no need to, quite frankly.

15:03Speaker 1:Detective McElderry argued that leaving the remains overnight was unacceptable. He didn't want to risk their being disturbed by animals or even by a potential perpetrator who could have observed the police activity in the canyon. He called the command post and spoke to a coroner captain. Eventually, the coroner captain agreed they could bring out the bones they'd found, the skull, a leg bone, and the pelvis. But when the search and rescue team lifted the skull from the leafy ground, they found it was attached to a nearly complete human skeleton. They put the skeleton on a plastic sheet in a body bag, along with the clothing, matrices, jeans, bra, and belt.

15:47Speaker 4:McElderry called back, and that's when some idiot at the command post on the corner side said, oh, then put her back. And I said, no, we don't do that. We're not going to pretend like we didn't move the bones. And it was a done deal at that point. You know, it was controversial because the coroner did give permission. I was there. I was a witness to that. On the end, on the Dark Canyon side, and of course there were witnesses at the command post also.

16:20Speaker 1:Ed Winter, the assistant chief coroner, was incensed. He said no one had his permission to move an entire skeleton, and he publicly accused the sheriff's department of compromising his evidence scene. He even suggested the sheriff's department might have broken the law.

16:38Speaker 3:Under the law, the coroners ultimately have the authority to decide how remains are going to be removed that are discovered. There's no question about that.

16:46Speaker 1:This is Michael Giannacco.

16:48Speaker 3:But in reality, the coroner's office doesn't have the wherewithal to make some of the rescues and recoveries that need to be done. And in those cases, almost always they request rescues. search and rescue, and other law enforcement agencies to assist in removing remains.

17:07Speaker 1:He's an expert in law enforcement procedures, policies, and officer wrongdoing. It was his job to figure out if the sheriff's department had acted improperly by removing Mitrice's bones. You've looked at probably thousands of cases of police misconduct?

17:26Speaker 3:Certainly in getting close to a thousand, if not surpassing that number over the years.

17:32Speaker 1:Does this case stand out for you for any reason?

17:38Speaker 3:The unique set of circumstances, for sure. The tragic outcome, for sure. The unanswered questions, for sure.

17:52Speaker 1:In 2012, Janako produced a report for the Office of Independent Review, which oversees the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

18:00Speaker 3:It was extraordinary, the degree of disconnect in this case. Some of it's explainable by the unusual circumstances, but it was a significant disconnect.

18:13Speaker 1:And the unusual circumstances that you referred to are what?

18:20Speaker 3:The time of day, the remoteness of the location, the inability to effectively communicate on the cell phones. There was also some issues with regard to who was in charge of the coroner's team, which I think created some issues for the Sheriff's Department.

18:37Speaker 1:Donaco and his staff reviewed all the materials related to the recovery. He even hiked to the remains site to see it for himself. He's still not sure exactly what happened, but he doesn't believe it was police misconduct.

18:51Speaker 3:And as indicated in the report, there was some communication with the coroners. The coroners went back and forth and It's hard to figure out, you know, exactly what happened, but the decision was made by Homicide to remove the remains as it was getting dark, and they felt like they needed to do that.

19:13Speaker 1:Janaka was able to determine that the removal of the remains didn't influence the outcome of the autopsy. The harm was in the relationship with the family and public perception. And that harm was significant.

19:27Speaker 3:And the reason that we write about it. And the reason that it's so unfortunate is because any missteps by law enforcement in these kinds of cases, even then when all is said and done, it might not have made a difference to the eventual outcome. It does create distrust by those who are most impacted by what's going on, family members and others. And certainly the back and forth thing between those two agencies did not create an element of trust in the capability of the law enforcement agencies in recovering her remains.

20:00Speaker 1:And there was more. After the autopsy, the coroner accidentally released Mitrice's clothing to the funeral home. The clothes were discovered in the body bag with her remains on the day of her funeral.

20:13Speaker 3:That was also a mess. That's a legal term, by the way. But, yeah. Releasing the clothes to the family or for the family discovering that the clothes were still with her remains was wrong. I think there was a recognition that the clothing needed to be transferred over to an investigative agency, and I think eventually it was.

20:38Speaker 1:But that certainly would have led the family to feel that the whole process and investigation and inquiry hadn't been handled carefully.

20:46Speaker 3:That is correct.

20:49Speaker 1:And yet, in spite of everything, Janako has never doubted the core contention of law enforcement, that Mitrice was not a victim of homicide, and that she made her way into Dark Canyon on her own. Can you tell me why you think that?

21:03Speaker 3:Because I don't have any other explanation for how she got up there. She got tired, she was disoriented, she couldn't find a way out, and she expired as a result of probably lack of water or food or both. Certainly the Allegations that I've heard over the years that deputies were involved in her demise, there's absolutely not one shred of evidence to support that theory.

21:29Speaker 1:But just as Mitrice's family didn't think she walked six miles to Montanito from Lost Hills Station, they certainly didn't think she climbed up into Dark Canyon on her own. And when they went into Dark Canyon themselves, they knew it for sure. When the coroner's team finally made it to the site of Mitrice's remains, more than two weeks after the initial discovery, they retrieved several additional bones. The sheriff's department, working hastily against the dying light, had missed them.

22:15Speaker 1:Michael Richardson was outraged, and he did something outrageous. He sent a box of chicken bones to Sheriff Lee Baca. He called it his bone-to-pick campaign.

22:28Speaker 4:So.

22:30Speaker 5:The way that they took my tree's remains and just boxed them up and threw them in a plastic bag. We went to Roscoe's Chicken and Waffle and the bones that was left remaining, we put them in a box and mailed them to Baca and says, imagine if this was your kid that was swept up and put in a box like this.

22:57Speaker 1:Even after the coroner's team searched Dark Canyon, there were still bones missing. Matrice's friends and family wanted to do their own recovery.

23:07Speaker 6:So we had wanted to go hike back into the site.

23:11Speaker 1:Dr. Rhonda Hampton again.

23:14Speaker 6:So finally, I called Lee Baca, and so we have a meeting, and he says to his commanding staff, I don't understand why we can't just let the family know. And then he says, No, better yet, I want the search and rescue team to hike the family in there so that they can, you know, you know, feel where she was and, you know, kind of have their memorial.

23:38Speaker 1:In November of 2010, three months after Mitrice was found, her mother, her aunt, Dr. Hampton, and Clea Coff, an independent forensic anthropologist who was working with the family, hiked up Dark Canyon. They were escorted by Sergeant Wright from Malibu Search and Rescue and several members of his team. It was a grueling hike. At one point, they had to put on harnesses and belay up a sheer rock face.

24:06Speaker 6:They had equipment on us and everything, and it was overgrown, so they would hack through the poison oak and whatever when we needed to go over boulders.

24:16Speaker 1:There wasn't a chance, they thought, Mitrice had come this way. She was a suburban girl. in vans, who had asthma. It took them several hours to reach the site, in a depression about 40 feet off the creek bed. Looking around, Dr. Hampton felt a rush of anger. People had been there. There were metal irrigation pipes related to the marijuana grow, and there was a ton of trash.

24:43Speaker 6:When we were down there, there were food wrappers. Certainly the marijuana grow had all their equipment down there. I didn't want to touch it because I thought, oh, I'm going to tell the detectives about this so they can come and look at it.

24:56Speaker 1:There was no way the growers would have carried all that stuff up the creek bed. Clearly, there was another way in.

25:03Speaker 6:I don't believe that they would access all that equipment through the creek bed the way that they took us. I think there's a much easier, and probably more than one, much easier way to get there.

25:13Speaker 1:But how would Mitrice, stumbling around in the dark, have found that way in? unless she was taken there by someone who knew the trails. Clea Coff, the forensic anthropologist, had worked in Rwanda after the genocide, helping to exhume victims and look for evidence of war crimes. She was trained in finding and identifying small bone fragments. That's why the family wanted her there. They wanted to find the rest of Mitrice's bones.

25:45Speaker 6:When we were down there, I had already had... arranged for Clea to show me how to search for bones.

25:54Speaker 1:Dr. Hampton started sifting through the leaves.

25:58Speaker 6:I was mimicking her hand movements, and as soon as I did that, like that, then there was a bone right there. She looked at me like, like shocked that it was just that bone that was right there. And then she had to alert Tui that we found a bone, and then that was it. We had to, they had to airlift us out of there. What bone did it turn out to be? It turned out to be her finger bone.

26:25Speaker 1:A few months later, in February of 2011, the coroner's team went into Dark Canyon for a final sweep.

26:33Speaker 7:I went out there with the, it's called the SORT team, Special Operations Recovery Team.

26:41Speaker 1:This is Dr. Lisa Scheinen, the forensic pathologist who performed the autopsy on Mitrice.

26:46Speaker 7:They wanted to go back one more time, that I went out with the investigators on this team.

26:53Speaker 1:Rather than hike up the creek bed, the SORT team was lowered into the canyon by helicopter.

26:59Speaker 7:My heart was in my throat the whole time because you were just attached to this line that they had running down from the 1,000 feet or however many feet it was from the helicopter into the canyon. and you were held on with a carabiner, which is like a big clip, and that's the only thing really holding you on there. And I'm going, oh my God, this thing better not come loose.

27:22Speaker 1:The terrain was forbidding.

27:24Speaker 7:It was not pretty. It was extremely overgrown, very irregular terrain. It's not a good place for hiking trails. It felt kind of claustrophobic, the way there was so much foliage, and it was so dense was that, yeah, you were feeling kind of hemmed in.

27:47Speaker 1:And were you successful in finding any more remains on that trip?

27:51Speaker 4:We did.

27:51Speaker 7:We found several additional remains, mostly small bones. We don't really know exactly if they were where the whole body was. They're probably close, but they could have been washed downstream. Dr.

28:04Speaker 1:Scheinen and the SORT team collected eight additional bone fragments that day. But one important bone was still missing, arguably the most important bone, the hyoid, the bone in the throat that often breaks during strangulation. There was no trauma to Mitrice's skull, no sign of gunshot wound or stabbing. That tiny bone could be the one piece of forensic evidence that would change her cause of death from undetermined to homicide. But the coroner's didn't find it Sergeant Tuohy-Wrights had many opportunities to think about Mitrice's death. He visited the site numerous times. Back then, he thought what everyone in law enforcement thought.

28:54Speaker 4:A lot of us had the opinion that Mitrice had some kind of a mental breakdown, that she somehow got up in Dark Canyon and that she somehow died from exposure of some type. Or. Possibly something else like rattlesnakes or feminist spiders, things like that.

29:19Speaker 1:He concluded that she'd wanted to die. Otherwise, she would have walked back out the way she'd come in. And there was one more thing about the site where the remains were found that made him think Mitrice hadn't wanted to be rescued. It was so close to the porn ranch.

29:38Speaker 3:And.

29:39Speaker 4:When I was standing where the remains were found, I could hear the dogs that were owned by those people. that was called the Porn Ranch. So that tells me if I can hear their dogs barking, they could hear her yelling. If she needs help, if she's screaming in the middle of the night, I would think that it's possible, very possible, that that location might hear her. So it led me to believe that she just didn't want to be found.

30:17Speaker 1:Sergeant Wright figured Mitrice hadn't needed help. But to me, the fact that the people at the porn ranch didn't hear a call for help could mean something else. Not that she didn't scream, but that she couldn't. What if whoever had taken her there strangled her? Or what if By the time she got into Dark Canyon, she was already dead. Next time on Lost Hills.

30:48Speaker 2:Do you think somebody could have taken her?

30:50Speaker 5:You know what?

30:53Speaker 4:If somebody took her and did whatever they did, I think they would have had to have come back with more than one person to drag that body down to where it was. She's two miles up on the mountain.

31:08Speaker 5:You want to go up there right now?

31:09Speaker 7:Yeah, sure.

31:10Speaker 2:Let's go.

31:12Speaker 1:That's next in Episode 7, In the Shit. 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.