10. The Wallypad | Lost Hills

0:15Speaker 1:Pushkin.

0:23Speaker 2:In the spring of 2011, Rick's friend Jay Engelshall was arrested and charged with selling heroin. Jay ended up having to serve more than a year in county jail. And one night, while he was in custody, he had some visitors.

0:38Speaker 3:They said I had a visit. And I'm like, really? I was a little late for a visit. And then I find out that it's two detectives, and they wanted to ask me questions.

0:48Speaker 2:They wanted to talk about Rick.

0:50Speaker 3:They asked me about Rick and his fort, and I told them everything I knew, and they asked me if I'd ever been up there at the fort, and I said, yeah, you know, drinking a beer or smoking a cigarette or whatever, because at that point, who knows, DNA and everything else, but I wasn't going to lie to them. I wanted to tell them everything I could and hopefully be helpful, and the They asked me a few questions like, how long has Rick been staying there? How often does he go up there?

1:20Speaker 2:They asked Jay if he knew anything about Rick and Mitrice Richardson.

1:26Speaker 3:What the cops asked me was, do you think he'd be a good suspect? And I said, I'd look into it because he's violent with women, and you guys know that.

1:35Speaker 2:By this time, it was pretty much an open secret in Montanito that people thought Rick was involved in Mitrice's disappearance.

1:43Speaker 3:Everybody just sort of joked about it in a way. You know, Rick, you sure you don't know what happened to her and this and that, you know, something like that. And then me and my friend started thinking about it a little bit more. We're thinking, well, maybe he could have had something to do with it, you know.

2:00Speaker 2:Homicide detectives had already looked into Rick in 2010 before Mitrice's remains were found. But they dismissed him as a person of interest when the ribcage at the fort turned out to be deer bones. This, in spite of Rick's known history of violence against women, and the proximity of his fort to the place in Dark Canyon where Mitrice's remains were ultimately found. But now, some two years later, the detectives were taking another look at Rick. This time, they were focusing on the house where Rick would often crash, the house belonging to his firefighter friend, Mark Wallace. The Mark Wallace whose business card read, Head honcho slash motherfucker in charge. This would be the Sheriff's Department's best chance to confront Rick Forsberg about my trees. I'm Dana Goodyear, and this is Lost Hills.

3:05Speaker 4:Lost Hills.

3:27Speaker 2:Episode 10, The Wally Pad. Mark Wallace's house, the place Rick hung out and stayed on and off, has a nickname.

3:40Speaker 1:The Wally Pad.

3:43Speaker 2:Mark built the house himself, using boulders he scavenged from rock slides and lumber from the old Malibu Pier.

3:50Speaker 5:It's all the old rustic wood and, like, the woodworking in there. I mean, everything is perfectly... chiseled and like the fireplace me and you we could sleep in it's like a bedroom this.

4:01Speaker 2:Is allison joiner she's an ex-girlfriend of mark's.

4:05Speaker 5:He built it from ground up so you know and i mean it's a gorgeous home he is phenomenal actually he killed it it's it's one of the coolest houses i've seen in la.

4:14Speaker 2:Allison's a kick a pint-sized hair and makeup artist who's also a stunt woman on the day we visit her she tells us she's prepping for a shoot with duane the rock johnson.

4:26Speaker 6:We sit down at her kitchen.

4:29Speaker 5:Table and she pours herself a beer into a glass jar from the high-end organic market, Erewhon.

4:34Speaker 6:She met Mark in 2010.

4:54Speaker 2:And in 2011, she says, she started spending time at the Wally Pad with her son, who was around six years old at the time. Allison says the way she met Mark was totally random. She had this makeup artist friend.

5:08Speaker 5:She's an amazing makeup artist. And she worked for this photographer who did, like, Black Men's Magazine. He did Kim Kardashian.

5:17Speaker 2:Her friend and the photographer specialized in a niche area.

5:21Speaker 5:I call it the ass before the face photography. You know, it's like, I don't think it's porn, but it's just like, excuse me, but jail jack off magazines. You know, that's what they are to me.

5:32Speaker 2:In March of 2010, Allison's friend asked her to come help with hair at a shoot in Montanito. This was about six months after Mitrice went missing and five months before her remains were found. Allison pulled up to the Wally pad. The shoot was happening in some lower part of the property, where there was a pig pen and an old pig named Oscar Meyer. She didn't even go down there. She was just working on the model.

5:59Speaker 5:We were there for hours. I didn't know what we were doing. I thought it was a cute girl. It was just like a cute girl. So we were doing her hair and her makeup. And then I'm like, literally like two hours later, I'm like, what are we doing? And they're like, oh, a porn shoot.

6:14Speaker 2:And then Mark showed up and put on a charm offensive.

6:19Speaker 5:He's a sweet talker.

6:20Speaker 4:He's fun.

6:21Speaker 5:He's very smart. He knows a lot about history and artifacts. He's one of those dudes that kind of any conversation you get into him, he'll know something about. Or he'll bullshit his way through it. And he gets very well respected because he's a fireman.

6:37Speaker 2:Mark was impressive in a very man's man kind of way. Building bonfires and launching expeditions and charging around the neighborhood on a horse or in a backhoe.

6:48Speaker 5:Mark's Mr. Boy Scout boy. Like, if you're going to survive anywhere, it's going to be with Mark. He will build a hole 100 feet down in a night. I mean, the dude can do anything. I don't care if it's from welding to fixing a car to, you know, cutting down a fucking 40-foot tree. I'll do it. Like, it's insane. He'll go up to a rattlesnake and literally go down and grab them in the head and swing them around and their head comes off. I've seen it with my own fucking eyes. Twice.

7:21Speaker 2:This whole Montanito mountain man scene was kind of familiar to her.

7:26Speaker 5:I grew up wealthy people that wanted to be white trash. And to me, that's Calabasas. That's Montanito. And it's like high-class white trash over there.

7:38Speaker 2:Soon after Allison started dating Mark, she met Rick, who often stayed over at Mark's house.

7:45Speaker 5:He was a cool guy. He looked like a Malibu rich beach bum guy. I just remember him in his scruffy white shirt with his blue jean cut-off pants. He's fucking barefooted. I just remember he had long scruff hair. He was like that mousy brown with some gold in it. I was like, dude, you had to have been cute when you were younger.

8:04Speaker 2:She didn't find Rick threatening. Quite the opposite.

8:08Speaker 5:Like, if I saw Rick at night, I'd be like, fuck, I'm safe. No, because he just is a cool personality. You don't feel sketchiness.

8:17Speaker 2:But then one day, Mark told Allison something about Rick that changed the way she thought about him.

8:24Speaker 5:We were up in the garage and he casually goes, that girl that died a couple years ago, he goes, they think that he killed her. And I'm like, well, did he? And he just gave me this weird look.

8:40Speaker 2:All these years later, Allison can still replay this moment like a little movie in her head.

8:47Speaker 5:He just went serious and like quiet for a second. To have a pause of quiet with Mark Wallace is shocking because he's not a quiet guy. So for me, it was, you know, I remember it. I still fucking remember it.

9:01Speaker 2:That's when Allison knew she had to get herself and her child far away from the Wally pad.

9:23Speaker 6:You know, I never, I don't know any of the facts of that situation.

9:28Speaker 2:In the video where Rick is being interviewed by Raven, Rick gives an explanation for why he didn't go to the cops after seeing Maitrese the day she disappeared.

9:37Speaker 6:To be honest with you, to tell you the truth, right at the first night, I go, you know, I had to just go to the cops, you know. And everybody's going, well, you're on parole. What are you going to do? They ask you, you know, and you've got a battery on a woman on your fucking....

9:54Speaker 2:His history alone could make him a suspect.

9:59Speaker 3:Someone had given Rick up to the cops.

10:01Speaker 6:But it's unclear if he ever found out who. And was Rick saying anything? Was he yelling? I don't even remember.

10:30Speaker 2:We found Lisa Lepore, the woman who told us about Rick strangling her, in the court documents from a legal dispute Mark and Allison had after they broke up. It turned out Rick strangling Lisa was the final stage of their strained relationship. What preceded it was like something out of a Raymond Chandler novel, with meth. The first time I talked to Lisa on the phone, she immediately blurted out that she'd taken it upon herself to solve the Mitrice-Richardson case by inserting herself into the scene at Mark's house and making them like her in the hope that she could wheedle a confession out of Rick. When she finally agreed to let Haley and me come over, she told us a wild story. It started with Allison.

11:21Speaker 4:Yeah, I was watching this child, Allison's boy.

11:26Speaker 2:While Allison was dating Mark off and on, she lived for a while in an apartment complex in Malibu Canyon. Lisa was Allison's neighbor in the apartment complex and helped her with her son. One day, this would have been around early 2012, Lisa gets pulled over by a Lost Hills deputy, unfairly, she thinks, and she tells Allison about it. That gets Allison going about the Lost Hills cops.

11:53Speaker 4:So I go home. Phone rings. It's Allison. And I told her what had happened. She goes, oh, those cops at Lost Hills, they're not going to help you.

12:03Speaker 2:According to Lisa, Allison then tells her about a creepy guy up at Mark's house, Rick, who apparently has something to do with the death of Mitrice Richardson.

12:13Speaker 4:He didn't rape her. He just chopped her up, this guy that stayed in his house. I'm like, what? He didn't rape her. He just chopped her up. I said, what are you saying? And my head was just spinning. She goes, you want to go by Mark's Go Writing later? And I was just like, no. And I'm like, wait a minute, Mark's, that's where the guy is.

12:31Speaker 2:Lisa's determined to find out what's going on. So she and Allison head over to Mark's place, and Lisa makes it her business to befriend Rick.

12:42Speaker 4:So I had to go down there and make him like me. I had to make him accept me, like cook for him, bought him drugs, all kinds of stuff, you know, to make him accept me into his world.

12:54Speaker 2:Lisa may be reckless, but... But she isn't stupid. She wants to make sure someone knows.

12:59Speaker 1:What she's up to.

13:01Speaker 2:So before she ever goes up to Mark's house and meets Rick, she makes contact with the watch commander at Lost Hill Station, Lieutenant James Royal. She tells him what she's heard about Rick.

13:12Speaker 4:I told the police officer what I heard, and I said, I'm going to scream it from the tallest mountain. If you guys forgot something or whatever, I'm going to investigate this. And, you know, if there's a killer down there, I'm going to find out about it.

13:27Speaker 2:Lieutenant Royal wasn't at Lost Hill Station at the time of Mitrice's disappearance or the discovery of her remains, and he doesn't know much about the case. When he relays Lisa's information about Rick Forsberg to homicide, the detectives remember the 2010 investigation into the ribcage at Rick's fort. That inquiry was closed out when the bones turned out to be deer bones. But this information about Forsberg is different and potentially significant.

13:57Speaker 6:The allegation was pretty intense.

14:00Speaker 1:Sergeant Toohey Wright.

14:02Speaker 6:It was that somebody that lived in the Montanito area was claiming that this individual, Forsberg, had said he had either killed Matrice or was involved with Matrice. It sounded really interesting, like almost earth-shattering.

14:24Speaker 2:Matrice's remains had been discovered in August 2010. and there'd been little to no progress on the case. Law enforcement had decided that in the absence of other information, the most likely explanation for Mitrice's death is that she wandered into the canyon alone and died. But now there's this person with a history of violence against women who's already on the sheriff's department's radar who may have a direct connection to Mitrice. And there's this other person, Lisa, who's telling law enforcement that she thinks she can get Rick to confess to her. It's a dangerous proposition. Rick is a violent criminal. And Lieutenant Royal tries to warn Lisa of the risks. But she won't listen. Lisa says she went with Rick to his fort. She takes my notebook and, in a shaky hand, starts sketching a map.

15:25Speaker 4:You go Paiuma and then it cuts over this way. Cuts over this way and like that. Rick's property is right there. Okay.

15:36Speaker 2:And was it kind of like dug out a little bit?

15:39Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah. He had it all dug out. Everything, little pathways. And I saw all kinds of stuff there, you know, just there were bones. I wasn't sure if they were human or animal or what. There was women's clothes there and You know, it was a really neat fort, but it was just kind of spooky, you know?

15:56Speaker 2:Lisa isn't an official informant or an agent of law enforcement, but the cops can't stop her from doing what she's doing. And they're open to hearing what she finds out and passing it up the chain to homicide.

16:09Speaker 4:And so this investigation went on and on, and I was delivering stuff to the police officers.

16:17Speaker 6:There was talk of Dark Canyon. There was talk of growing marijuana. So when you put it all together, even though it's all circumstantial, it's very, very interesting. And I was impressed. I mean, I was kind of shocked. But that's when I started to entertain the idea that perhaps there's more to this case. Perhaps this case isn't just a missing person, but there could be possibly some foul play involved. And then.

16:49Speaker 2:Rick invites Lisa to go hiking with him in Dark Canyon. After they've known each other for several weeks, Rick tells Lisa he wants to show her his pot grow in Dark Canyon, and Lisa wants to go. She's hoping Rick will take her to the exact spot where Mitrice's remains were found, a place only her killer would know. But the whole plan gets scuttled, because according to Sergeant Wright, just before Lisa's hike into Dark Canyon, the homicide detectives decide to interview Mark Wallace about Rick.

17:38Speaker 4:Rick calls me and he goes, they think I killed that nigger in the canyon. I'm like, what? And he goes, get over here. And I thought he knew me, that I had outed him, you know.

17:46Speaker 2:Lisa calls Lieutenant Royal from Lost Hill Station and her contact at the Homicide Bureau.

17:53Speaker 4:I said, did you question Forsberg yet? He said, no. I called the homicide detective. Did you question him? No. And I said, he's telling me to come down there. They go, don't go. And I said, I'm going down there.

18:04Speaker 2:Against the advice of law enforcement, Lisa goes to meet Rick.

18:08Speaker 4:He got in and he goes, drive. And he goes, this was the last place I saw her alive.

18:14Speaker 2:They stop in front of the tennis courthouse.

18:17Speaker 4:He goes, right here, he said she was having an argument with this Channel 5 guy. He has a house there. He said I should have protected her. I go, protect her against what?

18:25Speaker 2:At that point, Lisa ends up driving Rick to Lost Hill Station for his interview.

18:31Speaker 4:So they had me deliver him to take a polygraph at the police station, and he passed with flying colors.

18:40Speaker 2:Lisa is convinced that Rick killed Mitrice and that he passed the polygraph because he'd been taught how to beat one.

18:48Speaker 4:He passed like you and I couldn't even pass because we know something about the case, you know. Something would tick on it, you know. But I guess they can learn that in prison. It's a learned behavior that they can learn. So, yeah, he got exonerated, you know.

19:05Speaker 2:I asked Lisa if she ever heard Rick say anything about killing Mitrice.

19:11Speaker 4:I would ask questions about it, and he just kind of brushed it off. He didn't really talk about it. He's kind of an awkward character.

19:22Speaker 2:But she does have her own theory of why Rick would have harmed Mitrice, based on knowing him and his attitudes.

19:30Speaker 4:Whenever he was telling me about that when he saw her, because she was a lesbian. She was black. Sergeant Wright says, as far as he knows, the investigation into Forsberg ended with the He snapped, and he went after her.

19:53Speaker 2:Sergeant Wright says, as far as he knows, the investigation into Forsberg ended with the polygraph.

20:00Speaker 6:I heard that basically he passed a poly, and of course there's been other cases, like the Green River case, for instance. I mean, some people pass polys and they lie, but I don't know. I mean, they checked it all out, supposedly, and it went nowhere.

20:18Speaker 2:Sergeant Wright isn't privy to the details of the homicide investigation.

20:22Speaker 6:I mean, on one hand, somebody could think they kissed it off, but on the other hand, I would have expected somebody to go real deep on it, and I just have no way of knowing if that happened or not.

20:37Speaker 2:One thing is clear. Homicide didn't pursue a case against Rick Forsberg. He was never named as a suspect, and charges were not filed. The most maddening part is that we don't know why. Haley and I tried reaching people up and down the chain of command, including three retired homicide detectives who'd worked the case. No one wanted to get involved. And the homicide lieutenant in charge of cold cases at the sheriff's department told me there's currently no investigator assigned to Mitrice's case. It's been investigated and reinvestigated.

21:12Speaker 2:And without new evidence, it will remain.

21:15Speaker 1:Just as it is.

21:20Speaker 2:Not long ago, I had a clarifying conversation with a retired LAPD robbery homicide detective who specializes in cold cases. In his view, the problem with Mitrice's case is the undetermined cause of death. That puts it in a kind of no-man's land. Law enforcement agencies are businesses, he said, and if you're not solving a homicide, you're wasting company time. Add to that, the Mitrice-Richardson case was highly politicized. Who would want to risk their reputation on a case like that?

21:55Speaker 1:Of course, Haley and I wanted to talk to Mark Wallace.

21:59Speaker 2:Rick had been in and out of the Wally pad around the time of Mitrice's disappearance. Lisa Lepore had insinuated herself into the scene there to get to Rick, and the homicide detectives had interviewed Mark about Rick's involvement with Mitrice. Allison Joyner, Mark's ex-girlfriend, told us she was convinced Mark knew what happened.

22:20Speaker 5:There's no question in my mind. I mean, I know I shouldn't say I know, but I totally know he knows. Mark's a nosy motherfucker, and he knows everything that goes on.

22:30Speaker 2:But it wasn't just Allison. Just about everyone we spoke to in Montanito told us if anyone would have the answer we were looking for, it would be Mark.

22:41Speaker 6:He knew everything. Mark Wallace. Wallace.

22:46Speaker 4:Mark Wallace knows.

22:48Speaker 6:He knows Rick. Mark Wallace was absolutely on fire. He had lots of information.

22:54Speaker 5:Mark knows. 100%.

22:59Speaker 2:Last Fourth of July, I was thousands of miles from Montanito eating a lobster roll when I got a text. Just spoke with Mark Wallace at the Montanito Parade, the text read.

23:10Speaker 1:Naturally.

23:11Speaker 2:Everything in Montanito revolves around the Fourth of July parade. The text continued. He thinks he knows who did it. A guy who was in prison for 16 years and was living in Montanito at the time. That tracked pretty closely with Rick's history. But the best part of the text was the line that read, He said he'll talk to you. After the Fourth of July text, I called Mark several times. In September, I got a text back saying he could talk later that day, but he didn't pick up. Instead, Mark wrote me another text. Quote, I'm very leery about talking.

23:55Speaker 1:Sorry.

23:56Speaker 2:The sheriffs out here are very threatening.

24:00Speaker 1:He went on.

24:01Speaker 2:They put a CI in my home and surveillance on my property.

24:05Speaker 1:Unquote.

24:07Speaker 2:A CI is cop talk for a confidential informant. He must be talking about Lisa, though she was really more of a citizen detective than a CI. He wrote, quote, the whole episode with Rick and LACSD, that's the LA County Sheriff's Department, was a nightmare that I got sucked into solely because I let Rick stay in my house during a very cold winter.

24:32Speaker 1:End quote.

24:34Speaker 2:I want you to know I'm not a callous person and that I have strong feelings about my Therese Richardson and this tragedy. I had nothing to do with her demise. During my reporting, I stumbled upon something the Sheriff's Department may have missed during their investigation into.

24:53Speaker 1:Rick and the goings-on at the Wally pad.

24:57Speaker 2:A detail from their own searches for Mitrice in the days after her disappearance.

25:04Speaker 1:The list of what.

25:05Speaker 2:We know about Mitrice's movements within Montanito on September 17, 2009 is short.

25:11Speaker 1:And contradictory.

25:14Speaker 2:Rick Forsberg in the video says he heard her at 4.30 in the morning in front of the tennis court house. Karen Smith, the owner of the house, says she saw her at 6.30.

25:24Speaker 1:In the morning in the backyard.

25:27Speaker 2:Deputies found Mitrice's footprints on the horse trail beside the Smiths, leading down into their backyard. They also found her footprints running from the Smiths' backyard out to the street in front. That's consistent with Karen Smith's story. Rick's story is not supported by any footprint evidence. Scent dogs indicated that Mitrice had also been at the next house over on Cold Canyon Road.

25:54Speaker 6:I do recall the dog leaving the Smith's property from the front and walking eastbound on Cold Canyon Road in the dirt.

26:04Speaker 2:And then the scent went cold at the next house over?

26:09Speaker 6:Yeah, it appeared to go to that house or go cold after that house.

26:15Speaker 2:It was as if my trees had vanished into thin air.

26:19Speaker 6:And that is common in some missing person cases where we follow a scent with scent dogs that appear to have actually locked into a scent, and all of a sudden it just stops in the middle of a road. And that happens, and that's consistent with somebody being picked up.

26:42Speaker 2:There is no further mention of Mitrice's scent or her footprints in the official reports. But when I got in touch with a member of the Sheriff's Department's search team, he said an additional set of Vans prints matching those found at the tennis courthouse had been found about two miles away at the top of Cold Canyon Road. Based on the appearance of the impressions in the dirt, The deputy told me the two sets of tracks had been laid down around the same time, but there was no way to know which ones had been left first. The tracks at the top of Cold Canyon were in what he described as a loitering pattern. He said, apparently my trees paused at that location. We have no idea for how long, and unfortunately, we don't know where she went from there.

27:35Speaker 1:When I heard about the.

27:36Speaker 2:Prints at the top of Cold Canyon, I felt a knot form in my stomach. This was a totally new piece of information about Mitrice's movements in Montanito. But it wasn't just that. It was the location where she was loitering. She was loitering outside Mark Wallace's house. At the time Mitrice's tracks were discovered at the top of Cold Canyon, law enforcement was searching for a missing person. They weren't thinking about Rick Forsberg, or who his friends were, or where he spent time. Deputies did search Mark's property back then, but they didn't find any signs of Mitrice.

28:18Speaker 1:And that was it.

28:20Speaker 2:So those footsteps would have been just another dead end that caused investigators to scratch their heads at the ever-expanding mystery of Mitrice. Years later, in 2012, after her remains had been found, When homicide detectives were focusing on the rumors about a strange guy with a fort who spent a lot of time at Mark Wallace's house, did anyone remember that Mitrice's footprints had been found right outside? Maybe it was an incredible coincidence. Or maybe it would have helped them solve the case. Either way, Rick never told the cops what happened next, after he encountered Mitrice outside the tennis courthouse. But he did tell someone. Next time on Lost Hills.

29:15Speaker 7:He wanted to tell me something because he had his head down and he kept rubbing through his hair. 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.

29:31Speaker 2:That's next on Episode 11, The Suitcase. 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.