4. Hopscotch | Lost Hills

0:15Speaker 1:Pushkin.

0:24Speaker 2:She sat on the top step, and I looked out that window. By the time I got my husband to look out the window, she was gone. And we looked out the front, and we never did find her or see her again.

0:38Speaker 1:This is Karen Smith.

0:40Speaker 2:My name is Karen Smith, and I saw my Trace Richardson, the last day that she was seen by anyone that has come forward.

0:49Speaker 1:The Smiths' house is at the bottom of Cold Canyon Road. It's the tennis courthouse in Montanito. Karen had been reluctant to let me come over. Her husband, Bill, was the TV reporter who'd called the cops about a prowler in the yard in what turned out to be the last confirmed sighting of Mitrice. He passed away a few years ago, and she wasn't feeling her best.

1:12Speaker 3:I've got keys.

1:13Speaker 2:Bad hips, bad shoulder.

1:16Speaker 3:I'm a mess.

1:19Speaker 1:She walked me around the side of the house to the back, and we sat down on a couple of white plastic chairs. The patio was strewn with dark feathers.

1:28Speaker 2:Probably the vultures, the turkey vultures, that like to land on my tennis court lights and leave me a gift every time they take off.

1:36Speaker 1:Well, that's very courteous of them.

1:39Speaker 2:The tennis court has all these white blotches right below the lights. They like to open their wings in the morning and dry them.

1:48Speaker 1:Beyond the patio was a large, dusty yard with a sun-bleached plastic play structure left over from her son's childhood. There were some railroad ties serving as steps. That's where Karen saw Mitrice around 6.30 a.m. on the morning of her disappearance. And it was Karen, even though her husband Bill, talking to the cops, described the scene as if he'd been the one to see her.

2:14Speaker 2:He's the one that talked to the sheriffs, mostly. I was being quiet. And he was a news reporter for 35 years, so he took control of the discussion, and maybe they just assumed. Because my son said the same thing. No, Dad saw her. And I go, no, it was me. I'm the one that saw her. She was sitting on the top step here in the back. And it was unusual, because nobody really comes on the property even though we don't have any fences in the back of it. But I looked down and I said, are you all right?

2:53Speaker 2:And she said, I'm just resting. And I said, okay. And then I left, went to get my husband, and by the time I got to the other bathroom window, she was gone. And then I looked out the front window of the dining room to see if she went one way or the other there, never did see her.

3:12Speaker 1:At the edge of the yard, beyond some dried-out century plants, I noticed a trail. What does the backyard open out to, just into the neighborhood?

3:23Speaker 2:Just to another property. Other properties, and people walk the horse trail, which is above and over and down, and they go to a cul-de-sac on the other side.

3:33Speaker 1:Oh, what's that cul-de-sac?

3:36Speaker 2:Let's see. Malibu Meadows Road is what it's called. And that's... That's over there. It's wide open, too, just like most of these properties.

3:46Speaker 1:So there's a horse trail that leads from there to here.

3:49Speaker 2:Yes, there's a horse trail. It comes up over and it goes around and down into the street, right above this side of those trees.

3:59Speaker 1:Riders can come along the trail, cross Cold Canyon Road, and connect to the Backbone Trail, a 67-mile-long trail that runs all through the Santa Monica Mountains. The backbone passes by the mouth of Dart Canyon, the canyon where Mitrice's remains were ultimately found. And she was definitely alone when you spotted her.

4:22Speaker 2:Oh, yes. She was all by herself and non-threatening. That's all I remember. That's it. I wish I had more information, and I was so upset that I just let her go like that, knowing what happened later that, you know... She unfortunately met her demise. I always shook my head thinking, I wonder, I just don't know what happened. And I always wish I had done more, but at the time there was nothing more to do.

4:52Speaker 1:I asked her about that other story, the one the Montanito lifer told in the video, where he claimed my trees had been at the front door of the Smith's house earlier in the morning, shouting. Karen said she didn't know anything about that. She did say I could check out the trail. I followed it to where it started, in a grove of mature oak trees in the heart of Montanito. I looked around. There was no sign to mark the trail. In broad daylight, it was barely visible, just a faint impression in the dust, mostly obscured by fallen leaves. How had Mitrice made her way here, all the way from Lost Hill Station, in the dark? And where had she gone? I'm Dana Goodyear, and this is Lost Hills. Episode 4, Hopscotch. Mitrice went missing early on a Thursday morning. On Friday night, her mother called Mitrice's mentor, Dr.

6:29Speaker 1:Rhonda Hampton.

6:30Speaker 4:I was driving home from work. I remember it, you know, like it was yesterday. And her mom called and said, you know, has Mitrice reached out to you? I haven't seen her. And I said, no, I haven't seen her. So on my drive home, I'm telling her, no, you know, we were going to have lunch on Monday, but I haven't talked to her since then. And then mom proceeded to tell me how she had been at the restaurant and acting, you know, strangely, and that she had been arrested and released.

6:55Speaker 1:Matrice had been released approximately 43 hours earlier, and no one had heard from her. And besides the sighting at the Smiths, there'd been no other reports of anyone seeing her. Her girlfriend, Desiree Black, finds this odd.

7:10Speaker 5:I think that it would be just kind of missing the point if we didn't acknowledge the fact that she was a young, black, single female in Malibu. Calabasas. Somewhere where wasn't exactly made for us. Somewhere where she should have stuck out. Somebody should have seen her. And I think that is one of the pieces to the story that's kind of still astonishing to me. That nobody saw her. Because those just being facts, the fact that she was Young, attractive, black, female.

8:09Speaker 2:Alone.

8:10Speaker 5:Alone. If someone saw her, they would have remembered that in Calabasas. She would have been hard to miss. And that makes people a target.

8:27Speaker 1:Leticia filed a missing persons report at Lost Hill Station the day she disappeared. Deputies took it as a courtesy, because Matrice being a resident of the city of L.A., it was really an LAPD case. When the deputy at Lost Hills told Latice that someone matching Matrice's description had been seen in Montanito early Thursday morning, Latice had driven out there. But no one else seemed to be looking for her daughter, and she felt that crucial time was being lost.

8:58Speaker 4:And mom called me because she said she did not know what to do because they were not searching for her and there was no planned search. And she asked if I would contact the detective on the case to try to plead for help.

9:11Speaker 1:The detective was Kristen Merrill with the LAPD Missing Persons Unit. Dr. Hampton says Detective Merrill told her LAPD Missing Persons didn't have funds to mount a search. There would need to be a compelling reason to search for Mitrice. If you go to the LAPD missing persons website, this is all spelled out. Since being a missing person is not a crime, police are given a very limited role while conducting these types of investigations. As a general rule, all people have a right to be left alone, and police intrusion into their lives must be minimal. It goes on to say that where foul play is suspected or the person is otherwise endangered, the police will investigate.

9:58Speaker 4:So when it started looking like they weren't going to search, of course my anxiety is rising, and you just say whatever it is you can say to get the help that you need.

10:06Speaker 1:She shared some background on Mitrice's mental health. and the details about her behavior at Joffrey's.

10:12Speaker 4:So then I just start quoting the law. If she was at the restaurant saying she was from Mars, if she was saying she was there to avenge the death of Michael Jackson, you know, the people, the patrons in the restaurant were saying she was acting strange. I was like, well, why wasn't she 5150'd? So after about an hour and a half of talking to the detective, they did agree to do a search. So they agreed to do the search on Saturday. And at that, they weren't going to start that search until 10 o'clock in the morning. So that's a lot of time that went by. I couldn't sleep, obviously, and I had never been to Malibu. And so somewhere around 5 o'clock in the morning, I called my girlfriend and asked her, have you ever been to Malibu and can you come out with me? She's another therapist who worked in my office, so we both had clients that day.

10:58Speaker 4:We shut the practice down and drove out to Malibu.

11:03Speaker 1:Over the next several days, Dr. Hampton, along with members of Mitrice's family and other supporters, kept returning to Malibu. They didn't really know where to go.

11:13Speaker 4:We were frantic, passing out flyers, you know, at Pepperdine, on Pacific Coast Highway, in Calabasas, anywhere we can think of. We stayed there. on Pacific Coast Highway, passing out flyers until about midnight.

11:27Speaker 1:She remembers taking flyers to the Ralph's supermarket on PCH.

11:31Speaker 4:And then on the side of that Ralph's, there's like a homeless encampment, kind of like on this hill. So we walked up there just to search, you know, maybe she ended up there or something, right? And so as we're searching, we saw this group of homeless men and we kind of just stopped and, hey, we're looking for this person. And then one of the men He sits up and says, look, the police don't care about her. The law enforcement doesn't care about her because she's a nigger, and you guys just need to get over it. And that was my first kind of in my face, like, oh, wait, there's a race component to this?

12:11Speaker 1:Before long, Dr. Hampton had reason to believe that the sheriff's department didn't care, except maybe about itself.

12:18Speaker 4:And then we came home, you know, retired. Turn on the TV, and Steve Whitmore, who was the spokesperson from LASD, is putting this twist on the story that was unbelievable, where he was kind of indicating that Mitrice was perfectly fine, nothing was wrong with her, she's an adult, she wanted to leave, so we had to let her leave.

12:42Speaker 1:Dr. Hampton was shocked. This was not only untrue, she thought, but entirely beside the point. They needed to find Mitrice. While Mitrice's friends and family were passing out flyers on Pacific Coast Highway, law enforcement was searching too.

13:12Speaker 3:I'm retired Sergeant Tui Wright, and at the time of this investigation, I was in charge of Malibu Search and Rescue. at Malibu Lost Hills Sheriff's Station.

13:23Speaker 1:I met Sergeant Wright back when I was working on the first season of Lost Hills. He's one of the people who helped solve the murder of Tristan Beaudet, the scientist who was shot and killed in 2018 while camping with his young daughters in Malibu Creek State Park. Sergeant Wright tracked the killer, a drifter named Anthony Rauta, to his encampment in the hills behind Lost Hills Station, where he was ultimately arrested with the murder weapon. In the spring of 2023, Rauta was found guilty and sentenced to 119 years to life in prison. He's appealing his conviction.

14:00Speaker 1:Over his career, Sergeant Wright searched for hundreds of lost and missing people in the Santa Monica Mountains. The LAPD didn't know the area, but Malibu Search and Rescue did. On September 19, 2009, two days after Mitrice disappeared, Sergeant Wright conducted a search. He started at the Smith's house, where Mitrice was last seen, rather than at Lost Hill Station, where she'd been released.

14:25Speaker 3:It's basically what I call a hopscotch. We basically start a search for missing persons at the last known location where somebody's seen. To start it before that just consumes unnecessary time.

14:41Speaker 1:That day, Sergeant Wright was working with a certified man tracker who found an important clue.

14:48Speaker 3:He's the one that found footprints going, they were basically in the side yard. I would call that the southwest side of the house.

14:59Speaker 1:The footprints were clearly directional. They found them entering the Smiths' property from the back by way of the trail and exiting at the front. And they were identifiable. They had the waffle pattern unique to Vans. They'd soon learn Mitrice was wearing Vans when she left Lost Hill Station. and her shoe size matched the prints found at the Smiths. It wasn't much, but the tracks told a story, or a fragment of one.

15:30Speaker 3:Now, when you're looking at footprints, an expert can tell whether somebody's walking or running. It's usually pretty easy to tell a running individual because the print goes down into the ground different.

15:43Speaker 1:The tracker measured each footfall. At first, entering the backyard, Mitrice had been walking. There was a consistent 14-inch gap between the toe of one print and the heel of the next. But the prints leading from the backyard to the front showed pronounced toe digs, and the stride was much longer, 26 inches between footfalls.

16:07Speaker 3:They indicated running motion to the front of the house, to the driveway area. So we assumed she was seen in the backyard and that she ran... alongside the house, out to the front, out the driveway, onto Coal Canyon.

16:24Speaker 1:Sergeant Wright and the tracker found a few more footprints in the dirt at the front of the house, but they couldn't tell which way Mitrice had gone. The footprints stopped, but a team of dogs that was also working that day picked up Mitrice's scent and led their handlers to the neighboring house. That house, set back from the road and surrounded by trees, belongs to a family called the Aftergoods. Sergeant Wright obtained permission to search it.

16:52Speaker 3:I made sure that we looked in the type of places where somebody could be hiding or secreted, such as closets, rooms under the stairs, things like that.

17:06Speaker 1:I'm wondering if anyone in either house was ever considered a suspect in Mitrice's disappearance.

17:15Speaker 3:I wouldn't use the term suspect at that point. We were just looking at a missing person. At the time, we were thinking, well, maybe Mitrice was wandering from house to house.

17:26Speaker 1:But at the aftergoods, Mitrice's scent went cold.

17:30Speaker 3:Now, I don't recall if it petered out at that house's door or if it went a little further, but I'm pretty sure it petered out before we got to what I would call the bridge over Dark Canyon Creek. on Cold Canyon. I'm sure it didn't go past that. You know, I've heard rumors of people saying things about the scent all over the place. I am not aware of any other scent that was worked or located during the search.

18:02Speaker 1:He remembers checking the sand on the banks of Dark Creek for signs that Mitrice had followed the creek up into Dark Canyon.

18:10Speaker 3:And I got out of the vehicle and I looked around in that area. It was an area where the creek flattened out, and there was quite a bit of sand there. And I looked for footprints at that time, and I did not see any footprints, none whatsoever. So I didn't have any reason to believe that she had walked up there, at least from that direction, from that entryway into Dark Canyon.

18:40Speaker 1:At the time of the first search, Mitrice had only been missing for two days. Law enforcement was looking for a woman who might be lost or disoriented. They were looking for a missing person. They weren't looking for a victim. They weren't thinking about suspects. But three days later, on September 22nd, LAPD missing persons handed the case over to a pair of LAPD robbery homicide detectives, Chuck Knowles and Steve Oguchi. And the sheriff's department, which was assisting the LAPD investigation, also assigned a full-time team of homicide detectives.

19:17Speaker 1:There were a lot of tips to investigate. Matrice, while being nowhere, was suddenly, seemingly, everywhere. She was at the Ralphs in Malibu in a silver sports car. She was in Carmel or Santa Monica, Topanga, a Kinko's in Culver City, on a train headed for the airport in pink slippers, talking to herself. These were phantoms. None of them turned out to be Mitrice. Back in Montanito, though, neighbors were starting to get scared. They didn't think Mitrice had gone far.

19:51Speaker 1:They'd started to believe that Mitrice was in and around Montanito well past the morning of September 17th. hiding or being hidden, possibly for days, before she died. There's not much to Montanito. Just a few hundred homes clustered in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains under a canopy of oaks. People there claim it was the winter camp of the Chumash Indians and that it has mystical protection. Fires may rage all around, they say, but Montanito never burns.

20:40Speaker 1:There are no sidewalks or street lamps intentionally. It's an official dark sky community. a haven for nocturnal animals, a place where you can see the stars. You get morning frost in Montanito. In the afternoon, the peaks block out the sun. The stark nature is all there in the place names. Cold Canyon. Dark Creek. Dark Canyon. The residents are private and circumspect, and they don't love talking to law enforcement. It's always been a place for alternative lifestyles. Swingers, potheads, cowgirls, and pornographers, alongside the doctors and lawyers and showbiz folks, and people who just want to raise their kids where they can play barefoot in a creek. Mitrice's vanishing threatened an essential myth about Montanito, a story about its safety, its special bubble of protection. Now it seemed like a place where bad things could happen. Or maybe... Bad things had always happened there, and now people were noticing. In the days after Mitrice's disappearance, there were a number of disturbances reported in the neighborhood. Many of them involved a woman, seemingly in distress. One neighbor reported hearing a woman babbling

22:09Speaker 1:in an unfinished house across from the Smiths in an area known as the Triangle. There were multiple reports of a woman screaming near Dark Creek, where it comes down from Dark Canyon into the neighborhood. According to a documentary about the case made by local filmmaker Chip Croft, residents heard a woman scream two times around 11 p.m. just a few days after Mitrice disappeared. The second scream, one of the witnesses said, was cut short. Some speculated maybe the screamer's throat had been slit. Recently, Haley and I met up with a woman named Emma Schultz, who lived in Montanito back in 2009. She remembers seeing police cars at the Smiths' house on the morning that Mitrice went missing.

23:01Speaker 1:She'd been driving her kids to school. It was the deputies responding to Bill Smith's call about a prowler, the last official sighting of Mitrice.

23:10Speaker 6:I knew when she was last seen, so I knew where she was.

23:13Speaker 1:She remembered seeing an unfamiliar white car parked near the Smiths' house on Cold Canyon Road right around the time of the disappearance. She thought it could be significant. Maybe somebody picked her up.

23:25Speaker 6:Maybe she called somebody. Maybe she did get to a phone and called somebody, and somehow they ended up here and lost.

23:31Speaker 1:I don't know.

23:32Speaker 6:I was just thinking there could have been any story. You know, in your head, you make up all these stories.

23:36Speaker 1:She called the phone number on a bulletin she'd seen about Mitrice and talked to Dr. Rhonda Hampton.

23:43Speaker 6:I called, and I said, I know you were missing my trees, and I don't know what the police have told you, but I, and this may mean nothing or may mean something, but there was a white car that's parked where my trees was last seen.

23:58Speaker 1:And they said, well, where is that?

24:00Speaker 6:And I said, well, what do you mean?

24:01Speaker 1:It was where the.

24:02Speaker 6:Police interviewed the couple that last saw her. And she said, I don't know where that is.

24:08Speaker 1:Emma was shocked. She figured everyone in Mitrice's inner circle would have had the address of the last place she'd been seen.

24:16Speaker 6:And so I told Rhonda, come out, I'll walk you to where she was last seen. You can understand where, you know, their daughter was last seen alive. And then I told them, you know, feel free also to walk around and put flyers out and shared with them, you know, what the community was about. I think they were surprised at how far it was and how wooded it was. I think that was surprising to them. and how dark it would have been.

24:45Speaker 1:Emma agreed to drive us around Montanito, too. We left the parking lot of the Saddle Peak Lodge, the only public building in the community, and followed Cold Canyon Road into a network of narrow streets.

24:58Speaker 6:You know, your brain kind of goes crazy when you think someone just went missing right around the corner and she was last seen, like, right there and never seen again. And again, this is a small, very kind of closed tight community and you don't you don't kind of drive in here if you don't know somebody you don't wander your way in here um yeah it's real tight community you can see and and it has a little kind of you know um was that deliverance so here's the little creek in here.

25:42Speaker 2:But you can see it's very kind of, you.

25:44Speaker 6:Don't drive in here unless you need to be in here. And everyone kind of looks at you when you drive by your car if you haven't been living here. You know, I think there's a lot of people keeping a lot of information instead of just sharing it and finding someone.

25:59Speaker 1:She turned up a street that dead-ended into the woods. We got out of the car and stood at a trailhead. If you followed that trail, you'd hit the Backbone Trail. A lot of the properties in this part of Montanito basically border the wilderness. This was another place where there was a possible, though unsubstantiated, sighting of Maitrese. A housekeeper had reported seeing a black woman near the Backbone Trail.

26:28Speaker 6:And as you can see here, you're surrounded by mountains, but then there's this low area here, and it's a lot of hiking trails, it's a lot of people have horses in this community.

26:42Speaker 1:The riders were very involved with the effort to find Mitrice, she said.

26:48Speaker 6:I know the horse riders in the community went out all the time looking for her.

26:52Speaker 1:That I do know.

26:55Speaker 6:That was very organized and we did a lot of trail walks and everyone was always, there was a community board, everyone talking about going out and looking for her. I think the neighborhood was very supportive of trying to help find my trees. I mean, the community was very, you know, they wanted her found.

27:10Speaker 1:It's scary, you know.

27:11Speaker 6:I think that's something you always all think about.

27:17Speaker 1:Dr. Rhonda Hampton began to make herself a presence in the neighborhood.

27:22Speaker 4:And so it's like we're going to do this big search in Montanito, and at the time it was just a bunch of black folks, you know, kind of going in there.

27:28Speaker 1:She says they couldn't just show up and search. They needed Emma to help finesse it.

27:34Speaker 4:And I've always been thankful that she did that because I think the first, because there was mention of her race, you know, that, you know, Black people don't live out there. Black people don't come out here. And no one straight out said, don't come here. But you were very clear that it was not a place that Black people were supposed to be.

27:52Speaker 1:She found Montanito to be a peculiar place.

27:55Speaker 4:Any information that we would get from people was very, like, everybody was afraid to talk. So lots of information was just kind of given, like, on the sly.

28:08Speaker 1:Did you have the feeling when you were dealing with people in Montanito, like they wanted to tell you something, but they couldn't tell you something?

28:16Speaker 4:Yes, definitely. It was a general feeling, right? And even whether or not it was about my trees or not, like something was going on in that area, and people just. Didn't want to talk. Part of it is, and I heard from one person, they're just afraid of law enforcement. So, and I don't know if that's still true, but back then they were afraid of law enforcement because what it was explained to me is like, we're in the middle of nowhere. They are the only source of protection that we have. This story by this time had broke on the news and law enforcement did not look good. They're not really in a position to talk because these are the people that they have to rely on to protect them.

28:54Speaker 4:And because, you know, it's such in the middle, it's so secluded.

28:57Speaker 1:She passed out flyers showing Mitrice's booking photo and a close-up of the tattoo of Chinese characters at the nape of her neck. Hikers, trail bikers, horseback riders, and helpers wanted, the flyer said. We will be searching the trails, hills, and back roads in the Montanito region where she was last seen.

29:17Speaker 4:I was never really guided, and I still am not guided by my intuition on things. So even if I say this is what I think, I'm always considering every possibility. So I didn't mind doing searches wherever we needed to do those searches. So if there was a tip, then let's organize a party to go search. To me, if there's like a half a percent that she's still alive, I'm going to search everywhere.

29:41Speaker 1:Her brain became a repository for names, addresses, clues, and theories. Eventually, she uploaded a lot of that information to the internet, a public data dump that anyone interested in the case can use. But while Mitrice was missing, Dr. Hampton became invested in a rumor she heard about Mitrice being held hostage somewhere in the Santa Monica Mountains.

30:07Speaker 4:So Guy says, you know, there's some white supremacists, that's the word that they used, There's some white supremacist, and word on the street is that they're holding her somewhere in the canyon area.

30:20Speaker 1:According to law enforcement documents, Malibu Search and Rescue conducted numerous searches, quote, in response to a claim that Ms. Richardson was being held by white supremacists in Malibu, unquote. During that time period, some of the volunteers working with Dr. Hampton found what appeared to be corroborating evidence. They were searching off Paiuma Road, the winding road that takes you high up into the mountains over Montanito. They came across a culvert. It was freshly tagged with a large graffiti-style mural.

30:55Speaker 1:If the footprints in the Smiths' yard had been just the fragment of a story, this was a full-scale narrative, and it seemed like a confession to a crime. Next time on Lost Hills.

31:11Speaker 4:13 African-American women with afros who were nude and in very graphic, sexually provocative positions. One of the images was of a woman who was painted blue, kneeling on all fours. On her buttocks area, she had a symbol, the letters L, A, and she had a marijuana joint out of her mouth. That's what makes us think that it's possibly that the person is trying to just talk about my trees in terms of the fact that she was from L.A.

31:47Speaker 1:That's next in Episode 5, So Close. 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.