7. In the Shit | Lost Hills

0:15Speaker 1:Pushkin.

0:23Speaker 2:Dark Canyon is a narrow slot canyon that cuts a jagged line from the top of Paiuma Road down toward Montanito. It's choked with poison oak and brush and surrounded on three sides by canyon walls at least a thousand feet high. The terrain all around it is sunny, breezy scrubland, but the canyon itself is cold and dark and almost impenetrable. So how did Mitrice get to where she was found in Dark Canyon? Here are some possibilities. Mitrice entered Dark Canyon from the bottom. Mitrice entered Dark Canyon from the top.

1:04Speaker 2:Mitrice entered Dark Canyon from the porn ranch. Mitrice was alone. Mitrice was not alone. My truce was alive. My truce was not. If we're going to figure this out, it'll be by process of elimination. We tried going up Dark Canyon from the bottom a few different times. The remain site is not even a mile up from the entry point on the Backbone Trail. But it is incredibly slow going.

1:39Speaker 3:It's hours of hiking and traversing this stream bed back and forth, I think, to get up.

1:46Speaker 2:To where she was. When I went, it was after a winter of heavy rain, and the water was gushing.

1:56Speaker 3:Even if it was mostly dry in the actual drainage, you would be scrambling over boulders and rocks, and you'd have to be really motivated to do that.

2:08Speaker 2:Why would you do that? Can we go that way? Haley, my reporting partner, made another attempt during the dry month of July. She bushwhacked up the creek bed for two and a half hours before hitting a sheer rock face, at which point she was forced to turn around. We don't think it's likely Maitrese walked into Dark Canyon from the bottom. And if she did... It doesn't seem possible that she was alone. I'm Dana Goodyear, and this is Lost Hills. Episode 7, In the Shit. So how else could my trees have gotten into Dark Canyon? On Google Maps, it looks like you can access the canyon from higher up on Paiuma Road. There are trails that disappear under a canopy of green brush. We checked various turnoffs, sidestepping locked gates, and trying to stick to public land. One day, we were crashing around in the bushes at one of these seeming access points, getting increasingly discouraged when we heard the sound of a radio and a hammer. It was a guy in a bandana building a greenhouse.

3:55Speaker 5:My name's Ed.

3:56Speaker 6:We're up in the hills here in the Santa Monica Mountains. And I live in the most beautiful spot in the world. And I'm the only one in Malibu who has an underground house.

4:08Speaker 5:And it's like being in heaven.

4:12Speaker 2:Ed didn't want us to use his last name. He's had a few scrapes with the law, and even though he's changed his ways, he likes to be under the radar. But as it turns out, we're not the first people to come around asking about Mitrice. The sheriff's department had been to see him, too, after her remains were found. They had information about an access point leading into the canyon near his property.

4:35Speaker 6:And then one of them was, like, grilling me, like, oh, what do you know? And then one of the other guys came up and said, what do you know about Mitrice? I was thinking maybe you guys should tell me what you know about her, you know, but I didn't. There was nothing I could really say.

4:48Speaker 2:Ed takes us into his underground house. We follow him through a curtain of camo netting and down a ramp to a heavy wooden door.

4:56Speaker 6:And we're inside. We've got the fridge over here. The interior is 32 feet by 16 feet on the inside, 8 feet tall. And I use wood beams, just purely ornamental.

5:12Speaker 2:It's dimly lit and crammed with slimy terrariums holding rare botanical specimens. Carnivorous plants, miniature begonias, mosses. He sells them on eBay, along with some fancy millipedes he calls pink dragons.

5:26Speaker 6:And then I'm selling this begonias, and this is super rare, this one.

5:31Speaker 5:It's a grass begonia from Madagascar. Begonia bognerii. And it's pretty spectacular.

5:42Speaker 2:Before he was growing begonias, he was a marijuana farmer.

5:46Speaker 5:I've been through all the wars.

5:47Speaker 6:I've been arrested a bunch of times and almost done a bunch of time in prison and the whole thing.

5:54Speaker 2:Ed says he used to grow in Dark Canyon.

5:57Speaker 6:Yeah, it's going back from 2001 to about 2004. And there were about 300 plants here.

6:02Speaker 5:300 plants, yeah.

6:08Speaker 2:Back before legalization, this area was riddled with illegal grows, some amateur operations, others run by drug cartels. Ed says Dark Canyon was a great place to grow weed.

6:20Speaker 6:The plants were so big, you know, there was this one spot I was telling you about called Queens, where the plants were like, you know.

6:26Speaker 5:12 feet tall.

6:28Speaker 6:Once it gets above that, now you're exposed.

6:30Speaker 5:Now you have a problem.

6:33Speaker 2:One day, Ed's grow got spotted.

6:35Speaker 6:There was a helicopter that flew over And they flew over here and they went into Dark Canyon and they circled around, but kind of far away. And I go, did they see? Because they flew right over the plant. I go, I think they did. But I wasn't sure. But they were sneaky about it because they didn't just circle directly overhead. And so about two weeks later, I harvested everything. I did the whole thing. 300 plants was a huge amount. Then all of a sudden, I'm sitting here.

7:00Speaker 6:I'm doing something. And all of a sudden, the helicopters and they're 10 feet above the ground. And they're sitting right on top of me. And I run down into the, I had this whole tunnel area underneath the shrubs, like a, like a trail, but it was underneath.

7:14Speaker 5:So it was like a tunnel.

7:15Speaker 6:And, um, so I went, I went running down into there and these guys were like 10 feet above the, you know, at one time I.

7:24Speaker 5:Could actually, I was in this little crevice area.

7:27Speaker 6:I could actually feel the rotor wash like this, like 50 mile an hour wind, just blowing through this little dry Canyon that I was in, you know, under the brush. And I'm telling you, it was live.

7:37Speaker 5:It was intense.

7:40Speaker 2:Ed says that 20 years ago, a friend of his, hiking deep into Dark Canyon, had come across a big industrial pot grow. Ed thinks if his friend got down there, maybe we can too. He warns us we're going to have to do a little bushwhacking. We check our watches.

7:56Speaker 5:It's 11 a.m.

7:57Speaker 3:Do you want to do more touring or do you want to go down and get hiking?

8:01Speaker 7:Yeah, maybe let's go back to your car and I'll switch my.

8:05Speaker 8:Gear and we'll get hiking.

8:06Speaker 5:And then we can come back and talk if you want. Let's get on the road.

8:09Speaker 7:Yeah, I like it.

8:11Speaker 2:We go over the lip of the canyon into the dense brush. Ed's in front, clipping. We're behind him, crawling on our hands and knees.

8:19Speaker 6:You made a good path here.

8:24Speaker 9:I hope so.

8:29Speaker 5:You want to get one of those coyote trails if you can.

8:32Speaker 8:That would be awesome.

8:36Speaker 2:We pick our way along a ridge, then drop into the creek bed. It's filled with massive boulders and six-foot-tall saplings. There's poison oak everywhere.

8:45Speaker 8:How long have we been hiking?

8:50Speaker 2:I think we've been hiking for two hours. I wouldn't call it hiking, I'd call it crawling. That's what I would call it, too. Crawling, sliding on our butts. Haley keeps checking the GPS app on her phone, which is loaded with the coordinates of the remains site. The little arrow representing our position is still ridiculously far away. We press on, but it's starting to seem like we might never get there. Ed's been saying, just 200 more yards for what feels like hours.

9:21Speaker 6:Honestly, I could say no one's been here for a while. I've never even been this far down myself, so probably no one's been here in 30, 40 years at least.

9:30Speaker 5:Maybe even longer.

9:32Speaker 2:By now, the canyon is engulfed in shadow. It's 2.30, less than three hours till the sun goes down. We're not going to make it to the remain spot. Not even close. We have to turn around. We haul ourselves out of the creek bed and up to where we have a vantage point. I can see the porn ranch through my binoculars. Everything between here and there is trackless wilderness. How would you describe that terrain down there?

9:59Speaker 5:Oh, you're in shit, yeah. Yeah, you're in living hell.

10:05Speaker 2:Ed pulls out a loaf of bread and takes a few bites.

10:08Speaker 6:So it's about an 800-foot canyon in there. It's very, very intense. I have been down in there, and I'm telling you, you feel like a little teeny tiny bug down there. You look up at this massive cliff, you know, and that's the Earth's crust that's been lifted up out of the ground, and you're just seeing the side of the Earth.

10:29Speaker 5:So this is spectacular.

10:31Speaker 3:I don't remember if we actually got around to saying at our turnaround point that, I mean, we'd been going for two hours and we were like a fifth.

10:40Speaker 2:Of the way that we needed. More than two hours.

10:43Speaker 3:More than two hours to where my tree's remains were.

10:46Speaker 2:So there's just no way on earth she hiked in from the top.

10:51Speaker 3:There's no way on earth that.

10:56Speaker 2:Somebody brought her body in from the top. No. There's no way.

10:59Speaker 5:No, no, it's impossible.

11:02Speaker 2:He finishes his bread, and we drink the rest of our water. It takes us another couple of hours to get back to Ed's place. We beat our way out of the brush just as the sun slips below the horizon. So, did my tree center dark canyon from the bottom? Probably not. Did she go down from the top? No way. But we do know there's another way in.

11:27Speaker 3:Through.

11:28Speaker 2:The Porn Ranch. Suze Randall, a.k.a. the Porn Queen of Montanito, lives in a big white Spanish-style house surrounded by horse corrals and stables. She's in her 70s, feisty and petite with white pixie-cut hair.

11:56Speaker 9:We are the upper class. I mean, come on. Oh, we started upper class and worked our way slowly down. But with an English accent, you can get away with filth.

12:08Speaker 2:Suze had a huge career as a photographer of high-end adult content. Back in her heyday, porn was classy by comparison to what's out there today. Think lush, highly produced images of Stormy Daniels in a lacy white bra beside a donkey. But Suze is retired now.

12:27Speaker 9:I got kicked in the face by one of my horses and lost an eye, so that was a good excuse. But also, when we shoot, we'd spend two or three days getting ready. I mean, I'm not going to go and just shoot, you know. It's got to be prepared, a la Playboy, kind of drapey-papey, all that crappy-wappy.

12:47Speaker 2:Suze came to America in the 70s, courtesy of Hugh Hefner, who hired her as a photographer. At Playboy, and then later at Hustler, She shot herself using a cable release and a mirror.

13:01Speaker 9:Male photographers wanted to shoot me. I said, oh, no, no, no, I'll shoot myself. It's much more relaxing instead of having to do what some guy tells you. You get stiff and your shoulders raise and you're like this. It's like dancing. You've got to be on a flow. It was cool. I'm glad I did it because I certainly don't look like that now.

13:24Speaker 2:At the dawn of internet porn, Suze became a business tycoon, minting money on her site, suze.net.

13:32Speaker 9:Instead of being lock, sock, and barrel, you know, I would do what I wanted to do. I would go and party with them and then do what I wanted to do and they'd get mad and I'd say, up yours, and I'd get fired and then I'd go and work for somebody else and then, same thing, Hefner, Flint, I fought with all of them, but It meant that I ended up shooting for myself independently and owning all my pictures. So that when the internet came, I was the only photographer who owned her own pictures.

14:05Speaker 2:Suze's house is up the hill from Montanito at the end of a long driveway.

14:10Speaker 9:Oh, the history of this house is quite interesting. It's been here since like the 40s. There's been ranches here. And Bishop Raleigh had a chapel down there for the Church of Antioch. And this house in the 70s burnt down, and the guy who owned it rebuilt it. And he did all these arches and everything, but he rebuilt it around the bar so he could party with Lee Majors. And then they got so drunk, he'd be sober an hour a day. So he lost the ranch. But he was up here drunk with a gun, and nobody would come and see him, except I used to ride up on my horse and chit-chat him up.

14:51Speaker 2:On Because you had designs on this property?

14:54Speaker 9:Yeah, and he knew I wanted it. It took three years, and he knew I'd look after it.

14:59Speaker 2:She says Montanito was a great place to ride horses and raise a family.

15:04Speaker 9:We moved to this area because we were looking for a good school district for the kids. Kids do that for you. Your life revolves around them. I mean, work was work, but it was not our social life. There's nothing more boring than a bunch of pornographers, I'll tell you.

15:20Speaker 2:But the ranch was also the perfect porn location, first for Suze and then for her daughter Holly, who followed her mom into the business.

15:29Speaker 4:I grew up in, you know, what I like to say, kind of the Suze bubble. Everything that we shot was very beautiful, very high end.

15:35Speaker 2:Holly has occasionally used the ranch for shoots as well, though it's been years at this point.

15:40Speaker 4:It's a great property.

15:41Speaker 9:I mean, it's big. It's lots of parking.

15:44Speaker 4:There's lots of different areas to shoot. It's super private.

15:47Speaker 9:You don't get them screaming through the gullies. You don't get echoing.

15:53Speaker 2:Holly said that one time a shoot of hers had been interrupted by a pot bust in Dark Canyon.

15:59Speaker 4:We had a huge, like, illegal weed patch. up the canyon. And I was actually shooting when they were harvesting it. Well, when I say harvesting it, when they were, uh, possessing it, you know, they, the police had come and they, these police helicopters and they had all this weed that they put in these huge nets and then they airlifted it directly over our ranch. And I just remember being here and My whole crew was here, and the models were like, I hope they drop some. So, yeah, but that was the only, like, big weed bust that we saw.

16:33Speaker 9:That was years ago, and it was way up there, and they got to it from upper Paiuma. I mean, we didn't even know. We never saw anybody going down there until the cops turned up. We didn't know. Otherwise, we'd have been up there taking some.

16:47Speaker 2:Suze agreed to give me a tour of the property. We got in a quad, and she drove me around. I asked her about Mitrice. She told me that when she learned of Mitrice's disappearance, she organized a search party.

17:00Speaker 9:I mean, we spent days looking for her on horseback when she went missing, riding these things.

17:09Speaker 2:But then people started to speculate that Suze might somehow be involved in Mitrice's death. Mitrice was young and beautiful, and her body was found on public land bordering Suze's ranch. That would obviously make for a compelling narrative. But like so many elements of the Mitrice-Richardson story that have taken hold in the public imagination, I've seen no evidence to support this theory. None whatsoever.

17:33Speaker 9:Yeah, people were accusing me of having done S & M or something and murdered her. So yeah, I just want to go there. That's bullshit. Come on. If I'm going to murder anybody, it's going to be a cop.

17:59Speaker 2:We drove up Sousa's driveway and stopped the quad at an overlook at the edge of Dark Canyon. It was a sheer drop to the creek bed. Matrice's remains were found down there and about a quarter mile east of where we stood.

18:13Speaker 9:I call it Matrice Canyon. I mean, just to myself, but.

18:19Speaker 2:I.

18:23Speaker 9:Really try to.

18:28Speaker 2:The 2012 report from the Office of Independent Review included only a few details about the discovery of Mitrice's remains. One of these details was that the rangers had hiked into the site from, quote, a property located on Paiuma Road. That would be Sousa's property, the porn ranch. The report also said that after Malibu Search and Rescue and the homicide detectives arrived by helicopter, the rangers hiked out the way they'd come in. The report notes that it took them about a half an hour to get back to their starting point at the porn ranch. So, according to official documents, there's a way in from Suze's land. Suze is extremely private, and she takes the security of her property very seriously. There are big dogs, and the place is crawling with groundskeepers. That means you can't just show up there and knock on the door. It literally took years to convince her to let Haley and me come back and poke around a bit. We were hopeful that we could find that elusive trail, the one used by the rangers, that would take us to the remains site in half an hour. Suze had arranged for a chaperone.

19:40Speaker 7:Travis, local guide, Montanita resident.

19:43Speaker 2:Travis shows us the staging area that was used by law enforcement during the recovery of Mitrice's remains.

19:50Speaker 7:Yeah, I mean, it's a really short little cut across here, but I think honestly that they probably entered down there. I don't know where she entered, but that's... definitely where the police entered.

20:01Speaker 2:We start walking through thick green grasses on a narrow horse trail that quickly turns into an even narrower game trail.

20:10Speaker 7:But yeah, this whole area hasn't burned in a long time.

20:15Speaker 5:That's why it's overgrown.

20:16Speaker 2:It's so beautiful.

20:20Speaker 5:I love that sage smell, too.

20:22Speaker 7:It's devolved into a game trail because nobody really goes.

20:25Speaker 5:This way anymore.

20:26Speaker 7:But yeah, just deer and coyotes, probably mountain lions.

20:33Speaker 2:I can tell we're somewhere above the creek bed. I'm thinking this is the shortcut we've been looking for. And I can't help it. I'm getting really excited.

20:42Speaker 8:All right, so where do we go from here?

20:44Speaker 2:Down here? Go where the coyotes go? We get down low, limboing under a tangle of branches.

20:51Speaker 7:You know, this is kind of like a tree because it looks stable, but it'll actually just break down.

20:55Speaker 8:So watch out for the ceanothus.

20:59Speaker 7:I'm guessing it's probably overgrown.

21:02Speaker 9:Yeah.

21:05Speaker 2:Oh yeah, there is a trail down here. But then, to our indescribable disappointment, we find ourselves on the Backbone Trail, a few yards from the point of which you turn up into the creek bed, the place we've been so many times before. I feel like I'm being pranked. We convince Travis to take us back to the overlook, the place Suze calls Mitrice Canyon. In the years since I was last there, I've tried many times to picture it precisely— To test, mentally anyway, if there could be a hidden trail.

21:41Speaker 2:It would be the most direct route in. And another thing is, you wouldn't have to walk up Sousa's driveway to get there. There's a fire road with an outlet higher up on Paiuma Road that leads right to the overlook. It's gated and probably guarded, but still. Someone could have slipped through there in the dead of night. Back at the staging area, we get in the quad and head to the overlook.

22:11Speaker 7:Okay, so the fire road entrance is over there.

22:14Speaker 3:Yep.

22:14Speaker 7:This is the road coming down. That's the start of the canyon.

22:18Speaker 10:Yep.

22:19Speaker 2:We're standing by a wooden horse fence, looking down over a precipice into the canyon.

22:25Speaker 5:It's a sheer drop-off.

22:26Speaker 7:That's probably, I'd say, close to 300 feet. I mean, to the base of the creek, which you can kind of see, I mean, I don't even know. That could even be four stories high. And then from the GPS, I'm guessing she was probably about a quarter mile that way. So we're not even... I mean, it looks like about... We're probably about two-thirds of the way in to where she would be.

22:50Speaker 2:So you'd have to drop down four stories and then hike up a quarter mile.

22:57Speaker 7:To get back in there, it would take a very, very skilled bushwhacking guide to get back in there because it's... It's impassable, and there's so much poison oak down there, and it's mature poison oak, so you can't really even bushwhack it. You just got to go through it. And that's what the Malibu Search and Rescue said, and that's why they're using the helicopter to get back in there, because it's impassable.

23:20Speaker 2:We stand there quietly, just looking out over the canyon with its dozen shades of green.

23:28Speaker 7:Everything in Montanito proper is pretty rustic. and kind of just, you know, it's unrefined. I think that most of these mountain communities back in the Santa Monica Mountains are people like, you know, living kind of, you know, rustically, but, you know, you can go into Calabasas and hang out with Kanye and the Kardashians if you want. Because this is technically Calabasas, but this ain't Calabasas. You know, it's a thousand miles away from, you know, the Calabasas Commons and Justin Bieber.

24:02Speaker 7:This is raw California. California. You know, this is as raw as it gets. Nobody's ever lived here. You know, local Chumash have told me stories about this area that, you know, that they still believe they're up there, you know, artifacts and stuff. So this is all untouched wilderness. You know, a lot of people don't think LA has wilderness, but this is as wild as it gets.

24:26Speaker 2:When we leave the porn ranch, Haley and I are stumped. It seems like we may have exhausted all our possibilities. We think Mitrice couldn't and wouldn't have gone in from the bottom, top, or the porn ranch on her own. We think someone must have taken her in.

24:43Speaker 5:But who?

24:46Speaker 2:There's just one more source of information we can think of. A person who boasts about having detailed knowledge of Dark Canyon. We've asked so many people how to access the part of Dark Canyon where Mitrice was found. Everyone says, yes, of course, there are lots of ways in. But when we ask for details, the certainty fades away, and we're back where we started. Except for one source. He seems to know everything. It's the guy in the video we found online, the Montanito lifer interviewed by Raven Masterson.

25:32Speaker 8:Did you hear being hit on the door?

25:33Speaker 10:Talking to him.

25:37Speaker 2:He was the person who claimed he'd seen Mitrice at 4.30 a.m. on the day of her disappearance, shouting in front of the tennis courthouse. But he also talks a lot about the part of Dark Canyon where they found Mitrice's remains, what it's like there, and how to get there. He says that after he'd spotted her at the tennis courthouse, she must have walked up Paiuma Road.

26:06Speaker 10:That road's fairly, you know, like a lot of twists and turns, and for her to walk close to two miles to where it's turned off to Dark Creek, you know, from the top, which is the only way she could have gotten in there.

26:22Speaker 11:There's no way she could have hiked up from the bottom.

26:23Speaker 10:I mean, that's like, takes me and everything I have to hike up there.

26:31Speaker 2:He thinks maybe Mitrice, walking along the mountain ridge in the dark, fell down in a ditch.

26:38Speaker 8:Is it really dark?

26:40Speaker 10:It is. That night it would have been pitch black.

26:44Speaker 2:It isn't clear how he's envisioning this ditch in relation to the spot in Dark Canyon where her remains were found, but he sounds extremely familiar both with the canyon and the remain site.

26:55Speaker 11:Yeah, Dark Creek is pretty, it's overgrown with huge oaks and You know, a lot of rocks. But, you know, I hadn't been down in this one spot for a lot of years because a friend of mine's parents.

27:09Speaker 10:Used to own that property.

27:11Speaker 2:He says the place where Mitrice was found was a hangout spot, a place locals knew.

27:16Speaker 10:You know, we used to go down there when we were younger. Right. Because it's stone down there.

27:25Speaker 2:And just like Haley and me, he's thought a lot about how Mitrice would have gotten in there.

27:30Speaker 8:Do you think that a car could have gone up there?

27:32Speaker 10:There's no way a car could have gone up there.

27:35Speaker 9:Right.

27:35Speaker 10:Way in the world. It would have took three people, you know what I'm saying?

27:39Speaker 9:Right.

27:40Speaker 12:Two people would have gotten too tired.

27:43Speaker 10:She was a big girl.

27:46Speaker 2:In fact, Mitrice was not actually all that big. Five feet six, 125 pounds. But can I just say, his description is so specific, so concrete. It almost sounds like he's recalling a lived experience.

28:03Speaker 8:Do you think somebody could have taken her?

28:06Speaker 11:You know what?

28:09Speaker 12: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.

28:21Speaker 11:Down to where it was.

28:24Speaker 2:He offers to take Raven, who incidentally is a young black woman, to the site.

28:30Speaker 12:And she's two miles up on the mountain. You want to go up there right now?

28:34Speaker 5:Yeah, sure.

28:35Speaker 1:Let's go.

28:36Speaker 12:I can take you to where I know.

28:39Speaker 2:The video cuts. Now they're driving through Montanito, past the tennis courthouse.

28:44Speaker 9:So, what house is this?

28:46Speaker 13:This is the house where she was, where I heard her.

28:49Speaker 2:Yeah.

28:50Speaker 13:I came down off to cross the street right there is Woodluff. I heard a scream out there yelling. I came down, then I walked across, and I stood right here, but see, I couldn't see the front door because of all these cars.

29:02Speaker 2:Another cut. Now the camera's looking out over Dark Canyon from somewhere above.

29:11Speaker 8:Well, they've had people who were able to get down there.

29:14Speaker 1:And then that's Dark Creek going down there. And I think that's where they found her, right down there. I think that was some pot-grower's place.

29:27Speaker 2:Another cut.

29:29Speaker 5:Hello, everybody.

29:30Speaker 10:What's happening?

29:31Speaker 8:It's your girl.

29:33Speaker 2:Now Raven is on a hike. She could be down in the canyon.

29:36Speaker 8:I'm just getting to where my Trace Richardson's body was found. I'm carrying.

29:45Speaker 2:Then another cut, and she's walking by some odd fencing. Then the video just stops. We had a million questions for Raven. Had she actually found a way into Dark Canyon from higher up on Paiuma Road? Had the Montanito lifer guided her to the remains site? Did she have video of all that? We set up a meeting with her. Raven wasn't what I expected. She has a big personality online, as a topless rights activist and a shaman who sells hexes on Etsy. In person, though, she's surprisingly quiet and mild-mannered.

30:24Speaker 2:She doesn't have a fixed address and asked us to meet her at a Popeye's in South LA. We ended up sitting in my car to talk. She says she was very disturbed by Mitrice's disappearance and the lack of resolution to her story.

30:39Speaker 3:So you started going out to Malibu to kind of interview people to learn more about the Mitrice case?

30:45Speaker 2:Yes. She says she stumbled on the Montanito guy a year or two after Mitrice's remains were found.

30:53Speaker 8:I found him totally by accident.

30:57Speaker 2:She tells us she liked him. Even though he was in someone's basement, he saw himself as a mountain man, living at his spot. She got that he was essentially homeless.

31:08Speaker 8:He was a very nice person. From what I recall, I remember him giving me beers. He was very, very down to earth. He didn't mean any harm. He didn't come off to me as anybody malicious.

31:23Speaker 2:Unfortunately, Raven says she can't really remember much about the trip into Dark Canyon, and she can't find the video she made about it. But she does remember that the guy showed her his spot on the mountain. It was in the woods, off Paiuma Road. past the driveway to the porn ranch, but before you hit the property's fire road.

31:43Speaker 8:He had a little dugout. It looked like a very earthy hovel, but he had it set up very, very nice. I mean, I think he might have had a fridge, a little refrigerator that was a propane stove. I think he had like a separate room. He had it set up very, very nice.

32:05Speaker 2:When she went back to find him a short time later, He was gone. Sergeant Wright always told me he thought Mitrice had wandered into the canyon and died as a result of her mental illness. This was the consensus view of law enforcement, supported by the fact that the coroner had not been able to determine a cause of death. But then, after we'd known each other for three years, he told me he didn't actually see the case as quite that cut and dried. He was well into his retirement, and he was supposed to be relaxing and spending time with his family and having coffee with other retired deputies.

32:46Speaker 2:But he was ruminating on this old case. Of course it bothered him that he hadn't found Mitrice alive. But also, some of the specifics were nagging at him. He didn't really buy the hypothermia theory, or the dehydration theory. It just wasn't that cold in September of 2009, and there was water in the creek. So what, did she just will herself to death? How many days would that take? That's when he told me something new, something law enforcement hasn't shared publicly. He told me the sheriff's department did investigate someone. It was the guy with the fort, with the deer ribcage, and the women's IDs. But they never named him publicly, and there was no arrest. Sergeant Wright thought that guy might hold the answer to the Mitrice-Richardson case.

33:39Speaker 2:But Sergeant Wright wasn't a homicide detective, and he was out of law enforcement anyway, so there was nothing he could do about it. Except give me his name. Next time on Lost Hills... Do you know anything about that girl, Rick?

34:02Speaker 10:And he's like, what girl?

34:04Speaker 4:Laura, what girl?

34:05Speaker 7:You know, he had that raspy voice.

34:08Speaker 2:She's like, the girl, the girl, you know, the girl that fucking, the girl that's dead. The girl that they found. That's next in Episode 8, Rick Trouble. 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.