5. So Close | Lost Hills

0:15Speaker 1:Pushkin. During the time Mitrice was missing, a search party organized by Dr. Rhonda Hampton discovered a mural in a culvert high above Montanito. On the cement around two large tunnels, someone had painted a series of naked Black women in various degrading and bizarre poses. This is Dr. Hampton describing the scene in a video made by documentarian Chip Croft.

0:49Speaker 2:This culvert area here is where there was the images that were taken by the searchers of approximately 13 African-American women with afros who were nude and in very graphic ways. sexually provocative positions.

1:15Speaker 1:One was hula-hooping. One was spread-eagle. One was doing a handspring. One was climbing out of a vagina. Another was in a wheelchair, giving a thumbs-up. At the center, there was a man's face with crazed eyes and a mop of curly red hair.

1:33Speaker 2:Along the concrete here were wordings indicating Entering Afroland or something similar to that. Over the side here, it said Afro Hose, H-O-E-S, so Afro Hose.

1:48Speaker 1:One of the figures really caught Dr. Hampton's eye.

1:52Speaker 2: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-H. 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 talk about Mitrice in terms of the fact that she was from L.A., that she was accused of having marijuana.

2:17Speaker 1:To Mitrice's friends and family, this mural was tantamount to a confession, a narrative depiction of her abduction, rape, torture, and murder. According to Mitrice's mother, Latice Sutton, there was even a forensic psychologist who wrote up a report about it unsolicited, saying it was a quote-unquote sick trophy, the killer's calling card. But the day after it was discovered, when Dr. Hampton went to see it for herself, it was already gone. She found that suspicious. Here she is again at the scene.

2:53Speaker 2:This image yesterday was painted with the mural, which is what we're calling it. And here today, the city has quickly... come by and painted it over.

3:06Speaker 1:There was nothing to see but a swath of beige paint, the kind used by the graffiti task force. Law enforcement questioned the artist. It turned out he didn't know anything about Mitrice. This was just his thing, painting naked Black women with afros in sexually explicit positions. He sent Dr. Hampton an email telling her he was sorry for her loss. I knew the mural didn't have a direct connection to Mitrice. But still, it was so unbelievably eerie and compelling, like a reel of found footage explaining the total mystery of what had happened to Mitrice. So Haley and I figured we should see the spot and understand its proximity to the neighborhood and to Dark Canyon, where Mitrice's remains were found.

3:57Speaker 1:We met in Montanito and drove way up into the mountains. we parked on a narrow shoulder and got out. The culvert ran underneath the road, so it wasn't visible till you went down below street level. I think we were expecting to see the beige government paint. We were seriously surprised. Oh, there's some weird graffiti here right now. Does not look like a dis... It's like a similar style.

4:27Speaker 2:Oh my God, I just got all the hairs on my arms put up.

4:30Speaker 1:On the main panel, above the culvert's tunnels, someone had painted a new mural. It was nowhere near as elaborate as the original, but it did seem to share some basic DNA. That caricature over on the left looks similar to the, and the yellow one too.

4:48Speaker 2:And the green one too.

4:51Speaker 1:That's creepy as fuck. I poked my head into one of the tunnels.

4:57Speaker 3:How much do I not want to go in there?

5:02Speaker 4:Hello?

5:06Speaker 1:Then, over on the right, I noticed something really weird. Look at this.

5:11Speaker 2:Help.

5:14Speaker 1:It's the same, like, creepy orange hair. It was a face, outlined in orange, with curly orange hair and crazy eyes, next to the word, help. Then there's another face, and it looks like there might be like a marijuana leaf in the middle of it. What the fuck?

5:36Speaker 5:I want to go home.

5:39Speaker 1:The original mural turned out to be a red herring, and this was just a copycat. So why did I feel a mounting sense of dread? I think it's because I was starting to see how easy it is to get turned around in these mountains. to be misled by seeming clues that don't solve anything. And I'm guessing that's pretty much what Mitrice's friends and family were feeling when the first mural was discovered and debunked. They still didn't know what had happened to Mitrice. They were desperate to find her or find out. But they couldn't distinguish what might be crucial information that could lead them to an answer from what was spinning them blindfolded, in circles. I'm Dana Goodyear, and this is Lost Hills. Episode 5, So Close.

7:06Speaker 1:Throughout the fall of 2009, Mitrice's case was all over the news, and the pressure on the Sheriff's Department to explain their decision to release her without a safe ride home was intense. Here's a report from NBCLA.

7:22Speaker 6:Among all the swirling questions in this case, one thing is certain. Mitrice Richardson was last seen leaving this substation a week ago.

7:30Speaker 7:She was not intoxicated. She was not disoriented. The L.A.

7:33Speaker 8:County Sheriff's Department did not only everything procedurally correct, but was morally right.

7:39Speaker 6:The Sheriff's Department says they'll launch another expansive search, a hunt for clues as authorities try to figure out how a beautiful young woman could simply vanish into the night outside a sheriff's station.

7:52Speaker 1:The Sheriff's Department had arrested and released Mitrice on the assumption that she was not gravely disabled or a danger to herself or others. Now that she was missing, they were at pains to explain why, if she was perfectly fine, she had not returned to her family. This is a recording that documentarian Chip Croft made of a press conference outside Lost Hills Station three weeks after Mitrice's disappearance.

8:18Speaker 7:Steve Whitmore, Sheriff's Department spokesman.

8:21Speaker 8:Now, the important thing that I want to say, and I've said since the beginning, is we want to find Mitrice Richardson.

8:29Speaker 7:That's all we want to do. We want to find her.

8:32Speaker 1:At the station, he said, Mitrice gave no indication of needing psychiatric help.

8:38Speaker 8:She exhibited no signs of incapacitation whatsoever, no mental challenges.

8:43Speaker 7:She was not under the influence.

8:45Speaker 8:We gave her an extensive field sobriety test where the eyes are checked, where the pulse is checked. where this language is checked, where a person's physical abilities are checked.

8:56Speaker 1:The jailer, he said, had offered Maitrese a bed in an unlocked cell and also told her she was free to wait in the lobby for a ride.

9:05Speaker 8:And when she came here, the jailer, it was an African-American jailer, by the way, a woman who had been a jailer for 14 years with the L.A. County Sheriff's Department, talked to her at great length, visited with her, talked about music, jazz she liked, gospel she didn't.

9:19Speaker 7:There was a lucid conversation. That jailer said, why don't you stay?

9:23Speaker 1:A quick aside. A very senior member of the detective division, now retired, told me that one of the sheriff's department's biggest mistakes in the whole Mitrice-Richardson episode was that they didn't ask the Lost Hills jailer, Sharon Cummings, a black woman, to explain to the public why she'd been released. I wondered what Cummings would have said. She's also retired now, so I called her. The minute I said, Mitrice Richardson, she hung up the phone. At the press conference, Steve Whitmore, the Sheriff's Department spokesman, continued to defend the decision to let Mitrice leave.

10:03Speaker 8:This is a 24-year-old adult who is fully cognizant of her surroundings and is is coherent to said extent. If we hold them against their will, it's called over-detention. You can't do that in America.

10:19Speaker 1:But reporters pressed. Didn't the Lost Hills deputies have some responsibility to help her? Shouldn't she have been driven back to her car?

10:29Speaker 8:If she had asked, sure. But let me, that's an interesting question. We did that before. We've been asked to do that. And we've done it.

10:36Speaker 7:And then we've been disciplined for doing it.

10:38Speaker 2:Taking somebody back.

10:39Speaker 7:Exactly. Oh, yes.

10:41Speaker 8:We've been, people, if it's late at night, if the situation warrants it, not only in Malibu, but any station. There's some, especially in some stations where, like Century, where there may be some danger.

10:52Speaker 7:And I mean real danger. I mean, you know, real danger. Now, that doesn't say there's no danger here.

10:59Speaker 1:It makes sense the Sheriff's Department didn't want to dwell on Mitrice's mental state. It might expose them to liability. Soon, Mitrice's family would sue the county for negligence, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and wrongful death. That claim ended in a $ 900, 000 settlement for the family. But for the LAPD, the lead agency tasked with finding her, Mitrice's mental health was becoming an important investigative angle. Not long after Mitrice's disappearance, detectives reached out to Hannah Parks, the woman she'd fallen for in the summer of 2009. She knew Mitrice was missing and was waiting anxiously for her to get in touch.

11:43Speaker 3:In the back of my mind, I kept thinking maybe she'll pop up. Like I thought maybe she would just come to my house. I was waiting for her to kind of like reach out. I thought it was weird that she wasn't texting or calling, but then of course she didn't have her phone. But for me, in the back of my mind, of course I was concerned because I knew the mental state she was in. But I was like, she'll come over. Like, she'll pop up.

12:12Speaker 1:She was startled to get a call from LAPD Robbery Homicide.

12:16Speaker 3:They said, hey, we need to meet with you about the disappearance of my Therese Richardson. And we're on our way right now. And I'm like.

12:26Speaker 1:I'm at work, and they're like, we don't care. Hannah called her mom, and together they went to meet the detectives at a Starbucks.

12:35Speaker 3:They just asked me a bunch of questions about how I knew her, our relationship, things like that. And I asked them, why L.A.

12:47Speaker 1:Homicide?

12:48Speaker 3:Like, Why homicide? Because she's just missing, right? So shouldn't this be like missing persons?

12:59Speaker 1:At first, Hannah felt like she might be a suspect.

13:02Speaker 3:Then once they started talking to me more, I think they very quickly realized, like, I wasn't, I didn't have anything to do with it. Then they started trying to just get more information out of me regarding... my trees really.

13:23Speaker 1:The detectives asked Hannah if they could look around her home.

13:27Speaker 3:They ended up following me back to my apartment and I gave them like everything I had of my trees. So there was a couple of journals, some clothes.

13:41Speaker 1:And just a few little things.

13:42Speaker 3:Like I didn't have that much, but I gave them everything of hers that was at the house.

13:47Speaker 1:Detectives also searched Mitrice's car at the tow yard in Malibu and recovered a black purse containing several more journals. According to her father, they also found her wallet underneath a seat. It contained a bank card connected to an account with plenty of money in it. The journals were handed over to Detective Chuck Knowles, one of the LAPD robbery homicide detectives who'd been assigned to take over what was still, officially, a missing persons case. Knowles had the journals analyzed by an LAPD psychologist who saw indications of severe bipolar disorder. From Mitrice's phone records, they determined that she had not slept for five days by the time she arrived at Joffrey's. Knowles now understood how acute Mitrice's mental illness was at the time of her disappearance. It was the very recognition her friends and family had hoped for, to add urgency to the search. but it had an unintended effect. Because now, the LAPD appeared to view her illness and erratic behavior as a likely explanation for the fact that she couldn't be found. Mitrice might have committed suicide or succumbed to the elements. Or, as Detective Knowles

15:06Speaker 1:told the LA Times, she could have, quote, gotten herself into a comfortable relationship outside of her immediate friends and family. In other words, the cops were implying Mitrice had made herself disappear. One of the central mysteries of Mitrice's case is how she got from Lost Hill Station to Montanito, six miles in the dark. Law enforcement checked with local taxi companies. There was no record of her. Leaving Lost Hill Station, she would have, in all likelihood, walked east on Agora Road. In about a mile, she would have hit Las Virginas Road. To the left, past the McDonald's and a couple of gas stations, is the 101 freeway.

16:03Speaker 1:To the right, the road takes you through Malibu Canyon to Montanito. If you keep going, you hit Pacific Coast Highway and the ocean. Was she trying to get back to her car? And had she really gone all that way on foot? As soon as Mitrice went missing, her inner circle began demanding documentation of her arrest and detention. More than anything, they wanted to see the video footage of Mitrice leaving Lost Hill Station. They wanted to see which way she walked, or if someone who had yet to come forward had picked her up. They were hoping for a clue. But they were told there was no videotape.

16:45Speaker 1:At least, that's what they were told at first.

16:48Speaker 2:That story changes. So originally, we were told there were no front cameras.

16:53Speaker 7:Dr.

16:54Speaker 1:Rhonda Hampton again.

16:56Speaker 2:Every weekend, we were doing a search somewhere in some way, right? And so we kept coming back to how do we know that we're going in the right directions? So we were asking about the video so that we can see which way she walked when she went out the front door. And then they just denied that there was ever the existence of a video.

17:15Speaker 1:When they presented the Sheriff's Department with a picture of the camera at the front of Lost Hill Station, the story shifted.

17:22Speaker 2:We were told, oh, there are cameras, but it's recorded over.

17:25Speaker 1:And then the story shifted again.

17:29Speaker 2:And then the next one was, it's live, and so we don't record that. All three of those.

17:36Speaker 1:The evolving answer did nothing to satisfy Mitrice's friends and family. and did everything to convince them that the sheriff's department was hiding information, to throw them off, on purpose. Eventually, Dr. Hampton says, she asked about the video in a meeting with Tom Martin, who was the captain at Lost Hills Station when Mitrice went missing.

18:00Speaker 2:And then Tom Martin admitted at that point that he had the video, that he had had it, and that it was in his desk.

18:12Speaker 1:So there was a video, and this whole time it was at the station, in the captain's desk?

18:19Speaker 2:I mean, we were, it was pretty heated because it was like, wait, you lied all this time and said that there wasn't a video? You know, like, why would you hide it? He never answered that question.

18:28Speaker 1:The impression that the sheriff's department was lying only deepened when Mitrice's friends and family actually got to see the video. It was screened for them with a homicide detective named Lieutenant Mike Rawson, who was assisting on the case. It showed my Therese inside Lost Hill Station, and contrary to what the sheriff's spokesman had claimed, she did seem to be acting erratic.

18:52Speaker 2:From what I recall seeing on the video, she's placed in the cell with another woman, and she interacts with that woman a bit, and she's pacing back and forth, and eventually the woman... leaves. And so she's there by herself. And she goes up to the phone. She picks up the phone several times. She picks up the phone, puts it down, picks it up, puts it down. She starts swinging on the side of, so like the door and the jail has like a bar on it kind of.

19:32Speaker 2:And so she starts swinging. You know how kids, you'll see them kind of doing it in like when they're in a crib. It's kind of doing that. And then my tree says, kind of sitting or laying like in fetal position on this like concrete bench.

19:49Speaker 1:When it got to the part of the video where Mitrice was about to be released, Dr. Hampton watched attentively. This was the moment she'd been most focused on, where she might get to see which way Mitrice went, or if someone had picked her up.

20:03Speaker 2:They're collecting her, and so they gave her this, like, it's like a clear baggie, right? And it has, like, her belt in it, her hat's in it. There's some other paperwork in there. And then she's putting on her items and... And then they walk her out. Sharon Cummins, the jailer, walks her out of the side door. And so when she opens that door, it's pitch dark so that when they both exit together after that, all you see is darkness. And then the screen goes black, right?

20:33Speaker 2:At that point, when the screen went black, we kind of thought the video was over.

20:38Speaker 1:But the tape was still rolling, showing the darkened exterior of the station.

20:42Speaker 2:So. The guy who was showing us the film, um, I was sitting to his right. And so even though the screen was black, he looks over at me and he like nods his head. Like he's trying to get me to look at something. So I, you know, I just kind of look up and then Jonathan also looked up my Teresa's cousin. And he says, who's that? Because even though the screen was black at some point, um, So two minutes pass, but Sharon Cummins comes back and opens her door. And then at the same time, the deputy, a deputy leaves. Like, as soon as that door shut, the deputy leaves.

21:23Speaker 1:They hadn't known that a deputy had left the station shortly after Mitrice. It seemed like the answer they'd been looking for.

21:31Speaker 2:So then we're like, wait a minute, who was that who was leaving? I can tell that Lieutenant Rawson was very surprised. that there was more footage on that video because his face turned absolutely beet red.

21:47Speaker 1:The Sheriff's Department claims that all the deputies working that night were accounted for, and a report from the Office of Independent Review, a civilian oversight group, concluded that deputies had acted lawfully in Mitrice's arrest and release. Still, over the years, many people have speculated that a deputy from Lost Hills Station might have picked up Mitrice, assaulted her, killed her, and dumped her body. Or that a deputy may have picked her up and assaulted her, causing her to flee into Montanito, where she died. There is no evidence to support either scenario, but it doesn't seem to matter.

22:28Speaker 1:The Sheriff's Department's consistent impulse to shield themselves from blame made everything they did looked like a cover-up. Here's Michael, Mitrice's dad. This is from the first time I met him, almost five years ago, at an event being held on the 10-year anniversary of Mitrice's disappearance. He was firm in his belief that Mitrice's death was an inside job.

22:54Speaker 9:So it was a cover-up from the time Mitrice was released. all the way up and still to now, to this day, it's still a cover up. And even though, you know, let's say, how can you 100% surely say it was a sheriff that did something to my trees? Well, it's very easy at this point in time. I'm not going to lie about something that I didn't do. If I didn't do it, here's all the information. And ironically, the same thing that The sheriffs expect for you to do as a witness. If you don't do it, you get arrested for it. So like saying withholding evidence such as a tape of a crime, guess who's going to jail?

23:37Speaker 9:The person withholding, and none of them went to jail.

23:41Speaker 1:With the help of Dr. Hampton, Mitrice's family asked then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris to open a criminal investigation into the conduct of sheriff's deputies. including Captain Tom Martin, for his possession of the videotape. In a 2016 report, Harris's office found, quote, it is entirely doubtful that Martin can be successfully prosecuted for concealment of evidence as the tape was preserved and its contents eventually produced, unquote. In the course of our reporting, we heard of two more irregularities, from very different ends of the spectrum regarding deputies and Mitrice at the time of her release. The first was from Shermaine Henderson, Mitrice's cellmate at Lost Hills. She said she was uncomfortable with the way Mitrice was released. Even though they were no longer in the same cell, she could tell that Mitrice was leaving the station without a ride after midnight. That seemed wrong to her.

24:45Speaker 5:I guess they cited her out. But when you cite someone out, you still don't let them leave until midnight. They have a way to get somewhere.

24:50Speaker 7:I mean, they.

24:51Speaker 5:Can call a cab on their own, you know, something like that. You know, because it's in the middle of nowhere.

24:58Speaker 1:But what she heard next actually gave her the creeps.

25:01Speaker 6:What I was hearing, like, they were saying they would drop her off.

25:07Speaker 1:One of the deputies, she said, offered to give Mitrice a ride.

25:12Speaker 6:Yes, yes, one of the deputies. It was a male deputy.

25:16Speaker 1:Did you think that was weird or inappropriate that he had offered to give her a ride?

25:21Speaker 2:Yes.

25:22Speaker 4:Yes, I think it was.

25:24Speaker 6:When you release, you're released.

25:26Speaker 4:And you're gone.

25:27Speaker 5:It's like when caravans give you a ride, you know, you're released.

25:32Speaker 4:They'll give you a ride.

25:33Speaker 5:That's not their job.

25:36Speaker 1:Take it with a grain of salt, because it's just a snippet of a story from someone whose memory is, by her own admission, unreliable. And I have seen no documentation to support it. The second thing we heard about Mitrice and cops and cars came from a very different source.

25:54Speaker 7:Dr.

25:55Speaker 1:Lisa Scheinman, the forensic pathologist who conducted the autopsy. She worked closely with law enforcement as part of her job. She was sympathetic to the bind the deputies were in when they believed they were legally obligated to release Mitrice and she wanted to go.

26:12Speaker 10:And they were very nervous about letting her go because they knew she had nothing. It was dark out. They knew it was remote. But if she said no, they couldn't force her to stay. So they had to let her go.

26:28Speaker 1:She vaguely recalls hearing that deputies were so concerned that they decided to go out of their way for her.

26:35Speaker 10:I believe somebody said they actually followed her after she left. from a distance with a car just to see that she was okay. And eventually they veered off. But they were actually quite concerned about her.

26:53Speaker 1:If any of this is true, then all of these deputies and anyone they spoke to about it conspired to stay silent when the disappearance of Mitrice became a nationwide scandal. And no one from law enforcement has ever come forward with any information about this. Intriguing as these fragments are, They don't lead anywhere. And they detract from what I think is the deeper truth. Had Mitrice been given a ride from the station, she would likely still be alive.

27:21Speaker 11:In January 2010, when Mitrice had been missing for four months, Authorities launched one of the largest searches in Los Angeles history.

27:43Speaker 1:There were more than 300 people, more than 60 horses, dogs, ATVs, bikes, and air support. They searched from Calabasas to Pacific Coast Highway, including all throughout Malibu Creek State Park and the Backbone Trail. Here's Sergeant Tui Wright of Malibu Search and Rescue.

28:03Speaker 12:I can tell you that it was a huge undertaking. And it was pretty much unprecedented. I've never done a search with 400 personnel before that or since then.

28:15Speaker 1:By now, investigators had a clear understanding of Mitrice's mental state. They focused the January search on the areas below cliffs and dams and rock faces, thinking that Mitrice, in her distress, might have jumped. Law enforcement had pledged to search every inch of the area. And there were trails near the Smith's house, where Mitrice was last seen, connecting to Dark Canyon, the treacherous, steep, poison-oak-infested canyon that yawns above Montanito. It seemed unlikely that someone just trying to get back to her car would have gone in there. But maybe a person in the midst of a bipolar episode would. Maybe a suicidal person would. Sergeant Wright ordered it to be searched.

29:01Speaker 1:Back in the early 2000s, when Sergeant Wright was a narcotics detective, he'd learned about an illegal marijuana growing operation in Dark Canyon.

29:10Speaker 4:So, having that in the back of my mind, when we were doing.

29:14Speaker 12:The matrice search, I wanted to make sure what we call a sworn team, in other words, an armed team with armed peace officers, was assigned to search Dark Canyon.

29:28Speaker 1:They were carrying some rudimentary GPS devices, partly reliant on cell service. They were supposed to be able to track where each deputy had walked. The cell service in Montanito is spotty even today. Back then, it was very limited. And in Dark Canyon, it was pretty much non-existent.

29:47Speaker 4:They didn't work. We had no.

29:49Speaker 12:way of telling exactly how far searchers went up Dark Canyon.

29:58Speaker 1:He also tried using drones, a new technology at the time.

30:02Speaker 12:It was from an experimental drone. The program was out of... I believe it was San Diego, a university down there. I would call this drone pretty rudimentary by today's standards. And what I mean by that, it was a sort of what I would call a batwing drone. You had to turn it on and throw it, and it would take flight.

30:28Speaker 1:They searched the bottom of Dark Canyon, but didn't get very far. The operators were afraid of losing their drones. It's these searches of Dark Canyon that fill Sergeant Wright with regret to this day. Knowing what he knows now, he told me, he would have pushed the team to focus on Dark Canyon from the beginning and search its full extent.

30:51Speaker 12:It was so obvious in hindsight. It was one of the darkest, deepest canyons right there. And in hindsight, obviously, we didn't go deep enough soon enough. I mean, it was so close.

31:08Speaker 1:Sergeant Wright's been retired since 2019, but the Mitrice-Richardson case has continued to bother him. He wishes, of course, he'd found her alive, or even found her body sooner, when her remains could have told a more complete story. And I think all of that is why he decided to do something no one else in law enforcement has been willing to do, help us figure out what happened to her. But that came a little later. At first, He just helped us understand what it had been like when Mitrice was missing. As the months passed, it was clear to authorities they were no longer searching for a lost person.

31:50Speaker 1:They were searching for remains, possibly a skeleton. Finding bones is actually fairly common in Malibu because of all the wildlife. Here's Sergeant Wright.

32:02Speaker 12:People see bones when they're hiking on trails, and they also see them on the side of the road. particularly in turnouts, where you might have an area where you can park a car and maybe look over at a beautiful view of the ocean or something. People are standing there, and then they see bones, or they smell a dead smell.

32:22Speaker 1:But everyone in Malibu was on high alert, and so were the authorities. They were looking for a high-profile missing person. Those bones could be hers.

32:32Speaker 12:During the time of the Matrice investigation, we never ignored any of those. We went out on each and every one and we were thorough and would investigate. And I do recall some of those where people reported the smell of something dead. I remember one, we sent a team out. They went out and they looked and they smelled something and they looked and they basically found the remains of a dead coyote.

33:01Speaker 1:Law enforcement records show that on June 10th and 12th, 2010, Two months before Mitrice's remains were found, Malibu Search and Rescue conducted two operations in response to reports of bones in the area.

33:15Speaker 12:I do recall a tip came in to the detective bureau, and there was some talk of a ribcage was observed by somebody who was at a particular location off of Paiuma where they described a.

33:31Speaker 4:Fort, like a tree fort.

33:33Speaker 1:Sergeant Wright assembled a team, including his tracker and a cadaver dog.

33:38Speaker 12:We went out there in a couple of different vehicles. We took at least one rifle with us and maybe even a shotgun because it sounded suspicious.

33:51Speaker 1:The location was in the wilderness off Paiuma Road, about a mile up the mountain from the Smith's house in Montanito, close to the Backbone Trail.

34:00Speaker 4:And we went in and eventually we found what could be described as a fort.

34:07Speaker 12:Or, you know, back in the marijuana investigation days, we would call it a hooch, which is a term basically from Vietnam of a tent-type outpost in thick jungle.

34:23Speaker 4:So that's what we found.

34:27Speaker 12:We spread out and approached it, and I could see that it was made from camouflaged tarps that had wrapped.

34:34Speaker 4:Around Several trees, including a real big tree.

34:39Speaker 12:And it had a roof and it had a doorway area. And we went in and clearly on public land, we went in and cleared it.

34:51Speaker 4:And there was nobody inside.

34:53Speaker 12:Inside was sort of a bed area where you could tell somebody could sleep.

35:01Speaker 1:Someone was definitely living there.

35:03Speaker 4:And I do recall one book in particular. It was a U.S. Army survival manual.

35:12Speaker 12:I saw that in there. I saw on the outside of the, outside the fort, there was some cubes called Grodan cubes that were consistent with starting marijuana plants. And I actually saw some marijuana growing there, like a couple inches high.

35:31Speaker 1:Hanging from a tree outside the fort, they spotted the ribcage. This was the reason they were there, because the tipster had thought this ribcage might belong to Mitrice Richardson.

35:44Speaker 12:The ribcage was taken as evidence and submitted to the coroner or to the crime lab.

35:49Speaker 4:If I recall, it turned out to be deer bones.

35:52Speaker 1:Deer bones. Still, the fort was potentially significant. The person living there seemed to have a funny habit, of collecting items that belonged to various women.

36:05Speaker 12:What I recall on it is, I think it was IDs, identifications, and or ATM cards for a couple of different females.

36:18Speaker 1:But Mitrice's driver's license, which she had on her when she left Lost Hill Station, was not among them. While Mitrice was missing, her dad, Michael Richardson, had a wrenching experience. He was in Las Vegas with some friends.

36:37Speaker 9:My friend was driving. I was in the back seat, and I was on the window side. So when I looked over to the right, I just seen a girl standing at the light, getting ready to walk across the street, looked just like Mitrice. And I just said, stop the car, stop. And they're like, what, what, what? And I just jump out the car, and they're like, man, where you going? And cars was stopping, almost about to hit me. And they all get out like, what, what? I said, man, I could have sworn I just seen my daughter standing right here. And we were in the alley. Did you just see this girl like that? Nobody saw that person that we were talking about. And I was like, I know I'm not tripping. I saw that, you know. And I will still stand behind that. But this person that I saw vanished into the thin air. And it was another dead end.

37:30Speaker 1:When he got back to his hotel room, he called the LAPD detectives.

37:34Speaker 9:But I called it and said, man, I think my daughter in Vegas.

37:37Speaker 4:All right, what makes you think that, Michael?

37:41Speaker 9:All right, well, we'll check it out and let you know what we find. And it was like, it was a dead end, Michael.

37:52Speaker 4:I'm like, I know.

37:54Speaker 9:I said, OK, man, maybe it was just me wanting it to be her.

37:57Speaker 5:I don't know.

37:59Speaker 1:Then, someone else thought they saw Mitrice in Las Vegas. It was a high school friend of hers. This was in June 2010. The LAPD took the sighting seriously.

38:10Speaker 9:And, I mean, they all, detectives and everybody, set up camp and shop down there.

38:17Speaker 1:But today, Michael thinks this was a trap. A diversion by law enforcement to keep him out of Malibu so they could discover her remains.

38:27Speaker 9:And They were trying to get us, and me, falling for it, flew to Las Vegas.

38:37Speaker 1:It's a wild theory, fueled by frustration and mistrust, and by an unfortunate coincidence. On August 9, 2010, while Michael was in Las Vegas for a press conference about Mitrice, some park rangers checking out an old pot grow discovered her skull among the fallen leaves. The site was about a mile from where Mitrice was last seen, on the side of a steep ravine in Dark Canyon. Next time on Lost Hills.

39:14Speaker 9:So it just all unfolded like, they did a botched up job anyway by sweeping her remains in a plastic bag and flying it out before the coroner got there to make the call, which contaminated the crime scenes.

39:30Speaker 1:That's next in Episode 6, Reconnaissance. 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.