School of Humans.
On June twenty fifth, twenty twenty, a fifty six year old man named James Escalante, who had Native American heritage and was also known by his nickname Blackhawk, left his home in Wonder Valley, California, on his mountain bike. James
lived with a girlfriend, Sherry. She told law enforcement that when he left home that day, he was headed down the road about ten minutes from their place, in order to help a friend of theirs d whose car had gotten stuck in sugar sand, which is almost like dried desert Quicksand it is hot out there in the desert.
The average temperature for that part of the desert in July and August is around eighty nine degrees and highs regularly go over one hundred degrees or even one hundred and five, and out there in the desert it's dry heat, so it feels like you're baking in an oven. It happens every year hikers go missing. People just wander off
and get lost and don't come back. But the terrain also means that when people do go missing under mysterious circumstances, it can be easier for local law enforcement to write it off as just an accident. Now. Supposedly, the friend D had been out looking for rocks near Highway sixty two and Shelton Road, east of the town of twenty nine Palms. James had lived in that desert for a long time. He knew the area well, so the plan was for James to meet D at a specific intersection
to rescue her. But once he got out there, according to Sherry, he couldn't find D. So James called Sherry on his cell phone to figure out what was going on. At that point, Sherry called D on a three way call, so Sherry, D, and James were all on that call together, and then James told D to honk her horn so he could find her. He seemed to think he could hear her, so he hung up the phone. But he never got to D's car, and no one ever saw
James Escalante alive again. I'm Catherine Townsend. Over the past five years of making my true crime podcast, Helen Gone, I've learned that there is no such thing as a small town where murder never happens. I have received hundreds of messages from people all around the country asking for help with an unsolved murder that's affected them. Their families and their communities. If you have a case, she'd let
me and my team to look into. You can reach out to us at our Helen Gone Murder Line at six seven eight seven four four six one four or five. That's six seven eight seven four four six ' one four or five, or you can send us a message on Instagram at Helen Gonepod. This is Helen Gone Murder Line. I heard about this case from James's daughter in law, Heather Escalante, who listens to this podcast and reached out
to us for help. In the month's following James's disappearance, Heather and her husband started working hard to find out what happened to her father in law. She talked to us about what was going on in James's life around the time he went missing, and her struggle to put together the missing pieces.
So James lived out in Wonder Valley, California, in the middle of the desert. Wonder Valley is huge land mass wise, but it has under seven hundred residents in that area. It seems big, but it's really quite small and very farse in the desert. A lot of the buildings and things. Even if he went to maps and looked at it. A lot of his buildings are abandoned dilapidated, so it might sound like you know land mass wise, if there's
a lot, there's really not. It's very desolate and you can see a lot for miles and miles out there.
Heather explained that James was living in a trailer on the back of someone else's property. He lived with his girlfriend, Sherry, and a third person, her ex boyfriend and their mutual friend, a guy named Tyler who went by Tank.
At the time that James went in the thing, he was living with his girlfriend at the time, and to be honest, this is all things that we learned after he went in the thing. He was living with someone who's claiming that they were together at the time. Her name is Very. They also had another person staying out there with them, who oddly enough was Ferry's on again off again boyfriend Flashed Fyance for about eight nine years
prior to this as well. They were living at the back of someone's property off of Kerrn Road in Wonder Valley in travel trailers. And the reason they were there is because the person who was living in the home at the time had a lot of health issues and Scarry was supposally his caretaker. He actually passed away, probably about a month or so before James disappeared, and the family let them know, Hey, we're going to get ready to sell the house, so you guys need to move.
And so they were actually in the process of packing up and trying to move when James went missing, and so very and be on again, off again boyfriend that also lived there. Very strange dynamics. But who's their own I guess.
The person who owned the land and property they lived on passed away recently and their family was apparently planning on selling that land, so Tank, James and Sherry's living situation may have been about to change, which would have potentially meant that they would have had to move. Heather is open about the fact that James battled addictions and challenges in his life, including drugs.
To tell you a little bit about James James was, I've never made it a secret. James was not a faint. He had a pass He had accurrence that didn't I guess meet everybody's standard of what people want in their perfect victim. I guess you could say in a story, yeah, and you know, we've never made that a secret. We've never tried to hide any of that stuff, but James was, you know, despite all of that, James was an incredibly
sweet person. He had a big heart. That man will give you the shirt off of his back if you needed it. He was always helping people, even in in the throes of his own issues. You know, when we did his celebration of life, for instance, this is just
a really great example of just who James was. A girl that I had never met showed up and she came up to me and she says, you know, I just wanted to tell you where an important person James is to me because I was in the first of an active addiction, and even though James was battling his own demons, he mentored me and coached me into sobriety. And now I'm going and taking classes so that I can help other people get to him. So that was just I mean, that's to me, is just the perfect
example of how James was. You know, regardless of what he was dealing with in his own life, he always put other people first, and he always was willing to help people.
Heather said that James was quiet and kept to himself, which meant that often family members wouldn't talk to him for long periods of time. That was not unusual.
And you know, he was he was a very quiet man, kind of came across as a little bit mysterious, and he had a good sense of humor, and he was he was pretty he was he was a pretty wise guy. Like you know, if you if you needed advice, he was a great listener, but he was also great at giving advice. And he was a good person for everybody to go to when they regardless of what they needed. You know, like I said, he would do whatever he
could for you. So you know, that's kind of I guess the best way I can describe him as a person.
James lived a fairly simple life. He worked in construction and doing odd jobs around the desert.
He did a lot of construction type work and and so I know, a long time ago he used the lot at Salt Minds out there, but that was probably when my husband was teenager time frame, so it had been a while since he had done anything like that. But he was doing a lot of like odd jobs and things around the desert out there, you know, fixing things, working on people's houses and some rants out there. I know he was doing a lot of that right before he went missing.
Heather said that the first time she learned that James was missing was in September of twenty twenty. Remember this was during COVID, so going long stretches of time without seeing people in person or sometimes even talking to them was something that was a little bit more normalized in and James was someone who kept to himself anyway.
It was the beginning, like the first week of September. My husband and his dad both are very wiaet people. You know, they're not the type people you're going to start a conversation up with. Because he hadn't asked them a question, They're going to give you a one word answer, and then that's kind of you just kind of boasted there. So they didn't talk a lot on the phone or
things like that. And of course, my husband and I live out in South Carolina, so literally couldn't get much further away distance wise, so we didn't see the last time we saw him in person was in twenty seventeen when we went out there on trip. So we didn't see him very often, and they really didn't talk often
because neither of them are talkers to be on. Yeah, so you know, we started catching word from people out in the desert, like, hey, haven't seen your dad in a while, do you know where he's at, Like, we haven't heard from him. To be honest, in the beginning, we didn't really put a lot of weight into it one because of unfortunately the person that we were hearing it from is not the most reliable source. And then
because you know, James was kind of a walker. He's like a little bit of a nomad, if you will, and so he would take off sometimes for you know, a couple of days to a week, Yeah, things like that, and you know, just kind of get away from things and kind of you by himself. He was a loner, and so at first we didn't really just take it too seriously. But then after a while it was like, okay,
this was getting a little too much. So because of the distance, we asked a close family friend of ours to please go out there and check things out for us and like see what they could find out.
The family friend was not able to make contact with James, so Heather said that on September seventh, they had the family friend call the police in Wonder Valley to make a police report. Around that same time, Heather started posting about James on Facebook.
It was just a whirlwind from that point forward. I had immediately started putting, you know, creating missing person's flyers and trying to figure out like kind of how to get a space out there in the area. And beyond that, started joining all kinds of Facebook groups that, you know, if they were pertaining to that area the desert, I joined them. If it was just a missing person's group
in general, I joined them. Anything to do with American Indian missing type pages, joined those as well, and just started trying to get a space out there and let people know that he was missing and we're looking for him.
After that, James's girlfriend, Sherry, saw one of Heather's posts and actually made a comment underneath it. Heather said that that was her and her husband's first contact with Sherry, and she said that from the first time that her husband talked to Sherry on the phone, a conversation that Heather, by the way, overheard, Heather said she began to feel uncomfortable.
Something was wrong. Heather and her husband talked to Sherry on the phone after Sherry commented on Facebook post, and Heather said the whole thing felt off.
Jerry actually saw one of my posts on one of the desert pages out there and commented on it was like, Hey, I'm his girlfriend, give me a call and put her number on there. So had my husband call her. I was standing right next to him in the whole conversation between the two of them, that very first conversation immediately just I don't even know how to explain it. It just got my stomach turning, and I just had like the worst feeling the initial conversation between the two of them
that day on the phone. When she answered the phone, she immediately started apologizing profusely, like I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm fair, I'm so sorry, and we're you know. And then from there it's like the entire conversation she was referring to him in the past tent which immediately set me off a little bit, because, I mean, at this point, he's a missing person, right, that's it, And for all we knew at this point he might have just still been wandering. We didn't know. Yeah, I mean, he could
have been perfectly fine. So why are you referring to him in the past tense? So that was the first thing that immediately just set me off a little bit.
On that call, Sherry told them about what happened, the series of events that led to James going out to the desert to help their friend DP.
So she tells us at this point in time that there was a friend of theirs that she had gone out in the middle of the night, in the middle of the desert, in the streetlights, there's no nothing to hunt rocks, and got herself stuck out in sugar sand out in the desert, which is really soft fand that once you're in it, you're you're not getting out very easily.
Sherry said that after getting stuck, d had actually initially called the third guy who lived on that same property, Tank, but apparently he wasn't available to help, and then, according to Sherry, Dee also tried to call someone else, a guy named Gary. He said he wouldn't be able to go get d for hours since he was at work. So that's how James ended up volunteering to go out there to help.
So that's at the point when she started kind of blowing up Sherry's phone, and Sherry and James were supporting the Sherry sitting at their place. Neither of them had a vehicle, and Sherry claims that she sent James out there to help her friend on a mountain bike, which that for James was incredibly normal. James, even when he had a license and a car, he rode his bike everywhere, and I mean like ten twenty miles one way, kind of rode his mountain height everywhere.
According to Heather, he knew the area very well. Also, where D disappeared was close to where James and Cherry lived.
It's a dirt road, but it's a pretty start road until you get to a certain point, so I mean, for the most part, it would have been a pretty food ride for him. I looked it up on Google Map and even changed it to say I was going to be riding my bike, and it said it was about a ten to eleven minute bike ride, like it shouldn't have taken him that long.
But James didn't make it out to D and then he never came home. Heather says that according to Sherry, when James didn't come home, eventually Gary and Tank drove out to pick D up from the desert. But Heather said she doesn't understand one, No one D or Sherry or Tank or anyone else ever reported James missing or why they didn't look for him.
He never made it to d No one ever went looking for him, nobody reported him missing, nobody did anything. I mean, here's some man that you're claiming that is the love of your life, right, he goes missing and you don't do anything.
The reason Sherry eventually gave to Heather for non immediately calling police was that James had been involved in things, including drugs, things that they thought he would not appreciate them attracting police attention. Heather said that considering James's past, she can understand this logic to a certain point.
Honestly, they've given me a reason, and I can somewhat understand given James's history and current things that he you know that he did, they didn't really want to draw police attention to him. This was right but for me, and I get that, not that I don't even necessarily disagree with it to a point, right, right, I mean that was right, No, And that was the thing that was crazy to me. So like for a couple of days, maybe cool, he didn't want to, but I mean a
month or two later, that's a problem. James has never gone missing for that long and not been in contact with somebody.
Heather said that over the times they talked to Sherry, small details about the story seemed to change, like what time everything happened, So.
That is part of the story from Sherry that has changed multiple times. At one point it was, you know, eighty thirty in the morning, at one point it was ten am. I have talked to Sherry's multiple times. In the beginning, I tried to be very nice. After a while, it just didn't It didn't end up that way, so we don't really speak much anymore.
Heather said that she reached out to D through Facebook messenger and initially D was responsive, but then things between them got complicated after something was posted in one of the groups that were discussing James being missing, something that Heather said led to D cutting off contact with her and taking her to court. I want to say there's zero suggestion that D was in any way involved in
anything bad happening to James. And it's unfortunate when families who are desperate for answers and trying anything they can to put the word out there, when people sometimes make comments on these posts, comments that accuse people of things on social media sometimes this unfortunately leads to relationships getting shut down. But there's a lot we still don't know. Heather has not actually talked to de or to Tank
or to the other guy Gary. Heather began to read more and more about the number of people who went missing in or near the Mojave Desert. Some were accidents, others seem to have elements of foul play. There are definitely a lot of elemental dangers out there, not just the heat, but also things like hill and valley wash, which happens when flash floods occur. Basically, dry river bottoms fill up with water really fast. They can drown people and sweep them away all the way out in the desert.
On Reddit threads like missing for one one, people talk openly about the number of people who went missing in the area where James disappeared. One comment on Reddit red quote distance in the desert is meaningless. I'm in a further northwest area of the Mahave, but it's got similar dangers. Every hill and valley and wash looks the damn same, even if you have a particular mountain to orient yourself to. If you don't already know the distance and how big
it is, it's not very helpful. It could be two miles away or twenty end quote. In a lot of media reports, people talked about the number of bodies found in the desert, six bodies in the last three years alone. Were all of these disappearances just people who got lost or turned around, or could some of them have been
something more sinister. Some people started wondering if there could be a serial killer at work stalking the area, especially because someone else vanished on that same strip of road. This time it was thirty seven year old Erica Lloyd. James and Erica went missing nine days and a quarter
of a mile apart. On July twenty fifth, twenty twenty, a guy named Doug Billings, who was actually a Cave and nine expert, was searching for any trace of Erica or Erica's black car, and he found something, but it
wasn't Erica's black car. It was James Escalante's bike. On July twenty fifth, a month after James as Galante disappeared, a searcher looking for Erica Lloyd, a woman who went missing nine days before James, found James's bike, and then on August eighth, twenty twenty, according to an article on meat Eater, a hunting website, a hunter named Kyle Gibson was out in the desert north of Joshua Tree National Park,
near the town of twenty nine Palms. Twenty nine Palms is famous, actually, that whole region of desert is famous. It's in the Mojave in San Bernardino count It has the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center nearby. There are very ritzy areas in towns like Palm Springs. There's the Coachella Music festival out in near Indio. There are also a lot of hunters, like a lot of places where
I've spent time for this podcast, like the Ozarks. The wilderness is beautiful but also dangerous because, needless to say, you do not want to get disoriented and stranded out there. People do not last long. A lot of secrets are buried out there in that desert, including bodies and evidence that could be lost forever. They have found six bodies along that strip of road in the past three years alone.
While the hunter was out there, he saw bones. At first he thought they might belong to an animal, but then he saw jeans and black nikes. He called the police and showed the deputy you came to the scene his OSX app. The deputy was able to see the exact location where he walked and the location of the body. Police went out there and recovered the remains. They confirmed that the body was human, and in December, the coroner called James's family to confirm that body was James Escalante.
I'm Katherine Townsend. This is Helen Gone Murder Line. Helen Gone Murder Line is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts. It's written and narrated by me Catherine Townsend and produced by Gabby Watts. Special thanks to Amy Tubbs for her research assistance. This episode was sound designed and mixed by Noah Kamer. Our theme song is by Ben Sale, Executive producers of Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, and l. C. Crowley. Listen to Helen Gone ad free by subscribing to the
iHeart True Crime Plus channel on after Podcasts. If you were interested in seeing documents and materials from the case, you can follow the show on Instagram at Helen gonepott. If you have a case you'd like me and my team to look into, you can reach out to us at our helengoone Murder Line at six seven eight seven four four six one four five. That's six seven eight seven four four six one four five.
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