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On Jeane First, nineteen eighty seven, Teresa Anne Beer was about to go on an adventure. She was headed into the woods to look for Bigfoot. Teresa was sixteen years old and she was wrapping up her freshman year at Fresno High in Fresno, California.
She was one year behind a lot of her.
Classmates, which wasn't surprising because Teresa was living in a very abusive environment with her uncle, John Richmond, his two young sons, and his seventeen year old girlfriend. John also had a wife, but I haven't been able to confirm whether or not they were estranged at that time, or whether John's wife was actually living at home during that time with the girlfriend. As you'll see, John's family setup was,
to say the least, a bit unusual. Teresa's plan was to skip school on June first and drive into the Sierra Nevada Mountains for the day with a forty three year old friend of her uncle's named Russell Skip Welch.
But Teresa never.
Came home, and soon the man who took her into the woods was rambling about Teresa being kidnapped by a monster.
The case made local news.
Teresa's missing poster was released, along with her description height five foot five, of weight one hundred and ten pounds, with brown hair and hazel eyes, and a surgical scar on her lower right leg. The poster also stated that she went by a nickname Sam. According to a book that was written about the case, Skip told the authorities that this was his nickname for Teresa because he said she reminded him of a runaway girl that he saw
in a movie. On Friday, June nineteenth, nineteen eighty seven, the Fresno Bee published the first newspaper article about this case with the headline man blames Bigfoot for missing girl. But this was much more than a tabloid story. This case would involve allegations of sex, slavery, serial killers, drug use, Bigfoot colonies, and at the heart of this story, it would reveal a system that completely failed a young woman on every single level, a system that allowed a sixteen
year old to vanish without a trace. I'm Catherine Townsend. Over the past seven years of making my true crime podcast, Helen Gone, I've learned that there's no such thing as a small town where murder never happens. I've 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 you'd like 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 five. That's six seven eight seven four four six one four five, or you can send us a message on Instagram.
At Helen Gone Pod.
This is Helen Gone Murder Line. Teresa Anne Beer was born on April sixteenth, nineteen seventy nine, in Fresno, California, and from the very beginning her.
Life was hard.
Teresa grew up with her mother, Shirley, and her father, David. The couple also had two other daughters, Yolanda, who lived with David's grandmother, and Vicki, who lived at home with Teresa. But according to a book that was written by a journalist named Jay O'Connell in twenty twenty called Meth Murder and Bigfoot a California crime Saga, Shirley was physically abusive to her two young daughters. When Teresa was three years old, Shirley broke her daughter's leg. Teresa went to the hospital,
and sometime after that, social so servis got involved. So David and his wife ended up getting divorced, and according to the book, for several years Teresa and her older sister, Vicki lived in foster care with a family friend from church. Now there's very little information generally about those years, but from the book at least it seemed like Teresa was
actually thriving in that foster home. The book described the Foster family as loving, but several years after that, when Teresa was preteen age, her father filed to get custody of Teresa, so Teresa went to live with her father and his new wife, Margie, in the city of Compton in La County. But Teresa's older sister, Yolanda, later told Jay O'Connell that Margie was abusive. We don't know if
these claims are true. This is hearsay, but according to the book, Yolanda claimed that Margie would actually lock the refrigerator so that the kids couldn't get food. Things with her dad and stepmom were not working out, so Teresa spent some time staying with a great grandmother. Then her forty two year old uncle, John Richmond, pursued custody of Teresa.
But John Richmond was not a loving uncle. Not only was John using Teresa, as according to his girlfriend Tammy, a domestic slave by asking her to take care of his young sons instead of going to class, but also John and his friends.
Allegedly sexually abused Teresa.
Tammy said later that not only did John have sex with her, but that he would let his friends who were drug users, have sex with her. This was later confirmed by a detective, Doug Stokes, who worked the case and spoke to the author of the book, Jay O'Connell. One of John's friends was a forty three year old methamphetamine user and self described amateur bigfoot enthusiast named Russell Skip Welch. He was the one who took Teresa to
the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Skip had been married to a woman named Shannon, but according to media reports, she passed away in nineteen eighty five and died of a drug overdose.
Skip mainly did odd jobs.
He painted houses to earn money, but also had an interest in camping and searching for mind minerals in the wilderness. Skip's other hobby was filing mineral claims.
Let me back up for a minute.
There's a law called the General Mining Law of eighteen seventy two. It goes back to the time of the California gold Rush. Basically, what this law does is that it allows people who find valuable minerals like gold or copper on a plot of land to assert rights to the mine on that land. Skip mainly searched in an area called shut Eye Peak, an area in the Sierra National Forest. Apparently it was nicknamed by the Native Americans who made camp there.
Skip Pud also filed.
Paperwork for other claims in the north of the state, near the southern boundary of Yosemite National Park. This is a remote area of the country there are thousands of acres of untamed wilderness. One of the areas where Skip liked to go, according to the book, was an area called Ghost Canyon. Skip believed it was once an Indian burial ground back in the early eighties. Fresno in the area around it, like a lot of areas around the United States at that time, had a serious myth problem.
The meth trade was exploding. Both John and Skip used meth, and it was around the house. On the morning she disappeared, Teresa left home as if she was going to school, but she had a secret plan. Earlier that week, she had told two of her friends that she planned to skip school to head into the mountains with Skip so they could look for Bigfoot, who she claimed Skip had seen before. Skip was a Bigfoot expert, apparently, and knew where to find him. So on June first, Skip came
over to John Richmond's house. He told John that he would drive Teresa to school, but their actual plan, as she had told her friends, was to search for Bigfoot, or at least that's what Teresa thought the plan was. After that, Teresa disappeared. When she didn't show up at school, administrators called the house and talked to John. He told the person from the school that Teresa was homesick. Now,
admittedly he lied there. He later told the police that he lied because he wanted to handle the matter himself. But like a lot of other parts of this case, it's still a mystery. We do know a few things about what happened that morning. After leaving Teresa's house, Skip and Teresa stopped off at his daughter Shandra's house.
The thing that's so disturbing.
About this, among many other things, is that, according to the book, even his daughter Shandra later told police that she had a bad feeling about Skip.
She said Skip had a habit.
Of offering young women drugs and using that to lure them into sexual encounters. On that day, Skip was having some car problems, but after he ran some errands and went to cash's disability check, Skip started the car. He and Teresa headed into the mountains, but they didn't come back, and no one in Teresa's family ever saw her again. Teresa's uncle, John Richmond, called the Fresno police at nine
thirty pm on June first, to report Teresa missing. Detectives didn't follow up on this call until the next day, June second. The case was assigned to Detective Doug Stokes. He headed out to interview John Richmond.
First.
John told the detective that Skip was a speed freak who liked to think of himself as a survivalist, someone who could live off the land for a long period of time. John's girlfriend, Tammy, told detective Stokes about another girl who she believed had been dating or hanging out.
With Skip, a young woman named Michelle.
So detective Stokes went to talk to Michelle and found out that she was seventeen years old, very young like Teresa and a lot of the other women who Skip reportedly hung out with.
Now according to.
The book, Michelle said she wasn't dating Skip, she was just a casual acquaintance of his. But the second time police came to her house, she did tell detectives something else. She talked about a scare incident involving Skip that happened a year earlier. She said that in the summer of nineteen eighty six, Skip invited her to go on a big foot hunt in the mountains and that they headed out to camp in Sierra National Forest.
She said that she invited two male.
Friends who were about ten years older, a guy she was casually seeing named Sam, and another guy named Corky to go along with her. While they were out there, Skip was taking meth and said he saw a white monster. Apparently during this time, Skip started talking about how Bigfoot worshiped women, which at first seemed to be kind of a positive thing, but then Michelle said that Skip started talking about satanic sacrifices. She said that all of them
were terrified. It's not clear whether the things that Michelle and the other guys saw and heard were from paranoia, possibly due to drug use, or whether they were freaked out just by the scary environment and stories, or whether they actually saw or heard something out there. According to the book, Michelle told police that later that night, she woke up screaming. She said she saw something that she described as being white, about three feet tall, with big eyes,
something that she said looked like a devil. She said she started running and in her fear, almost fell off a cliff.
In the end, everyone made it.
Out of the woods that night, but after Theresa went missing, Detective Stokes was connecting the dots.
He'd figured out that Skip Welch, a known.
Drug abuser and rumored's sexual predator, had taken her to the mountains, and Skip already had warrants out on him for drunk driving and some other charges. Police were looking for Skip and his brown nineteen seventy six Monte Carlo, and it didn't take them long to find it, because on June fifth, the car was spotted at a friend of Skip's named Dorothy Davis. Dorothy told police that on June first, Skip had driven down the mountain very erratically and that when he got to her place, the car
had dents on it. He told her that a satanic group had taken control of a girl he was hanging out with. He said that it had changed into quote something white looking. Dorothy told police she believed that Skip was just high and then he needed to calm down and sleep it off. On June tenth, police picked Skip up and they brought him in for an interview. Now, during this interview, he talked about how he was a bigfoot expert. He was very open about that. He said
bigfoot exists. He said there have been tons of sightings of Bigfoot in the high Sierras.
And he seemed to be completely.
Serious about his theory that there were bipedal eight blake creatures living up in the mountains. Skip said, not only had he seen Bigfoot, he had interacted with Bigfoot and these other creatures who lived up in the mountains. He said that he had quote not violated them, and that therefore they made themselves readily available to him end quote.
He said he had taken pictures of Bigfoot on multiple occasions. Now, according to the book, Skip had even taken his alleged Bigfoot polaroids to an expert, the chair of the anthropology department at Fresno State University, and this anthropologist agreed to meet with Skip and look at his pictures. The anthropologist told Jae O'Connell. Back then, this wasn't unusual. There was
a lot of interest in Bigfoot during the eighties. The movie Harry and the Hendersons, about a family finding Bigfoot, came out in nineteen eighty seven.
I remember this.
There were a lot of rumors of Bigfoot sightings in the summer of nineteen eighty six. I remember, as soon as I could read, seeing tabloid newspapers at the supermarket with people who were claiming to see Bigfoot. So back
to his alleged evidence. When Skip showed the anthropologist the photos that he was so excited about, the anthropologist told Jay O'Connell years later that he vividly remembered that meeting, that he didn't see anything in those pictures except shadows, and that he talked to Skip about projection, the idea that we project images of expectation. Basically, we see what
we want to see. The expert saw zero evidence of Bigfoot, but Skip was absolutely convinced that he had seen Bigfoot, and he wasn't going to let someone else tell him otherwise. In fact, a few days later, Skip left a brown paper bag full of bones at the anthropologist's office that apparently were not human in nature. I'm just guessing here, but it seems like they were much more likely to have come from roadkill or grocery store, retisserie chicken or
something like that than a sasquatch. The anthropologist said that nothing he saw in Skip's evidence pointed to the existence of Bigfoot. I want to just take a minute to
talk about my connection to the case. So a couple of listeners called me about this case who were from the Fresno area, and around that time, totally by coincidence, I got a call from a producer who said that they were working on a documentary about this case, and they were planning on bringing in a bigfoot expert, and I said very politely that I would be happy to be a part of the crime documentary, but if I was part of it, I would want to focus on
the foster care system failures, the criminal justice system failures that allowed a young woman to go missing and be missing for more than a day before reported, and to explore any non Bigfoot related leads. I do not believe that Bigfoot exists. However, I am open minded. I understand that there are many animals that have not been found for a long time, such as the giant squid.
So while I.
Think it's extremely unlikely, I am not close minded in the possibility of evidence.
However, when it.
Comes to this case, there is absolutely zero evidence that Bigfoot was involved, and a lot of evidence that an alleged sexual predator who led a young woman up into the mountains was involved. I believe that making this case about Bigfoot is a serious disservice to Teresa the focus needs to stay on the victim, not Bigfoot. When you're trying to find a missing person, you look at the last person to have seen them alive and start from there.
In this case, the last person who saw Teresa alive was a man who was known for abusing drugs and luring underage teens out to the forest. When detectives talked to Skip, he told them several different stories. First, he said that he dropped Teresa off at school after they rode around for a while. He said that a blonde girl had met Teresa and they left together.
What Skip didn't know.
Was that detectives could already place his car at his friend's house, so they knew he had been up in the mountains. They called him out on that bogus story, which Skip admitted had not been the truth. So then he admitted that, yes, he did take Teresa up into the mountains. But then he went right back on this Bigfoot tangent, Only this time he said not only was Bigfoot up there, but that Bigfoot was guarding a race
of super intelligent beings. He said that Bigfoot was approximately ten to eleven feet tall and hairy, but this master race of people who lived up in the mountains, looked like regular people, and he said one of those master race humanoids apparently liked Teresa. Skip said that the superintelligent being who was hanging out with Teresa actually kind of looked like Teresa, that they were the same age and both medium height, and he said they ran off together
to escape our abusive household. After that, Skip told this wild story about being attacked by a devil like creature. He said he was trying to get down the mountain and drive away, but he said the creature basically picked his car up somehow and made it hover over the ground. Then he said that the entity was actually inside the vehicle with him. He said he looked in the rear view mirror and saw the face of a man in
the back seat. He said he began to believe that he was actually seeing the face of the devil riding in his car, so he told Detective Stokes he decided to do battle with this devil monster. He told police he started hitting the wooden speaker that was in the back of his car, trying to fight this poultergeist, and then he showed the detective a bunch of wounds on his hands. He had scratches on his knuckles, scratches that he claimed he got while hitting.
The car speakers.
Skip told Detective Stokes that he managed to escape this devil spirit by calling on the power of Jesus Christ, and after he apparently extra sized it, he drove to her friend's house in the North Fork area, but he said he returned to the mountains the next day where he la saw Teresa. He said she was running through the trees with this other humanoid girl.
He said when he called her name, she didn't respond.
He then said, apparently unprompted, that detectives wouldn't find any evidence of sexual abuse if they found Teresa. Then he told detectives that he could have had sex with her if he wanted to, but that he refused to do it because, quote, that was not in his nature, which, of course, is totally contrary to what a lot of other people, including Skip's own daughter, told police. So police were clearly figuring out that Skip's story made zero sense.
But could there have been other possibilities. Maybe Teresa went out to the mountains with Skip and then something happened that caused her to run away and someone else kidnapped her, or she was attacked by a wild animal, a bear or something else, or maybe she ran off and had an accident and fell.
It was a huge area. There were a lot of possibilities.
Bad things had happened to other young women in that area. And the sad thing is that, like Teresa, many of these young women who went missing were not immediately reported missing by family. Days, sometimes weeks went by before detectives looked for them. In nineteen eighty four, a nineteen year old named Kimberly Billy disappeared from Stockton, and the next year, sixteen year old Joanne Hobson went missing from the same area. Also in nineteen eighty five, a young woman named Robin
Armtrout vanished from the same area around Stockton's Delmar Park. Later, it was discovered that all three were victims of Lauren Herzog and Wesley Shermantine, who the media called the speed Freak killers. These guys were heavy metamphetamine users. So far, they had been convicted of four murders, and they're suspected in as many as sixty eight others, many involving rape
and torture. Not only were a lot of these young women not immediately reported missing, but Many of their remains stayed hidden for a long time, and some have not been found to this day. In twenty twelve, Wesley Shermantine gave the authorities information, including a map, that led them to a burial site in Lynden, California. Police dug to the bottom of a well and they found over one
thousand human bone fragments. They were able to identify the remains of Kimberly Billy and Joanne Hobson, but several other victims, including at least one fetus, remain unidentified.
To this day.
Another huge question about Teresa Beers case is where was the actual crime scene. Police asked Kip to take them to the area where he and Teresa camped out, so he led them up into the Sierra Mountains. Detectives did find evidence of some kind of a campsite.
According to the.
Police report quote, there was a smoldering fire among the heavy layer of pine needles that appeared to be somewhat damp. The smoldering burnt area was approximately three and a half feet wide by eight feet long end quote, so it
looked like somebody built a fire up there. And they also found Teresa's belongings Detective Stokes noted in the police report that there was a camera and a purse, plus articles of clothing that seemed to belong to a female, including a white bra and a T shirt with party animals written on it. They opened up the purse and found polaroid photos. In the photos was a young woman,
who they later confirmed was Teresa Bear. There were photos of Skip playing the guitar in an area that appeared to be that same campsite, and of Teresa hanging out there sitting on the same blanket that was spread out at the site they were looking at, but there was no sign of Teresa. Detective Doug Stokes told Jay O'Connell something else about those photos. He said that later on he showed the pictures to other investigators and they told him something shocking.
They said the area.
That Skip took them to could not have been the area in the pictures. After Skip welch led detectives to the campsite where he said he had been with Teresa Bear, Detective Doug Stokes showed the polaroids they had found at the campsite to some other investigators, people who were familiar with that area. The other investigators said that in their opinion, the spot where the campsite was that Skip showed them could not have been the same spot that was shown in the photos.
Detective Stokes said.
The other investigators pointed out to him that there was
another mountain in the background of the pictures they saw. Basically, they believed the polaroids were taken at a totally different place about twenty miles away in the Sierra National Forest, and although Detective Stokes couldn't say exactly which of the mountain peaks they were talking about in his book, Jay O'Connell said he had done his own research and he believed that it was a Maderra peak near an area called Ghost Canyon now Ghost Canyon, according to some members
of Skip's family, was an area where he had hung out in the past. Detective Stokes said he believed Skip recreated the fake camp site at the spot where he led police to stage a crime scene to make them believe that they had actually been camping there. Police started searching for Teresa, Detective Stokes asked for a piece of her clothing from John Richmond so the canine dogs could
get a cent. This is another creepy fact about the case that really just shows what kind of terrible situation, in my opinion, that Teresa was living in at home, because John Richmond gave the detective quote a white pair of girls underwear that appeared to be bloodied in the crotch area, and then John explained these were in fact Teresa's and that she had started her period the day before she had been missing end quote. So the book
asked the same question I had. How did her uncle know her minstrel cycle and why would he give detectives a pair of bloody underwear?
It just seems so creepy.
The area where Skip claimed that he and Teresa had came amped was called Brown's Creek, and at the campsite police found a blue shirt that Skip confirmed was his. It had a white powdery substance in the front pocket. On June sixteenth, Skip was arrested. He was released on his own recognissance by a judge, but apparently that was a mistake. Apparently the judge was unaware that another judge had actually put a thirty thousand dollars bail on Skip. He was allowed to leave, but two days later he
was brought back to jail. And this whole time Skip continued to stick to this Bigfoot story. Meanwhile, other people, even people in his own family, were asking a lot of questions. Skip's nineteen year old nephew, James Welch, came in voluntarily to talk to police. He said he needed to talk to someone because he had very important information that could help solve the case. He said he had gone up into the mountains several times with his uncle.
He said he knew his uncle very well and that his theory was that Skip had led detectives to a fake campsite, that he had actually taken Teresa into Ghost Canyon. James said that he thought his uncle quote, was just trying to lead us on a wild goose chase end quote. James said that he got into an argument with Skip at one point, and that Skip had told him about what he called a burial site of the devil.
Again.
James said he first thought Skip was talking about Bigfoot worshiping women in a positive way. He started to realize he believed what Skip was talking about was making some kind of human sacrifice for Bigfoot. He said, in his opinion, his uncle was trying to misdirect them, and according to the book, James said, Skip actually believed he could get publicity from this whole thing, and he wouldn't have to
do any jail time. He believed, maybe only a year or two for a charge like child neglect or child stealing. And that's exactly what happened. Police believed that Skip had been responsible for Teresa's disappearance, but they had a problem. They had no physical evidence and no body. Skip was completely unreliable even if he confessed. Now he had already lied multiple times to the police. Prosecutors apparently didn't feel they had enough to make a murder charge stick, so
they charged Skip with child stealing. If he was found guilty, he would serve a sentence of up to four years. That to me seems to be a shockingly short amount of time for that charge. Then the deputy district attorney offered Skip a plea bargain. If he pleaded guilty to child staaling, he would get a one year sentence, which again is ridiculously short.
But Skip said no to the deal.
He wanted to go to trial, and in the end, incredibly, Skip got zero jail time because the DA's office asked that the charges be dismissed. Apparently, according to the book, the district attorney felt that if the body was found, and if Skip had already been found guilty of the lesser charge of child staaling, double jeopardy might apply and they would never be able to charge him with murder. So nothing happened. Skip was free and no new charges
were brought. Time went on and Teresa Beierre's name very quickly dropped out of the news, and when it was mentioned, she became just another footnote and a weird tabloid story about Bigfoot. Five years after Teresa disappeared, a reporter from the Fresno Bee talked to John Richmond. He claimed in that interview that he loved Teresa and they were close. He told the reporter he believed that she was dead
or she had been sold into slavery. In March of nineteen ninety eight, a little over ten years after Teresa.
Disappeared, Skip died. He was fifty four years old.
Sometime around two thousand and eight, John Richmond died of cancer. There have been a few articles about this case since then. There was one on medium, and at the bottom in the comments was a person who claimed to be Skip's great niece. This commenter wrote quote he died of a drug overdose, so he was never charged with anything else. My dad tell this to whoever he can like. It's a funny family story. He's adamant that the speed freak killers got her and they admitted to it. But I
never found proof of that end quote. I would love to talk to members of Skip's family or John's family who are still out there. I've seen several people claiming to be family members or friends of the family commenting on these articles. I want everyone to know that I would actually really like to talk to these people, because I do believe that there could be clues in some of these anecdotal stories from years ago about where Teresa's body is. Her family was never able to bury her
and bring her home. No one who knew Teresa ever got answers about what actually happened up there in the mountains. Did Skip make sexual advances towards Teresa and she refused and something went wrong? Could she have run away afterwards and then Skip told the Bigfoot story to cover up the fact that he made sexual advances toward an underage girl. Or could Skip have been high on mess and so delusional that he genuinely believed that he saw Teresa run
away with Bigfoot. But if that was the case, then why does Detective Stokes believe that Skip lot about the camp site? If he truly believed she ran away with Bigfoot, why would he try to mislead investigators Today, no trace of Teresa Beer's body has ever been found. She is almost certainly still somewhere in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, possibly in Ghost Canyon. I'm Catherine Townsend. This is Helen Gone Murder Line. Helen Gone Murderline 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 and James Wheaton for legal review. Noah Caamer mixed and scored this episode. Our theme song is by Ben Salek, Executive producers of Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, and L. C.
Crowley.
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