Murders in the Mountains

to those people. This is a real time investigation and as a pandemic has unfolded, it's had a very real effect on crime. Yeah, I feel like this is really different than season one right now because obviously with season one you were embedded and there and meeting people. But

here now it seems kind of impossible with COVID. Well, I think also, like I mean a lot of the people involved in this are in a higher risk group, and some of them are older, Like I mean, Ship said he hasn't left his house in months, and a lot of people are kind of in that same in that same boat. I don't feel okay about going and knocking on doors. I can't go to anything. I mean, and there aren't the kind of things here, like you know, you can't go out and meet people at a restaurant.

You can't like go to there, you know, Malibu, that area that When we started this, I thought, Okay, well they have a lot of community meetings and things like that all the time normally, but obviously none of that's happening now. Yeah, and even the police and the fire guys since the summer have been so overstretched. Usually you can find like a friendly source to take you around, but even the people who I have or friendly sources are just you know, kind of overwhelmed right now. And

it's just it's been really hard. It's not I mean, you know, look, every every single element of our lives has been changed right now, and it's kind of like, why should investigations be any different? And I'm kind of I mean, it makes me think too that cold case investigations it's going to be tough because it's sort of like pressed us into a world where unless something is an absolute priority right now, it's not gonna get done.

And I kind of feel like that's what's happening with investigations. And then there's also all the fires and yeah, I'm about that, like, yes, that made things hard temporarily, that would have been yeah, that made it hard for people to go out to that area. But in a normal year where that was all that was happening, it would have been like, Okay, we wait until fire season's over and then you can go out there. But that's the problems.

There's no it seems like there's just kind of no end of this, no immediate endto this until there's a vaccine. We're getting more and more evident that my treece was alive and fully clothed on the morning of September seventeenth, then at some point that day she disappeared. So we need to answer two questions. First, could my Trees have walked to the area where her body was found on

her own? And second, who was in the neighborhood that night, Because if my Trees did not walk there on her own, the evidence suggests that she was taken there by someone who had familiarity with the area. I'm Catherine Townsend. This is Helen Gone. In order to figure out who could have been the last person to see my Trees, we wanted to get a better understanding of who lives in the Santa Monica Mountains. The Mountain range covers a massive area.

It stretches from the Hollywood Hills all the way to Point Mugu in Ventura County. Montegnito, where Bill Smith lives, is a quiet neighborhood full of people who love hiking and horseback riding. But there's also an underworld in the mountains. There are transient people with no fixed address, cartels who grow pot illegally, and ultra violent gangs. Since the pandemic, a lot of police departments that investigate cold cases have

found that they've had to alter their methods. They aren't able to generate tips or to do their usual outreach. I was inspired by one department in Texas I read about, who are basically doing the same thing that we're doing, doubling down on the evidence they already had. They went back to the drawing board and tried to see if there was anything that they missed. Office Campire. Yeah, Hi, Hey, this is a Smith a cold canyon. We had a prowler to walking around through the backyard here, but we

don't know what the situation was. I don't know. If you have a unit in there, it might do a little drive buy or somethink. We know that Bill Smith, the former KTLA Channel five reporter who saw my trees sitting on his back steps, called the Lost Hills Sheriff's department in the early morning hours of September seventeenth. And now we just said a strange womanould walk up through the backyard here that this is fairly large properation. She was sitting on the step right on the back of

the house. Here, this is kind of a circular. Bill Smith did not speak to anyone about my trees in the last few years of his life. We reached out to his widow several times but did not receive a response. Later, canine dogs were brought to the scene. They found one sneaker prints that they believed were my terces, and the dogs followed My Teresa's scent down the street from Bill

Smith's house, then lost the scent. Investigators believed that the footprints pattern showed that my trees had gone from walking to running. Then they disappeared. Now, this could have been because a car drove by and picked my trees up, but she could have also gotten scared. Maybe she saw the police and decided to get off the road and hide in the woods. After all, her earlier interaction with the police had not gone well. There have been other people who came forward and said that they saw my

Trees that night. When we talked to cherriffvill Nueva, he said that some one saw my Trees drinking from a garden hose after she was at Bill Smith's house. Then there was another woman, a middle school teacher, who reported that she had seen a woman matching my Trees's description walking south on a road near Malibu Canyon at around seven thirty am. She told the Los Angeles Times that she remembered this because a black woman walking alone through

those roads was an unusual sight. Someone else reported seeing my Trees walking down Payuma Road away from Malibuchanan Road, in the direction of Dark Canyon at around one thirty pm. Police pointed to these sightings as evidence that my Trees made it through the night. We can't know for sure what happened, but we have to follow my Trees's route as best we can and try to use the evidence

to explore the likeliest possibilities. If my Trese was wandering around during the day, she would have been exhausted, dehydrated, and by all accounts very possibly having some sort of a breakdown. I've spent a lot of time in this area. If she had continued down Malibu Canyon Road, she would have eventually made it to the Pacific Coast Highway back towards Civilization and the mpound yard where her car had

been towed. But that road is treacherous. There's no shoulder, you have to walk through the mountains with steep drops on one side, and you have to walk through a tunnel with no pedestrian sideway. The other street she could have taken was Payuma Road, and Payuma Road, as we

discovered while driving around, is very misleading. It seems to slope downward, but it's a long winding road that goes from west to east, so you have the sensation of going down the mountain, but really you're going deeper and deeper into the canyon. The evidence points to the fact that my Trees was alive and fully clothed on the morning of September seventeenth, and somehow ended up in that

creek bed. So that means that we need to know if she could have fallen or walked down to the creek bed from Montinito, or if someone could have dumped her down that hill. Okay, hi Michael, heay, Catherine, how are you. I'm good? How are you? I'm pretty good? Good. Well, thank you so much for talking to us. We've talked to my Teresa's father, Michael Richardson. She just, you know, it's really hard to put it into words, because she

was a good kid. You know, She's just loved to dance, she loved to entertain, she loved to be a comedian, and all her friends loved it. Just the life of the party sort of speak person overall, incredible kid, you know,

and was still like that vulnerable. You know, I could see how the wrong people could wind her in or wield her in because you know, as much as I tried to teach her and be you know, aware of people that she was just always too trustworthy of people, which was a problem I had with her, you know, like, always keep your guardage up, and she's like, no, you just you come from that life, so you know, everybody

is a suspect to that. But you know, this is one of the main reasons why I always wanted to educate her on mean people, you know, so yeah, to try to prevent something like this from happening. Over the years, he's talked about his suspicions with some of the people in the Montanito area. And the crazy thing about it was for a whole week straight while we were in Malibu,

searching and looking and everything like that. We just looked up a week later and there was this white lady there and we were like, okay, and who are you? And she's like, I'm the lady. I'm married to Bill Smith. I owned the property that she was on, and we was like, and now you show up, Like how ironic is that? And so what I was telling Matias was my trees mother. She asked me like, why do you

think she showed up? And I'm like, she's probably a spy knowing what's going on, and they had to get their story straight and they were coached, and now she feel comfortable enough to come out and see what we know so she could report it. But after one of his very close colleagues told me that years on, he interviewed me several times it's like, did you get anybody invested? I'm like, nobody will. They don't want to touch him.

I even leaned into it more after he raised suspicion because when the dogs went out, they picked up my trees footprints there and on his doorstep, and then all of a sudden, her footprints just vanished. So I'm saying, so she vanished from here, but nobody seeing a car pick her up, nobody seeing her get in a car. The UFO didn't come down low enough. You know. It was just something. But that was the most interesting place that I think they should have started asking questions. Well,

here's another strange thing that people keep omni. Before Bill Smith's called, there was another lady which we felt that she would had to be part of it, what have you. But she made the first initial call saying she was driving over there by. It was a cross street Boss Hills and some other street, and they said they saw a black lady looking rather suspicious and you know they're from Malibu, and not to sound racist or whatever, she said, but we just know that this is a person that

is not from here, could be lost or whatever. But that was the first call, and they said that call came in at six. Then one of the residents on Bill's Street said, according to one of the reports, the police came around twelve something or whatever, or twelve or three I'm maybe a little off, but one of those timeframes. But they said the police never showed up, right, they never showed up. And of course we're not privy to any traveling records, are logging and stops or anything of

that nature, so they wouldn't give us that. Now, we found no evidence that anyone Montinito did anything suspicious, but there are a lot of other people living in those hills. Could my trees have encountered some of them. The Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area is known for horse trails and hikes and wine tours, but it also has a dark side. A lot of people use the area to dispose of things they don't want, like trash and bodies.

This has been going on for a long time. During the nineteen eighties, the psychopathic serial killing couple Doug Clark and Carol Bundy, nicknamed the Sunset Strip Killers, dumped one of their many female victims here. Over the years, many other bodies have been found here as well. Some were ruled suicides they wanted to choose a peaceful place in their own lives. Others have been accidents when cars veer off one of the twisted roads, or someone jumps into

a dam on a dare. Some are still unsolved, like the of a sixteen year old who was beaten to death and dumped in a canyon. His remains were burned beyond recognition during a wildfire. Some are violent murders, and many are gang related. According to the Los Angeles Times, the MS thirteen Street gang has been active in the area. In twenty nineteen, police arrested several members of the gang and charged them with seven murders in the hills around

Malibu in the Angeles National Forest. Federal investigators said that the gang lured their enemies to remote locations, including the canyon, and then killed them using medieval methods, including torture and dismemberment. Federal prosecutors say that the gang used machetes, knives, and

baseball bats to kill suspected informants. In one instance, when gang members suspected someone of defacing an M. S thirteen graffiti tag, six of them kidnapped him, took him to the Angelus National Forest, and attacked him with a machete. Prosecutors say they cut his heart out. In May twenty eighteen, the body of a fifty two year old man named Francisco cruise was discovered in a ditch by the side of the road dump near the Malibu Hindu Temple. This

is a massive white landmark that people flocked to. It's also very near the area where my Trees's body was found. Francisco reportedly died from sharp fores injuries to the upper body and blunt force injury to the head, and according to a source quoted by The Hollywood Reporter, his body showed signs of torture, possibly with a drill. Two months later, the body of another man was found on Payuma Road, again in the same area. It was later revealed that

he died of a gunshot wound. Police say that both murders were gang related, and in at least one case, gang members have inflicted this medieval style violence on an innocent bystander. He was a homeless man who was temporarily living in a park controlled by the gang. But gang killings generally involve very visible trauma like guns or blunt force objects, and they've tended to be dumped near major

roads or public sites. These bodies were meant to be found and meant to make a statement to the gang's enemies. Unlike Mitesa's body, which was found in an extremely remote location that could not be accessed by car. There are also drifters and homeless people who live in the hills, like Anthony Rauda, a homeless drifter who was charged with the Malibu Creek State Park shootings. Now many people believe that Rauda wasn't the only person shooting at human targets

in the hills over the years. But either way, while the vast majority of transient people in the mountains are harmless, there are violent criminals living up there. Due to COVID, we've been stuck inside, so we've had to look at alternative ways of gathering evidence. During one of those late night sessions, we found another mysterious video that surfaced on YouTube with a man who claims to have seen my

trees on the night she disappeared. It was posted by a woman who describes herself as a psychic topless activist. She posts clips on her website. Some are really out there descriptions of lizard people and complex conspiracy theories. But there's one clip that could potentially be very relevant to my Teresa's case. It's from twenty twelve and it's an interview with a local man who claimed that he saw

my Trees on the night she disappeared. He said that he was walking down the mountain at around four point thirty in the morning at Woodbluff and Cold Canyon when he saw a house with a horseshoe driveway and a tennis court, presumably Bill Smith's house. He said My Trees was at the front door of the property. He said he couldn't see her because there were park cars blocking his view in the driveway, but he said that he

could hear her screaming at something. He couldn't make out what she was saying, but he said that she was angry and cursing. He claimed that police questioned him and he admitted that he had a criminal record, which made him reluctant to talk to police. At first, we wanted to find the man so that we could interview him ourselves, but we learned that sadly he passed away another dead end and there's another group of people who were omnipresent

and invisible, the cartel. Remember that on the day that Materesa's body was found, park rangers were looking for the remnants of an illegal marijuana grow the Santa Monica Mountains have many areas that make them ideal for an illegal grow, especially in two thousand and nine in twenty ten, before marijuana was made lead in California. During those years, park rangers and Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department deputies confiscated tons of plants, thousands upon thousands of acres of pot worth

hundreds of millions of dollars. According to sources who spoke to The Hollywood Reporter, Mexican cartels send growers to cultivate marijuana in the mountain near Malibu Creek State Park. This is a massive, multi billion dollar business. They work in pears or sometimes in groups. They hide in the hills and camp near the crop until the plants are ready to harvest. This way, they didn't have to worry about

smuggling the product across the border. There have been no official reports of cartel links to the bodies found in Malibu Creek State Park, But unlike the gangs, cartel members are deep in the woods in areas where no one else goes for weeks at a time and there's something else. Cecarios or drug cartel hitmen often slit their victim's throats. When we hiked through dark canyon. We saw irrigation hoses. On the day the park rangers found my Teres's body,

they saw irrigation hoses too, but Ronda was clear. She told us that when she and my Teresa's family members hiked up to the site where the remains were found, those hoses had been removed by law enforcement. So it looks like the cartel may have come back at some point other than the creek bed. There is another way to get to the area where my Terrese was found, through the back of a private property that the police used to start their hike. Oh my point is if

we scream, either of us screamed really loudly. Right now, there are a bunch of houses right there. Yeah, if you needed help, and we're like, you know, I feel like people would hear you here. We are the only people up here. Remember when my producer, Gabby and I went out into the woods, we found it almost impossible to get to the coordinates where my Trees's body was found.

Like this down here is this the creek bed. We agreed that it would have been very difficult for my Trees to have walked that route through the creek bed on her own. We started from the Backbone trail, so we just have to keep hiking down. Veered off that trail and went along the creek bed heading east, so she could have I mean, I get what your thinking. She could have fallen, and again that I would have expected some broken bones, Like if we fell from this height,

you would expect there to be some broken bones. There are several ways that my trees could have gone from Bill Smith's house. Behind the house where my Teresa's sneaker print stopped is a horse trail that connects to several more horse trails. They zigzag within Montinito. A couple of branches of these horse trails connect to the Backbone trail. It's like a labyrinth back there. One way puts you back out on Pauma Road before the entrance to Montnito. Another way puts you out on the other side of

Payama Road. All of these routes still put you about a mile out from where my Teresa's body was found in the middle of the woods. But the horse trail does connect to one other property. It's called Malibu Canyon Ranch. The property is a large nineteen seventies ranch house. You can actually rent it for one hundred and ninety five dollars an hour for shoots. There's a walk in saltwater pool and a former production house where many types of

productions have been shot over the years. If you're walking along Payuma Road, there's a long driveway up to the property. The back of the property runs along a ridge line that descends into the creek bed near the clearing where my Teresa's body was found. It's so close that when we were on our hike in the woods, we could hear the roar of an engine from up on that property. People call this property the Porn Ranch. It's owned by a woman named Sus Randall. A few years ago, Vice

UK wrote a profile on Sus Randall. They wrote, quote her name should be one of the most iconic and porn She was the first female playboy photographer to shoot a full frontel, the first woman to sell her nude photographs to the Sun end quote. But Sus Randall is notoriously private, and while a lot of her past has been racy, by her own admission, she's always been known as a consummate professional. Her work focuses on making women

feel comfortable during shoots. Her daughter, Holly Randall, followed her mother into the business. Though the women are pretty private, they don't seem to be operating in any type of a shadowy, nefarious underworld. Their work is out in the open and very mainstream. It's like a lot of people who have looked into this case over the years or that, you know, they kind of make reference to this. But then as you were saying, this is it's just kind of like a distraction to the case. And the only

thing that's interesting about that property really is its proximity location. Yeah, and I don't think there's anything to that. I YEA. My whole question about them is only literally only because of where it is, because that's a property that given the fact that this is an investigation into a disappearance in that area, that is the property where that can be accessed. Like, that's my question, and it doesn't have anything to do to me with a pornography or anything

like that. To me, that's pretty irrelevant. It's literally the fact that it's at that location, Like literally that that house could be anyone in any industry. I feel like, again, like the fact that there's they happen to work in pornography, they have in the industry. I really feel like that's

become a distraction to this case. It's one of those things that's like a weird distraction when in reality people should just focus on the fact that the property is in a location where she could have walked through it. And so that's the reason that's interesting to me for

the investigation. Again, I think, much like the graffiti that was found, sometimes people can see come up with, you know, in the absence of information, Sometimes people fill in the blanks and I just think that, you know, they're graffiti and the fact that pornography is filmed at that ranch sometimes are both totally irrelevant. But we can't know for

sure from looking at a map. Once again, we can't find anyone in authority to go with us, and we don't know for sure that we'll have cooperation from property owners. We need to figure out if my tries could have walked to that location on her own. Pandemic are no pandemic. We're going up that mountain. I'm Katherine Townsend and this is Helen Gone. Helen Gone is a production of School of Humans and iHeartRadio. It's written and narrated by me,

Katherine Townsend. Our producers are Gabby Watts, Taylor Church and James Morrison. Music is by Ben Sale, mix is by Tunewelders. Our executive producers are Brandon Barr, Else Crowley and Brian Lavin. Special thanks to Chip Croft for use of footage from his documentary Lost Compassion, School of Humans. School of Humans