Where is Mitrice?

Although when you're stranded, they help contact your family and the need of a spare tire or just in any need of emergency, but they also cause a lot of accidents, and they cause a lot of friendships from forming, because as soon as people get out of class, the first thing they want to do is talk on their cell phones. So I just wish that cell phones would be limited to just emergencies only. She's wearing a dazzling beige ball gown and glides across the stage to Frank Sinatra's The

Way You Look Tonight. She's funny, beautiful, and has an electric smile. Two years later, her family released this pageant video to show the public what my Terse looks like, how she talks, how she walks. Because my Terse is missing, desperate for answers, friends and family had begun to retrace my Teresa's steps. I'm Catherine Townsend and this is hell and gone. It's five thirty five am on September seventeenth, two thousand and nine, and Teresa's mother, Latisse, is terrified.

She called the Lost Hills Sheriff station at around four thirty am to ask about my Teresa's bail and to make arrangements to pick up her daughter, only for the jailer to tell her that my Teres had been released hours earlier laus Hield Station bomb gardener. So Latis called back and was connected to another officer. Yes, hi, my name is Latista, and I called not too long ago

regarding my daughter. My Trees rook at this Latista's telling him that her daughter was forty miles from home and depressed and had no way home and no knowledge of the area. She doesn't know the area. She's never been in your area. Where does she live? He is unfamiliar with that area. Do you think that possibly could have gotten a bus home? And oh, listen, my Chad has never ridden a bus. No, she would not know how

to ride a bus. I would probably wait till, you know, early this morning, and if she doesn't turn up, you can certainly call. I don't suspect anything bad happened. The officer she was on the phone with said she should wait a few hours before filing a missing person's report. We heard part of that phone call at the end of the last episode, but the rest of it is even more heartbreaking. I'm concerned because, well, first of all, I thought they were going to keep her overnight because

she was highly intoxicated. Something, something is obviously going on with her. Have you tried to the jailer and yes, yes, yes, yes I have. He said he tried to get her to stable. Because she was an adult, they had to let her go. I believe that she is highly depressed, and she she's in a depressive state. You know, it could be possible that maybe she I mean, there's a lot of options and a lot of possibilities, and I don't think all of them would be, you know, something dire.

But I can certainly understand and your fears, you know, being your daughter and all that. Well, I think she's suppressed. That's what happens. That's worth than just okay. That and the fact that she's in an area where she doesn't know where she's at. It doesn't take medication at all. No, I believe it's a state that she's in, right now because of just the weird activities to speaking what's name her name is, Latise is growing more and more alarmed

that the police don't seem to be doing more. Her daughter had been out of jail for hours and no one had heard from her. Why didn't they seem to care? By Friday morning, she was getting desperate. That's when Latis called doctor Ronda Hampton. So she went missing, you know,

technically at twelve twenty eighth on Thursday. And her mom called me on Friday and she was just asking me if my Trees had contacted me or if she had seen by the office or something like that, and then she kind of explained to me what was going on. Ronda and Latisse had gone through my Teresa's social media and what they found was disturbing. Ronda called the police and insisted that the situation was urgent. Latis and Ronda re emphasized to the police that they believed my Trees

may be experiencing some sort of mental health issue. They couldn't wait any longer. They needed to look for my trees. Now, did they start searching right away or how long did it take them to start searching? So what happened was, and they claim that they searched that same day, although none of the neighbors would call that happening at all. So I when I talked to it was LAPD of a case at this time. When I talked to the LAPD,

they weren't planning on doing a search. Basically, she told me that we needed to have some compelling information to secure the funds to do a search. So, you know, I went back and forth with the detective from LAPD and then eventually, I guess I was able to give her enough information that she said that okay, fine. They finally agreed to do a search, and that would have been on Saturday. And I think it was that Friday

that we learned about the Montanino phone call. The night my tse went missing, the Lost Hills Sheriff's Department got another call from a retired KATV Los Angeles local news reporter named Bill Smith well Saffa office CAMPI yeah, Hi, Hey, this is a smith a Cold Canyon. We had a prowler walking around through the backyard here, but we don't know what the situation was. I've going not here a unit in the area might do a little drive buy

or something. Bill said that he had seen someone on his property in the early morning hours of September seventeenth, an African America, matching my Teresa's description. We talked about this in the last episode. If you don't live in the LA area, you might think of it and the surrounding areas as a sprawling city or Malibu as a star studded beach front crowded with surfers. But up in

the mountains, it's a different story. It would have been absolutely deserted at night, and a young woman walking alone would have stood out, and it goes from neighborhood to woods in the blink of an eye. You're absolutely correct, because I remember when I was still living up in Seattle and I was thinking about moving to LA I read about somebody, just in a line of I think it was outside magazines. Somebody said the mountains of Los Angeles and I went, what, There's no mountains in the

Los Angeles. Come on, and it's what you're talking about is absolutely true. Unless you're here, you don't realize that there is a mountain range. Brian Rooney literally wrote the book about Malibu Creek State Park because it's home to biologically diverse landscape that made it right for the movies. Paramount and twentieth Century Fox use the landscape, which included Malibu Creek State Park, to shoot dozens of movies and TV shows, including the TV series Mash But for park

visitors it's also dangerous. Malibu Search and Rescue are busy year round rescuing hikers from around the park. Hazard's for sure, like you mentioned, rattlesnakes, for sure. It's remarkable how many people come to the very popular Malibu Creek State Park and do not have a map with them and have

no idea where they're going. They just arrive. It is so close to the city that people come out under prepared and they don't think about the dangers of that They're going into a backcountry area where there is you know, bad cell service, no running water, basically very few bathrooms, all that type of stuff, and they come out underprepared and they don't understand that this is not a shopping mall.

And dangers if you're talking natural dangers, of course, you know, like I said, getting lost, getting hurt, falling down a canyon, falling down off a ridge line, or something like that. Obviously, the animals are here. It might help too. That one of the most interesting things about these mountains is because there is Pacific Coast Highway on one side and the

one to one Freeway on the other side. If you're ever actually lost, all you have to do is walk downhill and you will hit one of those major arteries. So as long as you're walking downhill, you'll hit civilization. But if you're walking across and not going downhill, then you can be in trouble because you could go on. It's a fifty mile long range and you could theoretically walk for a long way and not hit anything. Montegnito is a neighborhood that's about six miles from the Lost

Hills Sheriff Station. It backs onto the Santa Monica Mountains. It's quiet up there. There are horse trails and private hiking trails that cut through the back of several residential properties and lead up into the mountains. Bill Smith was a retired TV reporter in two thousand and nine when he called the police that night, he said that he spotted a prowler sitting on his back porch. I don't know if you have a unit in the area, might do a little drive buy or something Okay, where's this it?

This is Cold Canyon and we just said a strange woman walk up through the back gyard here. There's fairly large property and she was sitting on the steps right right on the back of the house. Here. This is kind of a circular driveway and the big gates were closed, so we don't know where this woman came from. There's a horse trail, hiking trail accessed through here, but we've never had this kind of thing happen before. Once she looked like white black as you know, a tall, slim

black woman with afro hair. I thought she was sitting down stretched out on the wooden steps in the back of the house. Hard to tell, but does she look like she'd have been medium too, slightly tall with a big aprol hair, very skinny, and I think she was wearing maybe jeans or tight pants with a T shirt. Do you think you've never seen her there before? No? Never, nobody's ever does that. I mean, the people hike on

the trail all the time. We you know, the trail goes through our property, but we leave it open on purpose because it's kind of a nice thing for horses and people. And said she's laying across me. She was laying across the steps or but she was sitting kind of sprawled out on the wooden steps in the back of the house, right against the back of the house. She since got up and left. She since gone. Yeah,

she's been gone about five minutes now. But as we follow it over, we thought maybe a little drive by wouldn't be a bad idea. And what direction was she did she last seen him? He never saw her. She once she left, she just disappeared. I moved from one wind to another. I said to her, I hollered down. Are you all right? She said, I'm just resting or

something like that. But she's certainly gone out of her way to get to that close to the house because the hiking trail is not that close down the ridge. A great listen to me, I haven't checked the area for I appreciate that very much. Now the problems, thank you. Here the timeline gets a little fuzzy. We ask for the audio of the phone calls and the call logs from the LASD, but we're told that call logs are

usually destroyed after two years. Lost hill sheriffs say they got the call at six thirty am, but Bill Smith keeps saying it's dark and he can't see the woman clearly. But according to records, the sun rose over the Santa Monica Mountains at six forty am on Thursday, September seventeenth, two thousand and nine, so it was already getting light out. But if she was in a man a state because she had walked all the way from Lost Hills to Bill Smith's home, I mean, rare, but it's possible. But

it's just almighty strange. This is to Shaka Starwell. He works at react La react as a volunteer organization that acts as a liaison between families and police and also helps organize searches and missing persons cases for families. Tshaka

says the same thing that the family was feeling. They didn't understand how my trees could have walked the six miles from the Lost Hill Sheriff station to Montanito in the pitch black without even a cell phone light to illuminate the way, because if it was six she would at least a blue skylight there, So I thought it was in the wee hours. There's no way that she walked. She can't even walk and get there in two hours.

I just don't see it. There's no way she can drive from the freeway and get to Bill Smith's house without a map. And there are a lot of other places between Loss Hills the station and Bill Smith's home. There's a equestering yard, there's a state park all to the side around that road, and I mean, I'm just told them when we get down down and there, of course there's a gas station other things right there in the middle area. How does she just skip all of that?

It is possible to walk to Monteanito from the Lost Hill Sheriff's apartment, but how she got to Monteannito and why comes central questions of the investigation. I drove up to the station to try to piece together the route. Okay, so as you can see, look how the road is already. Imagine trying to walk down this at night. There's no side, there's no no shoulder. The Lost Hills Sheriff station is about a fifteen minute drive from Joffrey's, the restaurant where

the police picked up my trees. But in the tunnel there's not even like one of those little walkway things. So like literally if you're going through that tunnel and there's a car it's going to hit you in this right here. You would just never imagine three minutes ago. The drive from Jeoffreys to the station is treacherous. There are tons of hairpin turns, no shoulder and no sidewalk. The road is surrounded by mountains. One side of the road has a guardrail before a long fall into a

canyon and left onto a door road. You drive through a tunnel and there's no pedestrian shoulder, so anyone trying to walk through could not make it through that tunnel with any traffic, especially at night when it's dark. So it should be right up here. Yeah, I kind of. I'm going to think I recognized this. Let's see turning raft. Then you will arrive at your destinations over here. I was on the right in it. That's right, it's on

the left here it is, that's right here. The Lost Hills Sheriff Station is situated between a few neighborhoods that are gated with brick walls and large commercial and industrial buildings that are closed at night. There are no open businesses around you can't go in, i think, and no public transportation. The last buses would have stopped running hours before My Trees was released. You all right, So here it is. There's the front door. I'm just going to drive around to the so you see if there's a

side door. My Trees was released at twelve fifteen am and left the building at twelve thirty eight. SHARONN. Cummings, the jailer on duty that night, said she'd offered My Trees the chance to use the phone, but My Trees turned the offer down. Cummings also said she told My Trees she could wait into the lobby until someone came and got her. So, yeah, this is it. And when she left here she went back that way. My triest

left through the side door of the station. She had two options, go back down the winding path toward Jeoffrey's and the Pacific Coast Highway, or she could go the other way, the way that had a sidewalk at least for a few miles along Los Virgins Road, which turns into Malibu Canyon Road. If I was trying to get back to the beach, I would have gone this way, honestly, And that is where it gets treacherous. But again it's very misleading. You feel like you're going down toward the beach.

Montenito is like the first like once you get out and you rouzer in the middle of nowhere, it's like the next neighborhood along Bill Smith's house in Monteennito is right off Malibu Canyon Road, but the neighborhood is nestled between hiking trails and rugged wilderness. So it's odd that she would have walked there in the pitch blackness. So that was Bill Smiths and then from there, it's really confusing around here, like her family started to wonder, could

my trees have been driven to Montenito Number one. I don't buy for one minute that she walked, but let me just go with that. I'll let's just I'll go with it. If she did walk, it would make sense to me that she would make a right hand turn. Okay, fine,

gotta walk one direction. Okay, that makes sense. It would even make sense to me that she would stay on the main road, you know, because at least it's paved, right And it also would make sense to me that she would make a right because when you go down nothing's open. The Albertson's is closed. Everything is closed at

that time. Okay, so she'll make a right. Well, if she was if she If if she was the person who was seen at six thirty in the morning, then there was light, right, so there's some there had to be some light. Well, if so. Number one, we think she was there closer to four thirty in the morning, okay, but but even or five thirty, but they keep We're not really sure on the time, but neighbors were hearing her well before sixth thirty in the morning. On Saturday,

September nineteenth, police began their search for my trees. When investigators looked outside Bill Smith's house, they found tracks that they believed came from my teresa sneakers. According to Los Angeles Magazine, the sneaker prints were found out front. They followed the prince but lost them before they went down into the canyon called Dark Creek. My Teresa's family says that police told them to avoid the area to not

contaminate it. I wonder why they told you guys that I don't know, And you know, thank goodness for reporters. I have to tell you, because there was a reporter as we were patching out flyers who told us basically to get our asses up to the canyon, right, you know, and kind of told us, this is what you need to do, and and you know, thank goodness for time

because we did. We didn't know exactly where we were going, but we kind of drove around the canyon and then I you know, we didn't We still didn't know exactly where we're going. They had found footprints, and they really played me. You know, I was very naive back then, and so they told me that they had found footprints and that it looked like my truth was walking and then she was running, and then like and where she

was running. They were concerned that she may have jumped, and so they didn't say this, but they intimated that, like, look if they were gonna fight, like as if it was suicide, and so we wouldn't want to be We wouldn't want to find that my Treesa's friends and family also questioned the police's decision to start the search in

Monteanito rather than the Lost Hill Sheriff station. If the search of dogs had been deployed near the station, they wondered, could they have figured out if my Trees got into a vehicle. They used dogs, but they only used them from Where did they start from? Did they start from Bill Smith's house? Or did they start from the station.

So they did not start from the station at all, and they started I mean, I guess we would have to believe that they started in Montanaedo, because I remember we weren't allowed to be there when that was happening, right, So whether they were, I believe that they were in the Bill Smith's area and in the houses in that area, because some of the neighbors have told me that they, you know, that they saw, you know, the police out there on that day. That part only lasted four or

five hours though, and then they were out. It was supposed to be a two day, all day search, right, but it literally was four hours and that was it. Ronda said that when she was told by police that they were calling office search at four point thirty Saturday afternoon, she was shocked and angry. In the week after my Terse went missing, friends and family began flooding into the area around Lost Hills and Antito and posting flyers with

photos of Matreesa's face everywhere. There were several photos of my trees on the flyer, and the contrast between the glamour shot was smooth hair and a dazzling smile and the one of her police mugshot is stark. In the second photo, my Treece has a faint smile on her face, but she has bags under her eyes. Chipcroft is a

documentary filmmaker who lives in the area. It was I had moved to LA on September one, two thousand and nine, and I was settling in and it was about three weeks later that I was looking at the La Times online and I saw an article, a picture actually of a young African American woman holding a sign saying find my trees. And she was INVALIDU obviously along the highway and they were. It was during the one, I think

the first Saturday after My Trees went missing. Chip was unsettled by the sheriff's cavalier attitude towards my Teresa's disappearance when this When I saw this article, it just didn't ring true to me that she went missing with you know, no phone, no no nothing, no car, no way home,

no money or anything. And so I immediately felt this was based on obfuly a racist situation, and I think I still think it is, and I think she was considered to be an expendable young black woman from South LA that they probably might not even miss the people wouldn't care about so much. But it turned out not

to be the case. So anyway, So I there was an email address in the article for Ronda, and I emailed Ronda about the about the case, and she said that they were having a press conference coming up in the following week at the Sheriff's headquarters. And I said, well, okay, I'll come by and maybe I can meet you all, and I'll bring my camera. This is my daughter, My Richardson Chip headed to the Lost Hill Sheriff's department and recorded Latis as she made a passionate plea to police

to search harder for my trees. They failed her. She is suffering somewhere because we believe she is still alive, but they're not doing enough to search for her. We are suffering every day, not knowing what to do to find my daughter. They know this area, they have the means to daily search for her. I believe they have an obligation and a duty to continue to find look for her until they rescue her. She can be hurt somewhere,

my understanding. The last place she was seen was in a community off of Tiruma by the Saddleback lodge, which is very steep, very terraneous, very seclusive. Someone heard voices, no not voices, a voice of a woman talking to herself in a vacant house, and apparently there's many vacant houses in that area. The community has been unaware until they got wind of our efforts, not the Sheriff's Department's efforts, but our efforts putting flyers out there, making contact with

the neighborhood, just really trying to find my daughter. They knew none of this from the police department, and the community is outrage. Chip and Ronda started canvassing the neighbors in Monteennito themselves and followed every lead they could find. Most of the neighbors in Montinita were very cooperative and wanted to help them, and now they're the CDA eight

mil racism and laws or anything. Their role was quite helpful and a you know, they didn't know the cheffs that claimed they'd gone around knocked on everybody's door and questioned everybody. And we could barely find anybody that the sheriffs had ever knocked on anybody's door or question Chip heard a number of theories. One neighbor told Ship that they heard a scream at around eleven pm the following

Tuesday after my trees went missing. The neighbor didn't even know that there was a missing person at that point and never figured out the source of the scream. Chip talked to another neighbor as well, who said they discovered what appeared to be a shallow grave on a neighbor's property. We had the sheriffs come and investigate that that it was a like a sand pit, but it threw a

lot of rains in October. In the sand pits had sunk, as if somebody had dug in there or had removed somebody out of there, and it had sunk, and there was a breath that she noticed. She walked by there every day, and she noticed some things had been moved and tampered in that sand pit area, So that whole thing was very suspicious. Ship and the sheriffs went to check out the property with the shallow grave and said that the owner of the home screamed at the sheriff

to get off her property. Since she lived in South LA when she went missing. My Teresa's case was given to the LAPDS Missing Person's Unit, then the case was reassigned again, this time to the LAPD's Robbery Homicide Division. Officials said this was because the Robbery Homicide Division had more resources, but a lot of people over the years have commented that this move was one of many that made it seem like Lost Hills wanted to get rid

of this case as fast as they could. Don't forget the Los Angeles Police Department is involved in this as well. It is their investigation in fact, because she her residence is Los Angeles. But that's a kind of a technical thing because everybody's looking for The Los Angeles Police Department has two detectives that are just they're assigned to this case.

This is what they're doing. This is Steve Whitmore, a Community Information officer for the LASD, being interviewed in early October two thousand and nine, three weeks after my Terse went missing. Say, there has been three massive searches. The Saturday immediately following the disappearance, then the next Saturday where there was two hundred people. Now this is by air, this is by foot, and what is known are door knocks.

Where that fourteen square mile of houses doors were each one and if the house was empty, we would contact the owner and that we would go in and search those facilities with their permission. But it's important to note that we do not believe this to be any wrongdoing

involved here at all. This is a missing person. Well, I would refer you to the Los Angeles Police Department on that, yes, but they have publicly said they do not believe this to be have anything to do with wrongdoing, that this is a missing person, and what the La County Sheriff's Department is trying to do every day is

to find this young twenty four year old woman. Four months after my trees went missing, on January ninth, twenty ten, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department conducted a massive search. So I'm not sure, just because it's been changing every day. There's probably about fifty horses, there's about forty to fifty dogs that are going to be out here as well. We have Air Rescue five coming in, which are our rescue helicopter. It involved hundreds of volunteers covering an eighteen

square mile area. They used drones to conduct air searches, They did ground searches of creeks, trails, and ridges, but no trace of my trees was found. The plan is to put people really deep into the hills. A lot of the areas have been checked already, but we're going to really saturated, so Malibu Canyon will have people literally getting airlifted down into the canyon, dropping people all the way along the canyon. It's going to be a very slow,

methodical search. And Ronda was shocked to discover that even though the police were doing massive searches, they had not actually searched the area right next to Montenedo. And so they showed us the big map of the area that they were going to search, and so we were saying, wait a minute, why are you if you're using all this puns and all these people, why are you not searching Montnito and in particular the creek bit because at that point we learned about it. And then too Right

told us to be right. Was one of the officers working on the case. Too We Right told us, well, we're eventually going to cover one hundred percent of that area, but we're not going to do that now. And I was like, Chuy, I have read that when you're searching for a missing person, they're more likely to be found within the three mile radius of where they were lost be so why not start in mont Needo and work

your way out. Tashaka worked with Rohnda Chip and Latis to search the area in the woods right next to Montinito. That's pretty much what got us into the and to the old river bed that was down there, and how we started to hike in to that area. I think it was over in three separate times that we really got in there. And I remember that hike because we were going in and I started to get dark, so I was worried about wildlife, and so we ended up

coming back. There was some folks who was stopped by at the command center and would give these different stories that of course interested our guys a lot, and it was just very bizarre for the neighborhood. And I guess that she wasn't the only one who had kind of went missing where things had happened to other females in

that area, which made even more concerning. So just the things that we found along the way, like we found how many could be kids playing and doing other crazy naughty things there, But we had found underwear, brawls and things like that there did not belong to her at all. But these are just some of the items that we found. The searchers did find some things that struck them as odd.

This included a newly painted graffiti mural on a culvert in the canyon of approximately thirteen African American women with afros who were nude and very graphic sexually provocative positions. Ronda said that she was spooked by the fact that the mural portrayed a woman with the same hairstyle as My Trees and said, la as a psychologist, there are

certain images within that mural that are quite telling. Very often people who have some type of psychopathology will draw images with big eyes, and there were two images that had really big eyes, and one of them appeared to Police said that they got into contact with the young people who painted the mural. They said that the taggers were fans of the pop artist Keith Herring and had nothing to do with My Trees or the case. Okay,

here and near the trailer. In late June, nine months after My Trese went missing, a search team with the help of REACT, located a trailer that had been seen around the area. It had a no trespassing sign in the window. I mean didn't say no solicitation. Simon go ahead. They also determined that the culvert where the graffiti was tagged dropped down a cliff and into some bushes. Now watch,

it might drop off steeply if you very turbaned. Yeah, so if he killed somebody here, he could drag him through and shove him out the other side right the bushes down there. Volunteers crawled inside with flashlights, but all they found at the bottom were a couple of spray cans. Tashaka and his team weren't giving up. They continued to search the Monteenito area, and then there was hope. A high school friend of my Teresa's was in Las Vegas

and he swore that he saw her. At a news conference in Las Vegas, Los Angeles Police Captain Kevin McClure said they'd followed up on leeds and conducted around one hundred interviews in the area. We've located witnesses that are positively seen her. We located all the way from waitresses, bartenders, security officers, record citizens. We have talked to more than

seventy individuals who believe they have seen her. That's based on a photograph and some passage of time in most instances, but that volume causes us to believe we're on the right track. It's been eleven months since my trese went missing and nothing. On August ninth, twenty ten, California State Park rangers were inspecting parts of the Santa Monica Recreation

Area for marijuana cultivation. They were deep in the woods of Dark Canyon, near the creek bed that's dried up in the summer months, scouting for irrigation lines when they stumbled across scattered clothing and then human remains. Yeah, as I put the people for sure, it's dry. My producer, Gabby and I are hiking in the woods in what

feels like the middle of nowhere. I guess the rainy time starts in late November and it floods, but then the rest of the time it's dry as it is now and like it was when my tree is wellnessing. We started at the Backbone Trail in Malibu Creek State Park, but we're going off trail now, following the creek bed.

We first started up the Backbone trail because we had sort of a lot of people had told us that the spot was accessible from there, but we and the Backbone Trail looked walkable, like it looked like something that you could potentially if you're on the road, turn down and walk down. But once we got off of that into the creek bad and started heading toward the back of the house where the GPS coordinates start, it's really

it's very rocky. I wouldn't say, I mean, look, we're both really out of breath, but we're very amateur hikers. We were able to do it, so in no way dangerous, but it's also absolutely not something that you could do at night in the dark. The creek bed takes us to Dark Canyon. As we get further and further into the dense forest, the creek bed becomes more treacherous. Cliffs, rocks, poison oak, and overgrown ivy also, and I've gotten stung

by everything down here. When we're almost to our destination, we see irrigation pipes, we're seeing the irrigation We're seeing some sort of irrigation system, which could be the irrigation system that the guys from Alvy Search and Rescue found that day. On the day they found the remains, the ranger's job was to make sure that the marijuana growers

had not come back. Then one of the searchers saw something among the leaves, a red leather strap, then a black bra partially covered with debris, and finally a pair of blue jeans. Then the supervising ranger saw a human skull and a leg bone. The ranger could not get a signal on his cell phone, so he notified his dispatcher by radio. Tshaka just happened to be monitoring the radio that day. So part of what we do at La Ni React is that we monitor police fire frequencies.

So that day I just remember, I don't even know why and how, but I was working and I was listening, and I just tuned into the radio call, and so from knowing that they found something too, we don't know what it is. It could be an animal, it could be this, you know. Tshaka called Ronda and the family hustled to the edge of the canyon to wait for news.

All of a sudden, I got a phone call from to Shaka star Well from the reacting So he said, Rhonda, he said me, remains have been found in that general area where my trees was, and he's it was the way that it was a partly partially mummified skeletal remains, and they believe it's my trees. I called Latis, cancel my day, cancel her day. We jumped in the car and we headed out there. They kept waiting. Tshaka went to the Lost Hill Sheriff's department to get more information.

He kept calling the Lost Hill station to try and get updates. Then in the meantime, Lauren called the detective saying, hey, we got word that there's remains found. Lauren is Latis's sister, my Terce's aunt. He's like, what are you talking about? Yeah, what are you talking about? And then oh, when there was just a couple of bones, it was we're like, well, no, we have for that. It is partially mummified remains. So even then and you guys don't need to come. Of course,

we headed out there. So it was right there, and so we just waited there for ever, and they were trying to get us go home. And we went and go home and they're like, well, nothing's going to happen until morning. Way out, we'll stay posted. I was said, oh my car, okay, yeah, And so we wouldn't go. We wouldn't go, And so then it started getting like later and I just so eventually we saw the helicopter and then to shock up because he's very aware. He goes, I bet she's in there. I bet they air lifted

her out right. But they told us that they were going to do it in the morning, is what they told us, Like, well, we'll sit here till the morning. There. It wasn't until the following day that it was officially confirmed that there were remains that were extracted from the middle of Dark Canyon in the creek bed, and that they were my Terce's. She was found partially mummified, naked, with her clothing several feet away from her where she was fat. There's no way that she could get down there.

I just I just remember Bill Smith's home and we're walking on a trail. There's a trail, and then the trail kind of ends itself, but if you kind of go through some rough terrain, you can kind of make it through to the ravine, which is on a cliff side. So I mean, the way that it looks like her body was found, it was if you look down on the side of a cliff, kind of like she was pushed her or was thrown over downside this cliff side into that ravine. I very seriously doubt that anything or

something put her deep down in that ravine. We've asked almost everyone this question, and it's hard to get a clear answer. Could my trees have gotten in there herself? Most of them say no. First an anyone who knows my trees says that she hated the woods. And second, where she was found is miles from any access point. So while the road and civilization border interner weave the state parks, one wrong turn and you could be lost deep in the woods. But why would my trees have

kept walking? I just don't see her hiking that deep. We checked all the ways into where she was found and there was no way. I mean, it was rough for us. I mean I remember climbing through water tubes, sliding down I'm sure to see some of to get down to the point where we absolutely could not go anywhere and anymore, and that was only due to the sunlight, and then getting back to where we needed originally started from. It's just very, very very I mean, it's we were men.

I can't We did walk. We did hike with the family. Family did hike with us. It was daylight, so it wasn't that difficult. But at night there's no way I could see it at any type of state the moonlight, because I went out there one night. Now I wanted to see, and we were right in front of Bill Smith's house, and I wanted to see what does it look like that night there? And the moonlight is the

only light that you actually just see. But when you're down in the grove, the grove, the ravine area, it's so shaded, it's shaded by the trees that the moonlight, it just no justice didn't help at all. Is it really plausible that my trees could have walked down here herself hiked for hours through sharp thorns and trees and climbed up boulders, and then for some reason decided to take her clothes off and keep walking into danger. When we went on our hike, it was nearly impossible to

walk along the creek bed. It started out almost like a normal hike. I mean, it was a narrow trail, it was somewhat steep, but you could see, you could see houses, you could see the sides of the mountain.

It just felt like an omal height. But once we got on the creek bed, it started to be just like we're climbing over giant boulders and under logs, and now it's really impossible to get off of this trail because both sides were down in a valley, and so each side going up is very steep, so there's really no way to climb out of here. You kind of have to just go forward or backward. I don't think that.

I mean, we're going to walk out toward the road and we're going to see if there's any like obvious way she could have made it down here from the road the other way. But as of right now, if it continues like this, I'm gonna go ahead and say there's no way she walked to herself, I'm now more convinced that she did not walk here. Next time on Helen Gone, it is the confirmed remains of why Trees Richardson. Would we bury her? We're going to have to fight

for exhamation. Yeah, this situation is is really unfortunate and would have made it very difficult to determine the cause of death. This is not closed. This is still open, and that's what they're going to do. Now. If you object to that, that's your I'm just asking you, is that proper? What do you think of my going different? Is this circumstance, everything about it is a screaming red flag. I don't think I've ever seen a case where that happened.

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, Elsie Crowley and Brian Lavin. Special thanks to Chipcroft for use of footage from his documentary Boss Compassion m HM School of Humans m M School of Humans