1. The Killing Zone

the mountain lions are stressed half crazy. A few years ago, I wrote a story about them for The New Yorker, where I work. The people in Malibu were really upset, especially about a rogue lion known as P forty five, which was slaughtering pet alpacas and mini horses seemingly for sport. There was a huge debate over who was to blame for these deaths, a murderous lion or the people who had left their pets unprotected in lion country. One morning, I went out searching for evidence of lions in the

mountains near Malibu Creek State Park. I was with one of the wildlife biologists, and we were in a tangle of branches and bushes, looking at a dried out deer carcass, a month old lion kill. This question just popped into my head, so I asked him, Hey, do you ever find a dead body out here? He turned and looked at me so strangely he was going to stick to talking about lions, no comment on what humans might do

in these hills. In my fifteen years living in Los Angeles, I've logged a decent amount of time in Malibu, sometimes reporting, but mostly just taking my kids for afternoons at the beach. You know, Malibu, It's paradise, the ocean, the mountains, the honeycolored light, celebrities and surf bums, and laid back billionaires, people with prayer beads and private security. It's like a postcard of itself. The real gidget is a hostess at a local restaurant, and you could easily run into Kim

Kardashian at the sushi bar. But often in Malibu I get this unsettling sensation that there's something else there underneath that pretty surface, something elusive and slightly menacing, a riptide an undertow, and I can never quite shake the feeling. That the place is warning me to go away. Here's what I know when I start all this. It's not a lot. It was before sunrise June twenty second, eighteen, and the campground at Malibu Creek State Park was packed.

It's an idyllic spot. Campsites are arranged in a ring around a large meadow dotted with oak trees. Jagged peaks zigzag across the open sky. It was four in the morning, still dark. Everyone was inside their nylon tents and RVs, cozy in their sleeping bags for a couple more hours. But someone was awake, watching, silent, undetected, slipping shadow like around the sleeping campground. He had a gun and he

fired it directly into one family's tent. Inside the tent was a man named Tristan Bodette, a brilliant young research scientist thirty five years old. He was sleeping beside his two little girls. The bullet struck his forehead, killing him, and whoever did it slipped away into the darkness. It's like a story that's meant to terrify you, playing on your deepest fears. A story you'd tell around a campfire with ghosts and murderers and things you can't explain except

that this story is true. And once I heard it, I couldn't stop thinking about it. How did this happen? How does anything like this happen in Malibu, of all places? But it did happen in Malibu, And as I'd come to find out, inexplicable, nightmarish things happen in Malibu all the time. Tonight, a mystery in Malibu. The driver found a man dead in a ditch along Lost Versus Canyon Road. There have also been nine additional calls for shots fire.

I just don't feel safe anymore. Breaking now a homicide investigation. We do have a nude body and it's still unclear exactly how it got here. It is a suspicious death. The human bones were just a half mile from the trailhead. We possibly said somebody screaming for help. Detectives and I trying to figure out who he is and who killed him. I'll tell you what. They'll be standing with pitchforks outside Lost til Sheriff's department. I said to holler down, are

you all right? She said, I'm just resting or something like that. Once she left, she just disappeared. I'm doing a goodyear and This is Lost Hells episode one, the Killing Zone. Would you guys start by just saying your names and what your relationship is to Tristan. My name is Scott McCurdy. I'm Tristan's brother in law, and this is my wife. My name's Pamela wo I'm at Tristan's sister in law and married to Scott McCurdy. I want to talk to Scott because he was with Tristan on

the camping trip. He was in the next tent over with his own young boys. He's the closest person to the story. Tristan's little girls were two and four. The younger one could barely talk. Scott is the closest thing to a witness. Tristan always has this bucket list of things that he wants to do, and camping in Malibu State Park was on the bucket list. Years ago, before we had kids, he and I went up to Malibu Creek State Park and he and I always wanted to

go back and camp there. Scott tells me that Tristan, his wife, Erica, and their kids were about to move from Orange County up to the Bay Area. I feel like he knew that I was a little bit sad that he was going to be leaving Southern California. Erica is an obgyn and had a medical exam to study for.

So Tristan proposed a trip something he and Scott had been wanting to do for a long time, camping just the dads with the kids in Malibu Creek State Park, and he wanted to have kind of one last camping trip while he was down here and we were all together, and so it was meant to be this bonding, really

fun experience. The caravan up to Malibu, we're driving up and we pull in and Tristan was first, and we passed the ranger booth where you get your site, and I follow Tristan in and we'd go down the long winding road and he makes a wrong turn and off the asphalt road onto this gravel dirt road, which later he commented he was so excited that he got to take his forest or off roading. It was such a funny, dude.

The campground is basically a large oak meadow. There's a one way asphalt road that goes around it with campsites offset on either side. You know, we found our campsite, we got the kids out, and we all walked around and the campsite was was a little bit angled, and so Tristan really didn't like it because, you know, there wasn't a good spot to pitch the tent where you wouldn't be leaning one way or the other, and so

it just wasn't wasn't the ideal camp site. So we decided, and we were early enough not all the sites were full, that we decided we'd, you know, one of us would go back and bargain with the rain to get another site. They moved to a different spot, Site forty nine, in a nice flat area on the northern end of the meadow, and then they noticed that the guy in the next site over was leaving. They asked him if they could use his site too spread out a little. He said, sure,

no problem. Tristan set up his tent there in Site fifty one. Then he and Scott and all the kids spent the day at Surfrider Beach, that famous stretch along Pacific Coast Highway right by the Malibu Pier. At the end of the day, they headed back to the park and got ready for a night around the campfire. Scott says that Tristan could be counted on to bring delicious food and pre mixed cocktails when they camped. He was the kind of person who optimized everything. And so did you.

And Tristan get to stay up drinking Manhattan's or something out of a flask after the kids finally went to bed. Tristan had pre mixed Manhattan's for that trip, that last conversation we had. We you know, we stayed up and we were just talking about families for hours and hours and um and I told him how much I was gonna miss him. I'm like, I kind of guilted him a little bit, like, you know, well we had a good run, buddy, you know, we had a good run.

I'm gonna I'll miss you. You know. I remember at the end of the night, we decided, you know, okay, well it's it's late, let's go to bed. It was probably I don't know, I don't know what time it was. Maybe it was one o'clock or something. I'm not sure.

And you know, we put out the camp fire, and you know, we I gave him a big hug, and you know, I told him I loved him, and I told him I did I told him again that I was gonna miss him, and It makes me sad but so happy at the same time, because at least I got that. A few hours later, Scott says he was awakened by a loud noise like fireworks and the sound of one of his nieces crying. He couldn't figure out why Tristan wasn't helping her. He knew that something must

be wrong. He got up, leaving his own young children, and hurried over to Tristen's tent. He opened the flap. In the dark, he could see the girls kneeling beside their dad. One of them kept saying, wet, wet. He dug around for a phone, and when he found it, used it as a flashlight. He rolled Tristan over and saw that his face was drenched in blood. The girls were kneeling in a pool of it. That's what was wet.

He pulled the girls out of the tent into the chilly early morning air and began to scream for help. I've never investigated a murder before, but I'm assuming the autopsy will be filled with information. You know, leads I can follow that will get me started in the right direction. When the coroner releases it, I scour it for details. At the time of his death, It says Tristan Bodatt was wearing a gray tshirt, blue shorts, and white socks. His face was unshaven. He had a little alcohol in

his system, probably the Manhattan's, and a little THHC. Above his right eye, just below the hairline, but pretty close to dead center was an oval hole where a full copper jacketed lead bullet had entered, piercing his brain. That bullet was excavated from his right shoulder blade. Included with the autopsy is something called a GSR data sheet. It stands for Gunshot Residue. I had to look that up.

The box for homicide is checked, but everything else about Tristan Bodat's case and how he died can only be learned from the omissions gaps in the narrative of facts. The weapon is described as outstanding make a model, unknown, ammunition, brand and caliber. Unknown. Number of shots fired is left blank. How did the injury occur? The autopsy simply bopaquely says shot by another. When Tristan Bodett was killed, rumors started

flying around Malibu. Bodette worked at a pharmaceutical company and had published research on vaccines, probably he'd been targeted, assassinated by Big pharma or the government, or the perpetrator was a disgruntled park worker, possibly ex military, or maybe it had something to do with the elite go marijuana grows that everyone knows, or a problem in Malibu Creek State Park.

But what Scott says that they moved spots twice and ended up in a third spot given by a nameless stranger, it just makes me think about how random the killing was. Scott was there, he was with Tristan the whole time, right up until they zipped into their separate tents, and

he's baffled. For me, and I think for Tristan, campgrounds or a sanctuary, there were a place that you could go and you could let your guard down a little bit, the kids could play, you'd have fun setting up your camp and making dinner and just hanging out with the people you love. Do you think about Malibu differently now? Yeah,

you know, I definitely do. I mean, I think you've got just this really great spot in the world where you should be able to go and enjoy nature, And you just don't think that in a place so beautiful that you're going to experience something so evil. When I think about what happened to Tristan Boudet, I always think about the thin wall of his tent. He probably felt so safe nestled in beside his girls. He trusted nature, He wasn't scared. He had no idea what was out

there or how vulnerable he was going camping anywhere. Um, something could happen. You know, there could be there could be a bear, there could be a mountain lion. Those are kind of inherent risks in nature that you know they could be present, and you know if it happens, you know, if if there's if there's a bear, you know,

it's the idea of that is really scary, right. But usually when there's something like that, I mean, it's posted, you know, you know what, you know that there's there are predators out there lurking, and so maybe you keep your kids a little bit closer and you keep your kids a little bit safer that day. But you would never go to a campground where there was a known

human predator. No, no one whatever did that. We did not know that there was this danger at this park, and had we known, we would never have put our children in danger. Never. It was only after Tristan's death that he and everyone in Malibu found out there was a real danger. People were being targeted in Malibu Creek State Park. Law enforcement knew and Tristan Boudette was not the first victim. From twenty sixteen to twenty eighteen, there was a series of shootings in and around Malibu Creek

State Park. One person was injured, but no one died. These were near misses, six of them. I'm a thousand feet above Malibu in a helicopter with the Twoey Write, a retired sergeant detective from Lost Hills Station. That's a small outpost of the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, and it covers law enforcement for this whole area from coastal Malibu to Calabasas and the miles and miles of wilderness in between. It's a beautiful areas, are a wild area with some

rugged terrain. The sun such a beautiful out There's pointdo over by the beach. I can see a line of houses shoulder to shoulder on the sand. They look like toys. From here. It's some of the most expensive real estate in the world. You can see down there. That's Malibu Colony. That little Peninsula of Holmes. There quite a few rich and famous folks live there. We head inland over the mountains, following Malibu Canyon Road. This should Malibu Canyon going in Here,

the highway goes along the canyon. It's a major road connecting the beach and the valley. Something like twenty thousand cars travel on it every day. Over and here is some of the areas where like the Kardashians live and all of that kind of And there's Malibu Creek State Park. It's wild and pristine, volcanic rocks, oak savannah's undulating grasslands. If you remember the opening sequence to the nineteen seventies TV show Mash where the helicopter flies past craggy green peaks,

that's Malibu Creek State Park. But Sergeant Twey Wright see something different. He sees the killing zone. Hey, I'm thinking you might just to keep it simple. We might start with the shootings and then moved to the burglaries and then moved to the capture since it happened that way and the capture route in the camp. That sounds like a great sequence. Sergeant Wright was in charge of search

and rescue, finding hikers lost in the mountains below. His knowledge of this terrain put him right in the center of the investigation into Tristan Bodat's death and everything that happened before and after it. Sergeant Wright asks the pilot Pete to take a lap over the park. Pete, maybe a left bank there, and we'll go back over towards Tapia. Below us is a picnic spot, Tapia Park, at the

edge of Malibu Creek State Park. That's where in November twenty sixteen, a backpacker named Jimmy Rogers was shot hurt but not killed. We'll see being in a hammock slung between two trees near Miss number one. Over here in the park. Down in the campground there is where the next two incidents occurred. Less than a week later, and about a mile away, in the campground where Bodat was later killed, a man was shot at while inside his

camper near Miss number two. Two months later, in January twenty seventeen, there was another shooting in the same campground, this time at a couple sleeping in their car near Miss number Three's talking about the highway shootings. Then, in the summer of twenty seventeen, the targets seemed to change to moving cars driving along the canyon Road. In the span of a few weeks, first a white Porsche and then a white BMW were hit with gunfire near misses

four and five. Below us on the park side of the canyon Road, there's a hill well concealed by bushes and trees. You can see the hill and the brush and the canopy trees come right up to the edge of the highway YEP. Sergeant Rights theory is that a shooter lay in wait, firing on approaching cars. It's a good elevated position where you have immediate cover and an immediate escape direction. The shootings in the park and on the canyon Road were totally bizarre events rhymes with no reason.

They all happened at the same time around three four am. Each one involved a single shot, but after near miss number five things went quiet. Eleven months passed without another shooting until June eighteenth, twenty eighteen. Early that morning, around four am, in the same area, a Tesla, a white one, was hit in the hood near miss number six. Even then, after twenty months of unsolved shootings, law enforcement didn't alert the public. The Sheriff's department stayed silent. And so did

California State Parks. There was no press conference, nothing was posted at the park, no information wanted flier, not even a suggestion to remain vigilant. And four days after the Tesla was shot, Tristan Boudette was killed in the campground. When you got the call that there had been a shooting at the campground, it wasn't out of the blue for you. I'm just putting myself in your shoes and thinking you must have had a sinking feeling because there

had been a series of incidents leading up to that moment. Yeah, that is true, and this was our greatest fear that this was a serial shooter and that eventually he would hit somebody and or kill them. He'd already hit somebody in the beginning. So he's saying that privately, law enforcement worried there was a potential serial killer at large. They thought he was looking for victims and that Malibu Creek State Park and the Canyon Road were his hunting ground.

While millions of people, oblivious of the danger, continued to visit the trails, spend the night in the campground, and travel on the Canyon Road. Even me, I took my kids to Malibu Creek State Park in early twenty eighteen, we walked the three mile loop to the rock pool. It's a famous swimming spot, and we checked out the teenagers jumping from the ledges. We talked about camping in the campground when it got warm enough. It's hard not

to look back and wonder what if we had. After the Bodat murder, the earlier victims the near misses went to the media. There was an outcry in Malibu as people began to panic about the canyon shooter. The campground was temporarily closed, but though no one was in custody, the rest of the park remained open, and there was

still no sign posted about anything that had transpired there. Then, about a month after the murder, there was a rash of mysterious burglaries from commercial buildings near the periphery of the park. You wanna talk about the burgerschure, okay, scroungey desperate stuff, Not laptops or cell phones, but sandwiches from the fridge, seize candy, cinnamon rolls, junk food from the front of a vending machine, smashed out with a rock.

A couple of these places had video surveillance and a guy was caught on camera masked and wearing a headlamp with a backpack what appeared to be a rifle sticking out of it. The next place we're going to go to is called the Calabasas Recreation Center, just so happens to be directly next door to Malboy last tools sheriff station. The area where all these crimes took place is essentially

the backyard of the sheriff station and one burglary. The last one was literally next door, so he came within what would you say, a hundred yards of the sheriff station. I would say maybe even closer to the parking lot. Sergeant Wright says he followed bootprints from the rec center's parking lot up into the dusty, desolate hills behind the Sheriff's station. Do you see that big oak tree down at the bottom. Yep, we're looking at a fold in the hills where a gnarled oak clings to the side

of a steep slope. The one furthest back towards the hill, the big one. YEA. I figured there was a up here. Following, Sergeant writes hunch half a dozen Sheriff's deputies returned to the site of the last bootprint. As they trudged up and down hills in the bright sun, the only sound was a Sheriff's Department helicopter chuffing in the distance. But then a deputy heard a strange, clanging noise echoing through the canyon. It seemed to be coming from a ridge

to the west. Already steeped in shadow, the deputy dropped to his knee and looked through the optic on his rifle. Zooming in, he saw a man saw the whites of his eyes, as he would later testify, clean cut, early forties, wearing all black and a backpack with a rifle sticking out the top. The deputies jumped him right outside his camp.

Of course, he tried to flee, but deputies were on him real quick search and rescue and lost Hill's patrol immediately got their guns on him, and at some point he tossed the pack and you could see the rifle sticking out of the pack. The man with the gun was Anthony Routa, a loaner who'd been living in the hills on and off for years. The cops celebrated was

the mystery of the canyon shooter. All wrapped up. Sergeant Wright, who helped track Routa to his camp, admits that it all seems a little neat the drifter living behind the station, hiding in plain view. That guy's responsible for what may be the most violent crime wave in Malibu history. I would think it would take some nerve to commit a

burglary direct next door to the station. I mean, why would somebody commit a murder and then hold on to the same weapon and then do burglaries on videotape and making no very little effort to hide other than putting a mask on part of your face. There's an assumption that most criminals would think, if their picture was captured on camera with a weapon, that there's going to be a heightened law enforcement effort to engage them. And that's

exactly what happened. Okay number four and number five one calendar, Anthony, It's been a long morning. In a cold court room near the County Jail in downtown Los Angeles, Anthony Rawda is late for his hearing. Officially, at this stage, the charges have nothing to do with murder. Rauda is in violation of the terms of his post release community supervision, meaning he's an ex felon. He hasn't shown up to meet with his probation officer for two years, and he's

not supposed to have weapons or ammunition. The deputies who arrested him at his campsite say he had both unofficially, though the charges seem to have everything to do with the killing in Malibu Creek State Park. Only a few hours after Roudah's arrest, the sheriff himself had a press conference at the Hall of Justice, that's department headquarters downtown, and while they didn't quite say that Roudah was the suspect in the shootings or the murder, it was a

big show. The captain of the Major Crimes Bureau, the Lost Hills Captain, a top official from California State Parks. And now Roudah's being held without bail. And there are two plain closed detectives in the front row of the courtroom talking loudly about a fishing cabin. One of the detectives has long gray hair and a beard, and is wearing ship kickers and jeans. The other, lean, with sunken cheeks,

sneers at me when I try to say hello. Later, I'll find out that the lean one is Detective Mark Donnell, and that the one with the ship kickers is a detective named Tye Barry, complicated guy a long and twisted history with the Sheriff's Department. Donald and Barry are both part of the Major Crimes Bureau and worked the Malibu case. Finally, Rouda enters with a deputy in blue latex gloves gripping

his arm, guiding him to his seat. My first impression of Anthony Rowta is he's pale, library pale an indoorsman, not the weather beaten, leather skinned survivalist I'd been expecting. His hair is dark and slicked back in individual lines that look pencil drawn, a little goatee, blue jumpsuit, wrists cuffed behind his back. He's separated from the rest of the courtroom by a plexiglass partition. But he has something

he wants to say to the judge. Welcome to speed, over defense objection, and I would ask if anything to be off the record. That's Rounda's public defender attempting to intervene, and that's the judge who looks exceptionally annoyed. I I want to speak. You don't have rights to speed, but he's seeking through your return No I'm not going to speak. I'm not going to cooperate with the pub defenders opposee anymore's thousand okason. On that one, Rowdah hurls himself against

the plexiglass piece of ship. You're a piece of ship, bitch sharks that motherfucker. The bailiff calls for help and a bunch of deputies appear. They kick all the reporters out, but they forget about the microphones that have been placed on a podium at the front of the courtroom. And that's when Rowdah tells the judge to go fuck himself. I think my client is a little over brought, having been in custody. Fuck you. He seems mad at everyone, the judge, the DA, the bailiff, even as public defender

the one person who wants to help him. Roudah appears desperate, furious, trapped, He's thrashing about in the fluorescent light of this dingy, cold courtroom. He reminds me of the mountain lions hemmed in stressed out. A dangerous ghost is a gaining session. Several weeks later, when I see route end coourt, he's undergone a disturbing transformation. He's strapped to a restraint chair, his face covered by a mesh mask to stop him from spitting at the deputies. His head laws to one

side as if he's under heavy sedation. I noticed that the public defender who Route has been trying to fire, is gesturing to me. He wants me to come talk to him in a quiet corner at the back of the courtroom. I got the information, unfortunately under sealed, and so I can't He's talking about the discovery, the evidence provided by the Sheriff's department about the weapon and ammunition that Routa was arrested with. I don't think they've got

the ballistics or anything. In other words, he doesn't think they have enough to charge Routo with murder. You know, I'm not sure what direction you're going in there checked any others. I don't know any It means to be ricky okay, because I don't think this killer is the shooter. There's a killer out there, and I don't know if they shouldn't even be guessing. I don't know what his family situation was. I don't know if there was any arrivals.

I don't know if there's anything else something wrong Skid didn't do. He's crazy. That was so much pressure that they had to arrest somebody. I think they got the crisy guy. They probably want him in custody so that that they can get the sky interest or somebody doctor him, get him corminating stuff. It's the only thing I can figure because of these knots. It's unfair. He believes that route is a sacrificial lamb, meant to appease the agitated

Malibu community. Anyway, just between him and when Tristan Boudett was killed shot in Malibu Creek State Park in the hour before dawn, I couldn't stop thinking about it. Then I found out about all the other shootings too. Now the cops have arrested Anthony Rowda, a homeless guy living behind the station, and they seem to want everyone to think that it's all his fault, that he's the perfect bad guy, a single efficient explanation for everything that's been

going on. I don't know what to believe, but I know that's not the whole story. Could Anthony Rowda have committed all these crimes? What was law enforcement doing this whole time? How did Malibu turn into the killing zone