Pushkin.
A couple of years ago, I found a video buried on the Internet, deep in the metadata behind the four or four error codes. In it, a young black woman is questioning a middle aged white guy who's sitting on the edge of his bed drinking a beer.
Did you hear baiting on the door?
Talking at the door like they just shut it on it or something.
The person they're talking about is my Teres Richardson, a twenty four year old black woman who disappeared in Malibu in two thousand and nine and whose remains were discovered there eleven months later. They're talking about the day of her disappearance and.
Was above when I first started voice him.
By the time I got down, the love and kind of curiosity kind of drugged me closer to the Facebook.
The interview is being shot vertical, seemingly on a cell phone, with the guy taking up the whole frame. He looks like an aging California golden boy with gray and blonde hair, a tan and a barrel chest. He's relaxed, wearing a sky blue Henley shirt tucked into a pair of camouflage shorts.
So I really couldn't see her face, but I could see her shadow. It's.
While he says this, he gestures broadly, waving his big paws around in the air.
The light of the knife, you know, with the light of the front porch. She was screaming at something. Yeah, it was pretty loud, and I'm thinking, God, damn's.
For three of them. Mort What was she saying? She was saying, God damn buddy.
Oh yo, she was pitt or something, you know, something to be with the people at the house. She was angry and maybe they told her she had to read get a call at police, and she was telling.
Him, you shun.
What he got.
Curious the scene was so out of place in this quiet neighborhood, a young woman alone in the early morning hours, shouting she might be in trouble, because I think.
Well, if there's some dude there, I'm not gonna let some dody here, you know, right, I wouldn't have hesitated to walk on that property.
But since there wasn't, you.
Know, and I couldn't see anybody else except for her, or not really even her. Just she was angry something. I mean, I'm kind of that would have been right there. I have a good donald protected.
The interviewer. Her name's Raven Masterson. She made the video sometime after my Terce's remains were found. Like so many people, she wanted to figure out what happened to my trees because the death of my Teres Richardson is Malibu's most horrifying, notorious, and scandalous unsolved case. For fifteen years, my Teresa's story has been shrouded in mystery. The scant clues have been
worked over a thousand times to no end. There's no resolution, no satisfying explanation, and no one has been held accountable. Many people blame the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department for her death. Some take it farther, and this is how Ravenlean's in the video. They even think a deputy may have killed my Teres. My Rise was arrested at Jeoffrey's Restaurant on Pacific Coast Highway on September sixteenth, two thousand and nine. She was released from Lost Hill Station at
twelve twenty five am on the seventeenth. After that, there was one official sighting of her at six thirty am in the backyard of a house in Montanito, a secluded neighborhood off Malibuqion. That's about six miles from the Lost Hill Sheriff station. But the guy in the video, he says he saw her too, two hours earlier at four thirty am, making a commotion in the front yard of that same house. Montaneito Mountain Nest. It's a tight knit community in the shadow of the Santa Monica Mountains. Most
people in La don't even know it exists. It's got creeks and horses and neighbors that have known each other in some cases for generations. Kids run around barefoot. There's a big Fourth of July parade and an annual square dance. It's a place out of time. It feels like the rustic Horsey California of the nineteen forties mixed with the freewheeling party culture of the nineteen seventies. And it's got none of the flash of coastal Malibise or the nearby
gated communities of Calabasas. This is California, so of course there have been a couple of waves of gentrifiers. But among the old timers, the people who practically homesteaded there in the fifties, there's a distinct backwoods ingrown feeling, and it bears mentioning The whole place is extremely white, with one notable exception. Will Smith, one of the most famous black men in America, owns an estate in Montanito. But I don't think he frequents the Square Dance or the
Fourth of July parade. It's hard to express how unlikely it is that my trace would end up in this isolated community. There isn't even a sign for Montanito on Malibu Canyon. How would she even have known it was there. Eleven months after my Teres Richardson disappeared, park rangers checking a known illegal pot grow found her remains in a treacherous canyon above Montanito called Dark Canyon. During this time, the Santa Monica Mountains were notorious for harboring large marijuana
operations run by organized crime syndicates. These massive grows were often protected with armed guards who would camp out in the canyons for extended periods. The rangers had disrupted a Dark Canyon grow in July two thousand and nine, two months before my Teres's disappearance. When they returned in August of twenty ten, they didn't report any fresh signs of pot growing activity, but there in the dormant grow were
the remains of a black woman. She was mostly bones, a skeleton with small flaps of mummified skin remaining, and she was naked. From the beginning, every aspect of the case seemed off. What was wrong, how she was arrested, how she was released, how she was searched for, how her remains were discovered, how her remains were recovered, and
how her death was investigated. All of it looked like a colossal screw up on the part of law enforcement, starting with the Lost Hills cops and what the Sheriff's department has said about the case over the years, it just makes no sense. Their refrain, essentially is some cases can't be solved. This is a Sheriff's spokesman three days after my Teresa's body was found.
Homicide will continue their investigation. It's likely that we can never find out exactly how she got there, but they're going to do their very best to figure that.
And they're still saying my Teresa's death will always be a mystery. But I don't accept that it's a stubborn, strange, problematic case. But I do think it's solvable because someone in that secluded, tight knit community of Montanito knows what happened to her. I'm Dana Goodyear and this is Lost Hills Season four, Dark Canyon, Episode one, Vultures. Right off Pacific Coast Highway, across from the Malibu Lagoon, next to
the gas station, there's a small memorial. It's a rock with a plaque on it, commemorating the life of a man who was known as Malibu Jo. Malibujo was Jo Costello. He was originally from Genoa, Italy, but starting in the mid nineteen fifties, he became a beloved Malibu figure, riding his bike slowly up and down pH in a fedora and a baggy overcoat. In the summer of nineteen eighty eight, he was beaten and left for dead in the only under bushes where he lived, where the memorial is today.
He died a few days later. He was ninety six years old. The Sheriff's department investigated, but the killing was never solved, so no one was ever punished. Malibu Jo died two decades before my Terse Richardson. The cases have nothing to do with one another except this. Both Joe and my Trees show moments of rupture. They're both signs that Malibu isn't what it seems. Malibu is not paradise, sunshine, nature, beauty, health, wealth,
and eternal youth. That's the myth. But if I've learned one thing reporting here, it's that every seductive surface has its dark side. The beauty is the danger. It makes you let down your guard and believe in the fantasy. The unspoiled wilderness hides unspeakable crimes, and a place like that, a place like that breeds monsters. In the fall of two thousand and nine, my Teresa's disappearance was all over the local news.
The mystery unraveled on a September night in two thousand and nine, right where the Pacific reached the shores of Malibu.
It all started when my Teres tried to leave Jeoffrey's, a pricey restaurant on Pacific Coast high without paying her bill. She was arrested and taken to Lost Hill station, about thirteen miles away.
They contacted her mother, who said that she will pick her up in the morning.
If you will keep her there. Deputy said, we will.
But instead of staying at the station, my Teres walked out into the Malibu night. Her car was at a tow yard near pch with her belongings inside.
She was released at twelve thirty a m no wallet, no cell phone, no credit cards, no car.
She was gorgeous and charismatic, and as would later come out, she was in the midst of a mental health crisis.
A beauty contestant and honor student, and now a missing person.
According to her mom, she had no street savvy whatsoever, and she didn't know Malibu at all.
My Teres Richardson walked out of a Los Angeles County Sheriff's office and into a mystery that continues to baffle investigators.
And then the mystery became a horror.
Eleven months later, the twenty four year old college graduates.
Remains were found here in Dark Canyon. She was naked and partially mummified. They discovered a skull, they discovered a pelvis, and they discovered a lake on just bones. They determined officially, unequivocally, and unfortunately, it was my Terce Richardson.
Corners Officials haven't determined the cause of death, and they say Richardson's body was in the canyon for more than six months.
Whatever happened in Dark Canyon remains in the moment a dark secret.
It's been fifteen years since my trace disappeared, fourteen years since her remains were found, and there's been no progress on her case. There's no sign that law enforcement is actively working on it. But it's not a cold case. It's a quote active criminal investigation, which means the Sheriff's department doesn't have to share information. And believe me, they take that very seriously. They do not like to talk
about this case. In the midst of their silence, a sinister narrative has taken hold in the public imagination that the La County Sheriff's Department, specifically the Lost Heils cops, are behind my Teres's death. They deny this, but the idea lives on in a new generation of true crime TikTokers and YouTubers. Welcome to another episode of Murder, Mystery and Makeup Monday.
Today's story was about Matrise Richardson.
Kind of feels like that they were hiding something.
The police work in this case was off long.
Is this incompetence or cover up?
I mean they originally were trying to hide the fact that they had security footage.
The previous captain was in on it and promoted for his cover up job.
I believe that Maturse Richardson was murdered and it was covered up by the La County Sheriff's office.
We know the cops took my trees to the station, and the cops let her go in the dark. This part is true, undisputed fact. And then what how did she get from the station to Montanito six miles away? How did she end up in dark canyon? Why was she naked? And what happened to her missing bones?
Oh?
Yeah, that's one more undisputed fact. While most of my Teresa's bones were eventually accounted for, discovered in the canyon's heavy leaf litter, an important one has not been found, the fragile bone above the larynx that often breaks when a person is strangled. My Terce Richardson's death is not
officially a homicide. The autopsy reads, quote, while there is no evidence of antimortem trauma to the bones or the limited amount of tissue accompanying them, in the absence of internal viscera, internal injury cannot be completely ruled out and quote, in the absence of suitable specimens for toxicology testing, the possibility of fatal substance abuse cannot be ruled out, and quote death due to exposure, snake bite, pneumonia, or other
natural diseases also cannot be ruled out. Therefore, quote both cause and manner of death remain undetermined. Unquote Hello, I'm Dana Danah, nice to meet to meet. I'm at the home of Lisa Shinan. She's the forensic pathologist who conducted the autopsy of my Terce's remains. She's also one of the world's foremost authorities on roller coasters.
That is my big hobby, that collecting butterflies.
Her house, a normal looking suburban house in Redondo Beach, is basically a natural history museum. So do you capture them in a net and then pick a loup shadow box? Frames filled with specimens are stacked in every corner.
There's something called a killing jar which you can make. It's a jar that has a plaster of Paris base and then you pour in. You can use cyanide when you screw the cap on. It's a closed environment and it makes fumes that kill the butterfly, basically put it to sleep in seconds.
Doctor Shinen worked for the La County Coroner's Office for twenty four years or I was.
A deputy medical examiner at the La County Coroner's Office, now retired.
She worked on a lot of high profile cases. She did the autopsies on the musicians Elliott Smith, a notorious big.
My autopsied Steve Allen, Doctor nor from the Killing Fields, Brittany Murphy, Brian Keith.
That goes back away, but my Teresa's case stands out.
There are over the years some cases that do stick with me because of the circumstances of the case. There were so many unknowns. I mean, every time I've been near Malibu, I'd start thinking of, oh, geez, this is where my race was, and this is just such a tragic case.
But she knew at the start was very basic. A few scattered pieces of clothing and a human skeleton had been found in an inaccessible canyon in Malibu. The autopsy report details the pieces of my Teresa's clothing that were recovered from their remain site. One navy blue or black padded bra two pink narrow belt, medium large alligator skin pattern, three blue jeans US size twenty nine, dirty empty pockets. She'd been wearing a bob Marley T shirt and a
pair of vans when she left Lost Hill station. She also had her California driver's license on her. Those items, along with her hat and her keys, were missing.
I had the investigator's report. This particular investigator's report was very straightforward. It said somebody from law enforcement was checking an area in a remote canyon and found the bones and the clothing, and the clothing was about one hundred feet away from the skeleton. You know, that's very limited information, and sometimes we have two or three pages of information, but not so in this case. So the first thing you do is you lay everything out in anatomical order
and count what you've got. It was a nearly complete skeleton. It wasn't in an intact skeleton, and that everything was connected. There were a lot of disarticulated bones, but there were some areas or certain blocks, like some parts of the lower extremities parts of some of the upper extremities were held together by a minimal amount of soft tissue.
The soft tissue was mostly skin that had been mummified.
Yeah, mummification is a process. It can be accidental. If you have a body in a very dry, hot environment, the liquid essentially disappears, and what you get is this very leathery, rigid skin, sometimes some soft tissue. Usually the internal organs don't mummify, so it's mostly the skin muscle tendons at that type of thing.
There were a few small marks on some of the bones the work. Doctor Shinen thought of animals scavenging the remains.
The toes of the left foot were missing, and that was consistent with animal activity.
But otherwise the bones were intact.
We look for things like fractures, which would usually mean some sort of a blunt force impact. We would look for any evidence of a gunshot wound, or a stabbing. I didn't see any evidence of a physical traumatic injury.
There was also no way to tell if my trees had been sexually assaulted.
Without soft tissue, there's really nothing that you can do or see, and sperm doesn't last.
Without internal organs. There was no way to tell if she had overdosed.
She wasn't found with cocaine, with amphetamine, heroin, anything like that. Shouldn't really have a history of that type of thing, But again without being able to do an accurate test, we don't know.
There was a small amount of leg muscle. Doctor Shinan sent it in for toxicology, and that report came back inconclusive. As soon as my Trees's remains were discovered, law enforcement began suggesting that my Trees, experiencing a mental health episode, had probably wandered into Dark Canyon by herself and died from exposure, dehydration, venom, or something. Her death, they implied, was tragic but natural. I asked doctor Shinen about the natural causes theory.
In this particular case. There's several possibilities. There are rattlesnakes there. She could have been bitten by a rattlesnake. There's also a fire ants. She could have had a severe allergic reaction to something. There's poison oak there. That's horrible. It's everywhere, and some people are more sensitive than others.
But why would the skeleton be naked. My Trees's broad belt and jeans were found hundreds of feet from the skeleton, and the belt was no longer on the jeans. A seasonal stream, Dark Creek runs through the canyon, and cops suggested that a flashed flood could have removed her clothes, carrying them downstream. The winter my Trese was missing was a rainy one. But even so, it takes a real contortion of logic to imagine a flood could strip a body naked and remove a belt from a pair of pants.
Usually, when we have a person who's dead with their clothes on, the clothes will stay on. Even if the body mummifies, the clothes are going to stay on. Water might wash off socks or something like that, but it's not going to completely undress a body.
Doctor Shinen raised different natural explanation for my Trees's nudity hypothermia.
There's something that happens with extreme cold cold, paradoxical undressing. Normally, when you're cold, your blood vessels will constrict to try to keep the blood more central in the body. Well, what happens with paradoxical undressing is there is a reflex
dilatation of these blood vessels. So all of a sudden, you get this rush of nice, warm blood into these areas that were previously cold, and people who were probably a little bit out of it by this point think, oh my gosh, it's so warm, I'm too hot, and they take their clothes off. However, that tends to happen more often in extreme cold, where there's snow.
In mid September two thousand and nine, the average overnight low at the weather recording station nearest to Dark Canyon was in the mid sixties, and.
I'm not sure it would get cold enough up in the Care Canyon for that to happen, But it's just something to think about.
Obviously, there's another possible explanation, foul play.
There are sinister reasons for the person not having their their clothes on. I mean, could she have been sexually assaulted and they just took her clothes off and left them off. Who knows. It's certainly a real possibility.
And what about the missing clothing.
And also the fact that it was an incomplete set of clothes and none of the additional items of clothing were ever found, and including shoes, which I think have a little more weight than other clothing.
As with everything about my Teresa's case, the story of her remains is a story of absences, gaps, and guesses. A forensic pathologist works by process of elimination, but was so little hard evidence it was difficult to rule out anything.
So the fact that I didn't see any trauma in the bones doesn't mean trauma didn't happen. It's always possible that a gunshot wound can go through and through a body without hitting bone, same thing for a stab wound. What's also possible is asphyxia or a manual strangulation or maybe you know, choked with a rope. The reason people die when they're strangled is you're cutting off the blood flow to the brain. We're looking for things that reflect the fact that you are compressing neck structures.
In the autopsy report, there's a list of missing bones. Some bones from the hand, the left toes, presumably scavenged by animals, the tailbone, the zyphoid process at the bottom of the sternum, and a thin, fragile neck bone called the hyoid.
The hyoid bone is the only floating bone in the body. It's not attached to any other bone. It sits a little bit above the thyroid cartilage, and it's essentially there as a base of muscle attachment.
Because of its shape and position in the body, a broken hyoid can provide clear evidence of strangulation for a forensic pathologist. It's a very significant bone.
And what's important about it is it's a U shaped bone with the projections heading towards the back of the neck. So if it's compressed from both sides, which is what happens when you have a strangulation. Case with manual strangulation is that you're putting pressure on the wings of the hyoid bone and a can fracture. The thing with the hyoid is if you found it and it was broken, you could say, aha, this person was strangled.
But like the missing clothing and her id, my Teresa's hyoid bone was never found. Doctor Shinen says my Teresa's case could still be resolved with new evidence. The coroner could change the cause of death from undetermined.
If there was foul play involved, someone could confess. You never know, could be deathbed confession. Maybe they'll raid somewhere someplace and they'll find pictures of her. Anything is possible. They could just investigate the right person at the right time. Sometimes killers will save souvenirs that can be recognized as something from the person. Anything like that could happen.
Anything could happen, including this. Someone who knows something could decide they've kept the secret for too long. My Teresa's movements on September seventeenth, two thousand and nine, are mostly unknown. After she was released from Lost Hil Station at twelve twenty five am. She somehow made her way six miles to Montanito in the dark. The next morning, around six thirty am, she was spotted there in the backyard of a house at the bottom of Cold Canyon Road.
And I saw somebody sitting on the top step of the six railroad ties that we have in the backyard. I called David, said are you okay? And the answer was I thought yes, resting on And by the time we were around to the other window.
He was gone. That's Karen Smith speaking in an ABC seven documentary about my Teres's disappearance. Karen's house is kind of a landmark in the neighborhood because it has a tennis court out front. Her husband, Bill Smith, who died in twenty seventeen, was a reporter on KTLA, a local TV news station. The Smith's called the cops, and later deputies confirmed that the woman who'd been in the backyard was my Terce. That's the one official sighting of my
Terce Richardson after she left Lost Hill Station. But then there's the other story, the unofficial story, the one the guy on the edge of his bed told Raven in the lost interview.
It was four thirty in the morning. I'm coming down off my mountain, my little higher. So where do you live? Yeah, right down the street. I've lived in Lonlino all my life. It's my folks live here.
So he says he was heading down into the neighborhood from his spot on the mountain in the early morning hours.
Come down four to thirty in the morning.
And because I left about four fifteen for my spot, tis by that ten minutes seventeen minutes seat down and I'm coming down and there's that well almost step with bluff in Cold Canyon, and it was a right with bluff and Cold Canyon, and there's a house with a tennis court right there and as a as a big horseshoe driveway.
That's the Smith's house.
Looking up on the internet because the guy gave a statement, but.
His story and the Smith's story they're really different. The time where my Trase was on the property, they don't line up.
They found her in the backyard talking to herself, but you know when she wasn't in the backyard, and I thought she was in the front door, but I couldn't.
And in his account, she wasn't quietly resting. She was audibly distressed.
But I could hear his scream. I could teuch you black is by her withdraw Yeah.
The intonation in your voice.
I didn't know that black people lived in want Neo.
So he says he decided to hang out just to make sure she was safe.
Stayed there for about thirty seconds, and I said, come a little bit of fight of this right now.
But when she didn't seem to be in danger, he figured he should move along.
She was scaraming enough, did I go over the couse going to be here? I better get out of here. So I wasn't home.
The woman, he says, was a total stranger to him at the time. He didn't know she was about to become a household name.
And uh so.
I just I didn't think much of it, you know, I didn't know that she did be harassed. Oh it was the same night, you know, a certain stance of the situation.
He didn't know that deputies and search parties with horses, drones and dogs, we're going to be pouring into sleepy little Montanito looking for her, This young woman who was not from Malibu, who he thought didn't really fit in there there.
I go, huh, yeah.
I didn't think much about it until like two leagues later, when all this came on my news.
You know why worked the wood.
Even though he didn't know any of that, he knew something out of the ordinary had happened.
I told my land on the next morning, I said, what I like to be able to vouad last night.
The next thing that happened, he saw the vultures, so many vultures. Vultures are a fact of life in Montanito, but this was more than he'd ever seen before, more than he could count.
But so I just hear this a couple days later, you know, I hear that she's missing and that worked the wood. All this stuff's going on, like sorry, I'm hing my Like two days later, I see and I've seen a lot of vultures in my life. I lived after fifty years, right right, never.
Seen one hundred vultures it swoop, that's I seem like a thousand of them, you know what I mean. I've never seen that.
Mean, So when did you see this? I saw this like two days after she was missing, maybe four days after she was missing.
You know, I thought to myself, you know, because i.
Haven't got through all my life, and I'm kind of like a trapper, okay, a mountain right like that.
I wondered what they doing up there.
You know there's something dead out there, you know, obviously there's that many poultures.
This story of the Montanito lifer who saw my trees the morning of her disappearance, it's not out there. The recording and all the new information in it got buried under so much other information, so much missing conspiracy theories, dead ends lies. It was lost in the leaf litter
detritus of the internet. But it's kind of like that hyoid bone, tiny and super significant because this ordinary guy, sitting on the edge of his bed, drinking a beer, telling a story, he makes what is probably the single most important statement of any witness in this case.
I don't know.
Any of the facts except for that the constant eye was the last one to see her lie.
If he was the last one to see her alive, did he know something about her death? This season on Lost Hills, I know.
One of them officers had something to do with it.
It's like when I've seen a nose.
It was like, damn, that's crazy, because I was like in a sale with this woman.
She said they actually followed her after she left.
You think you heard someone talking about how the deputy could give her a ride somewhere.
Yes, I was a male deputy.
I'm gonna murder anybody. It's going to be a cop.
I mean, I had to sleep in front of my kid's door because of people coming to kill my kids.
I was dating her at the time, and she ended up going missing, and I was questioned.
By LA Homicide as a possible suspect for her disappearance. And then one of the other guys came in and said, what do you know about my trees? He knew exactly where she was, which gives me the chills.
Imagine if this was your kid that was swept up and put in.
A box like this.
Lost Tails Season four, Dark Canyon is written and hosted by Me Dana Goodyear. It was reported by me and Haley Fox, our senior producer. The show was created by me and Ben Adair. Lost Tails is a production of Western Sound and Pushkin Industries. Subscribe to Pushkin Plus and you can binge the whole season right now. Add free find Pushkin Plus on the Lost Hill Show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot Fm, slash plus,