4. Animals of the Night

for themselves. There were a lot of creepy similarities among the near miss and the murder, but publicly the cops kept repeating the same old story, not related, at least nothing they would share. But then after Rout's arrest, that changed. The crimes were all related, and not just that one person had done them all. Was that even possible? I need to walk around the campground see it for myself. So tonight on the grand reopening weekend, I'll be camping out.

Turning off the Canyon Road, there's a long entrance road leading to a little guard check. The park employees take your money and give you your parking pass. The two people working seem skittish. Are they nervous about something? A park by Site forty nine, that's where Scott McCurdy, Tristan's brother in law, camped. That's where I'm staying tonight. It's right next to Site fifty one, where Tristan Bodatt was murdered. I'm trying not to get creeped out. The campground is

basically deserted, empty campsite after empty campsite. It's a little eerie. There is a young couple here. They're celebrating their second wedding anniversary. We were just driving up to go camping, and we were planning to actually go to Los Padres National Forest, but we're nubs at the camping game and did not reserve like six months in advance like everyone else did. So we call they decided to try Malibu

Creek State Park. So we just popped on in and there's like a line of you know, cars coming in. But we said, like or like for sure it's packed, you know, And so he pulled up and they're like, nope, there's there's still some spots available. And then we come and there's like no one here. So then it's just another like the one other camper here at like eleven

am this morning. It was just like like, oh, you know, because we're asking if they knew of any hikes, and he's like, you know, they check this heck out, this heck out, but don't be scared about the murder. And we were just like, what are you talking about, Bromly, are you the murder? Like I gos like, oh my gotch so, but yeah, maybe we'll lea tonight. Walking around, I noticed one of those interpretive signs you often see in state parks, Animals of the night. It says while

campers sleep, the park belongs to the animals. Can you hear the howl of a coyote, the scratch scratch off mice, or the hoot of an owl? As you walk through the park, your flashlights suddenly reflects the glowing eyes of an animal. The sign talks about bobcats, coyotes, raccoons, but doesn't say anything about mountain lions. Maybe they didn't want to start a panic. It starts getting dark, so I head back to Site forty nine. I pitch my tent

in the meadow beside the fire pit. I light a fire and sit next to it while I eat my dinner take out from the grocery store. There's no one in triest in site Site fifty one. That's strange. When I drove in the park, workers told me it was already reserved. I zip into my tent. I text home, I'm fine, but this feels weird. I have a sleepless night. Every noise feels too close, rainfalls, I'm sure I feel something brush up against my tent, the thin wall of

my tent. I'm sure I hear footsteps approach and then recede. I'm so relieved. When the sky lightens to gray, I opened up my tent. It's before dawn, lightly drizzling. I noticed that the anniversary couple didn't make it through the night, and no one ever showed up to claim Sight fifty one. I'm Dana Goodyear and this is Lost Hills, Episode four, Animals of the Night. In the morning, I decide to explore a little more. The campground is the site of

the murder and two of the near misses. Also the place people are the most vulnerable, gathered sleeping guards down. I mean, part of being here is trying to understand this place that Rooda lived and this place that Tristan and Burdett died. Tristan's tent might have been there just beyond the picnic table, or he might have been right here where I am. But I wondered if his I wondered where his door was. I guess I study the map Site forty nine where I am, Site fifty one

where Tristan was. Then the road curves around the meadow fifty four fifty five, fifty eight fifty eight. That's where near Miss number two happened. It was November ninth, twenty sixteen, three thirty am. A man named Ron Carson was lying in bed when he says his camper was rocked by an explosion. He later testified that it quote felt like a bomb went off. He wasn't hit, but when he turned on the light he saw shotgun pellets stuck into the wall right next to where his head had been.

Just across the road from Site fifty eight is site fifty seven, the location of another attack, Near Miss number three. On January seventh, twenty seventeen, a woman and her boyfriend were sleeping in the back of her car when they were awakened by a bang between four and five am. The next day, she found a hole in her trunk. State Parks police recovered a metal shotgun slug. This is insane. These three crime scenes, the camper, the car, and Bodette's

tent are just a couple hundred feet apart. These shootings happened in a tight cluster in the same corner of the campground, where a footpath disappears into the woods. I follow it. It's overgrown with wild mustard and little purple flowers. I'm kind of curious about this way because this seems like, I mean, no one is out and about at four am, so anywhere would be a place you could go wouldn't

be observed. The path heads north toward the mountains. I know that somewhere out there, two or three miles away, beyond Mulholland Highway, in a remote and seldom traveled part of the park is where Anthony Rauta lived. It's where he was arrested, and it's not that far. There are only a couple hundred homeless people in Malibu, and they fall into distinct categories. There are the beach dwellers, a lot of them living in RV's along Pacific Coast Highway.

They're the mountain men, homestead or loner types like Routa who live up in the hills, and there are the townfolk who congregate in and around the library and shops. Yeah, we'll go. Um, let's just shake over here by the library and win Park and then we can walk in the Legacy I'm tagging along with the sheriff departments Homeless Outreach Team. These deputies make regular welfare checks to the camps scattered around Malibu. I'm hoping that they might have

run into Route at some point. We're across from the library in Legacy Park, right behind the ultra high end Malibu Country Shopping Center. This is a spot where a lot of homeless people gather. One of the deputies shows me an app they use to keep a record of everyone they make contact with. This is everyone I've spoken to in the last two years. Ozzie Anthony Route's dad told me that his son had a library card that he hung out at libraries a lot, in spite of

being a mountain man. I take a deep breath. Would you be able to check that database for someone for me to find out if they've received homeless services? And so, Yes, absolutely, I can check it. Okay, what's the name? Last name? First, first name, first Anthony. Okay, rout At, r A U d A seller right, you did it right. Okay, it's when I'm to scroll up, but it'll see did not find did not match any client. Okay. Disappointing, but not surprising. Routa seems like the kind of person who would have

avoided this kind of contact at all costs. But then, just as we're about to leave, a man named Josh Crawford walks up to him. My name is Josh Mail. How he used to camp here? Now he sleeps in a car. The cops tell me that he actually volunteered to help fight the Wolsey fire. Sleep over there in the park man, and uh, you know, kind of giving up on life. So you know, I'm curious how he ended up out here. Turns out it's the energy. It's

so beautiful, you know. Mallible is like, I say, that's the reason people come here, because it's an energy here. It's a nobody wants to leave. It's like, we'd rather sleep on the ground here than an apartment in hell? Do you hear me? I rather sleep on the ground here around this good energy. How how do you describe the community of people living in tents and sleeping rough and homeless around Malibu? Is it a welcoming community? Is it tight knit? Is it a lot of loaners? What's

the vibe? It's all above, it's tight en it. It's a lot of loaners. It's you got your junkies, you got your alcoholics, you got your people that's depressed. You got people that have lost their kids, made them lose their mind. You know, it's a lot of reason people end up out of here. On a psychological level, Can I ask you about a specific person, if you ever heard of somebody living in I pull up a picture of Router on my phone. There are only a few online.

One from the day of his arrest, another one that looks like an old mug shot, and if few from his courtroom appearances where he's in a restraint chair wearing a blue jumpsuit and a spit mask. Now I'm not pure, but that picture show looks so I think he used to come down and go to the library. And because that guy that's like a younger picture of my thing. He's talking about the old mug shot where Rauda has

a defiant old West outlaw luck. Yeah, because it looks like this guy used to be with this, uh white lady that was also you know, she was on the street, but he was a drinker. Like and uh, yeah, he had a girlfriend. I don't know about a girlfriend, but he was a white lady. He will be around every day and he will be with her. But this was like a couple of years ago or something. Yeah, I kind of want to say he had a He kept

a good tar with him too. What no hell of a player, I know, but he had a guitar with him. You know, everybody will kinna be out for the rockles or whatever. He used to say things like about him singing and stuff like that because he always had a gata with him, a guitar, a lady friend. It's so tempting to think of this as Rauta, but I can't find anyone who'll confirm it. No one else I talked to in Malibu has ever laid eyes on him until the day of his capture. I'm trying to catch a shadow.

Rodas so hard to pin down, so hard to place anywhere when he's not firmly behind bars. For months, I've been trying to get information from California State Parks, the government agency that runs Malibu Creek State Park, and for months they've been totally stonewalling. Hi Dan, Now, this is Gloria Sandoval from the firm California State Parks, returning your phone call. Unfortunately, due to the ongoing investigation, we can't

make anybody available for your interview at this time. But I ask for anything and everything, crime data, staffing levels, staff lists, occupancy data, incident reports, anything that might shed even a little light on what happened. Months go by between my emails and calls and their responses. After a long wait, I do get some data from State Parks, but it's incomplete and inconclusive, they tell me repeatedly, in

every way you can think of. No, no, we will not explain what happened Malibu Creek State Park between twenty sixteen and twenty eighteen. The parks have their own police force. Those are the rangers, sworn peace officers with badges and guns. They could have investigated the shootings. I know from talking to Sergeant Right that at least one person fairly high up at the park knew they needed Lostell's help. But what were they doing over there? It's impossible to find out.

The Only thing I do find out. I learned from court. It's pretty damning. The tent that Tristan Bodett was killed in the crime scene itself. It was never booked into evidence, it was never properly examined. It couldn't be because State Parks threw it away. If the craziest thing I've learned about the park is that they left a campground to open after there'd been multiple shootings there, then this is

the second craziest thing. Someone was murdered in his tent in that same campground and you throw it in the trash. No wonder. No one wants to talk to me. The only thing I can do is keep going back to the park. One day, I join a walking tour led by a former ranger to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Planet of the Apes, which was filmed in Malibu Creek State Park. So many people refer to this as the Jewel of Santa Monica Mounds. That's how desperate I am.

It's roughly a three mile round trip from here. We will just go up the road a little bit to see our first scene location. Then we'll come back and we'll head down into the heart of the park. It's a motley crew of film buffs and science fiction fans and people looking to fill as Sunday with a hike in Malibu Creek State Park. We're about thirty minutes in when someone brings up the Boudette murder. Oh oh, that

was in the campground. Unsurprisingly, the ranger doesn't want to talk about it, but I think it's possible they got the tire. Yeah. Well him, until we got the evidence, I guess. He does say that the killing has significantly depressed attendance at the park, and sifting through the data that state Parks gave me, I've learned that the financial impact was significant. Revenue fell by fifty percent, a loss of seven hundred thousand dollars compared to the year before. Ye,

it's all I mean. I'm not the park spokesman. No, that's for sure. I don't know really any more than I read in the newspapers or here on the news. And he says he thinks the element of danger has been eliminated, but also that there's still a lot that

hasn't been released, which I don't know. But there were one day that the hills were covered with sheriff's deputies and they're just you know, following all these various social trails, and I'm I'm sure this guy went off trail as well, right, So the more evidence the better, that's, you know, how you approve the case. During the tour, I've been keeping my eye on one of the other hikers, a guy wearing camouflage and to make America Great Again hat. He

seems very interested in the murder talk. I introduced myself and he tells me his name is Lou Johnson, and he's here with a boy named Huts and his landlady's son. We just stopped going anywhere. He tells me that before the murder, he and Hudson spent their weekends hiking all

over this area. That changed. Just the randomness of it was very troubling, I think, because it didn't matters like if you were if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time and moving in the wilderness, and this guy saw you, you know, you immortal danger there. As we fill up our water bottles, he tells me that one day, as he was driving to work, he saw that the hills were swarming with deputies collecting evidence

from Rounds campsite. One morning, I came around one of the last hairpine curves there, and there were police cars, sheriff's cars everywhere, ranger cars, some sheriffs, a group of sheriff deputies were coming up the road and I said, Hey, is this have to do with the investigation wrapping it up? And said yeah, we're just up here, you know, doing cleanup and stuff like that. You know, he said a few years earlier he tried to take Hudson hiking right

there in that exact spot, start hiking up there. There were animal trails and I remember remarking, Wow, these are He's really good with animal trails, and this was the trail in the grass was pretty well trodden. I thought, oh, maybe some hikers go up here. And it sort of follows a little canyon rise and there's a lot of big oak trees there with big canopies, and I remember we sat up underneath one and he was sort of

just sort of not maybe he didn't feel good. I don't know what it was, but he just didn't want to hike. And it was strange, lu says, really out of character for Hudson. But he couldn't make him go on, so they turned back, and you know, the thing that strikes me is now knowing that you know that was where route as camp was, that that's kind of a scary thing we could have if we had gone hiking up in there. Would he have felt threatened? You know,

he would kind of hiding out. I read, you know, he just didn't like people who knows We don't know. And it just was now looking back and I was like, wow, that felt like a close call for us safety wise. And again, had we known that these other things had happened at that time, we didn't know about We'd never heard about any problems. And it just is it's not kind of frustrating, it's very frustrating. It's infuriating because this transparency that these guys all take an oath for it.

I support the police. I'm a real supporter of law enforcement and all that, but when they pull stuff like this it seems political or for whatever reason, it really pisses me off. Lu says, the trail to Routa's camp is not too far from where we are now. He can show me if I want to meet him out there when the tour ends. We trade email addresses and he tells me he'll be in touch after my visits to the park. I keep thinking about Routa, sleeping night

after night in the wild. With his first letter, he enclosed a careful pencil drawing of two mountain lion cubs snuggling. I want to know more about his life outdoors. In his next letter, he writes, I was hardly ever scared. I did a lot of hiking, starving and freezing. I seen little baby bears, foxes, bobcats, eagles. There's a spot on the Tapanga Mountains where you can see the ocean. There's a spot on the Pacific Palisades where you can see to pass a robelus. Those words stop me cold.

I just moved to the Palisades, but he couldn't know that I've been using a different mailing address. It's right around that time I start having nightmares about Anthony Rowda Mhore. So like when I woke up, I woke up like I almost you could imagine if an explosion went off by your head, like really suddenly. And I don't really know why I woke up like that, because there was no pain or anything. So like the bottom of me, this is Jimmy Rogers near Miss number one. He was

attacked twenty months before Tristan Bodett was killed. He's agreed to meet up in this shady grove in Tapia Park, which is part of Malibu Creek State Park. So like, I woke up and then I was just like what happened in all Jimmy's a serious outdoorsman, a trained wildlife biologist who's worked for the Forest Service. He's telling me about the morning of November third, twenty sixteen. He was sleeping in a hammock in the park. He was on a solo backpacking trip, trying to complete all sixty seven

miles of the Backbone Trail in three days. Between three and four in the morning, he was startled awake, and then I felt something was on my arm or something was like clawing at my arm, which was my initial thought because my hammock was somewhat low to the ground. He tumbled out of his hammock, which had split in half. He stood there listening as his arm began to sting. His jacket was torn, and when he took it off, he saw holes in his arm, a lot of them.

It looked like a small animal had been gnawing on him. Because then I was like, well, if it was an animal. It had to have been rabbit or something. But I determined like any animal could have been, whether it was a rabbit, coyote, or fox, or just dog or skunk or anything. Even of rats, like they're pretty easy to find, especially in this oak leaf litter, because they can't move very fast, and especially he tells me that he ventured

very carefully into the woods. So I walked without a light down there because I really it's really about hearing the sounds. To me, I did hear one like that. It was just a one sudden movement in leaf litter, so it could have been a very small animal moving its whole body, or it could have been a person moving afoot. So I stopped and I just stared at where that sound was. I wanted to keep going, but I didn't because I literally thought, I don't want to

get shot in the face. I kind of literally thought somebody was looking at me, and they probably with that movement or getting ready to do something. So I sat there for a couple of minutes. I just said, I'm just gonna pack up all my stuff and leave. He gathered up his stuff, walked out of the park and along the canyon road, till his phone had a signal. He called his girlfriend and asked her to pick him up.

She took one look at his open wound, dozens of tiny punctures, and drove him straight to the emergency room for weeks. Afterward, he says he tried to rationalize the experience, so just none of the scenarios I kept painting made any sense. I literally just started thinking about every single animal that lives out here and it could possibly live out here. And I kind of ended it on a crazy thought and I literally determined it was vampire bats.

Vampire bats because when they bite, they secrete this numbing sensation so you can't feel it. And then they lapped your blood and it seemed like a superficial wound and the but then one day something unexpected happened. A round metal pellet fell out of his arm, then another and another, and it just popped out and it didn't feel like anything, and it was just a perfect shallow circle that it left. And then I found it and it was metal biting your teeth. You drop it on glass, and like, did

my body just make that? I don't think so. And then um, and then eventually we just a few of the wounds were still kind of open, so I go. Friend started like squeezing at it, so he took that one out and then we were like, all right, we need to get X ray and they found four There were four more embedded in there pretty deep, So then I went and got surgery. He hadn't been bitten by a rabbit animal or by a vampire bat good. He'd been shot with bird shot, small shotgun pellets used to

kill birds in flight. Jimmy shows me the scar. It's about three and a half inches across on the underside of his right arm, between the elbow and the shoulder. It's a big, scary looking wound. If you just look at the pattern of my arm, like, it looks like they are pretty close, but it's hard to say. But within five feet is what the police officers actually told me it was most likely. But the wound isn't even the most disturbing part. The most disturbing part is how

Jimmy sleeps. How he was sleeping when he was shot, bundled up in his down jacket and sleeping bag, wrapped up in his hammock, with his right arm draped over his head. It seemed to Jimmy that the person who shot him was aiming for his head. After the pellets fell out of his arm, Jimmy went back to the park and tried to find someone to talk to, someone he could tell this bizarre story too and maybe get answers.

So I just came out here and I was just looking around, and I found a state park employee and just told them what happened. And he told me that somebody's vehicle was shot with the same bird shot, and so they were really concerned about it, and so he gave me the number for the sheriff. I tried to contact them a few times, but they pretty much never revealed much information, and so probably after like a couple of emails and a couple of phone calls, I just stopped.

I asked Jimmy, if he'll indulge me go on a walk. I want to see how long it takes to get from where he was shot over to the campground. He's game. It's not far, but it takes us an hour on dusty trails through the foothills out a run fifteen minutes max. So we're going under a little sort of riparian area. We're in a ripe Parian area. From the campground, we walked to the entrance of the park out onto the canyon road where all those cars were shot near misses four, five,

and six. And while we walk, it hits me how small this area really is. I just want to say one thing, because we may not be here again. Up and down this stretch of road is where the tree dawn shootings at cars were concentrated. Wow, I didn't know that. That's crazy. It seems so obvious. It is all right here. Jimmy's right, it is all right here. How could the Sheriff's department in state parks not have seen that? How could they think or say they believed these were isolated incidents.

Why wouldn't they have warned the public? The authorities, Jimmy says, we're pretty unhelpful throughout his ordeal. After taking his report, they never followed up. They didn't seem to care. But they did say something odd. Well, they didn't really tell me much because they said that you can actually kind of manufacture different weapons. So like the officer actually said, they could have made something to fire this type around, like even something really small that you just hit from

the back. It could have been a handheld thing or anything. This is about the so called missing shotgun, The gun that was used in near misses one through five, the one that was fired at Jimmy while he slept in his hammock, The gun that has never been found. From what the cops told Jimmy, it sounds like that gun wasn't a gun at all.