I've heard that there's a house and has some bodies in the basement.
Somebody told you that Hicaia was a victim of human trafficking.
I'm come to find out. This is like it exploded into this huge thing.
I knew, I just knew something was wrong.
Police say thirty three year old Jared Bridigan was shot dead.
I kept calling his phone during the drive.
Gunned down in front of his two year old daughter.
It's a murder of the stun jack speech neighbors.
His murder has attracted national attention, with the investigators saying he was targeted. Eventually, a police officer answered and told me to come to the police station.
Justice is something that takes different shapes reformed.
If you know something, heard something, please it's never too late to.
Do the right thing.
So I'm Dana Thompson aka Body Movin, and.
I'm John Green. For about a decade, Deanna and I spent a lot of time on the Internet, especially in the underbelly of the Internet, trying to identify and get animal abusers arrested.
We spent countless hours scouring the dark web helping catch predators. We spent over a year and a half trying to get law enforcement to take us seriously about a man that was killing cats online and he was threatening to move on to kill humans. And that was Luca mcnatta.
Yeah, you might have heard about the Netflix special called Don't Fuck with Cats.
That's us. Well, now we're turning our online investigator skills to some of the most unexplained, unsolved, and just ignored cases.
This is true Crimes, the production of iHeartRadio and Katie's Studios.
I firmly believe that there are only three people outside of Jared who knew that that was his route, and that's myself, his ex's wife and her husband. No public statement, no please for help, nothing.
Why do you think that is?
Well, my opinion is they don't want it solved.
I think we need to know more about Jared's previous marriage.
Yeah, the relationship between Jared and his ex Donna Gardner Fernandez and her new husband, that needs to be looked at further. Kirsten made the point that only she, his ex wife, and her husband, would know the route he was traveling home, which makes Jared's divorce seem all the more crucial to understand.
Especially with his murder happening right after Jared dropped their kids off at his ex wife's home.
And of course you know there's also Shanna's new husband and his things he was doing to the neighbor's cats.
Let's talk more about Jared, his ex wife, Shanna's relationship with Kirsten, and Jared's brother Adam. Can you tell me why they got divorced?
In the court document, Shanna claims they just didn't love each other anymore. But and I'm sure you'll see this as you research it, she cheated on Jared with her personal trainer and when he confronted her about it after finding images between the two of them, she was just like, yep, I don't. I think she wanted to just get married because that's what her friends and her sisters were doing.
But then when Jared gained a little bit of weight as he was trying to launch some businesses, she just she just I don't think she ever truly loved him and looked for and out and she found it and that was the end.
Is the guy she married to, the guy that she had affair with, No, it is a different guy. Oh, different guy Okay. And does she have any.
Other children, No, she just has the twins, boy girl twins. I'm Jared.
Was there any fight over the children?
Constant? This has been reported on pretty heavily in the media, So it was over everything and honestly, yes, legal battle, tech messages, emails. It was not amicable whatsoever.
Did she want full clustody?
Yeah, she had pushed her.
That early on getting back when they went to the police. Have they lawyered up at all?
They hired the top notch criminal offense attorney in the state of Florida. However, he and they claimed they got him to help keep the images of the children out of the media, which makes absolutely zero sense.
She and his mom is.
One of the founders of a very large craft company, and she runs the blogs like a pr blog, and Liam and Abbey are blasted all over that thing. So it's like, if she really cared about her kid's pictures not being on the internet, then why is her mom's blog up like that whole excuse? It just doesn't add up.
Is it like a big company?
Yeah, they pull in millions of dollars a year? Really, Yeah, the company, It's been reported that it's like one hundred million dollars.
Does she work at all or she staying on mom.
She was running at home bakery business. She has since apparently closed down that baking business. When Jared and Shanna were married, they were given a monthly stipend of over eight thousand dollars from her parents, and that is a common thing that they have done with all of their children. So when she sued for full custody and child support during the divorce, he counter sued for alimony, full custody,
and child support. Didn't get any of that, so they basically walked away with neither of them paying each other anything and sharing fifty to fifty percent custody of the kids. However, when Shanna heard that Jared and I were getting married, she then sued him for child support, claiming that she was super poor. She showed up to court dress like she just shopped at Goodwill and found the frumpiest thing she could. Like, she did not look like herself, That's
how I'll put it. Like usually she's in very tight fitting athletic wear, showing off her sleeve tattoo, like she's very proud of like her physique and her body art. She was not like that in court. I had never seen Shanna like that, and we ended up having to pay her child support for years. Shanna also has a pattern of her parents do not think she had an affair, So I think they were shocked when it came out in the media that the person that Shannon had the
affair with confirmed that it actually happened. So I think that played into their anger of why Jared is getting money because they thought he was the bad guy and all of this, we're in reality, Shannon is the one that brought everything.
To a head. Everything that I'm reading point is saying that the ex wife is You know what I do is I read a lot of the comments that are posted, and it looks like everybody in town where you live is like, it's ex wife. It's the ex wife. So John and I will look into that. Clear. I mean, obviously there was a custody battle. We can get access to the records. I want to go through that.
Let's stop here for a break.
We'll be back in a moment.
So let's go back to the cats for a one second. In twenty eighteen, Mario Fernandez, who is married to Jared Bardigan's ex wife, Shanna Gardner. Fernandez was contacted by local police by to claim that he was killing neighborhood cats. So I dug into it a little bit, and this is the story. There was a neighborhood cat who was astray, and one of the neighbors took the stray in and
named them Apollo. While Apollo one day in twenty eighteen turned up with like a bloody leg, and so the neighbor took Apollo to the vet and turns out that he had been shot with a little pelican. Mario Fernandez apparently admitted it to a neighbor that he was getting irritated by the neighborhood cats. They were making his dogs bark at night, so the neighbor called the police. The police came and Mario refused to turn over this pelican.
Moving forward, I think it's going to be important to keep that in the back of our mind for now. We have a bunch of other avenues to go down. We just need to keep that filed away for now and come back to it later. While we continue to dig into Jared's life and the evidence surrounding his murder, were also looking into the disappearance of nineteen year old Chikaia blue hearting.
Jakaya has been missing for more than four years and was last seen in July of twenty eighteen in Billings, Montana. Hikaya was staying at a local community center during the day called Tumbleweed.
Unlike Jared's death, which has received a ton of national media coverage, Chikaia's case is the exact opposite.
As an Indigenous woman, Shakaia's disappearance has almost been entirely ignored.
Which is pretty standard, unfortunately, something that we're learning more about.
No group of people are more at risk or received less support from law enforcement than Indigenous women.
Chakaia Blue Harding.
That is a beautiful name.
It's absolutely gorgeous. Yeah, So for.
Me as or for us as people who look into things, a name like this is very important.
Well, it's gonna it's going to possess some problems, I know, and we're going.
To talk about that.
So when we use osent techniques, you know, usually it's a Google search most people use. So when you have a name like this, it's not ordinary, it's actually can be helpful and it can be not helpful. So especially the way it's spelled. It's not spelled in a traditional way, so that could help looking for information on this.
Person because her name could be spelled incorrectly on like police reports. It could be spelled incorrectly on like Reddit threads. It can you know what I mean? Like, it could be spelled incorrectly on places that we would go look to find information. Montana right now, So she's missing from Billings, Montana. Oh God, she was gorgeous, right, see the pictures of her?
She looks very young.
Yeah, well she was nineteen when she went missing. Oh is that her mom?
I think over the next couple of days, we're going to have to do some work on her own, figure out if there was any kind of foul play. I mean, obviously, the first thing we need to know is was an actual missing person's we work filed and if so, where was it filed? And is it still active? We need to get a better picture of who Shakaya.
Is, and like Jared, let's start with the people who know her best.
Fortunate for us, we get to talk to Shikaya's sister, Shawnee.
Yeah, I understand they were really close. She'll be able to tell us a lot about who Shikaya is and who she was spending time with before she went missing. Hi, Shawnee, Right, I'm less sorry that your family's going through this, But yeah, we just want to We would just want to bring as much attention to Shakaia as possible. Obviously, we'd love to solve it, you know, that'd be ideal, and we'd love to be able to find her, but if barring that, we want to bring as much attention as possible as
many eyes on her, right. And you know, we're not here to like judge or like retraumatize your family. We don't want to put you guys through any shit, you know what I mean. We're not here for that. So if at any time, at any time, like if I have a question that you don't want to answer, or like, you know, maybe you do want me to know, but you don't want it to be on the broadcast or whatever, just tell me, you know what I mean. I'm totally
one hundred percent, and I'm speaking for John two. We're one hundred percent on your side, you know what I mean. We just want to like establish a relationship with you and like just tell us about Shakaia. Like I'm able to read about her on the internet, but that doesn't really tell me who she was outside of social media. I need to know, like a little bit about her, like what was she like? Did she have hobbies? What can you tell me about her?
She's one of a cut She's stubborn, but she also always had like a big heart. Hi Kai aways had her own Chi Kai had her own type of humor.
But she had long hair. She had a roundish space.
She was not very tall.
She was very beautiful. She was very constant.
What did they call it, like a paradox. She loved to take care of herself, but she was very little maintenance. She loved the best makeup, but makeup wasn't important to her. Or she loved the bright lipstick, but only when she felt like it, never really cared about it or that was not her that she was very low maintenance.
Chikai and I are about five years apart.
We'd go just to kind of hang out with my friends.
I'd like to listen to music together.
Anything we can sing too. That's what we used to sing together. Not very great, but at least we tried. We like to pretend we can sing and sing together. I don't feel like it gets easier over time. She didn't want to be like everybody else. She wanted to be hers in her limited time. That she was here with us. You know, she felt comfortable in who she was.
She knew who she was.
She was just Shakaya.
She's definitely a little firecracker. She was very goofy though. She liked to be a center of attention. So if she could make you laugh at being funny, she would do anything she could and make you laugh. If you were on her bad side, you were definitely on her bad side.
I can tell you right now. We would have been friends one PC.
So I raised her from when she was let's see, she had to be in sixth grade, so she had to be about twelve, so I can really say there's.
Nobody like her.
There's definitely one of a kind. Again, because she was just very she was very stubborn. But yeah, she did like to darance. Sometimes we'd go for car rides and she would we would sing together. My favorite moment with her had to be when I hit a note. I wasn't even expecting to hit and she just gave me that look like, oh my god. She loved She loved kids.
She loved her.
Nieces and nephews. She grew up more as a brother as a sister to our oldest son, So She's very close with him. Anybody that we were close to, she kind of mostly clung to our I guess she connected more with misunderstood kids. I'm assuming cup I'm assuming maybe because I don't know she was. She felt misunderstood, and I get that with the background that we have, Yeah, with the background that we have it, I can see that.
Now.
Did she have a nickname Blue? So that is that? Is that her middle name? Yes? Yeah, she'd be twenty three.
Now, right she would be yes.
Do you know like the circumstances like who does she talk to? How? How do we know that was the last day? Was she? Did she contact you? Or her mom or her cousin or so?
She was in a place called Tumbleweed. How it started though, was just the family thing, where's like, hey, have have any of you heard from Chicaia? And we kind of started going down our list of everybody that she would be with. Have you heard from her? Have you heard from her? And nobody? And it was kind of going back to like a few like three weeks before the last time anybody saw her. So she wasn't reported till August, right, So we started kind of digging around and doing our
own investigation because it wasn't really to us. It felt like it wasn't really kicking off as much as we wanted it to. So we started going around and looking. But really it kind of came down to my niece Chakana, who had all of her passwords and access to her social media, and the last log in that she had on social media was the twenty.
Third, the night of the twenty third, I guess I have a question regarding that. So we were reading through she was making a lot of posts on that day. How would she have accessed how would she have accessed Facebook to make those posts?
There was like a week period of where she had my mother's phone. She also had access I'm assuming at Tumbleweed, and then I know she had been to the library quite a few times to access Supposedly, she goes missing July twenty third, Your.
Family hasn't been really in touch with her, so your you guys don't really realize right away in July, and then you guys, first sometime in August, you guys realize, Hey, she's missing. I believe sometime in August your mom goes to the police to file a missing person to report. Correct and who did she file that with.
That would be Billings police.
So she files it with the Billings Belief Police in August and August September. For three months, it just sits on somebody's desk.
Until a Yellowstone County Oh my gosh, Yellowstone County detective picked it up. It was never hand to see him, was never he just found it. He literally just found it lying on a.
Desk and that was a deective Fritz, Is that right.
That's one of the things that we're hearing about, is like when there's different law enforcement agencies, there's like a complete lack of communication, and that's why a lot of these girls go missing because it just sits on somebody's desk. And that's the shit that pisses Deanna.
And I do you know she was enrolled in the North Cheyenne Tribe.
Right northern Chaney, So I thought.
That when an Indigenous woman went missing, the FEDS would get involved at some point, but that.
Only they are supposed to. But that doesn't always happen. She wasn't actually even added to the database.
See here's the thing. Her social media presence just totally stopped, like just stopped. And she doesn't seem like the type of a type of girl that would just stop on social media.
She's not. That's why. That was another reason why as well, when we're like, hey, she's not even on any type of social media. Again, she kind of had her logins and so she could see when she was last on and again that was July twenty third, and we haven't seen or anything right her.
So she's being she's she's in a place where she can't post, right, She's in a situation where she doesn't have access to talk to anybody. So for her to just stop like that doesn't make me think she ran away? Does that make sense? So I that wasn't even an option that I went down, Like, there's no way this girl got on a bus and just ran away. Let's stop here for another quick break.
So I came across a Facebook page called bring Hikaya Harding Blue Home.
I'm assuming that's where her family's active is on Facebook, right.
Like, yeah, so it looks like this Facebook page was last active in December of twenty twenty one.
John, I set up the discord server. Discord server is just like a communications tool, right, It's like a chat room. And the reason I use discord is because you can organize it. You can organize it and pin things and send in for me and create threads, and it's just like a little chat room slash forum, I guess is the best way to do it.
It's a good way to manage information and have it in one central place that people can share it and look into. So that's one of the tools we use. Previously when we would work on animal cases. We primarily use Facebook because back ten years ago, Facebook was the social media everybody used. But in this day and age, we use other tools like discord.
I found a harding blue Shakaya. She lives in Fort Riley, Kansas. Her last post was July twenty fourth, twenty eighteen. I will throw the link into discords poop. So that's a situation where the name is spelled differently. This is like one of the problems that we're going to run into. Luckily, I am who I am. I can do whatever that we know I can do. Ratshet.
Yeah, So the days leading up to her missing, she was quite active on social media. Wait wait, wait, wait, wait, what's the date?
July twenty fourth, twenty eighteen, So the day after she went missing, right, she posted on the day after she reportedly went missing at ten o'clock at night, like a minute prior, she posted I'm not sure what that means. Reputation is a hard thing to keep when all you do is publicly entertaining and the popular have the votes on how to make it. I guess I care what you think. I wish you could see nothing. Very coded, very coded.
Sounds like maybe there's a love interest involved.
Perhaps. Yeah. I'm at home right now, and I wanted to start digging into Chakaia's socials and the find Shakaya facebook page because like, I really feel like people will leave like tips on that page. And it's also possible that people maybe that might have been involved in her disappearance may leave commons to try to mislead people, because that does happen. I'm not saying it did happen here, but it's definitely something I want to look at just in case.
Whenever we're looking for a person in particular, one of the first things I try to do is to see if that person is currently in custody, meaning in jail or prison. Fifty States a lot of prisons in jails. But luckily there's a website called Vinelink dot com that let you search across all fifty states. Vine is the nation's most reliable and confidential confidential source for updated custody status and criminal case information. Name search by name KaiA,
last name Harding and see if she's in custody. I am not a robot, okay. I passed that no persons. There are no matches. That's good for the information we were given. Chicaia was last seen sometime at the end of July, either July twenty third or twenty fifth and Billings, Montana. Apparently she was staying at a center called the Tumbleweed Runaway Center. So I'm looking up where that is and just kind of getting an idea of what it is and what they offer. Tumbleweedprogram dot org twenty four hour
hotline crisis about Tumbleweed overview. Tumbleweed meets at risk youth and young adult adults where they are and strives to create a continuum of care CEOC, making space for hope and opportunity. Founded in nineteen seventy six, Tumbleweed is a nonprofit, community based agency serving at risk youth and their families and support systems. So Shakaya may have been at a place in her life where she needed assistance from her community. Looks like Tumbleweed was her place of comfort for a while.
I wonder if somebody there would be willing to talk with us, if they're still working there and knew of her. So it's good that there are places like this in the community for people who need help, so hopefully we can reach out to them and talk to them.
Okay. So she reportedly went missing on July twenty third, twenty eighteen, but in the evening of July twenty fourth, she made eleven posts from nine to ten, basically I'll die young. On July twenty second, the day before she went missing, she posted I'll die young before I spend my whole life here on this earth. And then, like a bunch of selfies, I'm just looking for people. She's like interacting with quite a bit. Doesn't really have a lot of interaction. One person that pops up quite a
bit is I'll just call him Eric. Well, I'm gonna set him aside. And Eric spells his name uniquely, so that's another galvanizing issue. Let me go through his shit real quick. Oh. July eleventh, twenty seventeen, he changed his profile picture to a picture of him in Chikaia and her other profile liked it. Let me get a look at that? Or shared it? Oh, she shared it. Let's go look Chikaia Haunt one of her aliases, haunting. He's
gotta be somebody I can pull aside here. His last post was July twenty fifth, twenty seventeen, so about eleven months before Shokaia went missing. They clearly had some sort of relationship. She shared his picture saying that he missed she missed him. In February fifteenth, twenty and eighteen, she posted a photo with the Eric Fella and it says missing ugly and it's picture of them too. He liked it.
So they were definitely hanging out as late as February of twenty and eighteen, and that would have been four months prior to her disappearance. So she took a photo with Eric on November thirtieth, and she shared it in January, so like three months later, and it's captioned Nina Nina, Nina and her mother, Tamera Bear comes out said Chikaia Blue Mom loves you, please call me, so she might
have been. That was January twenty eight so six days later, okay, six days later, her mom posts, Hikaya, please call me. So there was apparently some time when Shakaya was you know, this must have been one of the times Shaikaia was in and out of the house. Okay, so she put. She shared a photo she made her profile picture her and Eric on January twenty first, twenty eighteen, and I can I know it's Eric because of his tattoos, because
his face is not shown. It's another reason. You got to get familiar with the people they're surrounding themselves with in several photos if you can, because sometimes you know, there'll just be some context clues, and the tattoos are one thing that you can identify somebody by. She shared one of his photos on November thirtieth, and it said I missed this mirror that he broke and never replaced
like he said he would. I knew he wouldn't. It couldn't be that too hard to lie about a mirror when he lied every motherfucking time he told me he loved me. What happened to him being a man of your word? You aren't a man at all. You's a fuck boy fucking with little girls and restion insnship just for some high voltage frequencies that you know nothing about. Thought you could come to good old Montana and run shit. Huh, Well we packed bigger artillery than what you guys call
an imaginary. Well you got done in by your phony x ass ex fiance. When I seen her reaction to my post about our unborn child, I should have known. Fuck you, Eric, you ain't nothing, but I want to be. You're such a good for nothing you wish you were shit rock bottom ass bitch. I didn't do love you though. Okay, so they got pregnant. So on Eric Galvin's page, he has his photos wide open and he takes the tons
as selfies. Right, And there was a photo of him wearing like a black shirt that I was talking about, And he created a new profile and it's named Eric Matthew and his profile picture is of him in that black shirt. Little shit thought he could get one over me.
Eh.
It's important because I'm gonna eventually end up looking at inmate records. Right, so we have three profiles for Eric right now? Why does he have so many profiles? Initially it makes me think, like what are they running from? Kind of thing, like they don't want people to find them but it could also just mean that he doesn't have a stable email addressed and I forgot his password to his other accounts. You know, it doesn't necessarily make
him guilty of anything. It just makes my spidy senses kind of I might be traumatized because a Luca, and I'm willing to admit that.
Year ago is when things were kind of really stopped progressing and there weren't any more Facebook posts or things talking about it. So in my mind, that's pretty concerning. A person goes missing four years ago and there's not a lot of new information that makes you start wondering, is this person still alive, or if they are still alive, how come nobody see them? How is Shakaia able to disappear like this? She doesn't seem in twenty eighteen like she was in a position where she had the means
to travel or anything like that. Eminacy If there is something larger than just this one case of Shakaia, are there other women who have gone missing in this area? And maybe that's the way we need to look at it. Maybe there's something more sinister at play than just one young girl going missing. Maybe there's multiple girls, and maybe there's something bigger that needs to be looked into. That's my goal for today, So drinking my first cup of coffee for today. So I think it's going to be
an interesting new way. I definitely think that people have all looked at it the same way, and we need to find a different approach and see if there's another reason. It seems like the idea that Shakaya may may have been taken, is being trafficked in the sex trade, could be a possibility. I mean, it's been four years and nobody's seen her. I want to find out if there's some kind of connection to that.
Already we are finding names and information about her last few months before she disappeared.
Especially the connection to a possible man who could have fathered a child with her, and other men Shakaia was talking to or had connections with. And let's be honest, in the case of a missing woman, we have to start with the men involved. We need to know more about the last few days and weeks before Shakaia disappeared.
Was she making money in any way? Do you know, like, was she working?
No?
See that's another thing though, too, is that Rico Wallace, So we were told that she was a victim of sex trafficking.
I'm in southern California, and I know the law enforcement and the sex trade is very big here. And like in California or in the West Coast, they talk about the circuit girls go from San Francisco Bay area, the Stockton, the Los Angeles, the veenis the Las Vegas and then active there is there a circuit like that up in that area or do you think she may be in that West coast.
From Washington to here to Colorado, Colorado.
I think it is, so there's a circuit for girls in that area.
We were told that Rico runs part of that circuit between Washington here, San Jose, I know it's southern Los Angeles for sure, and Phoenix. And we've also had a few sightings in Phoenix.
We're trying to filter through what's real, what's not real, what we should look at, what we shouldn't, And that's why we wanted to talk to you right away as soon as possible, so we could like filter through all this, get all the noise out of the way.
And say that's what's important.
Just hearing about this Rico guy, now I'm understanding like this seems like a very important person.
More on that next time.
True Crimes is executive produced by Stephanie Leidecker, Deanna Thompson, Courtney Armstrong, Jeff Shane, Andrew Arnaut, and me John Green. Additional producing by Connor Powell and Gabe Castile, Editing by Jeff Ti Music by Vanicorm Music.
True Crimes is a production of iHeart Radio and Katie Studios. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.