The Vocal Trail

I've heard that there's a house that has some bodies in the basement.

Somebody told you that Shakaia 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 Speach 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 or formed.

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 mcnauta.

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.

This episode contains extremely graphic information and it's not appropriate for children. Okay, So a couple of recordings ago, I ran into cousin Sophie's post about Shakaya being missing and was going through the comments and found a post from a woman named Darla May posted and the name of a person named Rica Wallace and said he's the last known person to be with her when she left Billings And it's the same dude who raped my a minor

Really, did you find anything good or useful well.

His full name is Rico Adrian Wallace, and he's currently in Yellowstone County Jail facing several charges, one of which is rape. He's from San Diego, but he's lived in Phoenix as well and appears to be an aspiring rapper. He has a long criminal history, and he's had several social media accounts that have been deactivated and reactivated, but his actual social media is pretty bare. There just isn't much there.

And we know that Shikaia's mother has posted about Rico and she seems to think that Rico seems to know what happened to Chikaia or where she is now. But I also think we need to talk to this other woman, Darla May, who Shakaia's mother seems to be interacting with on Facebook. Darla also seems to know a lot about Rigo too. Yeah.

I've looked at Darla as well, and she advocates a lot for Chicaia as well, so she might know a little bit more about Rico, and I think would be really smart.

To talk to her.

Hello, Hi, Darla, so nice to talk to you. Thank you so much much for talking to us. I know that there was some apprehension and I totally understand. So we've been looking into the disappearance of Chakaya Blue Harding, and I'm sure you kind of already know that. In looking at like all the social media, we ran into Rico Wallace, you know, and Romelo Big Day, and we've just kind of been trying to like piece together some stuff.

I'm pretty sure he like sold her.

How do you know Rico or not know him? But how did you run into him? What is your what's your information on him?

Five months after Shakaia, my daughter was going through her own stuff and she was just turned seventeen and September of twenty eighteen, and she had been a runaway and had met a guy that went by Miguel Martinez. I took off with him and we were looking for her and a bunch of the kids were telling us, oh, Miguel Martinez has her, and so.

We figured out because.

Of who our connections are, kind of with that information, who he was, where he was from the house he grew up in his family's names. You know, mom passed away, he had a twin sister, et cetera, et cetera. I was out talking to his neighbors when I got his home addressed and we went there, law enforcement came.

My daughter really.

Wanted to keep seeing him, and it was this whole thing about, you know, really I need to see him. I'm going to run away.

I'm not going to see them.

He's my boyfriend, and so you know, I said, fine, you can date him, but it has to be at our home, like we're going to meet this guy. And after a little while of them dating, he'd asked me if he could take her on a date. I said, okay, I guess, you know, but have her back by this time.

Oh my god, that was like a screening of some kind. Yes, oh my gosh.

Okay, and that was Miguel, which law enforcement, when I spoke to the detective had told me that Miguel Martinez is a.

One of the people who recruits.

And so anyways, two weeks later, my husband had just got off of work and then I guess Rico had reached out and she'd seen him, and he told her that Miguel Martinez would quote slide.

Through you know, that he would come pick her up.

He picked her up about a block away off my security cameras and then drove her to his residence where at that time she handed the bottle over to Rico, and there was Wiz was there, and two females were also identified to be recruiters for Rico and Wiz, and so Wizz is Ramello big dig So there there she hands the bottle to them. They smokes the marijuana. He proceeds to go into the kitchen behind a wall and make a drink, brings it out to her. She takes

She doesn't want to come home.

She's scared, so she's like, I need to go lay down, and Rico escorts her to his bedroom and this is where it's going to get graphic.

Is that okay? Okay?

So at that point he laid her down and she was out of consciousness. At some point later she woke up and she could see him over her, and he had later so that her butt was kind of almost off the bed and her legs were hanging off of the bed, and she woke up because she was in pain, and he had bit her from her clitoris to her anus and proceeded to rape her. And then the next morning, she literally carried her out of the apartment into his vehicle and dropped her off two blocks away and forced

Darla, Darla, Darla, real quick, when you say the police, are you talking Billings.

Police, Billings Police Department?

Okay, okay?

And I talked to like.

Even the chief of police, and I talked to the Human Trafficking Division here, and neither one of those places gave two shits about anything I had to say. Penny Ronning said she did talk to the chief of police and he was aware of who Rico was, but he never got back to me about anything else or anything until I started getting on Facebook and making a deal out of it.

So the billing speed tell you it's basically his word against your daughters.

Correct, And so eventually I get in touch with the prosecuting attorney and I demand to see him because I want to know why this case hasn't went any further. At that point, I guess he's the county attorney. He told us that the quote because he said they can't do you know, we can't get his DNA because he's not in custody. At that point, he was not in custody. And then they said that, you know, why what else? Why can't we use the crime scene photo she was

So that was a big red flag at that point.

A little while after that, I well, I was posting about Rico because we did have the rape case. It was an open case, and so I was posting about him and I started investigating him. I had started posting him aggressively on Facebook, and he left the state.

He left. He was actually arrested prior to coming to Montana and Idaho.

So he left Montana because of that.

I'm pretty sure, yeah, he took off.

And then a little while after that is when detectives reached out to me about Chicaya and said, you know all of the information, can you help us?

And I was like, holy crap.

They took my daughter and had her go and do lineup and identify the people and talk to them about what had happened with her case, because obviously it's very similar and the same person is involved in both anyway, So I started researching Rico. I was finding out who his family members was. So I found out that Rico had lived in San Diego, California, and he's he's related to a man named Raheem Callaway and that they moved here together, and Raheem Callaway had started a wrap business

And I also.

Found out that Raheem Calloway's exit dress and there's a video on YouTube from I twenty nineteen and it's Joahim's first music video, and Rico was in it.

And it shows the.

Address is three thirty three Jackson and that's in the Monroe area where in Billings, Montana, there's this area and it's on the south side and it's like three blocks Monroe, Jackson and another one.

I can't think of the third one right.

Now, but there are three blocks of row houses and law enforcement tells me that that is known for human trafficking.

I found out they all moved up here together. It made no sense to me.

We realized when the chicaia had happened that this is most likely human trafficking.

So I was thinking, you know, this.

Is just some old pedophile, you know that likes to go for little younger women, you know, like date rates and hurts them.

And come to find out this is like.

It exploded into this huge thing, so much bigger than.

What it looked like for the outside.

When when I talked to county attorney and I said, how many times did you try to make contact with Rico in regards to my daughter's case, He said, we tried too, And I said, well how about Hikaya Blue Harding tell me that they never once went to his house to investigate it. They told me that they never want tried to knock on his door in relation to her case, and the only reason they did because I made a big deal out of it.

But she's also white. She's white. They go to a white girl for a white girl, and.

Girl actually they try to make contact, but don't at all for a Native American with a history, and I think that's absolute bullshit to the way that people look at Native Americans here is terrible.

Oh my gosh, Darla has a ton of really important information about Rico. It's just awful what happened to her daughter. But wow, is she a fighter. She really advocates for her daughter.

Yeah, there was a ton of information she gave us and there's a lot to unpack there, and I'm trying to put it all together as we did it. So I don't know, what do you think?

I mean? You know, I'm trying not to insert my own experiences into these cases, but it's hard not to be a little bit triggered when you hear such graphic detail about a sexual assault. From an investigative standpoint, you have to separate yourself, right, you have to separate yourself from the experience and what actually happened, And that's hard to do.

Let's stop here for a break. We'll be back in a moment.

Our conversation with Darla got me thinking, I think we also need to dig more into Chicaia's friend Aaron, since he was at Tumbleweed and saw Shakaia in the last days that she was seeing in July of twenty eight. He supposedly was concerned for her safety and gave her a knife before she went into see.

Rico and sent. So much of the interaction between Chicaia and Rico and these other individuals happened around the Tumbleweed facility. I think we need to talk to somebody there. The current director is a woman named Georgia Caddy and get this, she used to be the human trafficking person there. If they have a position specifically for dealing with human trafficking, it must be a serious issue.

And maybe she'll know something about Aaron as well.

Hopefully our private investigator, Mike Tough can help track him down.

It's worth a shot. I think we should call him.

Hey, Deanna, you're there.

Hey, Mike's on the line too.

How are you doing Mike?

Hey, Mike, I'm good. How are you guys?

We're doing quite well. So the Chikaya case. Deanna and I.

Were talking about it earlier, kind of going over the timeline of events and stuff, and so we're kind of stuck on that right now when we're trying to talk to people, and it sounds like when Chikaia left, her and her sister weren't talking and she probably doesn't know much that was going on in that like six month timeframe.

So we're reaching out to people who Shakaia would have known. One of them is the guy Aaron Peterson.

So you said you remembered the story about how Shakaia went walking to a park some guy saw her.

She said I was going to meet some unknown male and.

That he gave her a knife. So this is the person that gave her the knife, but the story is changing. He knew Shakaiya, he knew Shakaya, and when the sister reached out to him, he goes, here's w you should look at. You should look at this Rico guy, her ex boyfriend. He was very upset that she broke up with him, and he was threatening people like Erin. And

He goes, well, here take this knife.

And we think that happened.

On July twenty third, right, Okay.

So we're trying to get a whole to this Aaron person to see if we can talk to him and if he could fill in some.

More holes with us.

So Shawnee sent us a bunch of screenshots and one of the screenshots is I think from Shakaia's Facebook and it's it's basically a common thread, so I can't see you know where it happened, but I'm assuming it's Shakaia's Facebook, right. And in the screenshots, Rico says, where are you at? Hit me up? And Aaron replies and says leave her alone. Nobody likes you. You're the reason she's leaving. Then he goes on to say he says, I'm right here. You know if you want me, you can come find me,

And that's the and then.

Right he says, you know, I didn't want her to go, but yeah, he gave her the knife.

So that's the night, and that's that's the last she's been seen, or that's days before that.

We think it was the twenty third, We don't know for sure. That's one thing. I mean, we're assuming it's the twenty third because why do we think that? Oh, I know no. So that night she posted a picture to her Snapchat and it's a photo of her laying down with Rico. And that was the last thing she ever posted to any social media ever.

Now, Rico's the guy in jail, right, right, he's.

The guy in jail. He's the guy with the buick.

And then the last photo that she posts of herself ever ever is with Rico laying in bed on Snapchat.

Right, And we have the photo.

You girls like.

That, you know, they don't stop just out of the blue posting. I know the sapchat, I know that.

And she was like prolific on Facebook, like she posted a lot of stuff.

You don't just stop, you don't just stop. No, But man, that when you hear about if you know she's on Facebook constantly and suddenly she just stops, I know, that's that's the red flag. Either a all of her phones and she's she's held somewhere against her will, and that means she's not even human trafficked. She's in a basement somewhere like the Cleveland girls and has no access to anything, or she's deceased, correct, because if she was still prostituting by now, she'd have had.

Access to something.

There's no way she'd have been working the streets you know, by a guy, and he's not going to have that much control over her. Because even with the Johns, she could borrow one of their phones real quick, or the cops would have got her or something by now. So I think she's either held prisoner somewhere against her will totally and maybe being used as a sex slate for that, or she's deceased somewhere.

The other thing too. Shawnee mentioned to us that she called the detectives to give them information and she doesn't feel she doesn't feel like they even wrote it down. I don't know if this is true or not right, but she doesn't feel like they even wrote the information down that she was giving them. So it mean, is it possible that the cops never questioned Rico one hundred percent? I'd like to think they would have, you know, or

We don't want to make them look bad.

It's not our intent.

And if we found anything, the first thing we do is go to them, since they're handling the case.

Yeah, I will email you guys are Eric and right away as soon as I know something.

So, Georgia, just so you know, I'm recording this phone call. Okay, okay, So at first, if you could just tell us who you are and what you do, that would be helpful.

Sure.

I'm Georgia Katie, and I'm the executive director at Tumbleweed. I'm also the person who started the anti trafficking program here at Tumbleweed in twenty fifteen.

Is trafficking a big issue in Billings, Montana? Human trafficking, I mean absolutely? How bad is it?

Well?

I mean I guess that's like kind of relative. I mean one is too bad, right, And the type of trafficking we see with probably over eighty five percent of the folks that utilize our dropping center is a type of trafficking called survival sex. So it's for a place to stay, something to eat, a drug habit, a cell phone, that type of trafficking. Now we do also see the

Oh my goodness.

So then that kind of puts the brakes on you, like, oh my gosh, and it's only like nine percent, is like this stranger stuff.

Do they even realize that that's happening to them if it's being done by a friend or a family.

Member, Sometimes they do, I think, but it becomes a normalcy to it.

Right.

First trafficking victim, her mom and grandma gave her to the landlord every month since she was like four to pay the rent. So if that's happening to you, it just seems like it's what's part of your life. These people that are supposed to protect you and care for you are saying, this is okay. So this is what I do. And so when I do, when I speak about trafficking and our drop and center, or two young folks I come in contact with, they're like, oh my god,

So like a friend could be like a boyfriend too.

Right, like, oh, claim to be a boyfriend. Worked with another young lady who I mean, small town Montana. You want to go see some stuff, right, and you don't have the resources. And so this young gentleman, I mean, he was very handsome. I only like three years age different, so it wasn't really weird. She was seventeen, he was like twenty one or something, and that doesn't seem strange. He said, hey, let's go see the ocean.

Shit.

She had never been. She's in a tire old town here in Montana. Jumps in with her boyfriend. You know, they get part way there and lo and behold they have no money. Well, if you want to keep going. Just do this for me, babe. You know, it's okay, it's this is not a bad thing. And so they end up getting pulled over like three states away as he's traffing her across several states, and when it gets pulled. When they get pulled over, she's telling the officers, this is my boyfriend.

She's saying, I have no idea who that is.

I just picked her up in the last town she was to give her a ride, right, And so then there's the and so she's struggling with the fact that I thought I was he was my boyfriend, you know, So.

He like manipulated her into like working for him pretty much.

Absolutely yes, And I imagine that happens with like people that have some sort of trauma or they're vulnerable, they just not love right, Like absolutely yeah.

And you don't imagine that somebody that Clint Fessus, you know, with your best interest, to do that to you. I can tell you story after story. They're master manipulators. They're just people in the world that are really out for themselves and they just they have some charisma and they just have a real way of like manipulating and being able to pick out vulnerabilities, right, and our young people are all over social media. You tell everything like my hate my mom, right, my mom so mean and she

We've been looking at, you know, talking to several different people and looking at different cases. We were presented with a case from a girl from Billings, Montana who went missing and she's still missing too. Who is that, Shakaia Blue Herding.

I know Shakaya. Yeah, we've been worked with our family and stuff was movie for a while. I actually have every day.

It reminds me why I come to work here. I have a letter in my drawer that I open every day to get the key to my foul cabinet out. And it's a piece of mail that's Shakaya Harding's now.

Oh you're kidding.

I'll never forget. The day that I last saw her, I was practicing my presentation. I was getting ready to go out and do awareness training, and I was in there dropping Center Resource Center, and I was practicing it. And she was plopped on the couch and she had just washed her hair and it smelled so good of like smelly shampoo, and she had fuzzy socks on these sweatpants.

And she was sat down there and she was eating her.

Lunch and just looked like she typical teenager or young adult posied up on a couch watching a movie. And she was very interested in my presentation. And as I began to kind of speak with her a little bit, she she kind of shut down, but she was listening. And then she left that day and I said, see you later, Hikaya Bhi.

I can still.

Smell that, and then she had this prettiest tear Yah ever did see.

The story we.

Were told is that back in twenty eighteen, Chakaia had had some trauma in her life. Unfortunately, she was self medicating with drugs. Absolutely, there were some issues between her and her family. They became kind of distant. Shakaya was apparently living on the street. She was using Tumbleweed services. Yeah, she made a post about how great tumbleweed was. It was the best place, and it sounds like she got a lot of benefit out of it. She wasn't in

He said, I have heard and or given to those spaces that should have it.

Yeah.

Good, well, yeah, we're kind of just kind of keeching us all together, you know, like it's just a sad story and the family is so desperate for information. Let's stop here for another quick break. So while we wait to hear back from Mike, our Pi and Montana, can we talk about Jared real quick in Florida Totally. We both thought at the beginning this was a carjacking gone bad, But the more we dig into the carjacking, it doesn't look like that, right, do you agree?

Yeah, especially with all the other stuff going around involving Jared's first marriage and his ex wife, it really feels like a targeted hit. It also feels like whoever killed Jared wasn't acting alone.

Yeah, it's just too complicated to be a carjacking, right, Yeah, So I was thinking, while we wait for our Florida PI Chris Algato to do a little digging, I thought we should talk to friends specialist Joseph Morgan. He works with Katie Studios a lot, and he might be able to help us gain a new insight into Jared's murder or maybe talk us through the crime seat a little.

That would be really helpful to have his eyes on this as if it was a target to hit like we think now and not a carjacking gone bad.

Yeah, let's do it.

This case really got to me because I was in this man's position in sense that you know, we're blended family, and it was contentious, and of course it never rose to this level. And this poor woman now is you know, has got these precious babies that she's gonna have to raise on her own, and Lord only knows what's going to happen to those twins, And so I want to do anything I can do to help her. I've got real heart for this case. Simply from that perspective. There's

They did search that wooded area the right there, right right, and they did have dogs too. I've kind of collected just some like facts about stuff. So they did have dogs, they did search that area, but they're not letting anybody know what they found. There's no information and even Kirsten doesn't know. So yeah, I.

Can certainly address that from a connectivity standpoint and why that would be important absolutely because this individual would have been dismounted at that point.

Time.

And also something else that's kind of very interesting. Is this tire slash rim thing that they found out at the road, that's going to have a very specific nomenclature on it, an identifier and the point of origin of that. Now, if a person had been wise that had set this up, they would have just gone to some random location and picked this thing up. But if it's something that had been that has connectivity to the perktrator's life, and there's all kinds of identifiers that we can get off there.

So they say it was three to four feet away from him.

They did release that, So we're going to be if that is the case, and there were multiple gunshots simple fire because the baby. I remember person saying at that time the baby had said boom boom boom, Daddy falls down or something like that.

Yes, boom boom boom, Daddy on the ground.

Yeah, daddy on the ground.

And we also have we also have video footage where you from a doorbell and you can hear there's there's three shots. We even found the so the tire has been traced to a Ford F one fifty and the police have released surveillance footage of a Ford F one fifty with a spare tire on it. And but they don't say where they got the surveillance footage. But we John Green and I found where they got the surveillance footage and it goes right back to the xif's house.

It's very interesting as a death Investigator's very telling to me the level of callous mus that's involved in this, right when you'll execute a man with his baby in a car seat in the vehicle, and there had to

I'm going to send you an email with our document and you can look at it whenever you want, yeah, sure, And it has linked it has links to all the pictures and everything like that. And then I'll remind you about Sunday too.

Okay, and I'll try it between now and then. I'll look at this and I'll try to come up with a bulleted list of points.

Sounds good.

Again, I have Mike on.

Okay, Hi, Mike go.

The last time we spoke.

With Mike the p I, we discussed not have him reaching out to Yellowstone County Sheriff's Department and ask if they would share some an update on anything that wishikaia as a professional courtesy from one law enforcement to another. And you said you reached out to them and you had some good, good.

Stuff, is what you said.

I reached out to the detective Fritz Riostone County. He's a detective assigned to her case. I said, we're working on this podcast. We're working on this case, and we don't I go. I want to get this out of the way. We're not here to bombard you with false leads or you know, are what we are theories.

We're going to tell you what we know.

If we find something good, we'll let you know, and we're going to verify it before we tell you and all that. But we are looking at this and we also don't want to be looking at stuff that we don't that is a waste of time. So I said great, So I go do you know Rico?

And he goes, oh, yeah, we know Rico.

And I said, did you guys interview him about her? And he goes, yes, we did. I said, did you clear him? And he goes, no, we did not clear him.

No shit.

He goes, what does that mean?

He goes, well, by time we got the case, as you know, it's been a while, so evidence is cold. So all we could do is just sit down and talk to him. And he pretty much just kept saying, don't know what you're talking about. Nope, don't know what you're talking about. Nope, didn't happen, nope, you know, And he goes, he just basically, you know, he's a career criminal.

He goes, but he is not.

Clear because he agrees with us if it is true that she went to see him the last time she has ever seen and then the snapchat picture of her in bed with him was the last picture that she put out on social media. Of herself. Then yeah, clearly he's a person of interest. And he goes, well, I think he's in prison. And I go, I go, I think he's in Yellowstone County jail.

Correct.

And he goes really And I go, yeah, I go check your roster. Yeah, he goes, last time.

Heard he was in prison.

I go, well, I think he's been moving yells from kind of jail. He might have a court for seeding coming up. And he goes, well, that's interesting thing.

Okay, I'll look at that.

And I said good. So then I said, well, do you have her DNA? Because I know as law enforcement, let's say her body's found in Arizona, okay, but she has no idea on her, so they have no idea who this person is. They will submit her DNA into a database to see if it gets a hit on as as somebody put her DNA in there as she's a missing person. And he goes, no, we didn't do that because the mother couldn't produce anything to us that

Maybe we'll get a hit.

The question for you guys to ask the sister is does she have contact with dad? And if she does, can she get him to sign the form when we.

Get the form and get.

It back to us.

So that's the big question there. That's what you guys got to take care because.

You know her, right, Yeah, so I'll certainly do that.

So that's what I know.

That's incredible, That is such good news. More on that next time.

True Crimes is executive produced by Stephanie Lydecker, Gianna Thompson, Courtney Armstrong, Jeff Shane, Andrew Arnout, and me John Green. Additional producing by Connor Powell and Gabe Castile, Editing by Jeff Ti Music by Vanicor Music.

True Crimes is a production of iHeartRadio and Katie Studios. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.