LOST HILLS-Dana Goodyear

into the night. Her whereabouts confounded authorities for nearly a year until her skeletonized and partially mummified remains were found on August ninth, twenty ten, up Rugged Dark Canyon, some six miles away from the station. There was no sign of trauma to Matrise's remains, and the coroner could not determine the cause of death, but Matrese's death was undoubtedly suspicious. Her bra belt and jeanes were found some distance from

her body. The rest of her clothing was never found, and investigators never recovered a tiny bone called the hyoid, which often breaks when a person is strangled. A tenacious reporter and gifted storyteller, Dana Goodyear spent the past five years on the case, leading her and her co reporter Hailey Fox to the secluded, tight knit mountain community of

Montonito where Matrese was last seen. Driven by conversations with Richardson's grieving friends and family, and undeterred by the scant clues that have been picked through by dozens of previous investigations lost Hills, dark Canyon probes where others have not, including Richardson's never before seen personal journals, new eyewitness interviews, and new potential forensic evidence. In twelve gripping episodes, Goodyear painstakingly builds a case that Matrise's death involved foul play,

and she identifies a potential suspect. The true crime podcast that we were featuring this evening is Lost Hills Dark Canyon Season four with my special guest journalist, author, writer, and host of the Lost Hills podcast, Dana Goodyear. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for this interview. Dana Goodyear.

it did many many years later. At the time, I was writing for The New Yorker full time, and I was writing poetry, and I had deep interest in crime stories and true crime stories, but I hadn't yet become a teller of them, and I don't think podcasts existed.

So the way that I got involved with my Teresa's story is that in twenty eighteen, I started investigating a story in Malibu, a horrible story of a young father who was camping with his two year old and four year old daughters in Malibu Creek State Park and he was inexplicably shot in the head at four in the morning, and there were no suspects initially, and there was a great outcry in Malibui, and it was obviously a terrible tragedy.

And as I began to learn more about that story and report it out and learn that there had been many incidents of shootings that had been happening in and around that campground and in Malibu Canyon, which runs alongside one side of the campground, that hadn't been reported to the public, I started hearing from people in the community that they've thought there could be a connection to my Teres Richardson because her case, her disappearance in two thousand

and nine and the discovery of her remains in twenty ten, had left people very unsatisfied. They had no answers as to what had really happened to her, and the story that law enforcement put out there also really didn't make sense. In the same way that there were many problems with the story of the shooting in Malibu Creek State Park, so people started to wonder, you know, could the same person who killed this father in the campground, Tristan Boudett,

have harmed you or she have harmed my Trees? And that did not turn out to be the case, as my reporting would show. But that was initially how I started reporting on my Trees. I was really reporting on a different murder, and everywhere I went people wanted to talk about my race Richardson. So it took years of developing sources in Malibu to feel that I could do justice to her story and bring something new to her

story because it's been told many times before. But there's a kind of built in limitation to a lot of the other reporting, which is that they just couldn't progress beyond what the law enforcement had said, even though that clearly was unsatisfactory. And I just got extremely lucky in being able to with my reporting partner, who was also a senior producer on the show, Hayley Fox, unpeel some of those layers and go with the story.

of locals and some of them celebrities and tourists. And nobody really knows why my trees showed up there that night, but she did. And she wasn't from Malibu. She loved the ocean and she loved to drive by the ocean. So some people in her the circle of her friends and family, speculated that maybe she was just taking a

drive by the ocean. And she told law enforcement later that night that she responded to those lights that she saw outside the restaurant, and so she pulled in and my trace was twenty four years old, very beautiful, very charming, very delightful human being from everything I've ever heard about her, a black woman who was a recent graduate of cal State Fullerton and was on her way to She was in the process of applying to graduate school for clinical psychology,

so she wanted to become a psychologist. And she showed up at Jeffreys and she was by herself, and she was acting strange, but not in a threatening way at all. She went and sat down with a large party of people, was chatting with them and saying some kind of a little bit off the wall things that they didn't really understand, but they didn't mind her sitting there because she was pretty entertaining. And then she ordered dinner and ended up

leaving the restaurant without paying her bill. So the staffit Jeoffrey's called basically called nine one one, saying we don't really know what to do. We're a little concerned about her. We don't know she's been saying some strange things and acting a little strange, and we don't know if she's okay. So can you help us out? And so deputies from Lost Hill Station, which is the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department's station that's out there and covers Malibu and Calabasas

and some other communities. Those deputies responded and they decided to give her a field sobriety test, and she passed. She wasn't drunk. It turned out they did find some marijuana in her car, which at that point was illegal. Was less than announce but it was not legal at that point. That's a misdemeanor at that point. And then they just felt like something was off about her and they said to the again to the Jeoffrey staff, you know, if you want us to take her with us, we

have to execute a citizens arrest for you. And so they did that, and so she was charged with the marijuana misdemeanor, but also with another misdemeanor, which was quote unquote defrauding an innkeeper for the failure to pay the bill. And they took her to Lost Hills station, which is pretty far distance actually from Jeoffrey's. So you have to drive all the way through Malibu Canyon and over basically to where the one O one Highway is for Californians.

So I want to let you jump in if you have more questions and I can tell you next what happened when she was at the station.

and pay her bill? And her great grandmother was ninety one years old and said, I can't come to Balibu and they wouldn't accept They had a policy apparently of not accepting a credit card over the phone, and they said she would have to fax it, and she didn't have a fax machine. So there were a lot of

to resolving the issue, you know. According to my Teresa's dad, one of the most painful ironies of this moment is that he later discovered that not only was her wallet in her car, but he said there was a bank card linked to an account with thousands of dollars in it. So it wasn't that she couldn't pay, It's just that, well, she didn't have the presence of mind right then to be able to execute that payment, and so they took it to the station.

keep her overnight, I won't come out there. She lived about an hour away and she had a ten or eleven year old daughter at home, my Terce's little half sister. I'd really rather just come in the morning. If you're going to keep her all night, I don't need to go out there and sit there in the lobby waiting for her to be released. But if you're going to release her, i'd love you know, I don't want her

wandering around. She doesn't know the area and she doesn't have friends out there, and she I'm paraphrasing, but that could be dangerous. And she actually said something that's so haunting to hear. She said, I'd hate to wake up in the morning and hear the report girl found somewhere with her head chopped off.

claim of over detention. But it's very unfortunate that someone there at this very small station where there were not very many other people in custody, that night didn't think to call her mother back and say, actually, we are

going to release her. So the other thing that happened was that my Teresa's phone had been impounded in her car, which was all the way back near Pacific Coast Highway, you know, about twelve miles from the station, and she had no ride, so she didn't have money to pay for a cab, she didn't have a phone to call a friend or to be tracked by anyone, and she

left the station. She left Lost Hill Station around twelve twenty five am, and nobody knows how she got from there to where she was next scene at six point thirty approximately the next morning. But that six thirty am citing the next morning was for a long time the kind of the last known sighting of her.

and she's she's terrified. And then, as it happened, the place where my Terce was seen at six point thirty in the morning is this small community of Montanito, which is kind of halfway back to approximately where my Teresa's car was, so you could sort of imagine maybe she was maybe she walked back there, or maybe someone gave her a ride, somebody who's never come forward. We really

don't know how she got to Montanito. She had six hours to walk about six miles, so it is possible, of course, that she did it on foot, but her mother felt that that was very unlikely, just given her her general habits. I guess should we say now what was becoming a parent to people in her in law enforcement and her family were starting to talk about the fact that my Truce was not well mentally and she had gone to Jeoffrey's in the midst of what would

later be described as a bipolar episode. But she had a not very well documented history of mental illness, and she herself was concerned about her own mental well being. But there was a big effort on part of the Sheriff's department initially to downplay any indications that my Trece was mentally ill at the time, because that would have put their decision to release her in such a fashion and even worse a worse light, and that could have been illegal potentially, I think. So they chose not to

put her on a psychiatric hold. So they were then sort of at pains to say, oh, no, she was. She seemed really fine, you know, there was nothing wrong with her. But it did come out that she was not fine at all, and she had not slept or eaten really for days leading up to this episode at Jeffrey's, and her odd conversations that she was having were kind of part of this breakdown that she was in the

in the middle of. But in any case, so my Trees could potentially have walked to Montanito and she was seen in a backyard there around six point thirty in the morning, and the owners of the home where she was actually called law enforcement. They called the sheriff's department and they said, there's a prowler. And so when my Teresa's mother called the station back and learned that her daughter was no longer there, somebody figured out, oh, wait a minute, we got a report of someone who sort

of sounds like the description of my teres Richardson. And they told her, They told Latis, oh, your your daughter go, you know, we think she's a Montanito. She's over there, probably with some friends or something like that. And so that seemed absolutely unbelievable to Latisse Sutton, my Teresa's mother. She did not have friends in Montanito. But that's basically

you know. Her next move was to file a missing person's report and try to start putting some pressure on law enforcement to find her daughter.

Monica Mountains. It's incredibly rural. There are mountain lions. Montanito is dark sky community, so there are not even street lights out there, and it's actually really easy to get lost in a place like that. And so the Lost Hi Station has a well known search and rescue group

and they started to conduct the searches. And they went first to that house in Montanito where my Trees had last been seen, and they found her footsteps and going down into the backyard of the couple who had called law enforcement saying there was a prowler, and going out to the front of the house and then the footprints. They couldn't find any other footprints near there, but they brought in some dogs and the dogs sniffed my Trees's scent and it led them to the house next door.

They searched that house. There was no sign of her there, and they really didn't know. At first. They were assuming that they were looking for somebody who was lost, who might be seeking help, who might be going house to house, who might be hungry, thirsty, or they didn't didn't really know. But then the information started to come from my Teresa's family and some of her friends that actually, maybe she wasn't in her right mental state. She was in some

kind of elevated state. She was not acting like herself basically. So eventually law enforcement really started looking for a suicide. They were looking at the bottom of cliffs for thinking maybe she had jumped. They started to really conceive of this case quite differently as a disappearance due to a suicide.

And eleven months passed, and then one day, a group of rangers who were searching for a marijuana grow, because that's another thing that happens out in these rural Santa Monica mountains, especially back then, there were some very large

marijuana operations. There were also some smaller, kind of more cottage industry type of operations, but they had these rangers had disrupted a grow a year earlier, before my race would have been there, and they went back to check whether the people respond operating the grow had started up again,

and they found her remains. And what they found was kind of in a sense where my starting point is as a reporter and Haley Fox and I just talked endlessly about this scenario that I'm about to describe to you. So my Terce's remains were skeletonized. There almost a complete skeleton, but naked. Her jeans and her belt and her bra

were found separate from her body. The belt was off, the jeans, her shirt, her underwear if she was wearing them, her shoes, those items were never found, and my traces remains were also partially mummified, which led to a lot of different speculation about, you know, where she had died and what had happened to her. But basically, at that point it became a coroner's case.

But the bottom line was we talked to the a forensic pathologist who conducted the autopsy and she said there was no evidence of trauma on the bones, so they could not classify this as a homicide. It was an undetermined cause of death. It was not obviously it wasn't. There was nothing to indicate a suicide. There was nothing to prove that it was a natural cause. That there are natural causes. There was not enough soft tissue to do any kind of rape kit or sexual assault assessment.

There was not enough soft tissue to do a thorough toxicology. You know, they really couldn't determine anything. They didn't know if it was an overdose, as suicide, of death from exposure, a death from snake bite, or a homicide. But if it was a homicide, it was one that didn't leave

any marks on the remains that were found. And that was just you know, that was the place that basically the story got left by law enforcement, which is they said, well, everything we've come to learn about her suggests that she was in the midst of a mental health crisis and wandered up into this canyon and died. And Haley and I just could not believe that that she had taken off her own clothes and just sat down and willed herself to death. And meanwhile, where were the rest of her clothes?

It was just she woke up, she saw this woman in the backyard. She called down, do you need any help? The woman, who everybody understands to be my trees responded, no, I'm just resting. And then by the time she looked

out the window again, my trees was gone. And the footprints that were found there were vans shoeprints in the size that my trees wore, and she was wearing vans that night, And basically they were seen running around to the side to the front of the house and then those those no more Vans footprints were seen near the Tennis Court house. So that was Karen Smith's story, simple and very basic. Now later, this is two thousand and nine September two thousand and nine when Karen Smith tells

that story. Several years later, somebody else told a different story about seeing my terse at around four thirty in the morning. And this person, who I called the Mantanitle Lifer, he said that she was in an altercation with somebody possibly inside the house, and that she was very upset and she was yelling in front of the house. And that story created a kind of problem in the narrative.

So did was she outside the house at four thirty am having an altercation or was she in the backyard at six thirty am, having just you know, taken a little rest, and Karen Smith said she didn't know anything about shouting at four thirty in the morning, and so there was a problem with this timeline, and that also became central to our inquiry and our basically our resolution that we brought this case to because we think that we know who harmed my trace.

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what does that lead you to do next? And who do you want to speak with specifically?

In part, it was also about the way in which he was stymied and blocked by his own law enforcement organization from solving it. But in the end he did with a lot of help from a lot of other

people too. But he had played an instrumental role, and we kept in touch, and I knew that the Mitrit's case really bothered him, and he had conducted many of the searches because he was the person in charge of the search and rescue team, and he cared deeply about the case, and he was really troubled that they hadn't been able to solve it. So he retired, and by the time I had all these conversations with him, he

was retired. And he eventually told me a piece of information that would open up the entire story for him alien me, and that was that there had been a person of interest that the Sheriff's department looked at. So when we got that information, we learned everything we possibly could about that person, and quite a lot that law enforcement never found out because people were willing to talk

to us all these years later. Who you know, maybe law enforcement had never contacted or maybe they hadn't said certain things of law enforcement that they said to us. I don't really I don't really know, but we were able to develop I think, a very compelling case for this person's involvement.

before my Teruce's remains were found. During the eleven months when they were searching for her, and Malibu Search and Rescue was pursuing all kinds of leads at that point. You know, all the time, people were saying that they'd seen her, or they saw human remains, or they saw a blood stain, and you know, so they were chasing down everything because everybody wanted to find out where she was, and so this was during that time when before there

human remains found. They went to see if there were in fact human remains at this at the place where this person moved, and they determined nope, those aren't human remains, and therefore that person kind of became was like got checked off the list in a sense. And then the rubers about this person persisted, and eventually they surfaced again and he was actually questioned and the law enforcement this is now the Homicide Bureau of the Sheriff's Department, not

the search and rescue people, the homicide detectives. They believed his story. And that's one of the things that I find the most unbelievable about this whole entire narrative is that somehow they took the word of someone who had a history of violence against women, who had a history of violence against law enforcement, who had a history of drug use, had been to prison for attacking women, and they took his word.

This person, from everything I've been able to learn, they had already sort of said no, we already looked at him and didn't turn out to be human remains where he was living, so therefore he couldn't have done this, which you know, to me, that just doesn't make sense, but they It's my big question to the Sheriff's department is why did you let him go? And how could you be so sure when there was so much to suggest, so much circumstantial evidence to suggest that he was involved.

Why would you let him walk? But they've never answered that question. And Haley and I discovered quite a bit of additional circumstantial evidence and have tried to present it to the Sheriff's department repeatedly, and they don't seem interested. And we even found what could be direct forensic evidence that we don't have the resources to analyze fully and say whether or not there's a direct connection between my

trees and this person and this location. Sheriff's department has those resources, but they won't even call us back.

is often broken when somebody is strangled. Now, strangulation can be a very hard, very hard to prove forensically, but one clear sign of it is when the hyoid is broken, you can be strangled, and the hyoid doesn't break, you can be you know, there's not too many other good reasons for the hyoid to break, but it is a

very small, very light composite bone, and that was never found. Now, I'm not suggesting that a killer would have been that this person who I think harmed my trees, would have been clever enough to or skilled enough to remove the highwoid bone if it was broken. I just think it's another terrible coincidence in this case that that bone is missing. But look, they could have they could have had that knowledge.

But what we do know is that this person had a history of violence against women, of going to prison for violence against women, and of strangling women.

thousand and nine, ten, eleven, twelve, heavy Matthews. But he was a heavy, heavy drinker his whole life, many DUIs and you know, many experiences attacking law enforcement. Even so, he had a very troubled past. I would say he had come back to Montanito after being released from prison for the incident that you mentioned where he was incarcerated

for his assault of his then girlfriend. He came back to his home community of Montanito, and he was kind of CouchSurfing with with loyal friends, but he also built himself a kind of off the grid bort and just you know, about a mile up the road above Montenito into the mountains, just off the just off the road, the brush is so dense that you just go five feet off the road and you're in the middle of nowhere. So he had a spot there that he liked to

hang out. And then not very far from there, over the other side of the road and you know, crossed some private property and then plunged down into a place called Dark Canyon, and that's where there was there were some big grow operations apparently that the rangers were checking on. But it's also a place where this guy had since the seventies, since he was a young man, had been growing marijuana. So this area of Dark Canyon, it's a slot canyon. It's very very difficult to access unless you

know the right little trail. This guy did, and he tried to take a bunch of women after my Teres to show them where he grew pot and or where my Terce's remains were. So this is somebody who was basically playing tour guide about my Teres's remain spot to a lot of people. And I think that's also pretty suspicious and strange, and at a time when it's not clear to me how he would have known exactly where her remains were found. So he knew how to get in there, He had been growing pot in there. He

also grew pot at his little fort. But my tries. One thing was that she actually really liked bot. That was kind of her drug of choice. So you can easily imagine a scenario where he said to her, Hey, let's even show you I have got the best plant. Come with me. Something went wrong, you know, or we don't know if he you know, we can't say for sure, like this was this intentional? Was there an accident and he was recently you know, he was on a role.

There was not an easy path for him to say, you know, I didn't do it, but this young woman fell and hit her head and died while she was with me, or overdosed, or you know, he was terrified of going back to prison. Many of his friends told us that many of his friends who had really good

reason to suspect him of being involved. So that's what we drew out in our story was basically all the knowledge that's been stored in the minds of these people, on the consciences of these people who knew this man, things that they didn't ever tell each other or tell

law enforcement. And we drew from that and drew that out and painted a portrait that I think, even if law enforcement won't listen to us or take up what we learned and go with it and actually lay this case to rest, which they should do for my Teresa's family and my trees, even if they won't do that, we feel that we have shed light on how she came to be in that canyon.

didn't want to have to turn him in. And this neighborhood connection and bond goes very deep with these people. But this is back then, back in around twenty twelve. This is what she was saying. Rick stopped, telling me, stop talking, I don't want to hear it. But before she silenced him, he did manage to tell her that he had picked my trees up on his motorcycle. So that's something that he sure didn't tell law enforcement that. I can't imagine they could have let him walk if

he had told them that. That, to me is a pretty good indicator that he lied in his polygraph. And once he picked her up, where did they go? Did they go to the fort? Well, we were looking for evidence at this fort that would connect to my trees. We were looking for items of hers that were never found, and we found a lot of women's underwear at that fort, and this is what we would We got some of it tested, but it's incredibly expensive to do private lab

DNA testing. And this is where we're begging the Sheriff's department to pick up where we had to leave off and actually test all of this underwear. Why did he have ladies underwear in many different sizes up there? Whose belongings are these? You know, some of them we think we understand who they might belong to, but others, you know, it's all different styles and sizes, and it's you know, the idea that one of these could be my trees is that could solve this case, But we don't know.

But the detectives who investigated the case, I have no reason to think that they're anything but good, honest, earnest investigators. But they certainly stopped short of where I would have stopped if I were in their shoes. And I can't I can't really do anything else other than speculate about why, and that's not really fair to do. I can only just sort of what feels like the right thing to do is to point at look, there were things that you guys didn't know back then things you didn't find.

Why they didn't go to his fort again, I have no idea, but they didn't, and this stuff was still there, and Haley and I found it and they should just take it now and someone should be a hero. But I don't know why they don't.

case are retired now, if not all of them. They were great guys, but they didn't They weren't as thorough, or they weren't as determined, or they weren't as I mean, you're kind of criticizing your colleagues, and that's not very comfortable. Sometimes. I think there's a big culture of just understand, you know, protecting each other from that. Yeah, I mean I think that if they all believed, I can't say they all.

Many people believed that her mental health explained her death, and this mental health episode she was in the midst of became the explanation. And what we said in many off the record conversations with law enforcement was, can't you see how her mental state, her state of mind on September seventeen, two thousand and nine, made her more vulnerable to a predator. Yes, it's not an either or It's not she was mentally ill or she was the victim

of a predator. Why can't you embrace the idea that it was both.

wall that you need to blay up. And she wasn't a woodsy girl, you know, according to her family. You know, she's a city girl. She's a she grew up in the suburbs mostly actually, and she was just not going to go hiking in her vans, you know, in the middle of the night and or at any time. And it just defies logic, honestly. So we tried to go in from the bottom, We tried to go in from the top, we tried to go in from the side.

There's just there's there's not. Really, if you ever attempted any of these things, you would you would see there's no reason for her to go there. And she wouldn't, and she could she probably couldn't unless someone was like, you know, pushing her up over these or or helping her down the steep these deep canyon walls. It's you know, or it's just not not a walk in the park and there's no reason she would have gone.

was involved in her death. We right found a lot to persuade us that law enforcement could have solved her death and didn't stop short of it. And maybe You're right, maybe it makes it worse in their minds, you know, the optics of it if she was killed, But everybody now thinks that she was killed and that a cop killed her. So I think that they could actually could be a redemption story.

do it. We got an actor to read her part, and I think it really I hope that it motivates people who listen to think about and feel more passionate about seeking justice for this actual young woman, my Terce Richardson. It was very evident reading the journals that she was

spiraling and struggling and really suffering. And we were looking at the journals also for clues, you know, long before we had this kind of as we were building our case against this person that we I think was involved with her death, we were also looking at the possibility that, you know, something else might have happened, and the journals were a big resource for us looking for clues, but also who should we be talking to about her? Who

really who knew what was going on? And it helped us piece together a lot having that insight into her life, So that was really really important for us.

a world. Crime and law enforcement in Malibu is its own special world. And yeah, it was really great to be working with people who had that kind of history with the show. You know, had been working on it since the beginning. So there are a lot of interconnections among the different seasons, you know, Like I mentioned, Sergeant Wright, who helped us break through with season four, had been a really important part of season one. So you know, they're just it's a small world out there, but a

lot of really wild stuff happens. So it turns out to be a pretty interesting beat.

free right now if you want to. But also I should mention that you can follow us at Lost Hills pod and you can find all the episodes on the Lost Hills show page on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.