Episode 2: An Unreasonable Act

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This series includes content that may not be suitable for all listeners. Listener discretion is advised. Previously on Valley of Shadows.

It's an all out manhunt for John Aujay, the thirty eight year old when hiking Thursday in a rugged section of the Angelus National Forest known as Devil Punch Bowls.

Park, he says, you know, there's a bunch of caves and stuff out here.

I could pretty much disappear and nobody would ever find you.

I participated in that search until my feet were bloody. But day six they said, well, shut it down. Why are you shutting it down? Well, they say that they decided he committed suicide.

I kept contacting homicide and saying something's wrong.

I'm telling you there's a problem.

There's something rotten in the woodpile, and it stinks and I can smell it.

Deputy John Auja disappeared while jogging in the Devil's punch Bowl on June eleventh, nineteen ninety eight.

A couple weeks.

Later, something tragic would also happen to his department issued canine, Bosco, and there are more than a few parallels between what happened with the two. Bosco was a Belgian Malinwah, which looks like a leaner version of a German shepherd. Auj got him as a puppy. He trained him to do police work and brought the dog home to live with him, his wife Deb and their daughter Chloe. I've had my dogs Stringer Bell for over a decade.

His Dringer Bell, Dringer Bear.

You gonna run around. He's a protector and eighty five pounds of emotional support. He's gonna run on the grass.

You're gonna eat some grass.

My home life revolves around my dog, just as the Aujays did around Bosco. We can tell because the dog's front and center and dozens of family photos. Those pictures now belong to Aujay's captain, Mike Bauer, and he shares them with us.

Oh my gosh, we get this picture of Chloe and the dog.

Yeah, you can tell that they were raised together.

She's like squeezing the dogs net, like their heads are pushed together, Like you lived like your best Bude.

Chloe appears to be three or four in the foot, though her arms are barely able to reach around Bosco's neck, so she leans in to make it happen, smiling from ear to ear. Bosco looks annoyed like an older sibling would, which is essentially what he was. And there was another important Bosco memento. Bower came across it while rifling through Aujay's patrol vehicle just days after he was reported missing.

I found his tape recorder in the visor with tape in a little tape recorder.

Like I have.

Bower points to a micro cassette player, something he uses for audio interviews and personal memos.

And so I brought it in the office. I played it. It's charming as hell.

The recording was a snapshot of John and Bosco's relationship. Bower doesn't have it anymore, but he recaps it for us, and it's easy for me to imagine.

He was playing FECh somewhere in like a high score field or somewhere out there in anlet valley.

He's throwing the ball.

To Bosco and he's going, hey, Bosco, and Bosco's barking, and they're doing a training exercise.

Good job, you try.

The connection canine cops have to their dogs is something special because they're together all the time in the trenches, working during the day and unwinding together at night.

When you talk about John's relationship with his dog, you have to understand he's a one man unit and that's his partner, and it's a bond, and it's a big deal because that dog saves that officer's life. The officers in charge of the dog like a child.

Canine officers become so bonded to their dogs that when one of these animals passes away, the Sheriff's department gives it a funeral like it would a uniformed officer. An American flag is draped over the dog's casket, a military band play taps, mourners give eulogies, and riflemen send the dog off with a twenty one gun salute. After Auja vanished, Bauer hears that someone from the department retrieved Bosco from

And I started searching for the dog. Where's the dog?

I was told that dog died at the kennel during a ved exam, and most likely the dog had some sort of heart problem.

The LA Sheriff's Department tells Bauer and the press that Bosco was taken to a police kennel where he died of natural causes, that the dog stopped eating after Auja disappeared, and.

The dog may have died of a broken heart because its master was gone.

That's a kind of sappy crap, I was told at the time.

Years later, Bauer hears a different account from a friend of all Jay's.

She said, it's a shame that dog had to be destroyed.

I said, wait a minute, Bosco died in a vet exam from.

Some sort of heart attack from missing his master.

So Bauer makes some phone calls and eventually reaches a deputy who were not going to name, and this deputy claims that he and a colleague killed Bosco. Bower met him at a diner and recorded their conversation.

Go he's gonna bite, always keep going because I got to.

Kill him before he does.

He says, I shot that dog with my twenty five I said in its kennel.

He says, yeah, I said, you killed the dog. He says, yeah, pull it, throwing that hubster twice cents.

The deputy says it cost them twenty cents the price of a bullet to take out Bosco. He says they did it becase as the dog was dangerous without John Auja there to control it. Bosco should have been reassigned to another deputy, or if the dog was a liability, it should have been properly euthanized.

You would expect a police organization that had ceremonies to honor their dogs to give a shit about that issue.

Instead of getting a police burial, Bosco was tossed in a dumpster behind the kennel where he was shot. Bowers pissed and he confronts the higher ups at the LASD.

I see you guys, what happened to Bosco?

Mike, I don't know, vote, but you will just stop this. We all agreed that it was a suicide and you should just let it go.

No, I'm not gonna let it go.

The department says, it makes no difference what happened to Moscow. Baj died by suicide, so case closed. But if the LASD would lie about Bosco, what else might they be lying about. I'm Haley Fowx.

I'm Betty Shephard and this is Valley of Shadows, Episode two, An Unreasonable Act the Devil's Punch Bowl on June eleventh, nineteen ninety eight. It's a scene we're going to keep returning to because the story of what happened to John AJ is like the sedimentary rock formations in the park. It builds up over time and change of shape as new layers are added. One of those layers comes from the last known person to talk to AHJ before his disappearance.

Jabs the picnic tables.

Dave Evanson has Parkinson's disease, which causes him to slur his speech, so his wife Don is helping him communicate with us. At this point, she knows the story pretty well because her husband has told it many times over the years, and he insists on telling it to us. Evanson's class was exiting the trail to go eat lunch when they ran into Aujenny.

Rail and he was just starting up the trail, and then the kids saw him and started firing questions because they recognized him from Family Night.

Every year, John Auj volunteered at Family Night, a community event held at a local elementary school where Dave and Don Evanson both had worked.

The roster of.

Entertainers included Auja and Bosco.

And Aja became one of the stars of the show because he would bring Bosco and do demonstrations on what the dog could do.

The event took place two days before the class went to the punch bowl, so when the students see Auj in the park, they crowd around him like he's a celebrity or really the owner of a celebrity. Do you remember any of the questions that they asked him?

Where's Boscow?

Where's Bosco? The kids ask? Auj says he had to leave the dog at home because he's here to train for an ultra marathon. Auj took his time with the students and even turned the conversation into a teachable moment, telling them about the importance of wilderness safety. To me, that does not sound like someone who's going out to the woods to take his own life. But that's what the Sheriff's Department says auj did after he finished talking

He's happy.

He was for.

Life, happy, having fun talking to the kids.

So where is the Sheriff's Department drawing their suicide conclusion from. Is there some other evidence we don't know about? Well, if there is, the LASD sure isn't sharing it with us. They denied our public records request, saying the requested records are part of an ongoing and active criminal investigation and are therefore exempt from disclosure an ongoing and active criminal investigation. This response does not make a lot of sense to me,

Including confidential suicide report I somehow got hold.

Of Bauer Hands is a case file that's hundreds of pages long. It includes reports that spanned years of investigation in the Auja's disappearance, and it tells a story.

This was assigned to Homicide Bureau Missing Persons Unit. They were the ones who had to make the decision that this was a suicide.

The missing person's investigation began with the person who reported John auj missing, his wife, Debbie.

Then they began to get the feeling, well, this guy's got some sort of relationship problems, maybe we better look at it.

Debbie tells detectives that she and her husband got into an argument before he took off for the punch bowl, and that she can't find his off duty gun.

They went out to her house and she said there's an empty holster on the workbench, but the two inches missing.

The department begins to speculate that Auj may have taken the gun with him into the Devil's punch bowl to use it on himself.

They then get psychological services involved in and find out about the marriage counseling.

The day before.

The day before Auj disappeared, he and Debbie had gone to couples counseling with an LASD psychologist. By the end of the session, the therapist concluded the Auj's were incompatible and should separate, and the Sheriff's Department says that's what pushed Auj over the edge, the final realization that he and Debbie were done.

When we ended, she said, if you have decided to go through with the divorce, to come back to her and she would give us ideas on parenting skills for Chloe's sake.

This is an interview Bauer recorded with Debbie in twenty fifteen. He questions her at length about her marriage to John because it's the crux of the department's suicide narrative. In a nutshell, Debbie was a stay at home mom while John worked a lot. She liked to party. His version of fun was extreme running. She was full figured with the bleach bond perm He was all muscle, topped off with the military crew cut. The report says that after

Okay, let me get to some characterizations that they wrote in the report. He was not verbally communicating with you, and he was getting more distant from that makes sense?

Yes, was he depressed?

Well, he had told the psychologist that he had been unhappy.

For two years with the marriage.

With the marriage Bower's fact checking the sheriff's report because it attributes a lot of its claims to Debbie's testimony, supposed characterizations of her husband and their life together.

Okay, when you talked to John afterwards on the drive home, what was the conversation between the two of you about this experience with marriage counseling? What was John's attitude?

I Since he was angry, do you.

Think he was hopeful that this session was going to help save the marriage?

No?

No, no, And already things aren't adding up. If Aujy had been unhappy with the marriage for two years and thought it was beyond repair, why would he suddenly snap? Well, the report quotes Debbie as saying that Auj was psychotic.

That's kind of describing a person who's mentally ill.

I don't know if I said he was psychotic.

I do remember saying that his eyes did not look right. I do remember saying that to them, what respect, just a real strong look in his eyes. Maybe his eyes looked intense.

There's a world of difference between intense looking eyes and psychosis. But investigators say there were other indications that Auj was suicidal. He was giving away his prized possessions, including a family heirloom, a gold necklace, and then right before he left for the punch bowl, Auj told Debbie to have a nice life. To detectives, that was Auj saying his final goodbyes. In conclusion, the LASD report says the likelihood of suicide is overwhelming

Auj had been seeing a forty five year old woman named Vicki d Vita. She was a competitive ultra marathon runner just like him, and she was the one Auj gave the heirloom necklace to. Their relationship was a bit of an open secret, especially when she showed up with the punch bowl searching for him day after day. We can't ask Davida what she thinks happened to Auj because she died of cancer in twenty ten, but her statement

He was telling Vicki that he was setting a certain time frame for him to make a decision what he was going to do.

Did you sense a move out was coming? Yes, it appeared that he was going to move out.

Given this new information, Auj sounds less like someone saying his final goodbyes and more like someone saying goodbye to a relationship that had already run its course, and it sheds new light on what Auja may have meant the morning of June eleventh when he told his wife Debbie to have a nice life.

What was your thought at the time when he said it? Did you think suicide at the time?

No, I get it.

Eye, it was not a threat of suicide. Had he ever made a threat of suicide in the past. He was going to kill himself because of some prole you two were having. No, no, never expressed it. No.

Debbie paints a picture of Auj's final days that looks very different from the Sheriff's departments in their report. It seems they've cherry picked details to support their suicide thesis and ignore or downplay those that contradict it. So we keep digging through the LSD reports. Bauer gives us to figure out how the department is connecting in stocks, and we find a kind of personality profile they did on Auj.

I feel like this has summed up so much of what we've read and heard about him into a punch list.

Can I just read the bullet points?

Yeah, okay, organized, responsible, punctual, regimented, committed, structured discipline.

There's a definite theme.

Did not believe in divorce or extra marital affairs, lived by and often said death before dishonor occasionally read Bible.

I like that last night.

It sounds like a real, real fun day. Auj's code of ethics is a big part of why the Sheriff's Department says he couldn't live with himself because he thought divorce and extramarital affairs were dishonorable. The LSD seems to be saying that Auj's girlfriend wasn't a reason to keep on living. It was the reason he took his life, because he was consumed with guilt over his part in ruining his marriage. We try to follow this logic.

His motto was death before dishonor, which alone is extreme. But it's interesting to me that here he is in this position where he knows he can't stay with his wife, but emotionally he's not ready or willing to accept divorce, and then the next day he disappears.

Yeah, but if he's someone that sees giving up on a marriage as failure as dishonorable, then he's sure shit thinks that killing himself and giving up on life is dishonorable. I'm just saying it cuts both ways.

Our main takeaway from this personality profile and the rest of the Auja report is that the suicide theory isn't based on hard facts. It's based on subjective accounts of John Auj's behavior. Just like those rock faces in the Devil's punch Bowl. It's a matter of interpretation.

You'd have to say, how was he going to be dishonored.

We check in with Dave Rathban as Auji's former partner. He was one of the few people who had insight into his personal life.

Divorce. That's dishonorable.

Even eighty year old cop thinks that's ridiculously puritanical.

I mean, might have been in eighteen ninety three, but that was one hundred years before this, so that's beyond a stretch. It's like science fiction or something.

I think Rathman got a divorce, which he says is pretty common for law enforcement officers.

My son even makes this joy. He's a lieutenant on the sheriff department.

And he said, yeah, my future ex wife and I are going to go here and do this and do that. I said, oh, for crying out loud, don't say that. He said, yeah, the deputies will say that. They think it's funny. And I said, I don't know if I think it's funny. Having gone through a divorce.

Rathman doesn't buy the whole death before dishonor explanation, and he feels pretty certain that auj would never take his own life on account of his daughter, Chloe.

If you got on the subject to Chloe, he glowed. Yeah, he glowed and he went softly, wam that fast.

He loved her to death. He would talk about her all the time.

Chloe, is Chloe that he's going to disappear in the mountains and kill himself and leave her alone? Does that fit with death before dishonor not very well? It's pretty dishonorable to just abandon your five year old daughter, Debbie.

Auja has her own doubts about the suicide theory.

It just causes confusion in me, that's all, because I don't know what to believe.

There are more than a few details about Aujay's final days that just don't add up for her, Like what he did the morning of his disappearance.

You said he went to the gas station.

Yes, because when the bill came from the Shell credit card.

And.

I had noticed that he had gassed up on June eleventh before going.

To the ball.

My gas tank is always hovering around empty. So the fact that Auj took the time to stop at a gas station on his way to the punch Bowl strongly implies he hadn't planned on this being his last drive. And according to the missing person's report, Auj put a sunshield on his dashboard to prevent his truck from overheating. It's another indication that Auja was planning to return from his run and drive away from the punch Bowl.

I would hope the Sheriff's department would it investigate this.

I just.

Still want John to be found or his remains.

There's another detail that throws a big wrench in the suicide theory. Remember that missing gun.

His holster was left on the workbench in the garage, and I've never found that small smith wesson.

They told me when he was missing, they didn't find any gun. They told me there was no gun in the truck.

Then I started hearing some rumors that there was a gun in the truck.

This missing gun is one of the lynchpins of the lasd's narrative. They say Aujay didn't usually take a gun with him while jogging, therefore he must have brought the firearm into the punch Bowl with suicidal intent. But it turns out the gun was not missing, not at first anyway.

Okay, so you were at punch Bowl.

Tell me what you did when you got there and what you saw, and any other details that you think are important.

Bower has been running down leads in the AJ case for years. There are a lot of unanswered questions, but at the top of the list is the one about Auj's phantom gun.

I see the truck, I run the plate. It is his truck.

Bauer is interviewing Randy Hebberly. Hebberly was an LASD deputy who worked patrol in the Anilo Valley, and he was one of the first officers to show up at the punch bowl after Auj was reported missing.

Look in the truck real quick with my flashlight. I checked the door. It was locked. I then looked closely in the truck. There's a little compartment and I see the snub nose stainless steel five shot.

That gun was in the truck.

Deputy Hebberly calls his sergeant and tells him he's located Auj's vehicle.

Do you remember telling the station in that cell phone call that you saw a gun.

In the truck. Yes, I told him his gun is in the truck.

According to Hibberly, Auj left his gun in the vehicle, which means it could not have been used by him to end his life. We ask around and find out Deputy Hebberly isn't the only one who remembers the gun. Sergeant Vince Burton confirms Heberly's account. He was one of the sergeants overseeing the auj search.

Deputy specifically said that his off duty gun was in the.

Car, and it wasn't just one deputy.

There's a couple defies that swear there was a gun there, and yet my lieutenant and I had a later time looked at all the records and everything. There's no indication that that gun was ever booked into evidence.

It's not shown.

This seems like a major oversight in the investigation, and even more troubling, Burton says, investigators didn't process the truck for any evidence.

Since it's not a murder, they're not going to process it.

They're not going to impound it.

If missing person says we'd like the car held because we think there's something suspicious, that's up to the detectives to make that call.

The missing person's detectives don't flag the truck for inspection, and so Audie's gun disappears, along with who knows what else. Do you think that the gun may have gone missing between when those first officers arrived and before homicide got there.

That's very possible.

Homicide interviewed me later, but we never talked about the gun, and the gun never came up.

That's weird, right, Homicide detectives make the case for suicide based in part on a missing gun, and yet they don't seem to be that interested in finding the gun. We haven't found any records that show detectives even asked responding officers about it. There appears to be a lot of the missteps in this investigation, starting from the beginning

Bower lives on a remote ranch in Idaho.

I've got to get my egg picker.

His lakeside property includes a home of which he uses as a base camp for his work on the Aujay case, and wide open land for his dogs, horses and ducks.

Oh the ducks, come on, girls, let's go.

Okay.

They have heated coops and kiddie pools to splashing. And the duck's food is handmade by Bower. Every day. He combines carrots, apples, corn, grapes, a bunch of stuff.

And sour dough bread.

And the staler the better because I put it through the blender and chop it up.

I don't feed these animals anything I wouldn't eat.

The ducks seem to be the darlings of Bower's farm, but all sorts of animals flock to him. Deer linger in the clearings Bower can tell him apart by their facial features. Wild turkeys congregate outside Bower's home at the same time each morning, waiting for their breakfast, and his stable of horses includes a one eyed fella named Quincy.

Come on, girls, watching.

Bauer interact with these animals, it's enlightening. It helps me understand why he reacted so strongly to Oscar's death and why he's so invested in the Aujay case. Because the things he cares about he cares about deeply. About ten years ago, Bower had scheduled a meeting with Larry Lincoln, captain of the Homicide Bureau at the time of Aujay's disappearance.

Every supervisor dreads coming into work and finding a horrible situations throwing on there in their lap, and they have to decide, am I going to cover it up?

Or am I gonna face it head on and then stop it.

About a week before the two were scheduled to meet, Lincoln sent Bauer a text saying he had to cancel. Bauer recorded a voice memo of the message right after he got it to add to his AUJ archive.

I'm gonna tape Larry Lincoln's text this morning at just before six am. I worked with John, was involved in the search for him, and was in charge of the investigation into his disappearance. With all that, I can say with certainty that John, and only John was responsible for his death. After eight years at homicide suicides caused me more grief than any murder. The bottom line, one cannot find reason in an unreasonable act. End of text.

Bower doesn't just think the suicide narrative is false. He thinks it's reckless. It promotes bad police work, it tarnishes Aujay's reputation, and causes immense pain to his loved ones. Processing his disappearance is one thing. But thinking Aujae killed himself and did it in a way that they'd never know how or why, that's a whole new level of anguish. And no one felt that more than his daughter, Chloe.

I said, I'm telling you, Chloe, don't believe it.

Do not believe it. Your father did not abandon you. He was taken from you.

Over the years, Bower developed a friendship with Chloe and Debbie, whose lives completely unraveled after Aujay's disappearance. Debbie struggled financially, toggling between part time jobs and collecting unemployment. She sold her house and moved in with her parents. She eventually ended up living in a car in a parking lot not far from the house she wanted shared it with John. And that's why Bauer now has so many of Ajay's things Because Debbie just didn't have a place to store them.

And she said, Mike, we've lost our girl. That's lost your said, We've lost our girl.

At the age of twenty six, Chloe Aujay took her home life. Some might call that an unreasonable act, but I feel for her. Tragedy upended her childhood. She lost her sense of belonging and security after her dad disappeared and the shadow of his alleged suicide followed her from place to place.

I told her that her father didn't abandon her. She wanted to believe that.

And this is why the auj case has become all consuming for Bauer because the La County Sheriff's Department, the institution he swore allegiance to for thirty three years, has told a lie so big and so many times that the story has become its own type of bullet, has wormed its way through time, destroying lives and racking up a number of casualties, and Bower's been forced to simply watch the tragedy unfold.

If John Auj didn't die by suicide, what happened to him? Throughout Bauer's investigation, He's heard a lot of stories about Auj, but there's one that just keeps coming up from multiple witnesses. That John Auj didn't take his own life, someone else did.

Early on, I let the suicide theory sit at fifty to fifty. As I've learned more and more, I'm at about ninety ninety five murder, five to ten percent suicide.

He said, Hey, Larry, I'm hearing shit on the street man and Auj didn't comit suicide. He was murdered. He goes, I'm hearing for more than one person. Well, Sena maybe looked into a little more.

They told our search teams on day one, John may have stumbled into a meth lab by accident.

And what happened to that idea?

This whole meth lab has just been a rumor I've heard for years, and I do wonder what's behind that.

We wonder what's behind that too, and why the Sheriff's department didn't do more to investigate these tips. But it turns out there was a homicide detective who took it upon himself to find out what really.

Happened all the time of the investigator. And I tell people this, even younger guys. This cop stuff is not like TV. You go with what makes common sense. Everything looks like this, well usually if it looks like that, that's what it is.

That's next time on Valley of Shadows.

If you have any information or tips related to the disappearance of John Aujay, please call two one three two six' two nine eight eight nine or Email shadows at pushkin DOT. Fm valley Of shadows is, reported written and produced BY Us Betsy shepherd And Haley. Fox our editor Is Diane. Hodson our executive producers Are Jacob smith And Alexandra. Garaton original music By Jake, Gorsky Ray, Lynch Mike, jersich And Hayden. Gardner sound design By Jake, gorsky fact checking By Anaica.

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