On June eleventh, nineteen ninety eight, the deputy from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department went missing.
It's an all out manhunt for John Auj. Every search and rescue team in La County has been called in to help.
Deputy Jonathan a J spin his day off jogging in a rugged section of the Mojave Desert known as the Devil's Punch Bowl, but he never returned home to his wife and young daughter.
Friends say Auj is a highly trained survivalist in hiker and fear his disappearance may mean he's in serious trouble.
Within days, tips started flooding into the Sheriff's department that their deputy was the victim of foul play.
I'm here, it's shit out of the street man Auj was murdered.
I'm hearing from a one more in person.
A ruler around the drug scene was that a deputy stumbled onto something he's shouldn't of and he was taken care of.
But the Sheriff's department dismissed the tips suddenly called off the search for Auja.
His death certificate says cause a death unknown manner, a death unknown no body.
And thirty years later, the La County Sheriff's Apartment still hasn't found him.
The only law enforcement agency in this country that I know of who has a missing deputy sheriff and doesn't seem to care.
What the hell happened?
What's the answer? Who's motivated to find the answer. And that's where we come in. I'm Betsy Shepherd and I'm Haley Fox. We're investigative journalists, and for the past year we've been retracing Auj's steps in the devil's punch bowl, trying to separate fact from fiction. How hot do you think it is right now?
I don't know.
It's pushing one hundred.
For sure. Your brain does some wonky stuff when you're dehydrated.
And they thought maybe he got on the trail and keeps doing the forest going, just kept roaming.
But out here it's not just heat stroke you have to worry about. It's meth labs hidden in canyons, outlaw bikers running drugs, and deputies who operate on both sides of the law. I think a lot of people picture breaking bad whatever you're talking about, making meth in the desert. Can you give us a reality check?
If you change the names. It's the same exact thing. Is this the story of a man who just got lost in the desert? Or of a cover up inside the nation's largest sheriff's department?
A homicide captain saying, detective, do not find out if this guy's guilty or innocent? Who does that?
Hey, I don't fucking kill a Coffinberry? What are you gonna do to me?
As my father would say, God bless him, there's something rotten in the woodpile, and it stinks and I can smell it.
What really happened to the missing deputy.
Which is Perry Mason? This shit?
This changes my whole way of gin him about theory. Valley of Shadows a new series from Pushkin Industries about crime and corruption in California's High Desert.
Do you have any advice for us while looking into this disappearance? I wouldn't do it alone. In the event somebody did decide that you were getting too close to something, you will not be found killed. You will simply disappear.
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