From Valley of Shadows: Tweaker Talk

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

They said, well, we think he might have sat on the edge of one of those minds and blown himself into the mind. I think, okay, we are really stretching now for an explanation as to why we can't find it.

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

I just still want John to be found or his remains.

They told our search teams on day one, John may have stumbled into a meth lab by accident, and what happened to that idea?

Let's see Bato, Biker's Coffee, Black Beauty Blade Chalk. I made this list from the Internet of all the names that were used to describe crystal meth, chicken feed, crank.

Christy, lengthy in handwritten by my boer.

Go fast, meth, Lee's quick, methless.

Meth Le's quick.

That's cute, TikTok fan.

There's a reason this almost eighty year old retired cop is trying to expand his drug vocabulary.

I began to understand that the world of trying to find John A. J In balb crystal math. That's why I made.

This list, because Bauer keeps hearing whispers of foul play.

The ruler around the drug scene was at a deputy stumbled onto something he's shouldning of.

The first thing I had heard was he had was running in the punch bowl and came upon.

A meth lamb, a meth lab, a meth lab.

Then it was said he tried to be a hero and that's when he was taken care of.

When Deputy John aj disappeared in nineteen ninety eight, there was a meth epidemic ravaging the Antelope Valley. It was a vortex of addiction and crime.

I think Neth has destroyed this community. I think they need to take a bomb and blow it up. It's that bad.

Neth is a powerful stimulant that hijacks the central nervous system and causes people to stay awake for days.

On end after the euphoria.

Experts said longtime users suffer mind twisting crashes, jagged nerves, desperation to sleep, a spooky paranoia, and too often unpredictable rage, often homicidal.

The drug can trick the brain into thinking there's a boogeyman around every corner.

I've had a patient come back to me after two years of not using it, saying that he was sorry that he hit his wife so hard, but he still convinced that she was having an affair with the extraterrestrials.

Maybe that's how the meth lab rumors got started as a drug fueled conspiracy theory, and there were a lot of conspiracy theories following Auja's disappearance, that he was kidnapped by the CIA, and another that he'd started a new life in Alaska. While the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department dismisses the leads as rumors spread by a hopped up game of telephone, but we discover a small detail buried in the missing person's report that suggests the rumors have

You should go have a drink with Larry Brandenberg at his bar and ask him what do you think?

Larry?

I have a few questions for you and see what he says.

And that's exactly what we do. We don't often get to do interviews in people's home bars, such a cool space, and we ask him what do you think, Larry about those tips that came in from local drug informants?

You're not going to get a boy scout or a girl scout that's gonna have information about the murder of a Deathy Shah. How would they know? So you got to talk to these people, and then it's your job to figure out who's telling the truth who's lying.

So we try to figure out who is telling the truth and who's lying.

I'm Betsy Shepherd, I'm Haley Fox and miss His Valley of Shadows, Episode three, Tweaker Talk.

Okay, let's see what you got here, mister Brandenburg.

Do you go by detected?

Okay?

Can you come show us some of your sheriff's men Rebulia.

Betsy and I are at the home of retired lasd homicide detective Larry Brandenburg, poking around his basement bar that doubles as a type of trophy room.

Well, that was a bag one of my old partners. You got me?

What does it say on there?

I think it says the best partner a copkitab or something like that.

Brandenburg's humility stands in contrast to his career highlights displayed on the wall. There's his Marine Corps uniform, A photo from an appearance on the TV show forty eight hours an LASD Service Award, and nearby there's a jukebox, a big screen TV, and a pool table with the giant logo of his Sheriff's badge on it.

Do you have a name for this room?

We just call it the Brandonburg Family Game Room. I try to get the kids go over games, and we're all Dodger fans, so revetsed the Dodgers.

Brandenburg is a grampa. Now goes by Papa, and he has a shock of gray hair to prove it, but he still looks a bit like a detective with his slicked back hair and steely gaze. For more than twenty years, Brandenburg was a bulldog. That was the nickname given to investigators at the LASD Homicide Bureau.

It was a La Tanji course said, yeah. The Sheriff's onmicide detectors are like bulltoks. Once they put their teeth to something and they never let go. Name stuck.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department oversees crime in the unincorporated areas of LA County. It's a massive space, four thousand square miles, which is about the size of Connecticut, covering that much ground. Requires a huge workforce. With its eighteen thousand employees, LASD is the largest sheriff's department in the country. Homicide cops like Larry Brandenburg work out of a bureau located near downtown La, so when they catch a case, they hoof it to whatever part of the county.

I think some of it was lack of interest motivation. I can't explain any other way.

Because the AV was quite the hall from the homicide bureau hour and a half drive time.

Nobody from down in La one to come up here at work because they didn't live up here. Hey see why the drive sucks.

LA deputies didn't want to move to the desert either, so the department had to recruit lovocals to run their AV stations, and that created a schism within the LASD.

They thought they could do their own thing and they didn't need anybody from down in LA tell them what to do. Hey, this is our valley. We know everybody up here, we grew up here, we live here, will handle this shit. But at the same time, department never dedicated the resources to this valley that they should have.

Brandenburg has two sons who are now LASD deputies in the Annelo Valley, and it's become a running joke in the family.

You know, I say, ah, you freaking deputies work up here. You guys are stupid, he'd laugh. You guys from down Belore a bunch of assholes. You come up here and think you know everything. But that was for a long time kind of the feeling.

Brandenburg had heard that Auj went missing, but he didn't know him or the specifics of what happened, and it wasn't a murder investigation. It was a missing person's case, so it was outside his domain. But then a colleague from the Anela Valley reaches out with an especially persuasive tip.

He said, Hey, Larry, I'm hearing shit on the street man, and Auj wasn't. He didn't commit suicide. He was murdered. He came across a math lab and you know, he tried to be a hero. He goes, I'm hearing from more than one person.

And there are other details about the Auj case that don't sit right with him. How many years were you a homicide detective?

A little over twenty.

In not twenty years? Did you ever have a case like this.

Where nobody a suicide? Never think about how would you do that?

So Brandenburg asks to review the Auj case file.

I went to the Captain Frank Merriman, who was the lieutenant in charge of Missing persons who handled the initial investigation, and I said, hey, Frank, I'm getting some information about Auja that you know we need to follow up on. He's what, He goes, that's a suicide. You're wasting your time.

But Brandenburg continues to press this. He's a bulldog, after all, and his persistence pays off. In early two thousand, he gets permission to look through the missing person's report and finds out new details about the deputy's disappearance from a year and a half earlier. He discovers that the department had received numerous tips that Auja was murdered, and that some of those tips came in just three days after the deputy went missing, while searchers were still out looking

It would be assigned to a murder team, people that are on call for new murders.

But that didn't happen because the missing person's team dismissed the tips. What would you say is the main difference between a missing person's investigator and a murder team or homicide detective.

Well, missing persons they handle a large volume. I mean, there are so many people report of missing La County every day, let alone every month every year, so they're making phone calls, try to find relatives. So they're busy doing that stuff. But a lot of it is handled at their desk, on the phone. Or you don't handle a murder like that, at least, I ope not.

Brander Murg thinks these detectives drop the ball big time, and he's not the only one. Internal documents from the LASD show that one lieutenant discussed the AJ case in terms of Murphy's law, which basically means anything that can go wrong will go wrong. We've reached out to the missing person's team, but they declined to talk to us. So all we know about their decision to not refer the case to a homicide detective is the one sentence

Well, shouldn't you maybe looked into that a little more? I mean, that's just my thought, and that's why I started looking at it.

Brandenburg does what he thinks should have happened back in nineteen ninety eight. He treats Aujay's disappearance like a homicide case, and he starts by tracking down two of the names in the missing person's report so he can reinterview the informants. To protect their identities, we're going to call them Sue and Mike. At the time, Sue was in custody on burglary charges, so Brandenburg and his partner head to the

Miss doing it? Or he did it, he sold it, he cooked it, and he did all of it.

Everyone in the area. Hinkle he was the Kevin Bacon and his community's six degrees of separation. He was only in his fifties when a J disappeared, but Hinkl was already known around town as old man. He had wild gray facial hair and was described by a local sheriff's deputy as bearded meta clause. He lived in a large a frame house up on a hill six miles from the punch bowl, and his property was a hive of

Heinkel was showing him knife collection two miles beyond, kind of like showing off a little bit.

You know.

This is an actual recording of Sue's conversation with Brandenburg.

I'll bendy bring it up the hop gath Henkler, Yeah, Okay, Tom, Heinkel brings it up to My boyfriend tells them basically what happened to.

The man that RJ was on a job, ran across that picking shit. That ran across and he had to be taken care of, meaning she was killed.

Sue goes on to say that, according to Hinkle, Auj stumbled on a meth lab and tried to be a hero with slight variations. The story is repeated by Mike in a separate interview and then in second hand accounts from a handful of other informants that Hinkle and or one of his associates had Auj taken care of. According to Sue and Mike, Hinkle pantomimed what he meant by taking care of.

He made the motion like this.

He made a hand gesture like a gun with his finger out, and then opened his hand like he was dropped.

The moment plays like a movie scene in my head. Meta clause is surrounded by a bloom of meth smoke and sharp shiny knives. He mentions the missing deputy with a knowing look. He draws his hand into a finger gun and then releases his fingers, displaying them out, And just like that, John A. J. Disappears down a mind shaft or some other hole out in the desert where people go to bury their secrets.

We're back at the Devil's punch Bowl. And this time we've come for a hike. Oh I love these. This is where you write your name and the time that you leave, so that in case you go missing, people know that we should do that. So dat, Betsy and I write our names down on a sign and sheet at the main trailhead and enter the park.

Why why are we doing Why are we doing this again?

I honestly, I just really had to get eyes on the punch bowl. I am having a really hard time seeing how someone could set up a meth lab in La County Park.

It just feels implausible to you.

Yeah, I mean, it just seems like you would be kind of asking to get.

Caught, not to mention, like meth labs are like not discreen, discreet.

Yeah, all right, let's let's check it out.

Let's check it out. As we start to descend down into the center of the punch bowl, Betsy loses her footing on the steep dusty trail. Okay, do you want me to go in front of you or hold your backpack.

So you can break my fall? Yeah? Holding my backpack like I'm a child method is a working freak.

Yeah, here, I got you. But we keep moving, snaking through the switchbacks in a slow zigzag motion.

How hot do you think it is right now? So one hundred? Did it break one hundreds today?

I don't know.

It's definitely close. It's pushing one hundred for sure. Being out here, we realize this public park is much less public than most.

It feels like we are on another planet and we are like the last living human beings. So I mean in terms of discreetness, like it's open, but it's also like out.

In the middle of nowhere. It's on the fringes.

We don't see any other hikers or rangers, and I find myself playing out the lab scenario in my head. You know, we know that Jonathan oj saw uh Classic kids on a field trip here, but then we also know that he went totally off trail and off roading, and to me, that would be the place where he could stumble upon the meth lab because there is all this land that is not accessible by trail. As we wind our way down the gorge with our phones on SOS mode, the idea of shady things happening out here

I was thinking, I didn't want to say anything. I didn't want to be the weaning of the group. Let's les let go, Let's not beat around the bush, let's get out of the bush. The second Haley gives me an out, I pretty much take off running because I'm always thinking of worst case scenarios, falling off a cliff, getting attacked by a bear. Now I have to worry about stumbling on a meth lab. I don't have to, but I will, because that's just who I am. A

In October nineteen forty seven, at Nila Desert Test Center in California, history is made by this aircraft and its pilot, Captain.

Vieger, and it was over this part of the Anilo Valley where Air Force pilot Chuck Yaeger pushed his plane up to seven hundred miles per hour and broke the sound barrier.

For at time a man has blown an airplane. Not there than the fiel of God.

These military experiments over the AV are actually where the principle of Murphy's law comes from. Because these space cowboys got so banged up while pushing their bodies to the limit resisting the forces of gravity and physics that an engineer on the project, a guy named Edward Murphy, said something along the lines of anything that can go wrong will go wrong. It be long before things would start

The aerospace cutback soon created a domino effect across the Antalope Valley, and the munce thriving economy began to evaporate, like.

So much water in the hot desert sun.

The meth trade became an easy option for unemployed residents to make some cash.

At the time, the Anlope Valley was a sesspool. It was a desert. It was known for manufacturing met the amphetamine, so people were getting busted left and right.

This is Chris Turk.

My dad calls me Christine when I'm in trouble, but most couldn't call me Chris.

Chris Turk is originally from Massachusetts, but she got stationed in the Antelope Valley while working for the US Army. She left the military after a few years, had a family, and then found work with a local attorney. Because when Matthew skyrocketed, so did the need for criminal defense. What was your position with him?

At first it was just apparently ago, and then it was investigative. I would go out on the streets and I would talk to the people. I would talk to some cops. I would join Everett to defend the client.

Turk discovered she had a real knack for it.

All the lawyers started asking my boss if I could work on some of their cases.

She was good at getting people to open up me.

I was more on their level. They would all talk to me. My ex husband is the half brother of these other two guys that were involved in a lot of the drug scene.

And she had a last name that carried weight with drug users.

Even though it was your marriage. A lot of them would just assume I was part of that family. They were really easy to get information, sometimes too easy.

The attorney Turk worked for had a meth habit of his own, so his law firm was well connected with the drug scene, and over time Turk learned a lot about the criminal ecosystem in the valley, who the big dealers were, where their laps were located, and which cops were making the busts. And she started to notice a trend that it was just the low level offenders who were getting picked up over and over again, but none of the heavyweights who were supplying the drugs, people like

He would have been one of the first people I invested, yet he ever was ever that one's never even touched.

By the late nineties, Hinkle had a day job working at a gas station a long pair Blossom Highway near the punch Bowl that's where he'd meet with a range of characters, including local sheriff's deputies.

He became the guy on the hill, and he became idolized.

And then something seemed to elevate Hinkle from a dealer to something more mythic.

Everybody would call him God because he had that power.

Before Aj, he was just Hinkle.

Jay.

He was God.

He didn't start calling himself God until after the aj disappearance.

Yep, yep.

There are plenty of people with a God complex, but few are so brazen to actually call themselves God. So when Hinkle takes on the title, Turk is floored. And then she hears about Hinkle's possible connection to Auji's disappearance. She hears it from Sue and Mike, who were clients of the lawyer she worked for.

Tom Hinkl's the one who told all the information about the cop who ran across something.

He shouldn't have.

Everybody called them God. He untouchable.

Turk notifies the authorities because this isn't a low level drug offense, this is a possible homicide, and she goes straight to the top, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which has a field office in the area.

And I talked to these two federal agents about what was going on.

Turk offers to introduce the FBI agents to Mike, but she says the meeting didn't go so well because when she and one of the agents show up to talk to Mike, he's hitting a meth pipe.

I mean, I'm talking a clouded smoke when we opened the door and the FBI agent and I just looked at each other.

We reached out to the FBI to ask about their involvement in the AUJ case, but they give us their standard line that they can neither confirm nor deny the existence of an investigation. So we don't know what came of Turk's tip to the Feds, but the info eventually makes its way to homicide Detective Larry Brandenburg, who does follow up on it.

Chris Turk was involved in the whole myth drug culture world, so I'd talked to her. If I could get information from her, I'll take it, you know, And if it's oh, crap, I just discarded.

Determining the credibility of informant statements is a complicated art. There are plenty of reasons that Sue and Mike and others related to the Aujay case may be untrustworthy. Informants are often longtime drug users with fuzzy memories, lengthy criminal histories, and ulterior motives, so Brandenburg says you have to listen to them and suss out their claims accordingly.

If you just just treaded everybody and you don't follow up on none of it, you're gonna buy anything out.

Brandenburg was skeptical going into his interviews with Sue and Mike, but by the end he believed the couple because they had little to gain. Sue already had a release date for her burglary charge and a lot to lose. Brandenburg says it would be incredibly shortsighted for them to lie about a man who had a reputation for being a cold hearted killer.

That's a pretty dangerous thing to do if you just make it up stories. I mean, that's really dumb. I was sure wouldn't consider doing it because if it gets back that you're snitching, or even if you're making this shit up, you're going to pay for it.

He also says that Sue and Mike and others would go on to tell the story many times, and the stories were similar and remained largely consistent.

The little details might change, but the main theme of it shouldn't if you're telling the truth.

And one hyper specific detail that never varied was the description of Hinkle's hand gesture, the one where he made a finger gun. That detail sticks with Brandenburg because there'd been talk of a gunshot from another source. In June nineteen ninety eight, a witness reported to Missing Persons detectives that he heard the sound of a firearm discharged around sunset the night au Jay disappeared.

We had talked about someone saying they heard a gunshot.

Devil's punch Bowl Park ranger Jack Farley remembers hearing this detail during to search for auj You.

Can't see the house from here, but it's like a half mile below the trail up there where the people lived that said they.

Heard that, And paralegal Chris Turk says the gunshot was discussed around town.

There was one shot like that, one witness said, because that's when I heard on the street.

Brandenburg tries to track down the witness using the name listed in the Missing Person's book.

That guy wouldn't talk to me. I tried more than once to go talk to him. I think he worked at the punch bowl or he lived right by it. So the gunshots heard near the punch bowl a single gunshot.

These details keep adding up, and Brandenburg starts to see how the scenario might have played out. Auj was running past one of Hinkle's meth labs.

He saw a bunch of streakers hanging out there, and then they're all sitting there with their hands in the cookie jard. Oh what the fuck we do now? Gee, we can't let this guy leave. He never left.

Brandenburg decides it's time to send the information up the flagpole to the homicide captain. Tell him what he's hearing from informants. But the captain blows him off.

Oh that's just tweaker talk. Tweaker talk, that's all it is.

Brandenburg says that term tweaker talk was used to discredit informants like Sue and Mike and undermine the theory that Aujy was murdered.

Well, tweakers do talks best e when they get high, they talk amongst each other. Yeah, some of it's embellis, some of it's changed. But if you had a main theme, it's keep getting repeated. There could be something to that.

Tweaker talk is a term Chris Turk is also familiar with because it was used to discredit many of the clients she worked with. She doesn't deny that meth users are often sleep deprived and paranoid, but that doesn't mean they don't have valuable information, especially when it comes to a subject they know.

The same tweakers that they said were not reliable. You couldn't get information from him, well, the same ones that they used information forwards to bust other people. So you can't listen to him on one hand and not listen to him on the other hand.

When an informant provides leads that pan out for law enforcement, their status changes to a confidential, reliable informant, and one of the best ways for investigators to determine if these leads are legit is to keep investigating see if the intel can be corroborated.

To me, that needs to be looked at real hard and seriously. Not Ah, she's a freaking tweaker. I don't believe the things she says, especially when it's already coming from some other sources.

But Brandenburg says he couldn't really do that because his captain undermined him at every turn, called him names, and tried to strong arm him into folding his investigation.

And I told him this bullshit. I don't agree with it.

We heard from you.

Why you're so passionate about it?

Why do you think he had such reaction?

I don't know. That's the question I can't answer.

Brandenburg is taken aback by homicide Captain Frank Merryman's aggressive attempts to put the AUJ matter to bed, especially after he finds a note in the missing person's file from Merryman which shows that Captain may have had his own doubts about the case.

I found a little posted when I was looking through the original file. When I first got it, yell will post it, and it was Frank's handwriting and his initials, and it said should this go to a murder team?

To me, this feels like a no brainer. It should have gone to a murder team to thoroughly vet the tips, to prove or disprove them. That should have happened three days after Auj went missing, when the tips first started coming in. If not, then it should have happened as more and more informants came forward, and it definitely should have been investigated in May of nineteen ninety nine, when a large scale meth lab was discovered near the punch Bowl where AUJ disappeared.

A few weeks into Detective Brandenburg's investigation, he gets a new lead from an LSD sergeant working narcotics in the Annealo Valley. He tells Brandenburg about a property they searched the year before, a meth lab that was located right down the road from the Devil's Punch Bowl.

Okay, let me get him a barry to this, Matt. Here's the punch bowl right here. This is how close it was, and hinkled it right over here too.

There was a meth lab near where AUJ disappeared. It wasn't in the punch Bowl technically, but it was close by, just two miles up the road that leads to the Punch Bowl parking lot.

The searcht was served at Devil's punch Bowl Road, Para Blossom, California, a forty acre parcel land located immediately northwest of Devil's punch Bowl County Park. During the search warrant, a major myth ampatami lab was discovered.

Brandenburg's reading the search warrant from May of nineteen ninety nine. That's when the LASD and other law enforcement agencies busted the lab. Brandenburg connects it to the AUJ case in early two thousand and So were you the first person to make the connection between what some of these informants were reporting and the lab that was found near the punch Bowl?

I think so, because I don't read any of it in these reports earlier on about that.

For Brandenburg, this was outside conference that the informant statements weren't just.

Tweak or talk.

The lab was located down the road from the Devil's Punch Bowl, a straight shot from the park.

But that's not all.

It was owned by a good friend of Tom Hankles, a guy named Rick Carroll. Carroll operated the lab on his property and he let other people cook there. It was a kind of meth making co op and a hangout spot for all sorts of local drug users. The lab had already been dismantled by the time Brandenburg enters the scene, but he sets out to learn everything he can from reports. The day of the lab bust, about two dozen law enforcement officers fan out across the property.

Rick ingkles it was a resident deputy. I will sorry the area he lived in. He knew this area probably better than anybody.

Deputy Angles also knows the players in the drug scene and how to navigate the desert terrain. So as he and others search the Carroll property, they discover an assortment of trailers, cars, and storage containers. Law enforcement uses the steel probe to check the ground for buried objects because meth users are known to get creative when hiding their stash.

It was extensive at underground tunnels. They had underground rooms, They had all the hardware, the glassware. These is a pretty big operation.

There is all sorts of stuff down there, a propane stove, flasks, and telltale blood like stains created by red phosphorus, one of the major chemicals used to make meth. Something deputies didn't find was meth. It appears to have been cleared out before the raid, but the lab likely would have been active in nineteen ninety eight when Aujy disappeared.

The lab equipment recovered was capable of producing hundreds of pounds of mess amfetamine. In addition, there was an operational back hole on the property also recovered as one shot got along with hundreds of additional pieces of evidence.

And there was another notable discovery at the compound.

The southeast portion of the meth lab, which have been on this side of it, drops right down into the punch bowl and that's where the shooting range was that they had, and they had silhouettes of cops at that shooting range. Can you say that again?

There were silhouettes of cops that the people that were at this math lab would.

Take shots at yeah, target practice, So these guys don't want like cops too much.

Brandenburg wants to better understand the proximity of the lab to the punch bowl, something best seen from an aerial view, so he calls up a colleague who flies helicopters for the Sheriff's Department. He's a pilot from the Special Enforcement Bureau, the same bureau auj worked for. They take off and circle over the Carroll property.

You see right over here is this property and you can see the outbuildings and the trailers where the meth lab was, and all these trails.

Then the pilot makes an offhand comment about Auja that causes things to click into place.

For Brandenburg, he goes, yeah, I used to run some of those trails right there with.

Aujiy oh wow, So he knew some of the routes that he would take.

So this lab was located right next to a trail that auj had run before, and it was just two miles from Raje's truck was discovered, which is almost the finish line in ultra marathon terms. At this point, a lot begins to gel for Brandenburg. He's more convinced than ever by what the informants have told him.

All that stuff just started adding up all the time of the investigator. 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.

So we go to see what it looks like for ourselves. As we approached the property where the Carroll lab was located, it looks a lot like I imagined it did back in nineteen ninety nine. It's sprawling, dotted with structures and shipping containers, and has a fence around the perimeter.

Seeing how close we are to where Aujay's truck was found, and that there is like a little road here that leads up to the mountains, it certainly seems possible that he could have stumbled on this like as he was trying to return to the park.

Yeah, that theory is starting to hold the more water to me. It's after we leave the property that we discover a new detail about the care Carrel lab that it's close to another key location, in this case, driving away from the Carroll property, we just happened to spot a mailbox with an address of someone we've been trying to reach for months. It turns out the witness who reported hearing a gun shot at sunset the day All

Off, which is Perry Mason.

This shit.

This changes my whole way of thinking about that theory.

How had the Sheriff's department not made any of these connections before? For why when the Carol Lab was rated in nineteen ninety nine, didn't someone think, huh, this seems like a pretty big coincidence given all the rumors we've

The AUJ thing that was too much of the same thing being said, how many times do you have to share it and not investigate with There's something more going on here.

Brandenburg keeps investigating, but it's hard working in a vacuum, and the Sheriff's Department isn't making things any easier for him. The detective pushes on, though, and he discovers Auj's disappearance may be connected to a bigger criminal enterprise, and as the scope of his investigation expands, so does the pool of suspects.

So the more I looked, you know, the more I started document shit. It in a short time started snowballing, and then the DEA got involved to try to tackle this massive meth amphetamine problem in Animal Valley, you know, the mostly white bikers that were cooking this stuff.

Next time on Valley of Shadows, the.

Outlaw bikers were big out there. If you crossed them, there was a guaranteed death that was going to be murdered. She said that there was a guy in the Bottles motorcycle gang and she said he was involved in this burder for the deputy and that she had been shown where he was buried.

A body was found out in the remote.

Area, duct taped, bloodied. You could see it like that imprint of a boot, a motorcycle boot on his face.

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 Haley Fox and Betsy Sheppard. Our editor is Diane Hodson. Our executive producers are Jacob Smith and Alexandra Garreton. Original music by Jake Gorsky, Ray Lynch, Mike Jersich, and Hayden Gardner. Sound designed by Jake Gorsky, fact checking