Introducing Valley of Shadows: The Devil’s Punchbowl

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Hey listeners, Betsy Shepherd here, I'm dropping into your feed to bring you a preview of my new podcast, Valley of Shadows. It's about an LA County Sheriff's deputy named John Aujay, who went missing in the Majave Desert back in nineteen ninety eight. Nearly thirty years later. The Sheriff's

This series includes content that may not be suitable for all listeners. Listener discretion is advised.

So it's okay, yeah.

I'll turn it down just a little bit because sometimes you get animated.

I get pissed off, pissed off old cop.

This pissed off old cop is Mike Bauer.

Okay, my name is Mike Bauer, retired Captain LA Sheriff. I retired in two thousand and two. My last assignment was Major Crimes Bureau, Detective Division, LA Sheriff.

Bower spent thirty three years climbing the ranks of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. And he looks the part of a retired captain. His white hair and mustache are neatly groomed, and his eyes are permanently fixed and a look that says, do not fuck up on my watch. And he's pissed off because of something that happened to one of his guys on his squad back.

In the summer of nineteen ninety eight.

June eleventh started off like a normal day in Los Angeles, June gloom and bad traffic.

I got up early out of Long Beach and headed up the six ZHO five and into East LA.

Our office in East LA.

Bauer was doing paperwork when a call came into the front desk. The receptionist answered.

Then she hung up and she comes down to get a cup of coffee across the hall and I said, hey, who was that. It was John Aujay.

John Aj was a thirty eight year old canine cop and he was calling to inquire about an upcoming job assignment.

I said, well, I've been trying to get hold of him, and she says, oh, well, maybe he'll call back.

He never called back.

John Aj was working for the unit Bower headed up at the time, the Special Enforcement Bureau or SEB for short.

Which consists of seven or eight SWAT teams, and the SWAT teams were involved in tactical responses to high risk situations in the field.

SEB handled things like active shooter situations, hostage negotiations, search and rescue. It was a job that attracted adrenaline junkies like Auj. He was an Army paratrooper and a survivalist, and those military skills, along with his buzz cut and square build, made him a shoe in for the Sheriff's Department.

He was in the Army in Special Forces. He was working at the elite unit of the department. I have to call him a loaner, but he was an elite loaner. Because the guy was doing fifty mile runs. He was an animal.

Auj got his kicks by going on long runs through California's backcountry. He go out deep into the wilderness to conquer the only obstacle course that still challenged him. And that's how Auja was spending his day off. On June eleventh, nineteen ninety eight, he woke up, put on his running gear and drove to one of his favorite parks, the Devil's Punch Bowl. It's a rugged canyon where the Angelus National Forest, the San Gabriel Mountains, and the Mojave Desert

That evening, I got a phone call saying that w Oj is missing, that he didn't come back to his vehicle and that they were going to start some more extensive searching for him.

It's an all out manhunt for John Auj. Every search and rescue team in La County has been called in to help the thirty eight year old when hiking Thursday in a rugged section of the Angels National Forest known as Devil Punch Bowls Park. It's a beautiful but dangerous area, an area where it may be extremely difficult to find all Jay.

It's a pretty unique situation.

The Sheriff's department is called in to look for a missing hiker who's one of their own. So the search and rescue team sent out to look for Auj consists of his friends and colleagues.

We took our teams out and deployed in two man teams over the edges of the trails, into the little nooks and crannies and the gullies that he could have slipped and fallen into.

But searchers find no trace of Ajay. It was as if he just vanished into thin air. And now, nearly thirty years later, the deputy is still missing.

I guess I'll open a box.

All that remains from Auj's life is packed into five cardboard boxes. The items are wrapped in plastic and Bower wears gloves as he combs through them.

This is John's work jacket, and it's an SEB jacket with his name embroidered on it, and Boss Goo his dog.

Now Bower's preserving Auja's belongings for future developments in the case.

Okay, so here's his running shoes with his name on the back.

Those should have some.

DNA in him.

The artifacts also tell us who Auja was. There's a photocollage full of happy memories him and his high school sweetheart Dub on their wedding day, a birthday party for their daughter Chloe, who was just five when he disappeared, and puppy picks of Bosco Auj's department issued canine. And next to these snapshots of domestic life, there's a steel ballistics helmet intended to stop rifle rounds, trophies for marksmanship,

A death certificate says cause, a death, unknown manner, a death unknown no body.

The deputy's body has never been found, which raises a lot of questions for Mike Bauer and a survivalist getting lost in the woods another big question mark. Over time, the miss of it all has turned into something else, deep and unsettling, suspicion about the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

The only law enforcement agency in this country that I know of, and I've looked around, 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 my cue.

When Mike Bouer first told me about au Jay, I thought an unsolved disappearance involving a cop, that's unusual. But when he started talking about the Sheriff's Department, his department, that's when I locked in. Because you'd expect the LA County Sheriff's Department to turn over every stone to find their guy. So the claim that the LASD may have an interest in not solving the case, now that's a story.

Hey, Betsy, Hey do.

I'm good?

I'm ready.

Yeah, I go to do this.

It's about time. I'm a little road t adventure all right, let's do it.

We've teamed up on stories before and decided to get the band back together to finanswers about this missing deputy and to take on the largest sheriff's department in the country.

There's a code of silence in law enforcement. You break that code of silence, you're done.

Hey, if don't fucking kill a Copponberry, what they gonna do to me?

It's an obstruction of justice of a very large scale.

I'm Betsy Shepherd.

I'm Haley Fowx, And this is Valley of Shadows, a show about crime and corruption in California's high Desert. Episode one, the Devil's Punch Bowl. Betsy and I are making the trek from downtown Los Angeles to the Anaelote Valley that's the desert area north of la where Deputy Auja disappeared. The drives about sixty miles, but takes an hour and a half to two hours because of the mountainous terrain.

See you actually have to take We gotta go.

North, Yeah, we're gonna go north, but this is La Dude.

We gotta go south.

One in south five north fourteen and then I think there's a one thirty eighth throat in there, but nothing's a street.

Shod spoken like a true Agelino.

I was born and raised in La County, Go Dodgers, but this part of it feels worlds away. The Antelope Valley, or the AV as it's sometimes called, is a three thousand square mile stretch of the Mojave, but this part of the high desert doesn't have the same allure and vibingess as places like Joshua Tree. Instead, the Avy is mostly empty space, dotted with defence plants, bedroom communities, and tumbleweed towns.

So a lot of just like.

Trailers kind of just parked out in the desert.

Yeah, I mean power lines and scrub rush. Our story takes place in and around Pair Blossom, California. It has a population of fifteen hundred and it's where the Devil's Punch bowls located. Driving through it, Betsy gets a case of deja vu.

He g had anxiety coming to places like this because it reminds me of like.

A town that it grew up and there's just just like I feel the oppressive weight of boredom.

Oh really.

I moved to La several years ago from South Louisiana. Had never been to Anela Valley before, but it was immediately familiar to me. Because if you were to replace desert with swamp, this region would look a lot like the small town I'm from. It's rural and kind of run down. There's more landscape than real estate, lots of pickup trucks in town.

Life seems like a thing of the past.

We got.

An abandoned motel, what's this, Oh like an abandoned old restaurant and wreck hall and people getting gas to presumably be all their way.

Yeah, I mean, I think the three gas stations in a row tell the story.

But the closer we get to the Devil's punch Bowl, where auj was last spotted, and other worldly landscape appears, full of spiky Joshua trees and sandstone columns.

It's actually really beautiful out here.

It's not expected to land.

Are you looking at these huge rocks jutting out of the ground and like they're making all those crazy shadows.

Seen anything like them?

I haven't either.

I feel like I've been an old Western movie, you know, like we're just got this like wide ethic landscape shots.

Total endless horizons, totally endless horizons.

I can see why John A j. Liked to come out here. It's pretty pretty, not big.

Okay, we are pulling into the Devil's punch Bowl County Park parking lot.

Here we are.

We've come here to retrace John Aujay's last known steps and to meet with ranger Jack Farley. He was working on the punch Bowl the day the deputy disappeared.

Hi are you?

But are you Jack Farley?

By chance?

This is my reporting partner, Haley.

Thank you for meeting us out here. Yes, Jock Farley's retired now, but for thirty five years he was assigned to work the punch Bowl.

What a cool job.

Great for me?

Yeah, it was awesome, good job.

It was Farley's job to keep an eye on things, to tend the grounds and patrol the area. So he noticed when AJ became a regular at the punch Bowl and he clocked Auj's regular parking space, the one closest to the trailhead.

So I can.

Remember seeing him sitting in the back of his truck when you get done with a run in the mountains. So when I'd walk out into the parking lot, I'd see him sitting out there and ask him about his run.

Farley remembers that the day Auj disappeared, his white Ford F one to fifty truck was parked in that very same spot, surrounded on all sides by wilderness.

One thing that impresses us so much about this area is that you have a desert landscape on one side, you have a mountain, it's in forests on the other, and then in between it's these really cool rock formations.

Right, it's all uplifted from earthquake activity. Oh wow, that's a punch bowl fault and that runs parallel with the mountains. And then when you came up to hear you cross the San Andreas Fault, which of course the big one that runs through California, several faults in the area. It took all this sand that was laid down flat by streams and tilted up into vertical relief.

And it creates a bowl shape.

You can see a definite bowl shape coming around like this so that's where it got the punch bowl name.

We're not totally sure about the devil part of it, though, according to local lore, early homesteaders saw grinning devil in the rock formations. We didn't see Satan in the rock face, but we did see something else thanks to a county park employee named Dave Numar.

See the shadow ends.

There's that big rock kind of all by itself.

If you look, it's like a forehead is facing us and there's a nose pointing street.

It looks like George Washington.

Yeah, it's a natural not rest more cool.

So there's all kinds of faces out here because it's like, oh if our brains are programmed to see patterns.

Pattern recognition is why we see gods and goddesses in the stars and the man in the moon. It's also a key part of criminal investigations, a way to turn information into a story. And that's why we've come to the Devil's Punch Bowl to see if we can make sense of what happened on June eleventh, nineteen ninety eight. So we pull out a map we printed from the internet. Because we're prepared journalists and elder millennials and we present it to Ranger Farland, let me show you what.

It looks like.

Yeah, line will definitely.

Be definitely get us lost in the wilderness. Farley proves his outdoor prowess by whipping out some real maps of the area to help orient us to our surroundings.

Okay, here's the Devil's Okay, and there's Burkhart Trail right there, goes over toward Devil's Chairs, so that'd be just to the east, goes to South Fork.

One witness reported seeing Auj near the picnic tables at the main trailhead sometime before noon. This witness was a local teacher there on a field trip with a bunch of elementary school kids. Auj stopped to talk to him. He pointed to a jagon mountain in the distance, Mount Baden Powell, and said that's where he was headed.

So the high mountain behind the telephone pole over there, Yeah, that's Baden Powell and that's where he would go sometimes.

How tall is the mountain?

Jeez, that is one of the higher ones. Let me think ten ten, I mean in this range.

And he would run from here to that mountain all the way over there and then.

Run up it. Yeah, he'd run over there and then they're switchbacks all the way to the top of that mountain.

Aujy was spotted again later in the day, when multiple witnesses say they saw him jogging through a campground just north of the mountain in the direction of the punch Bowl parking lot. But when Farley left his post at five PM, Auj's truck was still parked in the lot, and it stayed parked there as the evening bloomed over the desert, and then close to midnight, Aujy's wife called the sheriff's station to report him missing.

As June eleventh, nineteen ninety eight years It's end, Debbie auj becomes increasingly panicked because her husband, Deputy John A. J told her he'd be home around dark and by now he's several hours late. So she dials up one of the share of stations where Auja worked.

The call comes into the desk and it's from Debbie and it says, hey, my husband, who's a deputy, he went for a run and he didn't come home.

Vince Burton was a sergeant in the Antelope Valley. He was also Aujay's colleague and friend, so he gets on the phone with Debbie.

She was just upset.

She was crying. She was obviously very concerned.

I just I said, okay, Debbie, we're sending people up there, you know, keep you posted.

Patrol deputies high tail it to the punch bowl where they find Aujay's truck.

But no, they think maybe.

He got injured, slipped and fell for how to run in with some wildlife. So Burton dispatches Search and Rescue to the site and he calls in their coordinator, Dave Soer, to discuss Auj's likely route.

And Dave comes in and we pull up a map of the area. And I told him at that time, I said, you know, John's a runner, and he goes, yeah, and I said, no, he's a long distance runner. He's an ultra marathoner. He's like what.

Ultra marathoners are running extremists who power through long distances. In fact, Auj was scheduled to compete in a one hundred mile run the week after he went missing, so responders have a hard time wrapping their heads around the scale of the search.

I gave him the best information I could give him. You know, don't start your grid pattern so small.

This is Randy Meggerdley. He was a patrol deputy for the Share Department and one of Auj's running buddies. He reiterates to the command post that Auj was a beast.

You're running goat trails is basically what I categorized them as.

What do you mean by that goat trails?

Well, they're just megshift trails. Sometimes they'll be covered with snow, sometimes they'll be covered with mud, crossing rivers. I mean, it's crazy what kind of stuff that we were doing. There was one that we did. It was hand over foot trying to get up this mountain.

Wow.

And so part of the activity was figuring out how to get to.

The end of it.

Yeah, and one piece.

Hearing Meggerdy talk about ultra marathoners, it sounds like they have no off switch. So maybe Auj just overdid it.

Your brain does some wonky stuff when you're dehydrated, and they thought maybe he got on a trail and he was doing the forest gump, just kept running.

That's a theory that Auj was doing the forest gump and just kept running and got himself into a tailspin of dehydration. Responders take note and fan out across the search grid.

I was nice to him. I said, do you know I know the area pretty well?

If you guys want help, Ranger Jack Farley again, the.

Guy goes, no, we're search and rescue. We pretty much know what we're doing, you know. So I go okay, okay.

But it doesn't take long for the pros realize they're in over their heads.

So then they're going, hey, are you the guy that knows the area? You know, maybe you could give us a little help.

So Farley leads a few groups of deputies and bloodhounds down the local trails.

At one time thought they caught a scent and it went up on the trail going toward the Burckhart Trail, And we had talked about someone saying they heard a gunshot. 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 the dogs pick up a scent, possibly Aujay's, on a trail that's near a local resident. That guy reported to searchers that he heard a single gunshot at sunset the day Auja vanished. It's a detail the Sheriff's Department registers as a potential clue.

So I took a group of deputies over there and we went that really rugged, wooded canyon.

They didn't find anything, but searchers do spot some footprints on the mountain where Auj told people he was going. So Aujay's captain, Mike Bauer, takes to the skies to see where they lead.

And that was the first time I ever stepped out of a huge helicopter on the side of a mountain with one skid touching, And then that helicopter flew off while we examined the openings the Big Horn Mine to see whether or not it had been broken into.

Corn is a mine on top of the mountain leftover from the gold rush days. Its entrance has been welded shut to keep out hikers, and when the helicopter lands, nineties action movie style Bowers crew finds no signs of a break in. Auj's reported missing late Thursday night.

By the end of the.

Day Sunday, the Sheriff's department kicks things into high gear. They call in the US Army and Air Force along with the LASD heavy hitters. It's a specialized squad called Emergency Services Detail or ESD.

They do search and rescue, underwater search and recovery, and they support the special weapons team with medical skills.

Dave Rathbin was one of the ESD members sent out to search for Auj.

And the adrenaline that you get from ESD is different from any other adrenaline.

ESD deputies are equipped to handle all types of a emergency scenarios. But it wasn't just the rocky ledges and wild animals they.

Had to worry about here.

The area was full of all kinds of criminal activity.

One of the things they told our search teams on day one was John may have stumbled into a meth lab by accident. So that was told to us when we were out searching. And the reason they told us is they recommend that we take weapons.

Rathman and his team of searchers come to the punch Bowl armed and ready for action because maybe Auj isn't lost or injured or running for the hills. Maybe he's the victim of foul play. The command post doesn't expand on why they thought Aj may have been taken out by meth related violence, but to Rathbun, this theory doesn't sound too far fetched because the Anelo Valley is isolated outlawsh and on account of its size, difficult to police.

There are a lot of people who just don't want to be around other human beings out there, which makes them sometimes dangerous. There's people cooking meth.

Ah.

It was a little bit like the Old West in a way. I mean, this is a very unusual, strange place.

And remember that abandoned mind searcher scoped out. Well, it turns out they're everywhere and they are a prime location for body dumping.

One of the things ESD did was recover dead bodies from minds.

And it wasn't just the mines. Corpses turn up all over these parts.

You know, if all the dead bodies that were up there from being deliberately disposed of, stood up and once they'd be shoulder to shoulder.

It's a chilling image of the area's darker side. AJ would jog from the Devil's Punch Bowl into the Angelus National Forest, which has been called the most dangerous national forest in America. Around the time of Auj's disappearance, it's estimated that two to three dozen corpses turned up in the forest every year, and those were just the ones that were found. So Rathman understands the danger he faces, but pushes on. In search of footprints, you have to.

Look at the ground and look at bushes that have been pushed in. We walked and walked, and walked and walked, and walked and walked.

The search is taxing for Rathban physically and emotionally, because he and Auj were friends and back in the early nineties they were even partners.

If it was me that needed cover, he'd be there. Didn't even think about it. Someone you could definitely depend on.

Rathban and Auj spent a lot of time driving around together, but they didn't sit around riffing like partners in a Buddy Coock movie.

He was laconic, didn't have a lot to say unless you worked on him, and he was always kind of severe serious.

Auj was hardly two dimensional, though he used his dead pan personality to mess with people.

He had this secret sense of humor, but it was really hard to tell which CARDI was playing, the funny card or the I'm John and I'm dead serious card.

One time, Rathbin and Auj had to chase down a suspect. Rathbn was driving and he ends up reversing down a one way street. They got the guy, but Auj looked.

Pissed, and he added that Dave, I need to talk to you.

Rathven's gotten pretty good and impersonating John Auj's baritone voice, he says he sounded a lot like Lurch from the Adams family.

What you just did was a violent in California state law, and if you do something like that again, I'll have to write you up.

John.

We were chasing a suspect, and we are law enforcement officers and so we get exemptions during those things that may be true, but it was illegal. Is this John being funny? You would not know, and he will never let you know.

Auj was hard to read. In fact, there's even confusion over the pronunciation of his last name. His family says Oj, but to his friends.

It was Auj, and he never corrected us. And he's not very bashful.

We'll never know why he didn't tell people how to pronounce his name, but it seems fitting for someone who remains a mystery to so many. Auj was an enigma to just about everyone around him, so when he disappeared, he became an easy target for conspiracy theories. Stories begin to circulate that Auj's alive and well living in Alaska. Others say Mexico. Some say he was recruited by a

Dave, Yes, you guys think you can find people with your searches, and you think you're pretty good at it. Right. I could go on the mountains and you'd never find me. And I said, there are people who want to be found that we can't find. So I'm not really impressed with your with your declaration there. If you don't want to be found, I oh, pretty sure I wouldn't be able to find you.

So I agree.

And of course that conversation takes on extra meaning a searchers keep coming up empty handed.

I participated in that search until my feet were bloody, as did several of my peers. But day six they said, well, shut it down. What do you mean shut it down? Who said that? Who gave that order and shut the thing down? What are you talking about?

Day six, the Sheriff's department folds the search after six days and gives a statement to the press Sergeant Sower, one of the deputies overseeing the operation, says, quote, a good analogy would be someone coming up to you and giving you two to three pieces of a five hundred piece puzzle and asking you to guess what the picture is. Throw into that a few pieces of an entirely different puzzle, and that is what we work with. We might never get it right.

End quote.

You want to trust the department that they're doing the right thing, But no one asked us if we should shut it down. If I'm the search and rescue guy, and my partners are search and rescue guys, and the helicopter pilots have been on hundreds of searches, why are we asking them what they think and their input.

Rathmin says searches for missing hikers typically last seven to fourteen days, depending on the viability of the person. Auj was not your typical hiker, and given his personal and professional connection to the Sheriff's Department, it seems like the LASD would go the extra mile to find it.

So it's six days you cancel a search for somebody who can run fifty or one hundred miles in the wilderness really knows the wilderness is good or better than anybody in ESD. They've set it down. Why are you shutting it down?

The Sheriff's Department tells the public that Auj disappeared without a trace and that they're ending the search because they're just spinning their wheels. But behind the scenes, they're telling a very different story.

Well. They say that they decided he committed suicide.

Internal LASD reports claimed that Auj was distraught over his failing marriage and took his own life in the punch bowl. That gunshot the area resident heard that could have been the sound of Auj just putting an end to it all. But the Sheriff's Department makes that determination without a body. They don't find any remains, blood, bullets, or a suicide note.

Nothing.

The only thing they think they may have found of Aujay's was an energy bar wrapper left on one of the trails. From what we can tell, there's not a lot pointing to suicide, so we reach out to Aujay's colleagues and friends to get their thoughts.

He was obviously down, he was obviously upset, but was it enough to commit suicide.

Sergeant Vince Burden is still on the fence on the one hand, a Jay did appear torn up over his marital problems. On the other he seemed to be coping.

Would you be telling me about your ultra marathon if you were just going to end it all? Would you even be planning to go run at the punch Bowl, which is an ugly area anyway?

For fact checking purposes, we want to make clear the punch Bowl is not ugly.

But go on, Vince, None of that made sense to me. With the suicide.

Fraday's running buddy, Randy Meggerdley, there's no question.

Plain and simple. I think he killed himself. That's the only way I can explain, because he.

Says Aujay was acting strangely, even more strangely than usual in the weeks before his disappearance.

He says, you know, there's a bunch of caves and stuff out here, you can very much disappear I think was the word that he used, and nobody would ever find yet.

Auj said similar things to Dave Rathbin, but he didn't put a lot of stock into any of the statements because he says Aujay is just a weird guy.

Our unit was next to a big giant duck pond, and one of the ways we used to make jokes about each other is kind of like, where do you fit in the in the duck pond? John was an I don't malign him, but he was one of the oddest ducks in the pond, which is good, right, you need him, you don't want everybody swim in the.

Same Initially, Rathbin was open to the possibility of suicide, but he's become increasingly skeptical over time because if Aja had killed himself, he thinks his body or some trace of him would have turned up by now. So Auji's colleagues are divided on what happened to him. It's kind of like those faces seen in the rocks at the Devil's punch Bowl. Same details, but interpreted in different ways. And that makes sense because we feel conflicted about it too.

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

I didn't accept it. Just common sense told me you probably ought to see whether there's any evidence of self.

Infliction, pissed off Old Capp. Mike Bauer is evangelical in his belief that the suicide theory bullshit, because he says the Sheriff's Department didn't arrive at this conclusion, they led with it, and that poisoned the investigation from the start. Bower says that as early as day three, an LASD official was pushing the suicide narrative during search team briefings. To Bauer, this was equivalent to telling searchers to let up.

I took that person outside, and I said, what and the hell did you say that for? How could you possibly know that at this point? How could you possibly discourage them to search for somebody that worked for you?

The Sheriff's Department was even sharing this theory with the press.

We haven't ruled out the possibility of suicide, but we don't have any evidence to support that that's what he came here to do.

Bower thinks it's irresponsible to promote the suicide theory without a high degree of certainty, so he prodded the department to keep investigating.

I kept contacting homicide and saying, something's wrong.

I'm telling you there's a problem.

But he says, the apartment ignored the case to such an extent. But he began to question their motives.

Nobody was in charge of it, and nobody wanted any of it once they saw how stinky it was getting.

Randy meggerdly represents the other end of the spectrum, so we ask him what he thinks about the possibility of foul play.

I referred to myself as a mushroom. They just feed me a little bit of poop every once in a while. I wasn't in the know on that whole thing.

I've never heard the mushroom poop batafore before.

Yeah, yeah, oh, you seed you a little bit of poop, et you grow a little bit.

At first, the mushroom poop analogy went way over my head. It sounded like a Southern expression. My mom just forgot to teach me.

But then it clicked.

While I was watching The Departed, the Martin Score Seats movie, about corruption within the Boston Police Department.

My theory, Unfeeds is they're like mushrooms, feed him shit and keep them in the dock.

I think what Megerdley is saying is that he doesn't ask a lot of questions because he prefers to be kept in the dark about things that don't concern him and who can really blame him? I mean, law enforcement agencies are not exactly known for their culture of transparency.

That file. You'd have to get special, special permission to touch that file.

Dave Rathman, Auj's former partner, says, the Sheriff's department is unusually protective of the AUJ case file, and they.

Don't even like to hear you talking about it. Well, to me, that's what you would call a red flag.

So Rathman asked his buddy, a retired detective working cold cases for the Sheriff's apartment to review the AUJ case.

Could you maybe grab that case file? And he went, oh no. I said, what do you mean, Oh no, Why wouldn't you want to take a look at it? He said, no, that's a hot potato. No one's allowed to touch that. If I start poking around that case they'd let me go. I said, well, that's interesting. Why it's a suicide. He said, I don't know. I just know that that case can't be touched.

Those red flags are another reason Rappit and others just can't get behind the party line.

As my father would say, God bless him. There's some rotten in the woodpile and it stinks and I can smell it, and.

That brings us back to the poop mushroom.

It might thrive in darkness, but to me, that's not an ideal environment for policing. I mean, the whole concept behind law enforcement is it watchful eyed, deter crime. Right who is watching the police? There's very little oversight of law enforcement agencies, and it's hard to hold them accountable since they control the collection and release of information about internal problems.

The philosophy of the Sheriff's department is to hide it, and the philosophy of government in a lot of respects is that way. Now, with the terrible way they handle public records requests and stuff, they just basically stonewall you. They gave you the middle finger. If you're asking for something that the public has a right to know.

Tell me about it. Bauer. We tried with those public records requests and got the proverbial middle finger. Without access to the information, it's hard for us to know how the Sheriff's department handled the Auj case, and we'd remain in the dark if it weren't for Mike Bauer and

They lied to me.

They lied to me as a fucking captain of the fucking Sheriff's department with thirty three years on the job. They fucking lie to me while I'm in charge of Sheriff's intelligence. They're fucking lying to me about what they're doing at homicide to shut this thing up.

They don't want me involved in it.

Oh imagine that's how fancy that is.

We know that law enforcement has its problems, but they're not usually laid out for us by dyed in the wool cops, people who know this world from the inside and can show us where the bodies are buried. Figuratively speaking, we tell Bauer, we want to do a deep dive on the Aujay case, beginning with his investigation.

You guys have stumbled into a cluster of shit.

But he's not as encouraging as we expect him to be, and for good reason.

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.

This season on Valley of Shadows.

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

They ruler around the drug scene, was that a deputy stumbled onto something he shouldn't have and he was taken care of. I'm here, it's shit on the street minute.

I he didn't kid suicide, he was murdered.

I'm here for more than one person.

And I started hearing some rumors that there.

Was and yet there's no indication that gun was ever booked into evidence.

If you're at it or they thought you were gonna rat, there wasn't. Hey don't do that ever again, you're done. They got rid of you. So that's where the murders came in.

He was describing with his hands and his arms and his whole body where this cop was buried at.

In other words, it's not safe not because of criminals, it's not safe because of law enforcement. And there's nothing worse than that.

Hey, dude, we're getting like pretty far out in the middle of nowhere and no one knows where out here.

You've got to be careful where you go and who you talk to.

If you have any information or tips to the disappearance of John Aujay, please call two one three two six two nine eight eight nine for email Shadows at pushkin dot FM. Valley of Shadows is reported, written and produced by us Haley Fox and Betsy Shepherd. Our editor is Diane Hodson. Our executive producers are Jacob Smith and Alexandra Garreton. Original music by Jake Gorsky, Ray Lynch, Mike Jersich, and