February 4, 2026 • 40 mins
One human hour equals thirty tree hours. Winter lasts three days.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
The Red Weather is a work of fiction. Any resemblance
to actual persons or events reflects the adaptation of real,
publicly available materials for creative and legal reasons. The content
of this podcast is the sole responsibility of Red Weather
LLC and does not reflect the views of responsibilities of
iHeartMedia or its affiliates. Previously on The Red Weather in
(00:22):
nineteen ninety five, my neighbor and a trainer disappeared from
a commune.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
So this guy was called the Father or something creepy
like that. Very much polyamory, kind of like dude has
a bunch of wives kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
I was with Anna's sister Willow that night.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
If you were on the TenderHearts property, then none of
the adults were there.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
They were all on the Sunrise seance hike.
Speaker 4 (00:41):
Yeah, it was only a few days before their Tenderheart's
alibi at Felippart.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
What are you saying that they weren't at the Sunds,
not all of them?
Speaker 5 (00:57):
Good morning, good morning, good morning. I have.
Speaker 6 (01:05):
Tucked myself into a little space by.
Speaker 5 (01:09):
The wood shed, out of the rain.
Speaker 6 (01:12):
I think it's a perfect place and a perfect time
for a ramble.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
This is Elrick Light aka Eric Lidsky, the man who
founded a commune next to me when I was a kid.
Speaker 6 (01:26):
Anyone here that's living with us on this beautiful homestead
here in Sebastopol will tell you. I'm very particular about
my spots. I have a big believer that there are
positive spots and that there are not so positive spots.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
These were recorded sometime between nineteen eighty eight and nineteen
ninety two, while he walked in the woods or sat
in meadows places I might have been roaming around in
two me and Willow.
Speaker 6 (01:58):
Take this with you, suit along to these people if
you can. And many of these people that we're discussing
with heart and hearts aren't ready to hear the message.
And that's fine. Sometimes it's enough to deliver the message.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
But between the lectures or sermons, there are human moments
that are really specific.
Speaker 6 (02:24):
There's an owl I've named him Jabberwaukee.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
And sometimes bizarre.
Speaker 5 (02:34):
Why do I rock nicely? Why do I rock myself?
Do I rock myself to sleep at night? What's the difference?
Speaker 1 (02:49):
I kept listening waiting for something. I'm not sure what.
It's not like he was suddenly going to start talking
about human sacrifice or mentioned and a trainer. In fact,
he doesn't mention any names.
Speaker 7 (03:01):
Let it fall, let it fall, let it fall, let
it fall, let it fall, and be free, Be free.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
But his commitment is intense, and sometimes the line between
a sermon and something more personal gets blurry.
Speaker 8 (03:27):
I've done bad things, I know what, just like you,
Just like all of you, I sit and I pretend.
Speaker 9 (03:40):
And because I want to be.
Speaker 6 (03:46):
That vision of.
Speaker 10 (03:48):
What I know, I am capable of being.
Speaker 6 (03:53):
So I pretend.
Speaker 5 (03:58):
I know what.
Speaker 8 (03:59):
I'm gonna do it again. No, I don't want to
do it again. I'm going to do it again.
Speaker 9 (04:07):
Again. I don't want to do it again.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
When I went home to look into Anna's disappearance, I
knew I was going to have to learn as much
as I could about el Rick and the collective he
ran called Tender Hearts. Since Anna lived there before she
vanished in nineteen ninety five, I figured things would get
a little new age, spiritual, little hippie dippy. But I
never expected what I did find. I am actor and filmmaker,
(04:32):
right or strong. This is the red weather. Okay, let's
(05:30):
try this again. I was a week into going back
to my hometown and researching Anna's case. I was still
mostly just playing catch up to the investigation. I'm calling
from my parents' landline, so idea doesn't come up. Sheriff Maldonado,
who had led that investigation back in nineteen ninety five,
told me that things would make more sense if I
(05:51):
got access to the official case file. Hello, Hi, this
is Ryder Strong. I'm calling again for Grace Lachlan and
the current sheriff. Grace Blachlan had promised to share transcripts
of some witness interviews, but I hadn't heard back from
her for days, and the people in her office didn't
seem to have time for me. Everything's in storage, so
(06:12):
it's not easy.
Speaker 11 (06:14):
We have one building for the whole county.
Speaker 9 (06:16):
You're a meddlin. You're a medling.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
My buddy Chris was helping me. You're like every housewife
with a Facebook page who's playing Internet sloop.
Speaker 9 (06:23):
She's got a theory.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
So why don't I, you know, even if it's a
complete nothing burger, why don't I bring them a pager? Okay,
so you're going to go to the sheriff with a
busty pager that your dead dog buried. I knew Chris
was right. I had already admitted to the cops that
I had lied to them when I was fifteen, and
so if I was ever going to get their help
and learning about the case, I had to play it cool.
Going back over the details about that night, I really
(06:45):
begun to think that Anna's boyfriend Mick had something to
do with her disappearance. But then after talking to Maldonatto,
it was becoming clear that the Sheriff's department was way
more interested in Tender Hearts and its leader, Elrick Light.
But as far as I knew, and it disappeared, all
the adults of Tender Hearts had hiked up to Mount
Saint Helena for a sunrise seance, right and suff for
(07:07):
l Rick. Oh so you knew this too, yeah, almost immediately.
Monica Tremblaine was reporting for The Press Democrat in nineteen
ninety five.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
It was only a few days after Anna was missing
that the seance story it fell apart.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
A few of the women came forward. So where was
he and what did that mean for the investigation? And
who were Tender Hearts in the first place. When I
started interviewing friends, I quickly realized I knew very little
about their alternative living situations. Orion's commune had failed. Almost immediately.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
The community kind of got a little more contentious and
a little more distance and kind of factioned off.
Speaker 9 (07:42):
You know, my mom describes it kind of just like,
you know, not really lasting.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
There were a lot of strong personalities out there, you know,
people who want to get away from it all.
Speaker 9 (07:50):
I think have some strong reasons sometimes.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
And I didn't realize that my friend Cole's parents actually
met when his dad was handing out pamphlets for a
cult in San Francisco.
Speaker 9 (07:59):
I don't think lasted.
Speaker 12 (08:00):
It didn't last, and it's like, hey, let's build a
spaceship form much into the eighties. It was called Stell
and they had a charismatic leader that was quite questionable,
but the plan was to build a spaceship to escape
the end of the world in two thousand and four.
Obviously it came and gone, but I'm pretty sure kind
(08:24):
of folded up when it realized that rocket building was hard.
I'm just assuming. I'm just assuming that like a bunch
of people out in cornfields just realize their limitation about
building rocket.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
The tender hearts weren't that unusual for the area. But
of course, once Anna disappeared. There were a lot of
questions about them.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
A big part of the problem was they were just secretive.
They didn't want to talk to the cops. I mean,
they didn't trust anybody, but they really didn't trust authority figures.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
They had been targeted before by Maldon Auto specifically.
Speaker 9 (08:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (08:58):
Yeah, we had them up on a few violations. They
had problem with one of their neighbors, had to do
with with a truck or something.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
There was some argument over noise and they took the
tires off a neighbor's tractor.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
That escalated to some incidents with animals.
Speaker 9 (09:11):
They had lamas. Oh that's right, I remember them.
Speaker 4 (09:14):
Yeah, Well, some of those lamas would get out and
then they'd get sick.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
At some point, there were accusations about poisoning. Well, I
just remember, you gotta understand.
Speaker 4 (09:25):
I get out there and I'm just I'm there to
calm the situation, you know, cool it down a little bit.
But you got a group of women, very very angry
women in there. They're topless, some of them even buttoning.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
If there was a confrontation or if someone walked on
to the property. The women of Tender Hearts liked to
enact what they called a skin bombing.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
They'd go out and nake it. I kind of love
the It was a very specific, non violent tactic.
Speaker 4 (09:53):
It throws you off, you know, put you on guard,
and I'm not talking about it in a good way.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
One thing about growing up in West County, if there
was ever a gathering of some sort, there was always
at least one person naked. A lot of confusing messages.
Speaker 13 (10:08):
A lot of it was like, you know, people are swimming,
or you know, like you got a pool and people,
you know, we were in the.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
Hot tub pool or whatever.
Speaker 13 (10:15):
My parents' friends were definitely hippies and of the casually
nude variety when there was any call for it.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
It was part of the culture, a general belief in
who needs clothes? Be natural. It wasn't threatening or anything,
but still as casual as I think the adults wanted
it to be. When you're a kid, you could never
not notice it. If Will and I went to that
like main area, the kind of deck that wasn't finished,
that with the boards laid on the ground, there might
(10:43):
be someone naked because.
Speaker 9 (10:45):
They had an outdoor shower that was right there. Yes,
And I always felt like it was a little weird.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
But I didn't feel like I could say it was weird.
Speaker 9 (10:52):
You know, because if you did, you would be lame.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
But beyond the skin bombing and fights with neighbors, I
wanted to know what they were all about. I found
a historian who specializes in intentional communities, which I learned
is the newer preferred term for a commune.
Speaker 9 (11:09):
Hey, how great. Thanks.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Howard Tripp is the author of two books, counter Topia,
which covers the communities of the nineteen sixties and seventies,
and West of Eden, which chronicles the rise and fall
of small religious sects in the area.
Speaker 9 (11:23):
I hope you don't mind my little friends.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
You are right with that.
Speaker 9 (11:25):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
Howard's other hobby is ants. Yeah, so, how long have
you been farming them?
Speaker 11 (11:32):
It's been I mean it's been over a decade.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
He has an entire wall of his house that is
a series of ant farms, or, as I learned, they're
called former carrea.
Speaker 11 (11:41):
But one of the things I've always been fascinated by ICs.
Speaker 9 (11:45):
Oh like, that's like pheromones, right, right, exactly.
Speaker 11 (11:49):
But you're talking about how an individual ant senses the
world around them, the perception of what's real, what's happening.
Speaker 14 (11:55):
It can be altered completely like a drug.
Speaker 11 (11:57):
Even more than that, it's it's their actual sense of reality.
It's not you'll have like a colony, right thin get
invaded and they start working for another species.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
They don't even know why, and they're just as happy.
They just just want to do Tripid research tender Hearts
for his books, but they ultimately didn't make the cut.
Speaker 15 (12:15):
Well, if we're talking about the major communities from Sonoma County, Headwinds,
morning Star, the Farm before they went to Tennessee, you're
talking about these are much bigger operations groups that were
formalized in ways that Tender Hearts they could never really
get it together.
Speaker 9 (12:29):
Well, how many people were in it? It's like, oh wow, yeah,
very small.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
But then for your second book, wouldn't they have counted
as a spiritual group?
Speaker 11 (12:39):
You yeah, you would think that's uh, that's the sixty
four thousand dollars question, isn't it meaning?
Speaker 1 (12:43):
Were they even technically a religion? Did they have a
belief system?
Speaker 11 (12:47):
I know, I know what this looks like.
Speaker 9 (12:48):
These don't judge.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
Trip has an entire guest house behind his main house.
It's full of books and papers.
Speaker 15 (12:54):
Okay, here are some of Elerick's newsletters.
Speaker 9 (12:56):
Cool, we have these signs they put up.
Speaker 15 (12:59):
Yeah, and there are tapes of this lecture series.
Speaker 9 (13:02):
Oh wait, what really recordings?
Speaker 15 (13:04):
Yeah, yeah somewhere.
Speaker 9 (13:06):
Oh my god, I would.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Love to hear those, Which is how I got ten
hours of el Ric light talking.
Speaker 5 (13:12):
Well, let's just jump into it.
Speaker 6 (13:13):
We'll start with our invocation.
Speaker 8 (13:16):
As we always do.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
I am of the Earth.
Speaker 6 (13:21):
From the earth. I burn with a fire inside that
I promised to maintain, with the thick skin and a
tender heart.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
I actually found the tapes kind of soothing. There's definitely
a lot of jargon. Elrick liked to make up his
own terms.
Speaker 6 (13:41):
This is what we might call skymine is not the
only directo. Locusts and arrive at the choiceless awareness.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
Elric is earnest, thoughtful.
Speaker 16 (13:54):
We can absorb energetic facts by existing in in what
Castanano would call the the kernel of non ordinary reality.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
And he goes out of his way to reject his
own authority.
Speaker 5 (14:14):
No, I am not York or.
Speaker 6 (14:18):
I am not anyone's savior.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
One of the most exciting moments is when he gets
frustrated with his recording equipment.
Speaker 6 (14:26):
My ankles burst under the weight of ill consumed mother
fucking dammit. Really, Mike was off the whole time. My
ankles burst under the weight of ill conceived compulsions, and
(14:53):
I limped my way, like the hurried hair past Alice
into wonderland where only those with thrones and axes reigned.
Speaker 5 (15:07):
What are you living for? Where are you going? Late?
Speaker 8 (15:12):
Late?
Speaker 6 (15:13):
Always late for?
Speaker 15 (15:14):
What? For?
Speaker 12 (15:16):
What?
Speaker 5 (15:17):
For what? It's not real?
Speaker 6 (15:22):
None of it is real.
Speaker 10 (15:26):
You have been tricked, You've been lied too.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
This section, like when he says he's going to do
it again, feels raw, emotional and personal, but otherwise for
ten tapes, Elric is a teacher. He stays abstract and philosophical.
A unique worldview does evolve a metaphysics. He's inspired a
(15:53):
little by Krishna Murdi and a lot by Carlos Castanetta.
There's this belief in the positive power of psychedelic drugs
and something he calls tree Time, which begins with the
story of him being high on mescaline.
Speaker 10 (16:09):
Minutes can feel like hours, seconds could be a lifetime.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
But it gets somewhere kind of interesting. A baby cries.
Speaker 17 (16:25):
She cries if she's hungry or stared, and in that
moment she might think this feeling will never end.
Speaker 6 (16:38):
But as we grow, we grow into a different time consciousness.
Speaker 11 (16:46):
Oh my gosh, so time moves faster as you get older.
Speaker 18 (16:51):
Listen, if you consider a human life and you put
it on a scale of the semper baus.
Speaker 9 (17:00):
That's what he called redwoods, Of course he did.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
That's from their scientific name, or their Latin binomial sequoia sempaveerans.
Speaker 17 (17:07):
We're talking about three thousand years.
Speaker 18 (17:10):
And in that context, what's a day?
Speaker 17 (17:13):
What's a day?
Speaker 9 (17:13):
What's a year?
Speaker 17 (17:15):
In three time seasons? Last three days.
Speaker 6 (17:21):
All of American history would happen before you were eight
years old. A child who would be born grow to
be twelve in the span of a summer vacation.
Speaker 9 (17:37):
What is dude talking about time perception?
Speaker 1 (17:41):
He's scaling a human life up to a redwood tree.
And look, I did the math. Of course, he's actually right.
If you take one hundred years or the best human lifespan, sure,
and you stretch that over three thousand, it's thirty times.
So one hour is thirty hours. Just over a day,
that's one point two five days. And yes, a month
(18:01):
would go by in a day, winter would last three days.
Speaker 9 (18:04):
So all of his comparisons are exactly right. You need
a break, probably, Yeah.
Speaker 18 (18:12):
Imagine wisdom that scale the inside.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
Well, from the outside, it looked like your classic guru
cult situation.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
Yeah, well, I mean if it's all the tropes, right, Oh, yes, absolutely.
You've got a charismatic leader, he's got a new spiritual
take on life, and he runs off. He has a
bunch of.
Speaker 3 (18:48):
Whys, right right, right right, Except none of that, none
of what you actually just said was actually true.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
Those are all lies. When I started this podcast, one
of my main questions about Tender Hearts, which was kind
of naive, was was it a commune or was it
(19:16):
a cult? It turns out neither, and those categories are
kind of fuzzy to begin with.
Speaker 11 (19:22):
Had ideas later on, it's not how it started.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
It turns out Tender Hearts didn't begin as a religion
or a political movement or even a philosophy.
Speaker 11 (19:34):
It grew out of a woman shelter.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
Really before he found a Tender Hearts, Eric Letsky was
an employee of the Pavilion House. Pavilion was at the
forefront of a wave of shelters that sprung up in
the late seventies with what was then a pretty radical
idea that women might need their own place, a designated
shelter away from men.
Speaker 11 (19:52):
He helped run the whole thing until eighty five eighty six.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
They were your classic San Francisco liberals, in your face
and aggressive.
Speaker 11 (20:01):
Eleric got into trouble with the city officials.
Speaker 18 (20:03):
Four protesters were arrested today outside city Hall amidst ongoing
tensions between the city council and the Pavilion House.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
The distinction between a homeless shelter and a domestic violence
center was a blurry line that was still being worked out,
and in the early eighties, the owners of Pavilion wanted
to expand the shelter by allowing men to join, but
for some of the women and Elric, this was anathema.
It was a split in the Pavilion organization. There was
(20:33):
Elric on one side and the owners and city officials
on the other. Around the same time, Elrick came into
some money.
Speaker 3 (20:41):
The assumption is that maybe one of his parents or
perhaps grandparents passed away, but nobody knows for sure.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
So he pulled up stakes, left the city and bought
fifty acres in West Sonoma County. The fifty acres right
next to my parents, and so the women were.
Speaker 11 (20:58):
He got them off from the shelter, them personally and
their kids to come live off the land.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
Besides Anna and Willow, there were only a few other kids.
I remember a boy named Josiah and a girl named Francis,
and maybe one more. We called them grammets.
Speaker 13 (21:13):
I felt antagonized by them. I felt like they were
actively annoying to us. I think we might have just
been hating on younger kids.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
They were wild, right, I mean, you know, it was
like they were just kind of roaming free, and they
were a pack, like I definitely remember it being a pack.
It's like just a group of like loud, dirty kids,
like and they had attitude, like they were strong. Basically,
it's like an outdoor version of a women's shelter.
Speaker 11 (21:42):
Yeah, it was like a camp or a farm for
women escaping domestic violence.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
Everything I learned about Tender Hearts, but especially this, made
it even more important that I get in touch with
Anna and Willow's mom, Laaney. I'd always thought of her
as some sort of New age counter cultural seekers her,
But if she came from a women's shelter in San Francisco,
if she was escaping an abusive situation and brought her
(22:07):
daughters to raise them in the woods. That's a very
different person, Laney, Hi, it's rather or strong.
Speaker 9 (22:15):
How are you. I hope you're doing all right.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
For weeks I'd left messages. Weirdly, this new understanding of
the tender hearts was more radical and ahead of its
time than any of Elric's professed insights like tree Time
or Directo Locust. He was actually creating what nowadays you
would call a safe space for women. But we didn't
(22:40):
know any of that. Anybody local just saw a polygamous cult,
and interestingly Elrick and the women let that happen.
Speaker 11 (22:50):
So these, if you could see, they would post these
all around the town.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
Oh wow, Elric started spreading his teachings. So I'm looking
at there's a drawer of a kind of elephant plant person.
Speaker 5 (23:03):
What else?
Speaker 15 (23:03):
What do you see?
Speaker 5 (23:05):
All right?
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Well, there's text.
Speaker 8 (23:07):
No look closer.
Speaker 9 (23:07):
What are you missing? I don't know what is it?
Speaker 15 (23:10):
It's a lotus position?
Speaker 1 (23:11):
Oh yeah, all right, so it says you are a
goddess Gaya shakti terra isis what do you see all
around the world? Women of sounder minds and tender hearts
insight isn't oriental, nor is it western. Elrick light offers
only the sacred, in the universal, the divine, feminine. Oh
(23:32):
and then there's there's an address and a telephone number.
Speaker 5 (23:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 15 (23:35):
Ye.
Speaker 11 (23:35):
People had people subscribing from all across the country, Like
how many are they?
Speaker 1 (23:38):
Hundreds, maybe thousands. But locally the postings made them notorious,
and there were times when they could have easily spoken out,
but they let the rumors spread, which is actually a
brilliant way to keep people out of your business. Like
skin bombing. Allowing people to think they were a cult
ensured that outsiders, men in particular, stayed away. So the
(24:03):
question is, did Elrick believe this stuff?
Speaker 9 (24:07):
No?
Speaker 1 (24:07):
No, really. For his part, Maldonado is adamant.
Speaker 9 (24:11):
No.
Speaker 4 (24:12):
No, A con is a con is a con A
lot of make your money, a lot to cover your tracks,
and you just keep online.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
But when I listen to the tapes, Elrick seems earnest
to me.
Speaker 11 (24:21):
He was definitely having some kind of experience out there
in the whips right. Probably started with secular intentions to
live together on a farm, and then Eleric started reflecting
on things. He starts thinking rearranging places in his mind
and having new ideas that he has to share.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
But there was a pressing issue.
Speaker 14 (24:41):
It's really common among these intentional communities unless you have
a donation or best case, a tithing system that everyone
agrees on, right, someone has to pay the bills for
the TenderHearts.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
At first, that meant getting jobs. Laney work a safeway
what I can't No Connor, who lives in England, remembered this.
I can't even imagine her.
Speaker 13 (25:03):
Yeah, I know, I know, but I swear I remember
seeing her in a reflective vest in the parking lot,
like collecting carts.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
But the jobs weren't enough, and so TenderHearts did what
most everyone in Sonoma County did in the nineties.
Speaker 11 (25:14):
I mean, I would say in Sonoma, Mendosino, Humboldt, maybe
thirty forty percent, almost half of the communities are funded
by weed.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Hence the cannabis that was in the barn the night
that Anna.
Speaker 9 (25:23):
Disappeared, and it was all just sitting in that barn.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
This opened up a whole new avenue because if Elrick
was lying to the cops about where he was that night,
was he trying to protect the fact that he was
growing marijuana?
Speaker 9 (25:37):
I thirty forty five minutes. Thank you, Lennie.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
Could Anna have been killed because of like a drug that?
Speaker 9 (25:45):
I mean, it's just weed that was a huge deal
back then. He's right.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
This was the era of Camp.
Speaker 3 (25:53):
It's a theme that is reminiscent of those you see
in war zones, but this is California and the enemies
are marijuana.
Speaker 1 (25:59):
Grow Camp was the campaign against marijuana planting, a multi
agency task force that launched in nineteen eighty three. They
were a paramilitary organization with helicopters and machine guns.
Speaker 9 (26:12):
They were hardcore.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
So does that mean that people were smoking pot around us?
Does that mean that they would have been smoking pot
from tender hearts? Undoubtedly?
Speaker 9 (26:21):
Undoubtedly.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
So then who were some we know somebody who bought
weed from them or sold for them?
Speaker 9 (26:27):
Like, do we know any drug dealers? I mean, do
you remember anybody, Hilo, We're trying.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
To remember who sold weed back in the day. I
feel like there was an older guy. God, it was
like it was like there was Jim. He wasn't drug
I don't think so. But there was a guy who
was always hanging out at the Hesse building.
Speaker 9 (26:47):
He had like a battery nickname like Bunny that's copper talk.
He is not a drug dealer. It was like that motorcycle. No, No,
that guy was totally who.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Was the gu There was a guy not a name
like that, like a DJ name, and he used to
sell to all the skater kids.
Speaker 9 (27:05):
Remember rip hits was the thing.
Speaker 13 (27:08):
Yes, yes, that was not his name, but that's what
that's what they called him.
Speaker 9 (27:16):
That's what we called Do you think we could find him?
I could we find him. I could find him. I
think I could find him.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
So the other day, when I told you about willow
burning the weed, is this what you meant when you
said that the tender hearts weren't all kumbaya and butterflies.
Speaker 9 (27:30):
And they were always alive.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
Just to front, this was a criminal drug dealing operation.
That's true, but a little reductive because when I finally
got the transcripts of el Rick's interrogations, I realized Maldonado
wasn't giving me the whole story.
Speaker 9 (27:56):
Chris, there, they're here.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
I got an email from Sheriff Lachlan with a PDF attachment.
They had a watermark across every page, are strong and
they were a total mess. The names were hard to
figure out because everyone was designated by their initials.
Speaker 9 (28:11):
Oh okay, so RM seems like he's the one in
charge of That'sonado and two many guys working with me.
Speaker 4 (28:19):
It would have been Kadio. He headed up anything with
grow operations or substances. He was kind of like our
vice squad. And then, uh, I think I put Orrin. Yeah,
I put Bob Orrin as my ol leite.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
She sent me like, there's a couple interviews with a
few different people. Look, this one is actually your neighbors. Then, dude,
this is me. This is a transcript of me getting interviewed. No, yes,
look it's quote.
Speaker 11 (28:45):
No.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
We were at Connor's house, right, and Willow was with you. Yes,
and you didn't hear anything, not until the news.
Speaker 9 (28:51):
Connor's mom made.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
Us pancakes, and she told you about the fire. Yet,
Oh my god, she put my interviews in here?
Speaker 9 (28:58):
Who did uh? Lachlan the shriff? She sent me my
own transcripts. The why. I don't know just what to say.
You lied. We have a record of you lying.
Speaker 17 (29:08):
You.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
She also didn't include any of the interviews with Mick Bowden.
It was only me and Eleric. It looks like there's
four different ones here. Oh here the ceremony. Does that
involve the kids? And he goes no. They press him,
why not something you don't want them to see?
Speaker 9 (29:25):
And el Rick says absolutely not. Okay, now we got
we got three women, three of your.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
Women, your women, by the way, on the record, and
they say you weren't there at all. You let off
the blessing, the wind song or whatever it's called. And
they didn't see you until Wednesday. At some points Elrick
got defensive, there is nothing wrong with taking a hike
to see a sunrise?
Speaker 9 (29:48):
Is there?
Speaker 1 (29:48):
And Maldon outto says that depends, and Elerck goes, how
there is nothing.
Speaker 9 (29:54):
Do you go to church?
Speaker 1 (29:55):
The other cop is like, I have no problem with
the hike, and Eleric he's not letting go.
Speaker 9 (30:01):
You go to a church and pray.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
You go into a building, we go outside. That's the difference.
That's the only difference. And it's a good point, it's
sweet point. His dialogue definitely could use a punch up.
Speaker 9 (30:12):
It's not dialogue. Wait, we should.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
Do this as a reading. Yes, we printed out two copies. Yes,
all right, I'm the cops both of of course you
don't have anymore. I'm gonna pick up the slack.
Speaker 9 (30:29):
Brainwashing ladies is one thing.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
Why are you doing a New York character?
Speaker 9 (30:34):
Brainwashing the ladies is one thing. But the kids, you
get their checks footsteps. Rick says, I don't steal from kids.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
We had a ranch, Bob when was he a few years?
Speaker 9 (30:45):
Eleven kids? Eleven kids and none was in school. All
of the Tender Hearts kids go to school.
Speaker 6 (30:51):
No electricity checks come in every month, and these kids
are put out to the fields.
Speaker 9 (30:55):
It was it was their bulls come to life and
these pull fish. It's coming in from the fields. What
are they talking about? No idea? Okay, they're talking about
the sex.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
Some situation where they arrested other people with a bunch
of kids. It seems like they were trying to catch
Elrick admitting the Tender Hearts was making money off welfare.
Then they start fishing about drugs.
Speaker 9 (31:15):
Here we go, okay, this is this is classic good
cutback Cup moving into the killer. Tell us about the guys.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
At Jenna, Yeah, tell us what the guys at Jenna.
Speaker 9 (31:23):
The god degener is definitely drug stuff.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
Alric says, I don't know who you're talking about.
Speaker 9 (31:28):
I am this is definitely where they would slap the taken.
Just read it. Come me, please. If you weren't up
the hill, I'm not saying I wasn't.
Speaker 1 (31:37):
We know you weren't.
Speaker 9 (31:38):
Why don't you tell us about Tubers? What down at Tubers?
Speaker 4 (31:42):
There's a guy damned daily you know, I'm talking about
the lineless of dum sliless.
Speaker 9 (31:47):
Sometimes if I talk damn, what's he gonna tell me?
You don't know about Thursdays at tubas? The garden bodies?
Did you order the code red?
Speaker 1 (31:56):
All right?
Speaker 9 (31:57):
Do you want answers? I want the truth?
Speaker 1 (32:01):
Stop it?
Speaker 9 (32:02):
And Lerrick isn't even talking anymore.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
This is I don't know what love this garden party shit?
Speaker 9 (32:07):
Oh dude, oh this is that's sad.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
It took some rereading and a bit of research for
Chris and I finally figured out what was going on.
Tubers and garden parties were about bars and hookup spots
in the area. The cops were fishing for Leric to
admit something they had suspicions about, not the weed dealing,
not the fact that maybe he was lying about this
whole cult, that he was gay. Elrick. So he did
(32:37):
leave the seance.
Speaker 3 (32:38):
He went down to the East Bay, where he met
up with this man named Lucas Park who.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
Was it turns out, an ex boyfriend. In reality, this
shouldn't be shocking. We're talking about an outspoken feminist political
activist in the heart of a very liberal, very gay
friendly city, which is I guess exactly why there's something
heart wrenching here. Could stand up for women, for counterculture,
(33:02):
could be brave and outspoken about so much, but he
was still crippled by shame and fear regarding his sexuality.
How many of the women knew none of them.
Speaker 11 (33:13):
They knew he wasn't interested in them, but they figured
it was all part of his vouels celebacy.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
I actually heard this on the recordings. He talks about
the power of intracourse.
Speaker 6 (33:23):
Inter is between for among intras within a contained.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
Entity, polyamorous cult that wasn't Polly or a cult, a
pioneering feminist commune led by a gay man who didn't
come out of the closet. So the tender hearts were
complicit and letting the world think they were something they weren't.
This multi wife sex colt. They let that deception stand,
but they were also deceived from within, and perhaps the
(33:54):
most salient point for Maldonado in nineteen ninety five, and
for us now couldn't have killed DNA.
Speaker 3 (34:01):
Well, I mean, the confirm that Elrick was with Park
all night and into the next morning. So first story
was a lie, new alibi, it was salad.
Speaker 1 (34:10):
And as for the tender hearts, that's yeah, that's pretty
much all she wrote. The women dwindled over the next
year or so. Al Eric left for months at a time,
and then there was nobody there anymore. The land itself
eventually sold to one of our neighbors who has since
passed away. So as far as I know, it's in
some kind of probate limbo, all right, experiment.
Speaker 9 (34:33):
Tender hearts exist today? Right?
Speaker 1 (34:36):
Hell yeah, dude, me and like fifty naked chicks running
around the woods getting to know each other physically.
Speaker 15 (34:42):
Ok.
Speaker 9 (34:43):
Do I get to have sex with a tender hearts specifically?
Speaker 1 (34:46):
But just a communal situation where you're sharing resources and
living off the land, raising your.
Speaker 9 (34:52):
Kids do their sounds like a nightmare.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
Sounds pretty great to me, And I don't think I'm alone.
Even with his own experience growing up on a failed one,
Oriyan is optimistic.
Speaker 13 (35:02):
I mean, I feel like it's a little bit of
a coming full circle in a way. You know, I
got very very interested in some modern form of co
living and you share resources, you have a shared garden,
and you have a shared kitchen and co working space
for parties and whatever else, and it's like, seems pretty idyllic.
So it feels like I'm kind of like trying to
do what my parents sort of did, but better. Right, Like,
(35:23):
it's probably a classic, you know, thing that we all
try to do to some degree at times, fix the
mistakes that our parents made.
Speaker 9 (35:29):
Oh stop, think about that type people who want in
on this thing. They're not easy going people. They're not
cool people. No, they're vegans. There's social justice sumiers. But
you also got independent, critical thinkers.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
Artists, prescientious dirty drug addicts.
Speaker 9 (35:46):
Look at your boy, Howard, Look at your boy. How
do you want to move in with him and his aunts.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
Yeah, you got to live communally with him and his
insects as well.
Speaker 11 (35:54):
No no, no, Communism failed, but like socialism failed.
Speaker 9 (35:57):
Rider. Okay, there's a reason, dude, you ended up going
to boarding school. What does that have to do with anything.
Speaker 1 (36:03):
Chris spent the second half of high school, starting our
junior year in New Jersey at a boarding school So,
dun't your mom send you there because you know you
needed a different situation because you were being bullied.
Speaker 9 (36:14):
Oh, I would know the bullied stuff. That's not why
I went there.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
Okay, I'm just saying that the normal all American public
school childhood didn't work out for you. So you know
you needed something, You needed an alternative, and I think
a lot of us do.
Speaker 9 (36:30):
Most of us want something different. You're drinking the kool aid, man,
go go live in tree time.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
In nineteen ninety six, el Rick left Sebastopool went back
to San Francisco.
Speaker 11 (36:40):
There were signs of some political involvement, some classes taught
at some illness centers and retreats.
Speaker 1 (36:46):
But after Anna, he mostly vanished from the public.
Speaker 6 (36:51):
Not like these moments when it's just.
Speaker 5 (36:56):
You and I.
Speaker 6 (36:58):
Strange, stupid little medium of tape recorded.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
He died in two thousand and one cancer. Hold on,
(37:28):
what is this? After our dramatic reading, I was looking
back over the transcripts.
Speaker 12 (37:32):
Look at that?
Speaker 9 (37:32):
Oh who said that?
Speaker 1 (37:33):
It was a single line quote? R M. What do
you know? The Swami turns out to be a faggot.
That's Maldonado man. Oh, that's gross.
Speaker 9 (37:45):
Was that after he left the room or is that
when he was still in there?
Speaker 1 (37:47):
I think it's after. I don't know what's worse. Seeing
that sentence, it suddenly brought into focus where the investigators
were coming from. These are the people whose official job
it was to find out what happened to Anna. They
didn't like the tender hearts, they didn't like that they
did drugs, they didn't like that Elrick was gay. But
none of those things on their own are any real
(38:10):
justification for suspicion. That sucks, man, really, and you're gonna
go meet this guy? I was my last conversation with
Maldonado before I got the transcripts. He agreed to meet
me and walk me through the crime scene.
Speaker 15 (38:24):
Why don't we meet out there at the property.
Speaker 4 (38:26):
We had some strawberries from Andre stand out there by wagon.
Speaker 9 (38:30):
I'll show you what we found.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
I didn't know what to think. Maldonado was being helpful.
He was one of the few people who seemed like
he actually cared that I was looking back at this case.
And then, to make things worse, Chris got a voicemail.
Speaker 9 (38:50):
It was from Sparks.
Speaker 19 (38:51):
Chris, what up, man, It's Davie H.
Speaker 9 (38:55):
Sparks mcnight back in the.
Speaker 19 (38:56):
Day time for the time.
Speaker 4 (39:00):
Brother.
Speaker 19 (39:01):
Anyway, Yeah, I'll talk to rider. Uh, you know, I
got stories. I got inside Infomaion for real though. You
want to talk and a trainer, you got to talk
about those fuckers detecting that shit Baldonado.
Speaker 9 (39:15):
Come on, man, dude was a fool.
Speaker 19 (39:17):
Well, I got I got some stuff for you. My boy.
Speaker 9 (39:20):
Oh man, my boy, Mick. You know he was my boy.
But damn kid.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
Got a pass.
Speaker 9 (39:25):
You got a pass anyway, Yeah, man, hit me up.
Let's get a drink.
Speaker 19 (39:31):
I'll lay it all on you.
Speaker 1 (39:49):
The Red Weather is an iHeart podcast hosted by writer Strong,
sound engineering, editing and mixing by Bo Milkins, produced by
Tess Porthology. Executive producers at iHeartRadio Trevor Young and Matt Frederick,
Associate producer Bo milkis original score by Kyle Morgan. If
you're enjoying the show, please remember to leave with review
(40:10):
of raining. Thanks for listening.
The Red Weather is a work of fiction. Any resemblance
to actual persons or events reflects the adaptation of real,
publicly available materials for creative and legal reasons. The content
of this podcast is the sole responsibility of Red Weather
LLC and does not reflect the views of responsibilities of
iHeartMedia or its affiliates. Previously on The Red Weather in
(00:22):
nineteen ninety five, my neighbor and a trainer disappeared from
a commune.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
So this guy was called the Father or something creepy
like that. Very much polyamory, kind of like dude has
a bunch of wives kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
I was with Anna's sister Willow that night.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
If you were on the TenderHearts property, then none of
the adults were there.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
They were all on the Sunrise seance hike.
Speaker 4 (00:41):
Yeah, it was only a few days before their Tenderheart's
alibi at Felippart.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
What are you saying that they weren't at the Sunds,
not all of them?
Speaker 5 (00:57):
Good morning, good morning, good morning. I have.
Speaker 6 (01:05):
Tucked myself into a little space by.
Speaker 5 (01:09):
The wood shed, out of the rain.
Speaker 6 (01:12):
I think it's a perfect place and a perfect time
for a ramble.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
This is Elrick Light aka Eric Lidsky, the man who
founded a commune next to me when I was a kid.
Speaker 6 (01:26):
Anyone here that's living with us on this beautiful homestead
here in Sebastopol will tell you. I'm very particular about
my spots. I have a big believer that there are
positive spots and that there are not so positive spots.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
These were recorded sometime between nineteen eighty eight and nineteen
ninety two, while he walked in the woods or sat
in meadows places I might have been roaming around in
two me and Willow.
Speaker 6 (01:58):
Take this with you, suit along to these people if
you can. And many of these people that we're discussing
with heart and hearts aren't ready to hear the message.
And that's fine. Sometimes it's enough to deliver the message.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
But between the lectures or sermons, there are human moments
that are really specific.
Speaker 6 (02:24):
There's an owl I've named him Jabberwaukee.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
And sometimes bizarre.
Speaker 5 (02:34):
Why do I rock nicely? Why do I rock myself?
Do I rock myself to sleep at night? What's the difference?
Speaker 1 (02:49):
I kept listening waiting for something. I'm not sure what.
It's not like he was suddenly going to start talking
about human sacrifice or mentioned and a trainer. In fact,
he doesn't mention any names.
Speaker 7 (03:01):
Let it fall, let it fall, let it fall, let
it fall, let it fall, and be free, Be free.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
But his commitment is intense, and sometimes the line between
a sermon and something more personal gets blurry.
Speaker 8 (03:27):
I've done bad things, I know what, just like you,
Just like all of you, I sit and I pretend.
Speaker 9 (03:40):
And because I want to be.
Speaker 6 (03:46):
That vision of.
Speaker 10 (03:48):
What I know, I am capable of being.
Speaker 6 (03:53):
So I pretend.
Speaker 5 (03:58):
I know what.
Speaker 8 (03:59):
I'm gonna do it again. No, I don't want to
do it again. I'm going to do it again.
Speaker 9 (04:07):
Again. I don't want to do it again.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
When I went home to look into Anna's disappearance, I
knew I was going to have to learn as much
as I could about el Rick and the collective he
ran called Tender Hearts. Since Anna lived there before she
vanished in nineteen ninety five, I figured things would get
a little new age, spiritual, little hippie dippy. But I
never expected what I did find. I am actor and filmmaker,
(04:32):
right or strong. This is the red weather. Okay, let's
(05:30):
try this again. I was a week into going back
to my hometown and researching Anna's case. I was still
mostly just playing catch up to the investigation. I'm calling
from my parents' landline, so idea doesn't come up. Sheriff Maldonado,
who had led that investigation back in nineteen ninety five,
told me that things would make more sense if I
(05:51):
got access to the official case file. Hello, Hi, this
is Ryder Strong. I'm calling again for Grace Lachlan and
the current sheriff. Grace Blachlan had promised to share transcripts
of some witness interviews, but I hadn't heard back from
her for days, and the people in her office didn't
seem to have time for me. Everything's in storage, so
(06:12):
it's not easy.
Speaker 11 (06:14):
We have one building for the whole county.
Speaker 9 (06:16):
You're a meddlin. You're a medling.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
My buddy Chris was helping me. You're like every housewife
with a Facebook page who's playing Internet sloop.
Speaker 9 (06:23):
She's got a theory.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
So why don't I, you know, even if it's a
complete nothing burger, why don't I bring them a pager? Okay,
so you're going to go to the sheriff with a
busty pager that your dead dog buried. I knew Chris
was right. I had already admitted to the cops that
I had lied to them when I was fifteen, and
so if I was ever going to get their help
and learning about the case, I had to play it cool.
Going back over the details about that night, I really
(06:45):
begun to think that Anna's boyfriend Mick had something to
do with her disappearance. But then after talking to Maldonatto,
it was becoming clear that the Sheriff's department was way
more interested in Tender Hearts and its leader, Elrick Light.
But as far as I knew, and it disappeared, all
the adults of Tender Hearts had hiked up to Mount
Saint Helena for a sunrise seance, right and suff for
(07:07):
l Rick. Oh so you knew this too, yeah, almost immediately.
Monica Tremblaine was reporting for The Press Democrat in nineteen
ninety five.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
It was only a few days after Anna was missing
that the seance story it fell apart.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
A few of the women came forward. So where was
he and what did that mean for the investigation? And
who were Tender Hearts in the first place. When I
started interviewing friends, I quickly realized I knew very little
about their alternative living situations. Orion's commune had failed. Almost immediately.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
The community kind of got a little more contentious and
a little more distance and kind of factioned off.
Speaker 9 (07:42):
You know, my mom describes it kind of just like,
you know, not really lasting.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
There were a lot of strong personalities out there, you know,
people who want to get away from it all.
Speaker 9 (07:50):
I think have some strong reasons sometimes.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
And I didn't realize that my friend Cole's parents actually
met when his dad was handing out pamphlets for a
cult in San Francisco.
Speaker 9 (07:59):
I don't think lasted.
Speaker 12 (08:00):
It didn't last, and it's like, hey, let's build a
spaceship form much into the eighties. It was called Stell
and they had a charismatic leader that was quite questionable,
but the plan was to build a spaceship to escape
the end of the world in two thousand and four.
Obviously it came and gone, but I'm pretty sure kind
(08:24):
of folded up when it realized that rocket building was hard.
I'm just assuming. I'm just assuming that like a bunch
of people out in cornfields just realize their limitation about
building rocket.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
The tender hearts weren't that unusual for the area. But
of course, once Anna disappeared. There were a lot of
questions about them.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
A big part of the problem was they were just secretive.
They didn't want to talk to the cops. I mean,
they didn't trust anybody, but they really didn't trust authority figures.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
They had been targeted before by Maldon Auto specifically.
Speaker 9 (08:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (08:58):
Yeah, we had them up on a few violations. They
had problem with one of their neighbors, had to do
with with a truck or something.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
There was some argument over noise and they took the
tires off a neighbor's tractor.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
That escalated to some incidents with animals.
Speaker 9 (09:11):
They had lamas. Oh that's right, I remember them.
Speaker 4 (09:14):
Yeah, Well, some of those lamas would get out and
then they'd get sick.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
At some point, there were accusations about poisoning. Well, I
just remember, you gotta understand.
Speaker 4 (09:25):
I get out there and I'm just I'm there to
calm the situation, you know, cool it down a little bit.
But you got a group of women, very very angry
women in there. They're topless, some of them even buttoning.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
If there was a confrontation or if someone walked on
to the property. The women of Tender Hearts liked to
enact what they called a skin bombing.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
They'd go out and nake it. I kind of love
the It was a very specific, non violent tactic.
Speaker 4 (09:53):
It throws you off, you know, put you on guard,
and I'm not talking about it in a good way.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
One thing about growing up in West County, if there
was ever a gathering of some sort, there was always
at least one person naked. A lot of confusing messages.
Speaker 13 (10:08):
A lot of it was like, you know, people are swimming,
or you know, like you got a pool and people,
you know, we were in the.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
Hot tub pool or whatever.
Speaker 13 (10:15):
My parents' friends were definitely hippies and of the casually
nude variety when there was any call for it.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
It was part of the culture, a general belief in
who needs clothes? Be natural. It wasn't threatening or anything,
but still as casual as I think the adults wanted
it to be. When you're a kid, you could never
not notice it. If Will and I went to that
like main area, the kind of deck that wasn't finished,
that with the boards laid on the ground, there might
(10:43):
be someone naked because.
Speaker 9 (10:45):
They had an outdoor shower that was right there. Yes,
And I always felt like it was a little weird.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
But I didn't feel like I could say it was weird.
Speaker 9 (10:52):
You know, because if you did, you would be lame.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
But beyond the skin bombing and fights with neighbors, I
wanted to know what they were all about. I found
a historian who specializes in intentional communities, which I learned
is the newer preferred term for a commune.
Speaker 9 (11:09):
Hey, how great. Thanks.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Howard Tripp is the author of two books, counter Topia,
which covers the communities of the nineteen sixties and seventies,
and West of Eden, which chronicles the rise and fall
of small religious sects in the area.
Speaker 9 (11:23):
I hope you don't mind my little friends.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
You are right with that.
Speaker 9 (11:25):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
Howard's other hobby is ants. Yeah, so, how long have
you been farming them?
Speaker 11 (11:32):
It's been I mean it's been over a decade.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
He has an entire wall of his house that is
a series of ant farms, or, as I learned, they're
called former carrea.
Speaker 11 (11:41):
But one of the things I've always been fascinated by ICs.
Speaker 9 (11:45):
Oh like, that's like pheromones, right, right, exactly.
Speaker 11 (11:49):
But you're talking about how an individual ant senses the
world around them, the perception of what's real, what's happening.
Speaker 14 (11:55):
It can be altered completely like a drug.
Speaker 11 (11:57):
Even more than that, it's it's their actual sense of reality.
It's not you'll have like a colony, right thin get
invaded and they start working for another species.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
They don't even know why, and they're just as happy.
They just just want to do Tripid research tender Hearts
for his books, but they ultimately didn't make the cut.
Speaker 15 (12:15):
Well, if we're talking about the major communities from Sonoma County, Headwinds,
morning Star, the Farm before they went to Tennessee, you're
talking about these are much bigger operations groups that were
formalized in ways that Tender Hearts they could never really
get it together.
Speaker 9 (12:29):
Well, how many people were in it? It's like, oh wow, yeah,
very small.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
But then for your second book, wouldn't they have counted
as a spiritual group?
Speaker 11 (12:39):
You yeah, you would think that's uh, that's the sixty
four thousand dollars question, isn't it meaning?
Speaker 1 (12:43):
Were they even technically a religion? Did they have a
belief system?
Speaker 11 (12:47):
I know, I know what this looks like.
Speaker 9 (12:48):
These don't judge.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
Trip has an entire guest house behind his main house.
It's full of books and papers.
Speaker 15 (12:54):
Okay, here are some of Elerick's newsletters.
Speaker 9 (12:56):
Cool, we have these signs they put up.
Speaker 15 (12:59):
Yeah, and there are tapes of this lecture series.
Speaker 9 (13:02):
Oh wait, what really recordings?
Speaker 15 (13:04):
Yeah, yeah somewhere.
Speaker 9 (13:06):
Oh my god, I would.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Love to hear those, Which is how I got ten
hours of el Ric light talking.
Speaker 5 (13:12):
Well, let's just jump into it.
Speaker 6 (13:13):
We'll start with our invocation.
Speaker 8 (13:16):
As we always do.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
I am of the Earth.
Speaker 6 (13:21):
From the earth. I burn with a fire inside that
I promised to maintain, with the thick skin and a
tender heart.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
I actually found the tapes kind of soothing. There's definitely
a lot of jargon. Elrick liked to make up his
own terms.
Speaker 6 (13:41):
This is what we might call skymine is not the
only directo. Locusts and arrive at the choiceless awareness.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
Elric is earnest, thoughtful.
Speaker 16 (13:54):
We can absorb energetic facts by existing in in what
Castanano would call the the kernel of non ordinary reality.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
And he goes out of his way to reject his
own authority.
Speaker 5 (14:14):
No, I am not York or.
Speaker 6 (14:18):
I am not anyone's savior.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
One of the most exciting moments is when he gets
frustrated with his recording equipment.
Speaker 6 (14:26):
My ankles burst under the weight of ill consumed mother
fucking dammit. Really, Mike was off the whole time. My
ankles burst under the weight of ill conceived compulsions, and
(14:53):
I limped my way, like the hurried hair past Alice
into wonderland where only those with thrones and axes reigned.
Speaker 5 (15:07):
What are you living for? Where are you going? Late?
Speaker 8 (15:12):
Late?
Speaker 6 (15:13):
Always late for?
Speaker 15 (15:14):
What? For?
Speaker 12 (15:16):
What?
Speaker 5 (15:17):
For what? It's not real?
Speaker 6 (15:22):
None of it is real.
Speaker 10 (15:26):
You have been tricked, You've been lied too.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
This section, like when he says he's going to do
it again, feels raw, emotional and personal, but otherwise for
ten tapes, Elric is a teacher. He stays abstract and philosophical.
A unique worldview does evolve a metaphysics. He's inspired a
(15:53):
little by Krishna Murdi and a lot by Carlos Castanetta.
There's this belief in the positive power of psychedelic drugs
and something he calls tree Time, which begins with the
story of him being high on mescaline.
Speaker 10 (16:09):
Minutes can feel like hours, seconds could be a lifetime.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
But it gets somewhere kind of interesting. A baby cries.
Speaker 17 (16:25):
She cries if she's hungry or stared, and in that
moment she might think this feeling will never end.
Speaker 6 (16:38):
But as we grow, we grow into a different time consciousness.
Speaker 11 (16:46):
Oh my gosh, so time moves faster as you get older.
Speaker 18 (16:51):
Listen, if you consider a human life and you put
it on a scale of the semper baus.
Speaker 9 (17:00):
That's what he called redwoods, Of course he did.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
That's from their scientific name, or their Latin binomial sequoia sempaveerans.
Speaker 17 (17:07):
We're talking about three thousand years.
Speaker 18 (17:10):
And in that context, what's a day?
Speaker 17 (17:13):
What's a day?
Speaker 9 (17:13):
What's a year?
Speaker 17 (17:15):
In three time seasons? Last three days.
Speaker 6 (17:21):
All of American history would happen before you were eight
years old. A child who would be born grow to
be twelve in the span of a summer vacation.
Speaker 9 (17:37):
What is dude talking about time perception?
Speaker 1 (17:41):
He's scaling a human life up to a redwood tree.
And look, I did the math. Of course, he's actually right.
If you take one hundred years or the best human lifespan, sure,
and you stretch that over three thousand, it's thirty times.
So one hour is thirty hours. Just over a day,
that's one point two five days. And yes, a month
(18:01):
would go by in a day, winter would last three days.
Speaker 9 (18:04):
So all of his comparisons are exactly right. You need
a break, probably, Yeah.
Speaker 18 (18:12):
Imagine wisdom that scale the inside.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
Well, from the outside, it looked like your classic guru
cult situation.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
Yeah, well, I mean if it's all the tropes, right, Oh, yes, absolutely.
You've got a charismatic leader, he's got a new spiritual
take on life, and he runs off. He has a
bunch of.
Speaker 3 (18:48):
Whys, right right, right right, Except none of that, none
of what you actually just said was actually true.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
Those are all lies. When I started this podcast, one
of my main questions about Tender Hearts, which was kind
of naive, was was it a commune or was it
(19:16):
a cult? It turns out neither, and those categories are
kind of fuzzy to begin with.
Speaker 11 (19:22):
Had ideas later on, it's not how it started.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
It turns out Tender Hearts didn't begin as a religion
or a political movement or even a philosophy.
Speaker 11 (19:34):
It grew out of a woman shelter.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
Really before he found a Tender Hearts, Eric Letsky was
an employee of the Pavilion House. Pavilion was at the
forefront of a wave of shelters that sprung up in
the late seventies with what was then a pretty radical
idea that women might need their own place, a designated
shelter away from men.
Speaker 11 (19:52):
He helped run the whole thing until eighty five eighty six.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
They were your classic San Francisco liberals, in your face
and aggressive.
Speaker 11 (20:01):
Eleric got into trouble with the city officials.
Speaker 18 (20:03):
Four protesters were arrested today outside city Hall amidst ongoing
tensions between the city council and the Pavilion House.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
The distinction between a homeless shelter and a domestic violence
center was a blurry line that was still being worked out,
and in the early eighties, the owners of Pavilion wanted
to expand the shelter by allowing men to join, but
for some of the women and Elric, this was anathema.
It was a split in the Pavilion organization. There was
(20:33):
Elric on one side and the owners and city officials
on the other. Around the same time, Elrick came into
some money.
Speaker 3 (20:41):
The assumption is that maybe one of his parents or
perhaps grandparents passed away, but nobody knows for sure.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
So he pulled up stakes, left the city and bought
fifty acres in West Sonoma County. The fifty acres right
next to my parents, and so the women were.
Speaker 11 (20:58):
He got them off from the shelter, them personally and
their kids to come live off the land.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
Besides Anna and Willow, there were only a few other kids.
I remember a boy named Josiah and a girl named Francis,
and maybe one more. We called them grammets.
Speaker 13 (21:13):
I felt antagonized by them. I felt like they were
actively annoying to us. I think we might have just
been hating on younger kids.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
They were wild, right, I mean, you know, it was
like they were just kind of roaming free, and they
were a pack, like I definitely remember it being a pack.
It's like just a group of like loud, dirty kids,
like and they had attitude, like they were strong. Basically,
it's like an outdoor version of a women's shelter.
Speaker 11 (21:42):
Yeah, it was like a camp or a farm for
women escaping domestic violence.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
Everything I learned about Tender Hearts, but especially this, made
it even more important that I get in touch with
Anna and Willow's mom, Laaney. I'd always thought of her
as some sort of New age counter cultural seekers her,
But if she came from a women's shelter in San Francisco,
if she was escaping an abusive situation and brought her
(22:07):
daughters to raise them in the woods. That's a very
different person, Laney, Hi, it's rather or strong.
Speaker 9 (22:15):
How are you. I hope you're doing all right.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
For weeks I'd left messages. Weirdly, this new understanding of
the tender hearts was more radical and ahead of its
time than any of Elric's professed insights like tree Time
or Directo Locust. He was actually creating what nowadays you
would call a safe space for women. But we didn't
(22:40):
know any of that. Anybody local just saw a polygamous cult,
and interestingly Elrick and the women let that happen.
Speaker 11 (22:50):
So these, if you could see, they would post these
all around the town.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
Oh wow, Elric started spreading his teachings. So I'm looking
at there's a drawer of a kind of elephant plant person.
Speaker 5 (23:03):
What else?
Speaker 15 (23:03):
What do you see?
Speaker 5 (23:05):
All right?
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Well, there's text.
Speaker 8 (23:07):
No look closer.
Speaker 9 (23:07):
What are you missing? I don't know what is it?
Speaker 15 (23:10):
It's a lotus position?
Speaker 1 (23:11):
Oh yeah, all right, so it says you are a
goddess Gaya shakti terra isis what do you see all
around the world? Women of sounder minds and tender hearts
insight isn't oriental, nor is it western. Elrick light offers
only the sacred, in the universal, the divine, feminine. Oh
(23:32):
and then there's there's an address and a telephone number.
Speaker 5 (23:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 15 (23:35):
Ye.
Speaker 11 (23:35):
People had people subscribing from all across the country, Like
how many are they?
Speaker 1 (23:38):
Hundreds, maybe thousands. But locally the postings made them notorious,
and there were times when they could have easily spoken out,
but they let the rumors spread, which is actually a
brilliant way to keep people out of your business. Like
skin bombing. Allowing people to think they were a cult
ensured that outsiders, men in particular, stayed away. So the
(24:03):
question is, did Elrick believe this stuff?
Speaker 9 (24:07):
No?
Speaker 1 (24:07):
No, really. For his part, Maldonado is adamant.
Speaker 9 (24:11):
No.
Speaker 4 (24:12):
No, A con is a con is a con A
lot of make your money, a lot to cover your tracks,
and you just keep online.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
But when I listen to the tapes, Elrick seems earnest
to me.
Speaker 11 (24:21):
He was definitely having some kind of experience out there
in the whips right. Probably started with secular intentions to
live together on a farm, and then Eleric started reflecting
on things. He starts thinking rearranging places in his mind
and having new ideas that he has to share.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
But there was a pressing issue.
Speaker 14 (24:41):
It's really common among these intentional communities unless you have
a donation or best case, a tithing system that everyone
agrees on, right, someone has to pay the bills for
the TenderHearts.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
At first, that meant getting jobs. Laney work a safeway
what I can't No Connor, who lives in England, remembered this.
I can't even imagine her.
Speaker 13 (25:03):
Yeah, I know, I know, but I swear I remember
seeing her in a reflective vest in the parking lot,
like collecting carts.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
But the jobs weren't enough, and so TenderHearts did what
most everyone in Sonoma County did in the nineties.
Speaker 11 (25:14):
I mean, I would say in Sonoma, Mendosino, Humboldt, maybe
thirty forty percent, almost half of the communities are funded
by weed.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Hence the cannabis that was in the barn the night
that Anna.
Speaker 9 (25:23):
Disappeared, and it was all just sitting in that barn.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
This opened up a whole new avenue because if Elrick
was lying to the cops about where he was that night,
was he trying to protect the fact that he was
growing marijuana?
Speaker 9 (25:37):
I thirty forty five minutes. Thank you, Lennie.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
Could Anna have been killed because of like a drug that?
Speaker 9 (25:45):
I mean, it's just weed that was a huge deal
back then. He's right.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
This was the era of Camp.
Speaker 3 (25:53):
It's a theme that is reminiscent of those you see
in war zones, but this is California and the enemies
are marijuana.
Speaker 1 (25:59):
Grow Camp was the campaign against marijuana planting, a multi
agency task force that launched in nineteen eighty three. They
were a paramilitary organization with helicopters and machine guns.
Speaker 9 (26:12):
They were hardcore.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
So does that mean that people were smoking pot around us?
Does that mean that they would have been smoking pot
from tender hearts? Undoubtedly?
Speaker 9 (26:21):
Undoubtedly.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
So then who were some we know somebody who bought
weed from them or sold for them?
Speaker 9 (26:27):
Like, do we know any drug dealers? I mean, do
you remember anybody, Hilo, We're trying.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
To remember who sold weed back in the day. I
feel like there was an older guy. God, it was
like it was like there was Jim. He wasn't drug
I don't think so. But there was a guy who
was always hanging out at the Hesse building.
Speaker 9 (26:47):
He had like a battery nickname like Bunny that's copper talk.
He is not a drug dealer. It was like that motorcycle. No, No,
that guy was totally who.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Was the gu There was a guy not a name
like that, like a DJ name, and he used to
sell to all the skater kids.
Speaker 9 (27:05):
Remember rip hits was the thing.
Speaker 13 (27:08):
Yes, yes, that was not his name, but that's what
that's what they called him.
Speaker 9 (27:16):
That's what we called Do you think we could find him?
I could we find him. I could find him. I
think I could find him.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
So the other day, when I told you about willow
burning the weed, is this what you meant when you
said that the tender hearts weren't all kumbaya and butterflies.
Speaker 9 (27:30):
And they were always alive.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
Just to front, this was a criminal drug dealing operation.
That's true, but a little reductive because when I finally
got the transcripts of el Rick's interrogations, I realized Maldonado
wasn't giving me the whole story.
Speaker 9 (27:56):
Chris, there, they're here.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
I got an email from Sheriff Lachlan with a PDF attachment.
They had a watermark across every page, are strong and
they were a total mess. The names were hard to
figure out because everyone was designated by their initials.
Speaker 9 (28:11):
Oh okay, so RM seems like he's the one in
charge of That'sonado and two many guys working with me.
Speaker 4 (28:19):
It would have been Kadio. He headed up anything with
grow operations or substances. He was kind of like our
vice squad. And then, uh, I think I put Orrin. Yeah,
I put Bob Orrin as my ol leite.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
She sent me like, there's a couple interviews with a
few different people. Look, this one is actually your neighbors. Then, dude,
this is me. This is a transcript of me getting interviewed. No, yes,
look it's quote.
Speaker 11 (28:45):
No.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
We were at Connor's house, right, and Willow was with you. Yes,
and you didn't hear anything, not until the news.
Speaker 9 (28:51):
Connor's mom made.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
Us pancakes, and she told you about the fire. Yet,
Oh my god, she put my interviews in here?
Speaker 9 (28:58):
Who did uh? Lachlan the shriff? She sent me my
own transcripts. The why. I don't know just what to say.
You lied. We have a record of you lying.
Speaker 17 (29:08):
You.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
She also didn't include any of the interviews with Mick Bowden.
It was only me and Eleric. It looks like there's
four different ones here. Oh here the ceremony. Does that
involve the kids? And he goes no. They press him,
why not something you don't want them to see?
Speaker 9 (29:25):
And el Rick says absolutely not. Okay, now we got
we got three women, three of your.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
Women, your women, by the way, on the record, and
they say you weren't there at all. You let off
the blessing, the wind song or whatever it's called. And
they didn't see you until Wednesday. At some points Elrick
got defensive, there is nothing wrong with taking a hike
to see a sunrise?
Speaker 9 (29:48):
Is there?
Speaker 1 (29:48):
And Maldon outto says that depends, and Elerck goes, how
there is nothing.
Speaker 9 (29:54):
Do you go to church?
Speaker 1 (29:55):
The other cop is like, I have no problem with
the hike, and Eleric he's not letting go.
Speaker 9 (30:01):
You go to a church and pray.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
You go into a building, we go outside. That's the difference.
That's the only difference. And it's a good point, it's
sweet point. His dialogue definitely could use a punch up.
Speaker 9 (30:12):
It's not dialogue. Wait, we should.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
Do this as a reading. Yes, we printed out two copies. Yes,
all right, I'm the cops both of of course you
don't have anymore. I'm gonna pick up the slack.
Speaker 9 (30:29):
Brainwashing ladies is one thing.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
Why are you doing a New York character?
Speaker 9 (30:34):
Brainwashing the ladies is one thing. But the kids, you
get their checks footsteps. Rick says, I don't steal from kids.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
We had a ranch, Bob when was he a few years?
Speaker 9 (30:45):
Eleven kids? Eleven kids and none was in school. All
of the Tender Hearts kids go to school.
Speaker 6 (30:51):
No electricity checks come in every month, and these kids
are put out to the fields.
Speaker 9 (30:55):
It was it was their bulls come to life and
these pull fish. It's coming in from the fields. What
are they talking about? No idea? Okay, they're talking about
the sex.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
Some situation where they arrested other people with a bunch
of kids. It seems like they were trying to catch
Elrick admitting the Tender Hearts was making money off welfare.
Then they start fishing about drugs.
Speaker 9 (31:15):
Here we go, okay, this is this is classic good
cutback Cup moving into the killer. Tell us about the guys.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
At Jenna, Yeah, tell us what the guys at Jenna.
Speaker 9 (31:23):
The god degener is definitely drug stuff.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
Alric says, I don't know who you're talking about.
Speaker 9 (31:28):
I am this is definitely where they would slap the taken.
Just read it. Come me, please. If you weren't up
the hill, I'm not saying I wasn't.
Speaker 1 (31:37):
We know you weren't.
Speaker 9 (31:38):
Why don't you tell us about Tubers? What down at Tubers?
Speaker 4 (31:42):
There's a guy damned daily you know, I'm talking about
the lineless of dum sliless.
Speaker 9 (31:47):
Sometimes if I talk damn, what's he gonna tell me?
You don't know about Thursdays at tubas? The garden bodies?
Did you order the code red?
Speaker 1 (31:56):
All right?
Speaker 9 (31:57):
Do you want answers? I want the truth?
Speaker 1 (32:01):
Stop it?
Speaker 9 (32:02):
And Lerrick isn't even talking anymore.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
This is I don't know what love this garden party shit?
Speaker 9 (32:07):
Oh dude, oh this is that's sad.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
It took some rereading and a bit of research for
Chris and I finally figured out what was going on.
Tubers and garden parties were about bars and hookup spots
in the area. The cops were fishing for Leric to
admit something they had suspicions about, not the weed dealing,
not the fact that maybe he was lying about this
whole cult, that he was gay. Elrick. So he did
(32:37):
leave the seance.
Speaker 3 (32:38):
He went down to the East Bay, where he met
up with this man named Lucas Park who.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
Was it turns out, an ex boyfriend. In reality, this
shouldn't be shocking. We're talking about an outspoken feminist political
activist in the heart of a very liberal, very gay
friendly city, which is I guess exactly why there's something
heart wrenching here. Could stand up for women, for counterculture,
(33:02):
could be brave and outspoken about so much, but he
was still crippled by shame and fear regarding his sexuality.
How many of the women knew none of them.
Speaker 11 (33:13):
They knew he wasn't interested in them, but they figured
it was all part of his vouels celebacy.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
I actually heard this on the recordings. He talks about
the power of intracourse.
Speaker 6 (33:23):
Inter is between for among intras within a contained.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
Entity, polyamorous cult that wasn't Polly or a cult, a
pioneering feminist commune led by a gay man who didn't
come out of the closet. So the tender hearts were
complicit and letting the world think they were something they weren't.
This multi wife sex colt. They let that deception stand,
but they were also deceived from within, and perhaps the
(33:54):
most salient point for Maldonado in nineteen ninety five, and
for us now couldn't have killed DNA.
Speaker 3 (34:01):
Well, I mean, the confirm that Elrick was with Park
all night and into the next morning. So first story
was a lie, new alibi, it was salad.
Speaker 1 (34:10):
And as for the tender hearts, that's yeah, that's pretty
much all she wrote. The women dwindled over the next
year or so. Al Eric left for months at a time,
and then there was nobody there anymore. The land itself
eventually sold to one of our neighbors who has since
passed away. So as far as I know, it's in
some kind of probate limbo, all right, experiment.
Speaker 9 (34:33):
Tender hearts exist today? Right?
Speaker 1 (34:36):
Hell yeah, dude, me and like fifty naked chicks running
around the woods getting to know each other physically.
Speaker 15 (34:42):
Ok.
Speaker 9 (34:43):
Do I get to have sex with a tender hearts specifically?
Speaker 1 (34:46):
But just a communal situation where you're sharing resources and
living off the land, raising your.
Speaker 9 (34:52):
Kids do their sounds like a nightmare.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
Sounds pretty great to me, And I don't think I'm alone.
Even with his own experience growing up on a failed one,
Oriyan is optimistic.
Speaker 13 (35:02):
I mean, I feel like it's a little bit of
a coming full circle in a way. You know, I
got very very interested in some modern form of co
living and you share resources, you have a shared garden,
and you have a shared kitchen and co working space
for parties and whatever else, and it's like, seems pretty idyllic.
So it feels like I'm kind of like trying to
do what my parents sort of did, but better. Right, Like,
(35:23):
it's probably a classic, you know, thing that we all
try to do to some degree at times, fix the
mistakes that our parents made.
Speaker 9 (35:29):
Oh stop, think about that type people who want in
on this thing. They're not easy going people. They're not
cool people. No, they're vegans. There's social justice sumiers. But
you also got independent, critical thinkers.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
Artists, prescientious dirty drug addicts.
Speaker 9 (35:46):
Look at your boy, Howard, Look at your boy. How
do you want to move in with him and his aunts.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
Yeah, you got to live communally with him and his
insects as well.
Speaker 11 (35:54):
No no, no, Communism failed, but like socialism failed.
Speaker 9 (35:57):
Rider. Okay, there's a reason, dude, you ended up going
to boarding school. What does that have to do with anything.
Speaker 1 (36:03):
Chris spent the second half of high school, starting our
junior year in New Jersey at a boarding school So,
dun't your mom send you there because you know you
needed a different situation because you were being bullied.
Speaker 9 (36:14):
Oh, I would know the bullied stuff. That's not why
I went there.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
Okay, I'm just saying that the normal all American public
school childhood didn't work out for you. So you know
you needed something, You needed an alternative, and I think
a lot of us do.
Speaker 9 (36:30):
Most of us want something different. You're drinking the kool aid, man,
go go live in tree time.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
In nineteen ninety six, el Rick left Sebastopool went back
to San Francisco.
Speaker 11 (36:40):
There were signs of some political involvement, some classes taught
at some illness centers and retreats.
Speaker 1 (36:46):
But after Anna, he mostly vanished from the public.
Speaker 6 (36:51):
Not like these moments when it's just.
Speaker 5 (36:56):
You and I.
Speaker 6 (36:58):
Strange, stupid little medium of tape recorded.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
He died in two thousand and one cancer. Hold on,
(37:28):
what is this? After our dramatic reading, I was looking
back over the transcripts.
Speaker 12 (37:32):
Look at that?
Speaker 9 (37:32):
Oh who said that?
Speaker 1 (37:33):
It was a single line quote? R M. What do
you know? The Swami turns out to be a faggot.
That's Maldonado man. Oh, that's gross.
Speaker 9 (37:45):
Was that after he left the room or is that
when he was still in there?
Speaker 1 (37:47):
I think it's after. I don't know what's worse. Seeing
that sentence, it suddenly brought into focus where the investigators
were coming from. These are the people whose official job
it was to find out what happened to Anna. They
didn't like the tender hearts, they didn't like that they
did drugs, they didn't like that Elrick was gay. But
none of those things on their own are any real
(38:10):
justification for suspicion. That sucks, man, really, and you're gonna
go meet this guy? I was my last conversation with
Maldonado before I got the transcripts. He agreed to meet
me and walk me through the crime scene.
Speaker 15 (38:24):
Why don't we meet out there at the property.
Speaker 4 (38:26):
We had some strawberries from Andre stand out there by wagon.
Speaker 9 (38:30):
I'll show you what we found.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
I didn't know what to think. Maldonado was being helpful.
He was one of the few people who seemed like
he actually cared that I was looking back at this case.
And then, to make things worse, Chris got a voicemail.
Speaker 9 (38:50):
It was from Sparks.
Speaker 19 (38:51):
Chris, what up, man, It's Davie H.
Speaker 9 (38:55):
Sparks mcnight back in the.
Speaker 19 (38:56):
Day time for the time.
Speaker 4 (39:00):
Brother.
Speaker 19 (39:01):
Anyway, Yeah, I'll talk to rider. Uh, you know, I
got stories. I got inside Infomaion for real though. You
want to talk and a trainer, you got to talk
about those fuckers detecting that shit Baldonado.
Speaker 9 (39:15):
Come on, man, dude was a fool.
Speaker 19 (39:17):
Well, I got I got some stuff for you. My boy.
Speaker 9 (39:20):
Oh man, my boy, Mick. You know he was my boy.
But damn kid.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
Got a pass.
Speaker 9 (39:25):
You got a pass anyway, Yeah, man, hit me up.
Let's get a drink.
Speaker 19 (39:31):
I'll lay it all on you.
Speaker 1 (39:49):
The Red Weather is an iHeart podcast hosted by writer Strong,
sound engineering, editing and mixing by Bo Milkins, produced by
Tess Porthology. Executive producers at iHeartRadio Trevor Young and Matt Frederick,
Associate producer Bo milkis original score by Kyle Morgan. If
you're enjoying the show, please remember to leave with review
(40:10):
of raining. Thanks for listening.
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