July 28, 2025 • 63 mins
In 1990, a UCLA student was found murdered in a tunnel in LA. Detective Rick Jackson and his partner were assigned to the complicated case. Who had a motive to stab Ronald Baker? Was the pentagram pendant around his neck a clue? Author Matthew McGough and Detective Rick Jackson tell the story in their book, Black Tunnel White Magic: A Murder, a Detective’s Obsession, and ’90s Los Angeles at the Brink.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
One of the things that Rick and his partner are
informed of early on is that the night that the
murder occurred was actually the same as the summer solstice.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:49):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. In nineteen ninety, a UCLA
student was found murdered in a tunnel in la Detective
(01:11):
Rick Jackson and his partner were assigned to the complicated case.
Who had a motive to stab ron Baker was the
pentagram pendant around his necka clue. Author Matthew McGough and
detective Rick Jackson tell the story in their book Black Tunnel,
White Magic, a murder a detective's obsession in nineties Los
Angeles on the Brink. So we're going to go back
(01:37):
and forth because you guys co wrote this book together.
Matt a very experienced true crime author who has been
on the show before with the Lazarus Files. And then
you know, we have a retired detective, Rick Jackson. He
works cold cases now and he actually worked on this case.
So let's start with you, Matt. Okay, So this is
(01:58):
if we're setting the scene. We're in nineteen ninety it's June. First,
tell me what city we're in and kind of give
me the lay of the land a little bit. What's
it like.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
So this story, yes, as you said, it takes place
in June nineteen ninety is when it begins, and it's
in the city of Los Angeles and specifically in a
city park called Chatsworth Park. That's the very northwest reaches
of Los Angeles County, about as far north and west
as you can go in LA and while still being
(02:31):
within the city of LA. But it's pretty rustic. It's
actually quite a beautiful park. People do things like mountaineering
and hiking. It's like very rugged, and it's late on
the night of June twenty when there's fourteenagers who are
basically just out for a thrill. They are aware that
there's a railroad tunnel above Chatsworth Park and at that
(02:55):
time it was common for teenagers to hike up to
the railroad tunnel and just to get a thrill out
of it, go inside the tunnel, which was very dark,
and stand against the walls while the train went through,
press yourself against the wall and feel the train rushed by.
So it was it was close to midnight when these
(03:15):
teenagers went up there, two boys and two young women.
The boys had been there before, but the girls they
were with had not, so they hike up there and
on this day they get about halfway inside the tunnel
when they stumble upon a body and obviously flee running
out of the tunnel down the hill and go knock
on some doors until someone askers, and they called nine
(03:38):
to one one and the police respond and discover yes,
it is the body of a young man with curly hair,
kind of a slight physique and no id and he's
been stabbed several times and his throat has been slowed.
And because there's no idea on the body. It's what's
known as a John Doe. So the police document the rhyme, scene,
(04:00):
collect whatever evidence is there, and the body if the
victim is transported to the mark.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Tell me about the difficulties of a John Doe case
in general, or a Jane Doe case. I mean, obviously,
you know you don't have this person identified in nineteen
ninety pre cell phones. You know at that time period.
What's the first thing that an LAPD detective would do
to try to establish the identity of a John Doe.
Is it looking through missing person reports?
Speaker 3 (04:30):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (04:30):
Well, after the crime scene, that's the most important initial
thing is to control the crime scene. Of course, it
was the middle of the night in a kind of
a remote park, so there's not a lot of hikers
and other people up there at that time, so you
isolate the crime scene. It's pretty isolated already in a tunnel,
and you really document everything with photographs, your notes, diagrams,
(04:52):
print people up there to recover things that you think
might later be printed at the laboratory or bitter condition.
So that's the first thing, and you do and eventually
what you'll do not so much at the crime scene
but back at the station is make calls, check on
current missing persons. You'll run their fingerprints. You'll take fingerprints
(05:12):
once the corner's office gets there, and then run them
through whatever databases you can see if that person has
any kind of an arrest director or can be identified
through prints. There's numerous other sources that you can go through,
but those are the initial ones. But that takes place
once you lead the crime scene. The crime scene is
strictly about the crime scene, and you're not going to
(05:34):
worry about anythings as far as trying to identify him
at the location.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Okay, one more question for you before we go back
to the main part of the story with Matt So
Paul Hols talks about people who love to insert themselves
in criminal cases for various reasons. I'm curious about, kind
of looking back at your career, I'm thinking about these
four teenagers who discovered the body and then reported it.
Looking back at your career, how often have the people
(06:03):
who report a crime, especially a murder, are they actually
involved or is it actually pretty rare in you know,
your understanding.
Speaker 4 (06:13):
It's rare in my experience, and I think it's rare
in general experiences.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
Of most homicide detectives to rank.
Speaker 4 (06:21):
You asked that question because eventually the name of one
person of those four that were at the crime scene
not a really common name. Another clue comes forward within
a day or so where a person that we want
to interview eventually because of our victim's background, once we
identifying him, had the same name, and I'm thinking, wait
a minute, it's not that common of a name for
(06:43):
him to show up.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
And both of them.
Speaker 4 (06:45):
That just raised some hairs on my back of my
neck because I thought there was something that definitely we
had to consider. And then it eventually went away. But
it was interesting because this case for a short second
almost described the situation.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
Asked me about Yeah, I was curious about that. Okay, good,
So Matt, when we left you, you had described the body.
How many stab wounds did you say? Again, I'm sorry,
Oh many?
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Rick may be able to recall the precise number, but
many injuries to the torso and then also a really
deep slashing knife wound across the neck that no question
would have been fatal on its out.
Speaker 4 (07:25):
I think there were about fifteen stab wounds, pretty significant
stab wounds. There were the defensive cuts on the hands,
which became important because you know about the potential for
something under the nails because of the close contact situation.
But they were to the front, the back, the lower
extremities the hands, and then, like Matt said, pretty extreme slashing.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
Of the neck.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Now I'm going to ask you again, Rick about this.
So I've always thought and I feel like conventional wisdom
says that when you have that many stab wounds, right,
it's quote unquote overkill. It must be a personal vendetta
somebody who knows and they are trying to send a
message and they're angry. And then when I talked to
Paul about cases that range from the eighteen hundreds to
(08:11):
the early nineteen hundreds, he said, not all the time.
Sometimes people are just scared and want to make sure
that the person's dead. Sometimes a person's moving around so
much that you have to stab them that many times.
And so I thought that was interesting. I always thought
that went into profiling, you know, who is the person
who would have done this, But when when you have
somebody laying in a tunnel in a major city like LA,
(08:33):
that seems to complicate things eveningmore to know whether this
is somebody who knows him or somebody who was using
this as a crime of opportunity for some reason.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
This also was not just any tunnel. Yes, on one level,
it's just a rather remote, isolated railroad tunnel that commuter
trains would pass through. But it's also important to add
that within half a mile, you know as the proflies
from this tunnel, was the Spawn Movie Ranch, which is
where Charles Manson and his followers launched their crime spree
(09:07):
from in nineteen sixty nine, which again was much more
recent and fresh in the mind of people in Los
Angeles in nineteen ninety than it is today, and the
specter of the Manson crimes was such that this tunnel,
sometime between nineteen sixty nine and nineteen ninety received an
(09:27):
unofficial nickname as the Manson Tunnel. And one of the
striking things that Rick and the other officers saw when
they went up to this tunnel is that there was
a lot of pentagram graffiti and other things that sort
of bolstered, at least in terms of rumors and reputation,
(09:49):
that this is a place with satanic overtones, something of a.
Speaker 5 (09:54):
Magnet to people who might.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
Be interested in the occult as a gathering place where
people would possibly do rituals. So a lot of those
ideas are kind of swirling around this place, and it
was probably part of the thrill for these teenagers to
go up there, because it is very dark, more than
a little bit scary.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
It's like going to a haunted house.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
Yeah, I mean there's literally pentagrams that are spray painted
on the walls of the tunnel as you enter, and
actually in big spray painted letters above the entrance to
the tunnel was spray painted the phrase holy Terror. So again,
it's like a creepy, creepy place known as the Manson Tunnel,
(10:39):
and it's sort of the last thing that these teenagers
are expecting to find when they go in. But you
can visualize how terrifying it must have been to them
to go in there and really only lit by I
think the boys maybe had a cigarette lighter or two,
but to come upon what they found. And then again,
kind of the occult annotation that surrounded the location of
(11:02):
the murder provided the seeds for a lot of the
media attention that would develop in time around the case.
Speaker 4 (11:09):
I should also add that our victim, John Doe, wore
a pentagram necklace around his neck that was one of
the that was the only personal property he had on him.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
That night, we were talking about them discovering the body
and Rickywit's had probably the fifteen stab wounds. What did
you think about the overkill theory versus you know, just like,
if you want him dead, you're going to have to
stab him many times. It doesn't have to be a
personal thing.
Speaker 4 (11:37):
I wasn't, you know, eventually, when I found that out
a couple of days later, once I became involved, I
wasn't that convinced either way. You know, you're aware of
the potential personal connection and overkilled, but also it was
obviously there was at least some limited struggle and flailing
because his hands were getting knife wounds, his back, so things,
(11:58):
it was rolling around and other things going on during
the fight that led to his eventual demise. So you
just leave that open until you dive into it a
little bit further.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
Okay, So, Matt, what we know about this person is
it's a young man, curly hair, and he had been
stabbed many many times, and it sounds like had been
fighting back because he had defensive wounds. So what happens next?
What did the police do next?
Speaker 2 (12:28):
So there's a pair of detectives from the Devonshire Police Division,
which is the area, the part of LA where the
crime occurred. And so there's two homicide detectives who take
charge of this John Doe case. So they are trying
to do things like you suggested, check missing persons reports,
call hospitals to find out, you know, if anyone had
(12:49):
been reported missing, or just to do the due diligence
to try to figure out who this is.
Speaker 5 (12:54):
So there's one.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Police investigation that's focused entirely on identifying who this rictimus.
Separately from that, the same night as the teenagers are
hiking up to the tunnel, there's a family in Woodland Hills,
which is part of the San Fernando Valley here in
Los Angeles. It's a couple, Gail and Ka Baker, and
it's late that night, close to midnight. Mom has already
(13:19):
gone to sleep and Dad is sort of dozing in
front of the TV when the phone rings and he
wakes up and he picks up the phone and he
hears a strange voice, almost as if the person it
sounds to him, as if it's someone disguising their voice,
not using their true voice. And he hears this strange
voice on the phone say, mister Baker, we have your son.
(13:42):
If you don't pay us one hundred thousand dollars by tomorrow,
he will be killed. And mister Baker is really confused.
I mean he's just woken up and he gets this
phone call. And so his son is Ron, who's a
student at UCLA junior at UCLA, lives in an apartment
Van Eyes with two friends. And so mister Baker calls
(14:04):
Ron's apartment and one of the roommate's answers, yes, is
Ron home, And the roommate says no, he left earlier
that night to go to UCLA and that he hadn't
come home, and mister Baker says, well, when he comes home,
please have him call me right away. Mister Baker generally
assumes that it's some sort of a prank or something,
(14:27):
goes to sleep, doesn't call the police. The next morning,
mid morning at the Baker family home, the phone rings
again and it's the same strange voice who repeats the
exact same message, mister Baker, we have your son. If
you don't pay us hundred thousand dollars, he will be killed.
At this point, the Baker's call the apartment again, they're
(14:50):
informed by the roommates that Ron never came home last night,
and so at this point they are second guessing his
initial sense that this is some sort of harbless pranktice
may actually be something quite serious. And so the Bakers
call the LAPD and report these two ransom kidnapping calls.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
Do they say, what to do? They say, we've got
your kid. We need one hundred thousand dollars from you.
Are there more instructions after that?
Speaker 3 (15:17):
No, no, there's not.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
And you know, when the Fakers call the police and
report these first two calls, officers respond to their home
and actually set up a wiretap on the phone in
case there are further calls and further instructions. But that
third call never comes. So it's it's just the call
(15:41):
the previous night and the call the following morning. And
then the Bakers contact the police and a kidnapping slash
missing person's report is generated about Ron, finding where Ron is,
and so there's a period of a couple of days
where these two separate investigations want to kidnapping missing persons
(16:04):
and second a John Doe homicide, And it takes about
forty eight hours before the dots are connected that there's
an unidentified body at the morgue who matches the description
of the missing person in this kidnapping ransom investigation.
Speaker 5 (16:21):
And it's at that.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
Point, because it's obviously a complex case and a serious case,
that the decision is made at the LAPD that this
is a case that should be investigated by a Robbery
Hobicide division, which is the unit the Brick was part of,
specifically the Major Crimes unit within Robbery Homicide, which handles
all the most complex and high profile murder cases. So
(16:45):
Rick Jackson and his partner Frank Garcia are assigned the case,
and they're the ones who are charged with going to
the Baker House and giving the parents the terrible news
is the victim of a murder.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Rick, did you need for the parents to come down
to positively identify Ron.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
Eventually they did.
Speaker 4 (17:09):
We didn't go out there until the murder happened on
a Thursday night. We got involved on Sunday evening, and
so by the time we got there, it was you know,
nine thirty, ten o'clock at night, and so eventually they
did go down without us to make the identification. But
(17:30):
based on photographs and things that have been obtained, and
the physical description and the necklace and things like that,
we knew it was wrong. And as a homicide detective,
that is easily the worst part of the job is
to having, is to be the one to have to
make personal notification family.
Speaker 3 (17:49):
It's understandably it's awful to have to do that.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
Matt. What did Rick and Frank and you know, anybody
else who's trying to get information? What did they learn
about Ronald Baker after he's been positively identified and they've
talked to his parents.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
Just from speaking with the family, I think they knew
the basics about Ron's background, that he was a student
at UCLA. He was a really intelligent, sensitive guy, very
active in organizations like Amnesty International. He was a big environmentalist.
His family was very involved in their church Brick Was
(18:34):
it Methodist?
Speaker 3 (18:35):
I believed, yeah. I think it was a Methodist.
Speaker 5 (18:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
So the parents were very, very involved in their local church,
and Ron and his sister Patty were both raised within
the church. So he had a kind of religious background,
but he had a very curious, searching personality.
Speaker 5 (18:52):
Ron did, so he had.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
This background in Christianity and he was involved in things
like the Methodist youth group at UCLA. But at the
same time he was really interested in world religions, and
sometime before the murder, had become very interested in Wicca.
If you're not familiar with it, it's like a pagan religion
(19:15):
or philosophy, being in tune with nature, worshiping the sun
and the moon.
Speaker 5 (19:21):
And among the holidays for people who believe in Wicca.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
Are you know astronomical phenomenon, So the solstices and the equinox,
and you know days when the stars are aligned in
a certain way, those are causes for celebration.
Speaker 5 (19:38):
And one of the.
Speaker 2 (19:40):
Things that Rick and his partner are informed of early
on is that the night that the murder occurred was
actually the same as the summer solstice, which is the
first day of summer and the longest day of the
year and a Wicca holy day. And after informing Ron's
parents of his death, the next day, Rick and his
(20:02):
partner go to interview Ron's roommates and they visit his
apartment and one of the roommates was not there because
he had left town a few days earlier for a
pre planned family reunion, but a second roommate, whose name
was Duncan Martinez was at the apartment and Rick and
his partner Frank met him and were told by Duncan
that Ron had gone to UCLA that night to celebrate
(20:26):
the Summer Solstice with some of his friends in a
club at UCLA called the Mystic Circle.
Speaker 5 (20:31):
It was a.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
Student group that was collection of students who were all
interested in different aspects of the occult and religion and philosophy,
not at all any sort of Satanic worship type of stuff,
more just broader questioning of religion and the world and
(20:53):
nature and things like that. It seemed right from the start,
between the location where the body was found being the
bats and Tunnel, the fact that Ron was really into
WICCA and was a member of this club at UCLA,
and the murder occurred on the night of the Summer
Solstice all pointed in a direction that that kind of
(21:14):
couldn't be ignored, even as it seemed a little bit
far fetched that there would be a murder related to,
you know, some some sort of satanic motive.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
Rick, when the roommate Duncan tells you this, you and
Frank I assume go and try to confirm this story.
Did you find that this is what happened with Ronald
that night? Did he go to this meeting? I mean,
did this all add up to you all?
Speaker 4 (21:42):
Yeah, the roommates had mentioned that they had dropped them off.
At Ron didn't drive. He kind of notoriously bad history
of driving, and so he finally just stopped driving and
took busses everywhere in including the UCLA. So they said
they had drive him off about eight thirty to catch
a bus or late bus over to UCLA to be
(22:06):
with his Mystic Circle friends. It's basically what he had
told them. So eventually we did identify the Mystic Circle
group with the UCLA police. We did some research for
us and we had a flyer that we found in
Ron's room about the Mystic Circle and we had a
contact name on there to contact. So we did follow
(22:27):
up on that to see if there was some knowledge
of a group getting together on the night of the
Summer Solstice to do some kind of celebration, and that
was struck out there. We found nobody that had any
organized plan, No one had seen Ron, There was no
known contact with anybody from that group on that day,
(22:47):
so we were kind of back to square one.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
So that could either mean that Duncan is full of
it and lying about all of this, or that Ronald's
plans totally changed after he was dropped off. Is that
what y'all were looking at.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
Yeah, well that's the possibility.
Speaker 4 (23:03):
You know, we need to check out the Duncan in
his roommate. And also there was the other roommate, Nathan Blaylock,
who was at the family reunion by the time we
got involved. His girlfriend had visited that night and she
confirmed all this that ron had told her he was
going over to u CLA independently of them. Okay, so
that's what we were stuck with, and that's where the
(23:24):
whole mystery part of it is involved. And I should
say Duncan Martinez was very cooperative, very seemingly distraught. There
were a couple of female friends over who were friends
with the roommates and with ron that were there for
support and trying to figure out what they can do,
and we interviewed all of them that first meeting Mayo
(23:46):
at Duncan, which was the next day after the notification.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
Of the family.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
Like Rick said, there was a lot of due diligence
that they had to do to determine whether or not
this story of Ron being dropped off at the bus
stop was sure or not, but doing that due diligence
took time. Eventually, over the next days and weeks, Rank
and his partner staked out the bus route that Ron
(24:11):
supposedly took that night, interviewed the bus drivers who were
driving that route. No one had seen Ron, so there
was a lot of investigation that they had to do
into this story. But there was something that Duncan told
Rick and Frank that first interview that I think raised
(24:32):
their hackles a little bit, even though it didn't really
make sense. There was no indication at all that there
was any sort of animosity between Ron and Duncan and Nathan,
his two roommates. Do you want me to recount it?
Or Rick, do you want to explain what that thing
that Duncan said was that just struck you? And Frank
as odd.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (24:55):
That Monday we go over and eventually Frank and I
both interviewed the two females first that were there just
to get back on iron and things of that nature.
And Frank finished his interview with the one female first,
and so he began interviewing Duncan. And these were all
separate interviews they weren't done in the same room, we'd
(25:15):
go into a different room. So everybody there's some consistency,
and we don't want others being influenced by the other
things of that nature. And so after Frank's interview with
Duncan and we left that night and driving back downtown,
he told me, actually I didn't hear it, but Frank
told me that Duncan had said something that kind of
(25:36):
bothered him a little bit. And that was that On Saturday,
so two days after the murder, he and Nathan decided
to go out and try to be proactive. And that's
one detective told them, you know, reach out, go to
places he used to go, things like that, and they
said they went to Chatsworth Park, that he and Nathan
(25:56):
went to Chatsworth Park on Saturday morning to look for
Ron and they looked around the park, which was huge,
and then they went up to the tunnel and they said,
in retrospect, we don't know why we went up to tunnel.
We decided not to go in and then we left
and you know, that was the end of it. And
Frank would say, well, why would you go to this
(26:18):
park that Ron liked to go to if somebody had
kidnapped him. Why would you go to the park, you know,
because kidnappers aren't in the habit of taking people the
places they liked to go. Kidnappers take people other places
that worked best for a quote unquote kidnapping. And that
(26:38):
bothered Frank a little bit, And so I played the
devil's advocate, you know, said, well, you know, maybe they
just didn't know what else to do. They had to
do something. Nervous energy just we've got to do something
to find our friend, help our friends. So maybe they
just went there. But I thought it was a little
strange too. It was just very coincidental for him to
bring that up. So that in itself didn't mean a
(27:00):
whole whole lot, but it put a little place marker
in our mind about you know, we need to work
a little harder on on the two roommates as well,
because there were their own old bis for each other
and what they had done that night.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
But did everybody know at this point that he had
been found It was positively identified. He was in the
tunnel already.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
Let me try to clarify the timeline. Thursday night is
when the body is found as a John Doe and
also the family receiving these ransom calls. But the body
is not identified as Ron until Sunday.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
Oh okay, So unless.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
You're involved in the murder, you should not know until
Sunday that Ron is dead.
Speaker 1 (27:43):
Okay, now I get it.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
The belief among all of his friends is that Ron
has been kidnapped. Now we know factually Ron is already
dead because his body was found on Thursday night, but
no one else knows that except for the police until Sunday,
when and the police go to Ron's family and inform him.
Up to that point, Ron was a missing person's case.
Speaker 5 (28:07):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
And so the thing that struck Rick's partner Frank Garcia
as odd is, Okay, your roommate is supposedly kidnapped, and
you decide that you're going to go look for him,
and you're telling us that the place that you went
to go look for him is where his body was
actually found. And when they asked him why that's odd
(28:31):
that you would go look for him at Chestsworth Park.
Why would you go there? His answer was, well, we
know that Ron used to like to go to Chatsboroth
Park to meditate, and we thought that maybe he was
up there. But again, That doesn't make sense because if
you're a kidnapping victim, you don't get to choose where
you want to go.
Speaker 5 (28:49):
You don't get to.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Say, let's take me somewhere where I like to go meditate.
You go wherever the kidnappers are going to take you.
And so it was very odd for these guys at
a point in time when no one knew that Ron
was dead and no one knew that his body had
been discovered in this remote place, that they went to
go looking for Rob in that place. Now, it doesn't
(29:11):
rise to a motive or any anything like that. It
was just it was just strange and kind of inexplicable
that they would do that. So I think that's a
seed of doubt that gets planted very early in their
first interaction with Duncan Martinez, and significantly, by everyone's account,
(29:33):
Duncan and Nathan are the last two people to see
Rob alive, and they're both telling the same story that
they dropped him off at the bus stop together and
they never saw him again that night, and he told
them the same story that he was going to use
Cla to celebrate the summer solstice with his mystic circle friends,
and so again Rick and Frank have to look at
(29:53):
Duncan and Nathan because they're the last people seen with him.
So they really want to try to eliminate.
Speaker 5 (30:00):
Them to suspects because again.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
There's no sense at all of no money problems, no
personal problems, there's no sense of any of that.
Speaker 5 (30:09):
So they're just.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
Trying to confirm these guys stories that Ron got on
the bus and went to UCLA. But they keep running
into problems when they try to confirm that because they
speak to bus drivers, they show photos of Ron, they
speak to bus passengers.
Speaker 5 (30:25):
No one saw Ron get on the bus that night.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
None of the drivers they interviewed, all of the drivers
who were driving buses that night, no one recognized Ron.
No one remember seeing him get on the bus get
off the bus. None of his friends in use CLA
had made plans with him. And so it's a combination
of these factors that I think caused Rick and Frank
to hone in on Duncan and Nathan.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
What is the motive of Duncan or you know, Nathan,
or whoever is saying we went to the park, we
went to the tunnel before he's found. If they are
guilty of this, what is their motive of saying this
at all. Is this another pol holes people insert themselves
inexplicably into investigations kind of thing, or are they wanting
(31:10):
information from you?
Speaker 4 (31:12):
I would say at this point we had no idea
about any kind of motive. I mean, what would if,
let's say, if the roommates were involved. There didn't seem
to be anything that jumped out at us.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
And also good reasons to argue against these roommates being
involved because neither of them had a criminal record.
Speaker 5 (31:32):
Although Nathan was out of town on the day.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
Of that first interview when Rick and Frank interviewed Duncan,
he eventually came back to California and both him and
Duncan were very cooperative with the investigation, sat for multiple interviews,
were always cordial, never got defensive, lost their tempers. So again,
(31:57):
like the normal cues that you would expect if you
had something to hide or you wouldn't, you know, want
to engage with these detectives investigating a friend or a
roommate's murder, none of those red flags were there at all.
So again it was it was like something odd that
Duncan had said that didn't make sense, and there was
this there's the Manson tunnel stuff that's.
Speaker 5 (32:17):
Sort of floating around.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
There's these ransom calls that are floating around, and then
there's just the oddness of the idea that, Okay, you
thought your friend was kidnapped and you decided to get
a search party together and go look for him at
the place where his body was found because you knew
that he used to like to hang out there.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
Yeah, what happens between those interviews with Duncan and Nathan
and when this case cools or I don't know if
we say goals cold, is is anything else developed before
you kind of go I got other murders to deal with.
I will work this at the same time.
Speaker 4 (32:56):
Well, that's always the situation with what he says, You're
always have multiple cases ongoing the same time, and that's
why it's nice to be able to get a case
solved fairly rapidly. This one didn't seem like it's going
to happen just based on the early action in the case,
because you know, you don't know when another one's going
(33:17):
to land on your desk for you to take. And
at Robery Homicide Division, we were kind of lucky. We
got involved cases a lot of times that weren't cut
and dry most of the time, and that's why we
got called in on those to take over those because
we had the detective manpower, if you will, to work
cases for a longer period of times than the divisional ones.
(33:39):
But I would say we kept trying to eliminate Duncan
and Nathan because of some of the early things that
we've just talked about, but everywhere, everywhere who we went
to see if we could eliminate him, check them off.
It kind of pointed toward them, to be very honest,
little things. But after a while, things start piling up
(34:01):
and you know, you're shaking your head, But at the
same time, you can't let go and just move on.
You need to keep going that way. And so eventually
we asked Duncan Martinez to take a polygraph test, which
he was more than willing to do. He said, that's
where things changed significantly.
Speaker 3 (34:22):
To be very.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
Honest, Well, this is a good time to talk about
the polygraph. You know, I think the audience I've written
about it and they've heard this at nauseum at this point.
But you know, we know the polygraph isn't admissible in court.
It can be any inaccurate? Is this a way that
is this an intimidation thing or a way to pressure suspect?
Is that how it was used on Duncan At this point.
Speaker 4 (34:44):
My thinking of it, and I can speak for Frank
here because we were partners at the time and we
discussed this. First of all, do you want to see
what his reaction is going to be? Is he going
to get so no, I'm not interested, I don't trust
him or whatever, and he was like, no way, no,
I'll do it. So our feeling was this, if he
passed a polygraph test, I would feel fairly comfortable that
(35:07):
he wasn't involved. If he quote unquote failed it, it
depends on how bad he failed it whether I would
kind of group most likely he did it or are
we still having the room? Are there certain questions that
he seemed to pass by?
Speaker 3 (35:22):
Okay?
Speaker 4 (35:23):
On other ones that he seemed to separative on, like
knowledge of versus, were you involved?
Speaker 3 (35:30):
Were you there? Things? All of that nature. So it
was it was an investigative tool. It's the best way
to describe it, okay, And that's the way we looked
at it when we when we offered it to him.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
Are you continuing I have to assume everyone is continuing
to investigate the random stranger, you know scenario, which in
that area, in that tunnel, at that time of night,
you can't write off that somebody stumble. He's up there
for some reason. Right, he's got this pentagram around his
neck and we don't know why. But someone comes upon
him and there's an argument and then he ends up dead.
(36:03):
But that must almost feel impossible in La at that
point in nineteen ninety two.
Speaker 3 (36:09):
Yeah, we did eliminate people.
Speaker 4 (36:11):
We had one person and it didn't show up in
the book because we turned in seven hundred and seventy
seven pages for our book, and we knew that was unacceptable,
but we wanted professional editors to do it, you know. Yeah,
and we cut significantly, but that eventually we had a
guy that was interviewed in the park before had been
(36:33):
arrested for assaulting a park ranger with a knife, a
large knife, just months before, and so we could not
ignore that. And eventually it took us a while, but
because he was out of town, he lived, he roamed
the US, but we did eliminate it. We placed him
in a town back in Ohio at the date of
(36:55):
the murder, so we did look at other people, We
did look at occult stuff. It was running heavy with
the occult stuff early on big time, including Michael Conley,
the now famous crime fiction writer who at the time
had never written his first Bosh book yet, he had
written nothing, He had not published a book when he.
Speaker 3 (37:17):
Wrote this article.
Speaker 4 (37:19):
He also brought in the whole occult possibilities, which obviously
salt papers and it was not It hadn't been ruled
out yet, So we were dealing with that kind of thing,
taking a lot of phone calls from people that had
beliefs in naming people that hung out at the park as.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
Well as Rick said Duncan's polygraph was a major turning
point in the investigation, and he was asked, you know
a series of questions, some of them, I guess what
you would call control questions, what is your name?
Speaker 5 (37:49):
What year were you born?
Speaker 2 (37:50):
And then pertinent questions were you present when Rob Baker
was killed?
Speaker 5 (37:55):
Do you know who killed Rob Baker?
Speaker 2 (37:57):
Questions that pertained exactly, you know, precisely the cases being investigated,
and Duncan failed miserably, particularly with regard to the pertinent questions,
and at the conclusion of the interview or the polygraph
rack and Frank confront Duncan with the results, and he
(38:17):
swears that he's telling the truth and can't explain how
or why he would have failed this polygraph, and in
the wake of that he lawyers up. I think it's
only about a week or so after that that Rake
and Frank are woken in the middle of the night
by a call from the police telling them that Duncan
(38:38):
has reported himself the victim of a kidnapping himself, that
he had kicked up the phone and called one of
his friends, and because it was late at night, this
woman heard the phone ringing went to answer it. But
again in nineteen ninety people have answering machines that if
you don't pick it up by the third, fourth ring
(38:59):
or whatever, the machine picks up and begins recording. So
there's actually a recording of what Duncan said on the
phone that night when he called his friend, which was Lydia,
I've been kidnapped. They're holding me in a warehouse in
North Hollywood. And then a series of like violent noises
as if someone had caught him making this call, and
like a punching sound or the phone dropping, and then
(39:21):
the line goes dead. So again from Rick and Frank's perspective,
this is on the heels of Duncan failing a polygraph.
This is already a case involving one series of kidnapping calls,
and now this guy is reporting himself the victim of
a kidnapping and basically disappears. No one has heard from him,
and no one close to him, including Nathan, his roommate,
(39:43):
can explain who may have been targeting him, who would
you want him kidnapped and so forth. So a little
bit of investigation, Rick and his partner determined that that
phone call was actually placed from a payphone in the
gray bus station at the Las Vegas Airport. So as
(40:04):
soon as they traced that number, they know for a
fact that Duncan is lying because the call was not
placed from a warehouse in North Hollywood. It was placed
from Nevada. And a few days after that they received
word that Duncan had shown up at his birth father's
home in Kentucky, and it had shown up there, you know,
(40:25):
having arrived on a bus from Los Angeles.
Speaker 5 (40:29):
So not a kid nap victim.
Speaker 2 (40:32):
So at that point it's clear this is not our
genuine kid napping it's a fake kid napping. Duncan has fled,
but we don't know where he is, we can't interview him,
and most importantly, we don't know why he fled. And
for people like Ron Baker's family, Duncan's disappearance was particularly
terrifying because they didn't know if the same person who
(40:53):
potentially targeted Rod was now targeting Duncan.
Speaker 5 (40:57):
No one knew what the thing.
Speaker 4 (40:59):
And they were close Duncan too. You had been a
family friend, had been at their house many times.
Speaker 2 (41:04):
Duncan had delivered a eulogy at Ron's funeral and was
one of the pallbearers, so he was like.
Speaker 5 (41:10):
A family friend.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
And again, this is a case that goes through various stages,
and Duncan's quote unquote kidnapping kicked off a very protracted
period that lasted about eighteen months that sort of froze
the investigation because they couldn't reach Duncan. They had this
fouled polygraph result and this crazy story that he had
(41:34):
told that they knew was false.
Speaker 5 (41:35):
But they couldn't find him.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
And Nathan was consistent in terms of both his demeanor
and his willingness to cooperate and speak with Rick and Frank,
But at the same time hewing entirely to the original
story of we took Ron to the bus, and we
dropped him off to the bus, and we never saw
him since then.
Speaker 5 (41:56):
And I don't know what to.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
Tell you, guys, And I don't know why Duncan would
have felt polygraph or why he would have disappeared, But
I'm telling you the truth. And so for a considerable
amount of time, Rick and Frank aren't really able to
do very much to advance the investigation, apart from keeping
their eyes and ears open for dunkin servicing.
Speaker 5 (42:17):
At some point we.
Speaker 4 (42:18):
Were actively, you know, checking on him, doing FBI offline searches.
They might get a ticket or show up somewhere somewhere
in the United States.
Speaker 3 (42:28):
But for a year and a half he was gone.
Speaker 4 (42:31):
Until basically we get a call from the FBI in
Salt Lake City, Utah, in early ninety two, and they
have Duncan Martinez in custody using a.
Speaker 3 (42:45):
False name that he got.
Speaker 4 (42:47):
Eventually we find out he got it in Boston, Massachusetts.
He took on the identity of a child that had
died that would be about the same age from an
accidental ingestion of Dreno. He was one and a half
years old. Duncan became that child and actually cut records
out of the Hall of Records in Boston as if
(43:08):
the kid had not died, and he took on that name,
tried to get a passport, which they eventually determined was
a fraudulent application, a crime in itself, even if you
don't get the passport, just trying to get it. And
so when he eventually shows up in Utah and has
a traffic stop in ninety two, he gives that same name,
(43:31):
and of course there's now a warrant in the system
for him for the passport for our charges by the
FBI in Boston. And that's when eventually he decides with
his attorney that he wants to cooperate.
Speaker 1 (43:45):
It's just like the starkest contrast between Duncan and Nathan.
I mean, that's unreal. He just keeps digging. Duncan keeps
digging himself in deeper and deeper. What is that? I mean,
what is that somebody who is panicking and this is
where it comes from. He can't get it together, versus Nathan,
who is just going to dig in no matter what happens,
(44:06):
and stick with it is Nathan watch more crime shows
than Duncan. I mean, what's going on?
Speaker 4 (44:11):
Well, Nathan My partner at the time, Frank Garcia. The
first time we interviewed Nathan, we're driving back. He lived
out in Lake Elsiner with his girlfriend, and Frank says, man,
if that guy is involved, he's the coolest MF I've
ever dealt with in my life. Which is a top
chapter of one of our titles, and it's just something
(44:32):
that seared into my mind when Frank said that. So
Nathan's going nowhere, he's calm, collected, and he's ticking with
his story. Duncan is a different, different type of person,
and they're both very close. They were very close, as
was Duncan and Ron. It's like two best friends of
Duncan are the roommate and Nathan.
Speaker 1 (44:52):
So we are in nineteen ninety two and Duncan has
had enough of all of the silliness that he's been
pulling off. He and his attorneys say, Okay, we're ready.
Is this a plea deal situation to flip on Nathan
or what is this?
Speaker 2 (45:07):
It's very interesting and again, part of my experience working
on this book with Rick was learning how much work
has to be done on investigations. Like again, you can
suspect things and believe things to be true, and then
proving them at court is an entirely different matter.
Speaker 5 (45:25):
So to be.
Speaker 2 (45:26):
Clear, I don't think it's that he had some sort
of come to Jesus' remorse. I want to unburden myself
and do the right thing here. Duncan, he failed a polygraph,
he faked his own kidnapping, He fled, He stole the
identity of a deceased child in Massachusetts, long deceased child.
(45:49):
He tried to get a passport in that kid's name.
He did get a driver's license in that kid's name,
and he got.
Speaker 5 (45:54):
Caught in Utah. That's why he talked.
Speaker 2 (45:57):
It wasn't I'm tired of life on the run and
now I'm going to come forward. His hand was forced
to a degree when Duncan resurfaced. His attorney initially asked
for total immunity for Duncan to be able to tell
his story, and that obviously was a no go because
(46:18):
until the person gives you the information, you know, you
can't promise immunity. And then the person says, well, I
did the murder.
Speaker 5 (46:24):
And that you can't do anything about that.
Speaker 2 (46:27):
So the agreement that was negotiated between Duncan's attorney and
the DA's office was something called King for a Day
or Queen for a day, and it's basically a legal
arrangement by which someone can reveal information to the authorities
without the fear of that information that they're giving to
(46:51):
the police being used against that. So Duncan was permitted
to sit down with the detectives and it was a
recorded interview. There's audio of it. But the agreement was
made up front that as long as Duncan told the
truth and spoke only to the defectives about the events
in the case and did not go out then afterwards
(47:13):
and tell other people the same information that he was
telling the police, that that could not be used against.
Speaker 5 (47:19):
Him in court.
Speaker 2 (47:20):
And so under those terms, Duncan revealed the backstory and
the motive for the first time of what actually happened
on that night in June nineteen ninety when Rob was killed.
Speaker 1 (47:34):
Okay, well, which one of you wants to tell me?
What Duncan says?
Speaker 2 (47:38):
Duncan tells Rick and Frank a story that he and Nathan,
some months before the murder were home drinking beers and
watching TV when an episode of the TV show Dragnet,
the old LAPD show came on and Duncan explained that
this was an episode involving a kidnapping for ransom, and
(48:00):
he and Nathan started talking about how ham handed the
criminals in the episode were in terms of the plan
that they tried to pull off, and that if you
actually wanted to get away with the kidnapping for ransom,
that you would have to do it in a different way,
and him, Duncan and Nathan began talking and going back
(48:22):
and forth about this idea of how do you commit
the perfect crime. He claims that they were he never
thought that it was serious. This is part of the
backdrop of what Duncan is explaining to Rick and Frank
is we did have these conversations, Nathan and I, but
I never thought that it was serious. I never thought
that it was real. Yes, we discussed Ron as a
(48:44):
possible victim, but no, I never thought that it would
really happen, and basically walks through everything that happened that night,
but puts pretty much all the blame on Nathan in
terms of the actual stabbing and dunk and claims to
have been completely ignorant that this was actually a real
plan that was going to happen, and the blame that
(49:07):
he puts on Nathan includes admitting that Duncan himself made
the ransom calls to mister Baker that night, but he
insists that he only did it because Nathan ordered him
to and he was afraid that if he didn't, that Nathan,
having killed Ron, would kill him next. So with this
information out on the table, and part of the way
(49:27):
that we structure the book is that it's a series
of betrayals. The first betrayal is of Ron, particularly by Duncan,
because they're very close friends and they've been friends and
Duncan knows this family. The second betrayal with this King
for a Day interview is Duncan betraying Nathan. And if
you remember I said, one of the important terms of
(49:49):
the King for a Day riemant is that you're not
supposed to talk to other people about what happened, and
if you do, that information can be used against you
in court because it's outside of you know what you
would say on a given day. And so there's twist
and turns in this case from the beginning to the
end and even beyond the end, because this is a
(50:09):
case that occurred in nineteen ninety and it went to
trial in nineteen ninety six. Rick and I were writing
this book, you know, decades later, and there was a
final twist in the case that came about in twenty
twenty that again none of us anticipated. But Duncan's betrayal
of Ron with the murder and his betrayal of his
partner in crime Nathan, is actually not the final betrayal
(50:32):
in the story. There's at least one and maybe more
than one beyond that.
Speaker 3 (50:37):
I should say one thing real quickly.
Speaker 4 (50:39):
Duncan is making himself is least involved as he can,
obviously looking for some benefit here. There was something he said,
and he probably never realized he said it about the
mitigation of not really thinking this was going to happen,
or not really having planned it too much. He says
to me at some point on record that I looked
(51:03):
over at Nathan and it was supposed to happen then,
and when it didn't happen, meaning at the tunnel, then
I thought it's not going to That totally is in
conflict with I didn't think it was going to happen.
That shows you how much planning they put into it.
(51:23):
When he knew exactly when it was going to happen
and where it was going to happen.
Speaker 1 (51:26):
At the tunnel, God, Duncan. Duncan really has to know
when to shut the hell up, doesn't he? I mean,
it just keeps going.
Speaker 3 (51:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (51:33):
No. He is the most intriguing character in this in
this book.
Speaker 1 (51:37):
Are they both on trial? Is that what happens? I'm
assuming Nathan says he's not. None of us happened.
Speaker 4 (51:42):
There's a series of Duncan cooperates. There's a series of
phone calls he makes, and one in person visit where
he's wearing a wire, and we get significant information and
lack of denials of Duncan's statements to Nathan, Nathan not
denying them, and a lot of things like, hey, we
might this might not be a safe place to talk
(52:04):
about this kind of stuff. A lot of consciousness, consciousness
of guilt things. And eventually we charged Nathan with the murder,
not Duncan, because none of the evidence we have against
him is admissible as of yet. And then there's a
few more things he does while he's in Utah. Brother
he's pledging a fraternity, he's a student. So he's going
(52:26):
on with his life. Because not that we want that,
because we think he's still culpable and should be accept responsibility,
or we should charge him and hold him accountable. But
he's living the life of a college student frat boy
in Utah. And Nathan by now has been charged with
Ron's murder and it's sitting in prison.
Speaker 1 (52:47):
Now, tell me what does Nathan say. Does he deny
all of it or does he cop to any of it,
and does he illuminate Duncan's role at all in anything?
Speaker 4 (52:57):
Eventually, what happens we confront him. He goes through this
whole original story with us, and then we say, well,
we have something that's somebody telling us that you're involved.
And we had preset our other tape recorder to play
tapes when he got to that point, and we say, well,
I said, do you want to hear who's saying you're involved?
(53:19):
And we hit the button and here's the two voices,
and he just has head drops to the ground. Eventually,
he does admit it to some degree. He does not
implicate Duncan. At that point he says, I'll deal with it. Myself.
I'm not going to be like somebody else that we
know here and roll over on people that we have
an agreement with. But eventually that changes. When he gets
(53:43):
closer to trial, he starts trying to switch the message,
but it's kind of too late. Then it's pretty obvious
what happened.
Speaker 1 (53:50):
Do we end up getting both of these guys, I hope,
I mean, Rick, you had hinted, or one of you
had hinted that you got to keep your stupid mouth
shut for this king for a day agreement to be valid.
Does he on his mouth in Utah and then it
blows everything up? Or what happens?
Speaker 3 (54:04):
Yeah, he does. He gets arrested for a burglary.
Speaker 4 (54:08):
He's caught inside of a sporting good store and blames
it on somebody else that says, I'm going to tell
on you all this la stuff if you don't go
to do this burglary for me. Well, we disproved that totally.
But he already has his story by the officers taking
him to Once they walk him out of the store,
he's already telling them, Hey, I need to talk to
a detective. There's something I need to tell them. Well
(54:31):
he does, and we are aware that he's going to
talk to him, and so we have to make sure
it's recorded. And he lays this whole thing out to
a detective and using the whole story as his reason
that he needs to get out of this burglary. He
tries by blaming this other person, so all that becomes
admissible evidence. And it was an early Christmas It was
(54:53):
an early Christmas present for me. It was in December
of I think probably about ninety three or four. And
eventually he's charged and Marcia Clark was the prosecutor at
the time.
Speaker 3 (55:05):
She and we were all friends.
Speaker 4 (55:07):
And then of course she ends up leaving because OJ
happens a short time thereafter.
Speaker 1 (55:13):
So he goes on trial. They both go on trial, right.
Speaker 4 (55:16):
Well's gone trial separately, okay, because some evidence against one
is not evidence against the other ones, like the phone
calls and things like that. They're both convicted of life
without parole.
Speaker 2 (55:27):
So the way that the trials ended, with both Duncan
and Nathan both being convicted of first orgree murder, both
receiving the same sentenced life without parole, there was like
a certain symmetry to it where even though the physical
evidence suggests that it was Nathan who actually committed the stabbing.
In a lot of ways, Duncan is arguably the more
(55:48):
reprehensible of the two in terms of his behavior, because
his betrayal of Ron was so personal. Again, like we said,
he delivered a eulogy at Ron's funeral, knowing what had
really happened to Ron. He lied to the family members
in addition to the police, and so on and so forth,
So it seemed fitting that they would both receive the
(56:13):
same sentence, rather than one received more leniency than the other.
So things were actually kind of inequilibrium at the time
of twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen that Rick and I started
writing this book together. And what none of us anticipated
is that in the middle of writing this book, Duncan
would receive kind of out of the blue, and it's
(56:35):
something a story that we tell in more detail in
the last couple chapters of the book. But he was
granted a sentence commutation by Governor Gavin Newsom California, which
had the effect of reducing his sentence from life without
parole to twenty five to life, which is one step down.
And because Duncan had already served more than twenty five
(56:58):
years in prison, that made him immediately eligible for Pearl,
and some months after this commutation was granted by the governor,
Duncan received a parole hearing and was granted Pearl, and
some months after this parole hearing was in fact released,
(57:19):
and again throws this situation, which felt like it had
a bit of a balance in terms of the treatment
at the two suspects, again out of whack. Where Duncan
is is free living without any sort of supervision anymore
in terms of Pearl or probation or anything like that,
(57:40):
while Nathan remains in prison, serving his original sentence of
life without parole and not even eligible to receive a
parole hearing unless governor knew some where to intervene again
in his case. So that's where the story stands today.
But if we know anything from this case over the
(58:01):
last thirty some years, it may not be the last
twist in this case.
Speaker 1 (58:06):
When we walk away from this story, what is the
takeaway for what? We'll just Matt, what do you think?
What's the takeaway for you from this story? What are
we learning about anything besides how screwed up the justice
system can be.
Speaker 2 (58:22):
Well, I think the book stands as something of a
case study of a really fascinating homicide case at a
time of tremendous tension and transition within the city of
LA and maybe American culture, because some of these events
like Robbie King and the La Riots and oj Simpson
(58:43):
were yeah, for sure events in LA but also events
with the national and maybe even international impact. So the
backdrop and the characters of the quality of the case,
and then part of the book two is a bit
of a memoir of Rick, who's had a really incredible
career and served as a consultant to a lot of
(59:04):
really very influential writers, from Michael Connolly to James Alroy
to Joseph Wombaugh, and so helping Rick get his story
out there in book for him was also something that
was really exciting for me and something that I'm really
proud of now that the book is out.
Speaker 1 (59:21):
Well, Rick, let me end with you. Was this, you know,
collaboration with Matt Was this sort of a cathartic experience
for you or was it difficult to talk about some
of these things? Maybe you had some oh I wish
I had you know that that can be hard to admit.
Speaker 4 (59:36):
Yeah, there was a few parts in it that were
a little bit tough. During the midst of this, my
mentor and homicide was murdered and I handled his murder,
you know, which is really.
Speaker 3 (59:49):
Kind of unusual. And there was some personal stuff.
Speaker 4 (59:51):
I went to a divorce and ended up, you know,
being across country from my girls, who I always been
really close to.
Speaker 3 (59:57):
That was tough.
Speaker 4 (59:58):
But I love books. I've always loved books. I don't
read as much as I should because I read so
much other stuff, but I love books. And so having
worked with some of the writers that Matt listed, you know,
I was always around the publishing aspect of it, and
I always wrote well. I just didn't know if I
wrote well enough to write a book that would get published,
(01:00:21):
especially by a major publisher like a Little Brown And
so I wanted Matt, who would become friends independent of this,
and I read the Lastarus files, and I knew he
had the ability to put it together, I have to say,
and that will agree. I wrote ninety percent of the
first first drafts, or eighty to ninety percent of the
(01:00:41):
first draft of the whole thing. He was still burned
out from the craziness of writing that other book. And
then he made them better for sure, and together. We worked,
I mean we were on the phone because we lived
in different parts of the state. Now we were on
the phone daily for three four hours, especially during our
editing processes and stuff.
Speaker 3 (01:01:02):
So it was tough. The writing part was the easiest for.
Speaker 2 (01:01:05):
Me, I think, in terms of trying to open a
window onto how things work well and at other times
don't work well. I mean, how homicide real life homicide
investigation should go again in terms of events later on
that that led to one of these guys getting out
(01:01:27):
of prison. It's I think again, maybe not pleasant, but
certainly important to try to shed a light on how
the system works. It doesn't work, it could work better,
and it shouldn't be that when you have someone who
has such a record of dishonesty and manipulate the behavior
(01:01:50):
that that's the only person who the governor hear froms
and deciding whether or not to let that person out
of prison. There should be some sort of balance and
some sort of investigation that rather than no investigation when
these decisions are being made, so that there's a degree
of fairness. Because there's no doubt people who are in
(01:02:11):
prison who deserve a parole hearing and may not get
one and again Duncan received one and receive parole, And
people can read our book and judge whether they think
that was a well reasoned or a non reasoned decision.
Speaker 1 (01:02:39):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock and Don't Forget. There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast, Tenfold More
Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and
give them a listen if you haven't already. This has
been an exact plea write production. Our senior producer is
(01:03:02):
Alexis a Morosi. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This
episode was mixed by John Bradley. Curtis heath is our composer.
Artwork by Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen
Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer. Listen to Wicked Words on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
(01:03:24):
Follow Wicked Words on Instagram at tenfold More Wicked and
on Facebook at Wicked Words pod
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
One of the things that Rick and his partner are
informed of early on is that the night that the
murder occurred was actually the same as the summer solstice.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:49):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. In nineteen ninety, a UCLA
student was found murdered in a tunnel in la Detective
(01:11):
Rick Jackson and his partner were assigned to the complicated case.
Who had a motive to stab ron Baker was the
pentagram pendant around his necka clue. Author Matthew McGough and
detective Rick Jackson tell the story in their book Black Tunnel,
White Magic, a murder a detective's obsession in nineties Los
Angeles on the Brink. So we're going to go back
(01:37):
and forth because you guys co wrote this book together.
Matt a very experienced true crime author who has been
on the show before with the Lazarus Files. And then
you know, we have a retired detective, Rick Jackson. He
works cold cases now and he actually worked on this case.
So let's start with you, Matt. Okay, So this is
(01:58):
if we're setting the scene. We're in nineteen ninety it's June. First,
tell me what city we're in and kind of give
me the lay of the land a little bit. What's
it like.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
So this story, yes, as you said, it takes place
in June nineteen ninety is when it begins, and it's
in the city of Los Angeles and specifically in a
city park called Chatsworth Park. That's the very northwest reaches
of Los Angeles County, about as far north and west
as you can go in LA and while still being
(02:31):
within the city of LA. But it's pretty rustic. It's
actually quite a beautiful park. People do things like mountaineering
and hiking. It's like very rugged, and it's late on
the night of June twenty when there's fourteenagers who are
basically just out for a thrill. They are aware that
there's a railroad tunnel above Chatsworth Park and at that
(02:55):
time it was common for teenagers to hike up to
the railroad tunnel and just to get a thrill out
of it, go inside the tunnel, which was very dark,
and stand against the walls while the train went through,
press yourself against the wall and feel the train rushed by.
So it was it was close to midnight when these
(03:15):
teenagers went up there, two boys and two young women.
The boys had been there before, but the girls they
were with had not, so they hike up there and
on this day they get about halfway inside the tunnel
when they stumble upon a body and obviously flee running
out of the tunnel down the hill and go knock
on some doors until someone askers, and they called nine
(03:38):
to one one and the police respond and discover yes,
it is the body of a young man with curly hair,
kind of a slight physique and no id and he's
been stabbed several times and his throat has been slowed.
And because there's no idea on the body. It's what's
known as a John Doe. So the police document the rhyme, scene,
(04:00):
collect whatever evidence is there, and the body if the
victim is transported to the mark.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Tell me about the difficulties of a John Doe case
in general, or a Jane Doe case. I mean, obviously,
you know you don't have this person identified in nineteen
ninety pre cell phones. You know at that time period.
What's the first thing that an LAPD detective would do
to try to establish the identity of a John Doe.
Is it looking through missing person reports?
Speaker 3 (04:30):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (04:30):
Well, after the crime scene, that's the most important initial
thing is to control the crime scene. Of course, it
was the middle of the night in a kind of
a remote park, so there's not a lot of hikers
and other people up there at that time, so you
isolate the crime scene. It's pretty isolated already in a tunnel,
and you really document everything with photographs, your notes, diagrams,
(04:52):
print people up there to recover things that you think
might later be printed at the laboratory or bitter condition.
So that's the first thing, and you do and eventually
what you'll do not so much at the crime scene
but back at the station is make calls, check on
current missing persons. You'll run their fingerprints. You'll take fingerprints
(05:12):
once the corner's office gets there, and then run them
through whatever databases you can see if that person has
any kind of an arrest director or can be identified
through prints. There's numerous other sources that you can go through,
but those are the initial ones. But that takes place
once you lead the crime scene. The crime scene is
strictly about the crime scene, and you're not going to
(05:34):
worry about anythings as far as trying to identify him
at the location.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Okay, one more question for you before we go back
to the main part of the story with Matt So
Paul Hols talks about people who love to insert themselves
in criminal cases for various reasons. I'm curious about, kind
of looking back at your career, I'm thinking about these
four teenagers who discovered the body and then reported it.
Looking back at your career, how often have the people
(06:03):
who report a crime, especially a murder, are they actually
involved or is it actually pretty rare in you know,
your understanding.
Speaker 4 (06:13):
It's rare in my experience, and I think it's rare
in general experiences.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
Of most homicide detectives to rank.
Speaker 4 (06:21):
You asked that question because eventually the name of one
person of those four that were at the crime scene
not a really common name. Another clue comes forward within
a day or so where a person that we want
to interview eventually because of our victim's background, once we
identifying him, had the same name, and I'm thinking, wait
a minute, it's not that common of a name for
(06:43):
him to show up.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
And both of them.
Speaker 4 (06:45):
That just raised some hairs on my back of my
neck because I thought there was something that definitely we
had to consider. And then it eventually went away. But
it was interesting because this case for a short second
almost described the situation.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
Asked me about Yeah, I was curious about that. Okay, good,
So Matt, when we left you, you had described the body.
How many stab wounds did you say? Again, I'm sorry,
Oh many?
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Rick may be able to recall the precise number, but
many injuries to the torso and then also a really
deep slashing knife wound across the neck that no question
would have been fatal on its out.
Speaker 4 (07:25):
I think there were about fifteen stab wounds, pretty significant
stab wounds. There were the defensive cuts on the hands,
which became important because you know about the potential for
something under the nails because of the close contact situation.
But they were to the front, the back, the lower
extremities the hands, and then, like Matt said, pretty extreme slashing.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
Of the neck.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Now I'm going to ask you again, Rick about this.
So I've always thought and I feel like conventional wisdom
says that when you have that many stab wounds, right,
it's quote unquote overkill. It must be a personal vendetta
somebody who knows and they are trying to send a
message and they're angry. And then when I talked to
Paul about cases that range from the eighteen hundreds to
(08:11):
the early nineteen hundreds, he said, not all the time.
Sometimes people are just scared and want to make sure
that the person's dead. Sometimes a person's moving around so
much that you have to stab them that many times.
And so I thought that was interesting. I always thought
that went into profiling, you know, who is the person
who would have done this, But when when you have
somebody laying in a tunnel in a major city like LA,
(08:33):
that seems to complicate things eveningmore to know whether this
is somebody who knows him or somebody who was using
this as a crime of opportunity for some reason.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
This also was not just any tunnel. Yes, on one level,
it's just a rather remote, isolated railroad tunnel that commuter
trains would pass through. But it's also important to add
that within half a mile, you know as the proflies
from this tunnel, was the Spawn Movie Ranch, which is
where Charles Manson and his followers launched their crime spree
(09:07):
from in nineteen sixty nine, which again was much more
recent and fresh in the mind of people in Los
Angeles in nineteen ninety than it is today, and the
specter of the Manson crimes was such that this tunnel,
sometime between nineteen sixty nine and nineteen ninety received an
(09:27):
unofficial nickname as the Manson Tunnel. And one of the
striking things that Rick and the other officers saw when
they went up to this tunnel is that there was
a lot of pentagram graffiti and other things that sort
of bolstered, at least in terms of rumors and reputation,
(09:49):
that this is a place with satanic overtones, something of a.
Speaker 5 (09:54):
Magnet to people who might.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
Be interested in the occult as a gathering place where
people would possibly do rituals. So a lot of those
ideas are kind of swirling around this place, and it
was probably part of the thrill for these teenagers to
go up there, because it is very dark, more than
a little bit scary.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
It's like going to a haunted house.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
Yeah, I mean there's literally pentagrams that are spray painted
on the walls of the tunnel as you enter, and
actually in big spray painted letters above the entrance to
the tunnel was spray painted the phrase holy Terror. So again,
it's like a creepy, creepy place known as the Manson Tunnel,
(10:39):
and it's sort of the last thing that these teenagers
are expecting to find when they go in. But you
can visualize how terrifying it must have been to them
to go in there and really only lit by I
think the boys maybe had a cigarette lighter or two,
but to come upon what they found. And then again,
kind of the occult annotation that surrounded the location of
(11:02):
the murder provided the seeds for a lot of the
media attention that would develop in time around the case.
Speaker 4 (11:09):
I should also add that our victim, John Doe, wore
a pentagram necklace around his neck that was one of
the that was the only personal property he had on him.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
That night, we were talking about them discovering the body
and Rickywit's had probably the fifteen stab wounds. What did
you think about the overkill theory versus you know, just like,
if you want him dead, you're going to have to
stab him many times. It doesn't have to be a
personal thing.
Speaker 4 (11:37):
I wasn't, you know, eventually, when I found that out
a couple of days later, once I became involved, I
wasn't that convinced either way. You know, you're aware of
the potential personal connection and overkilled, but also it was
obviously there was at least some limited struggle and flailing
because his hands were getting knife wounds, his back, so things,
(11:58):
it was rolling around and other things going on during
the fight that led to his eventual demise. So you
just leave that open until you dive into it a
little bit further.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
Okay, So, Matt, what we know about this person is
it's a young man, curly hair, and he had been
stabbed many many times, and it sounds like had been
fighting back because he had defensive wounds. So what happens next?
What did the police do next?
Speaker 2 (12:28):
So there's a pair of detectives from the Devonshire Police Division,
which is the area, the part of LA where the
crime occurred. And so there's two homicide detectives who take
charge of this John Doe case. So they are trying
to do things like you suggested, check missing persons reports,
call hospitals to find out, you know, if anyone had
(12:49):
been reported missing, or just to do the due diligence
to try to figure out who this is.
Speaker 5 (12:54):
So there's one.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Police investigation that's focused entirely on identifying who this rictimus.
Separately from that, the same night as the teenagers are
hiking up to the tunnel, there's a family in Woodland Hills,
which is part of the San Fernando Valley here in
Los Angeles. It's a couple, Gail and Ka Baker, and
it's late that night, close to midnight. Mom has already
(13:19):
gone to sleep and Dad is sort of dozing in
front of the TV when the phone rings and he
wakes up and he picks up the phone and he
hears a strange voice, almost as if the person it
sounds to him, as if it's someone disguising their voice,
not using their true voice. And he hears this strange
voice on the phone say, mister Baker, we have your son.
(13:42):
If you don't pay us one hundred thousand dollars by tomorrow,
he will be killed. And mister Baker is really confused.
I mean he's just woken up and he gets this
phone call. And so his son is Ron, who's a
student at UCLA junior at UCLA, lives in an apartment
Van Eyes with two friends. And so mister Baker calls
(14:04):
Ron's apartment and one of the roommate's answers, yes, is
Ron home, And the roommate says no, he left earlier
that night to go to UCLA and that he hadn't
come home, and mister Baker says, well, when he comes home,
please have him call me right away. Mister Baker generally
assumes that it's some sort of a prank or something,
(14:27):
goes to sleep, doesn't call the police. The next morning,
mid morning at the Baker family home, the phone rings
again and it's the same strange voice who repeats the
exact same message, mister Baker, we have your son. If
you don't pay us hundred thousand dollars, he will be killed.
At this point, the Baker's call the apartment again, they're
(14:50):
informed by the roommates that Ron never came home last night,
and so at this point they are second guessing his
initial sense that this is some sort of harbless pranktice
may actually be something quite serious. And so the Bakers
call the LAPD and report these two ransom kidnapping calls.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
Do they say, what to do? They say, we've got
your kid. We need one hundred thousand dollars from you.
Are there more instructions after that?
Speaker 3 (15:17):
No, no, there's not.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
And you know, when the Fakers call the police and
report these first two calls, officers respond to their home
and actually set up a wiretap on the phone in
case there are further calls and further instructions. But that
third call never comes. So it's it's just the call
(15:41):
the previous night and the call the following morning. And
then the Bakers contact the police and a kidnapping slash
missing person's report is generated about Ron, finding where Ron is,
and so there's a period of a couple of days
where these two separate investigations want to kidnapping missing persons
(16:04):
and second a John Doe homicide, And it takes about
forty eight hours before the dots are connected that there's
an unidentified body at the morgue who matches the description
of the missing person in this kidnapping ransom investigation.
Speaker 5 (16:21):
And it's at that.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
Point, because it's obviously a complex case and a serious case,
that the decision is made at the LAPD that this
is a case that should be investigated by a Robbery
Hobicide division, which is the unit the Brick was part of,
specifically the Major Crimes unit within Robbery Homicide, which handles
all the most complex and high profile murder cases. So
(16:45):
Rick Jackson and his partner Frank Garcia are assigned the case,
and they're the ones who are charged with going to
the Baker House and giving the parents the terrible news
is the victim of a murder.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Rick, did you need for the parents to come down
to positively identify Ron.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
Eventually they did.
Speaker 4 (17:09):
We didn't go out there until the murder happened on
a Thursday night. We got involved on Sunday evening, and
so by the time we got there, it was you know,
nine thirty, ten o'clock at night, and so eventually they
did go down without us to make the identification. But
(17:30):
based on photographs and things that have been obtained, and
the physical description and the necklace and things like that,
we knew it was wrong. And as a homicide detective,
that is easily the worst part of the job is
to having, is to be the one to have to
make personal notification family.
Speaker 3 (17:49):
It's understandably it's awful to have to do that.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
Matt. What did Rick and Frank and you know, anybody
else who's trying to get information? What did they learn
about Ronald Baker after he's been positively identified and they've
talked to his parents.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
Just from speaking with the family, I think they knew
the basics about Ron's background, that he was a student
at UCLA. He was a really intelligent, sensitive guy, very
active in organizations like Amnesty International. He was a big environmentalist.
His family was very involved in their church Brick Was
(18:34):
it Methodist?
Speaker 3 (18:35):
I believed, yeah. I think it was a Methodist.
Speaker 5 (18:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
So the parents were very, very involved in their local church,
and Ron and his sister Patty were both raised within
the church. So he had a kind of religious background,
but he had a very curious, searching personality.
Speaker 5 (18:52):
Ron did, so he had.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
This background in Christianity and he was involved in things
like the Methodist youth group at UCLA. But at the
same time he was really interested in world religions, and
sometime before the murder, had become very interested in Wicca.
If you're not familiar with it, it's like a pagan religion
(19:15):
or philosophy, being in tune with nature, worshiping the sun
and the moon.
Speaker 5 (19:21):
And among the holidays for people who believe in Wicca.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
Are you know astronomical phenomenon, So the solstices and the equinox,
and you know days when the stars are aligned in
a certain way, those are causes for celebration.
Speaker 5 (19:38):
And one of the.
Speaker 2 (19:40):
Things that Rick and his partner are informed of early
on is that the night that the murder occurred was
actually the same as the summer solstice, which is the
first day of summer and the longest day of the
year and a Wicca holy day. And after informing Ron's
parents of his death, the next day, Rick and his
(20:02):
partner go to interview Ron's roommates and they visit his
apartment and one of the roommates was not there because
he had left town a few days earlier for a
pre planned family reunion, but a second roommate, whose name
was Duncan Martinez was at the apartment and Rick and
his partner Frank met him and were told by Duncan
that Ron had gone to UCLA that night to celebrate
(20:26):
the Summer Solstice with some of his friends in a
club at UCLA called the Mystic Circle.
Speaker 5 (20:31):
It was a.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
Student group that was collection of students who were all
interested in different aspects of the occult and religion and philosophy,
not at all any sort of Satanic worship type of stuff,
more just broader questioning of religion and the world and
(20:53):
nature and things like that. It seemed right from the start,
between the location where the body was found being the
bats and Tunnel, the fact that Ron was really into
WICCA and was a member of this club at UCLA,
and the murder occurred on the night of the Summer
Solstice all pointed in a direction that that kind of
(21:14):
couldn't be ignored, even as it seemed a little bit
far fetched that there would be a murder related to,
you know, some some sort of satanic motive.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
Rick, when the roommate Duncan tells you this, you and
Frank I assume go and try to confirm this story.
Did you find that this is what happened with Ronald
that night? Did he go to this meeting? I mean,
did this all add up to you all?
Speaker 4 (21:42):
Yeah, the roommates had mentioned that they had dropped them off.
At Ron didn't drive. He kind of notoriously bad history
of driving, and so he finally just stopped driving and
took busses everywhere in including the UCLA. So they said
they had drive him off about eight thirty to catch
a bus or late bus over to UCLA to be
(22:06):
with his Mystic Circle friends. It's basically what he had
told them. So eventually we did identify the Mystic Circle
group with the UCLA police. We did some research for
us and we had a flyer that we found in
Ron's room about the Mystic Circle and we had a
contact name on there to contact. So we did follow
(22:27):
up on that to see if there was some knowledge
of a group getting together on the night of the
Summer Solstice to do some kind of celebration, and that
was struck out there. We found nobody that had any
organized plan, No one had seen Ron, There was no
known contact with anybody from that group on that day,
(22:47):
so we were kind of back to square one.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
So that could either mean that Duncan is full of
it and lying about all of this, or that Ronald's
plans totally changed after he was dropped off. Is that
what y'all were looking at.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
Yeah, well that's the possibility.
Speaker 4 (23:03):
You know, we need to check out the Duncan in
his roommate. And also there was the other roommate, Nathan Blaylock,
who was at the family reunion by the time we
got involved. His girlfriend had visited that night and she
confirmed all this that ron had told her he was
going over to u CLA independently of them. Okay, so
that's what we were stuck with, and that's where the
(23:24):
whole mystery part of it is involved. And I should
say Duncan Martinez was very cooperative, very seemingly distraught. There
were a couple of female friends over who were friends
with the roommates and with ron that were there for
support and trying to figure out what they can do,
and we interviewed all of them that first meeting Mayo
(23:46):
at Duncan, which was the next day after the notification.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
Of the family.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
Like Rick said, there was a lot of due diligence
that they had to do to determine whether or not
this story of Ron being dropped off at the bus
stop was sure or not, but doing that due diligence
took time. Eventually, over the next days and weeks, Rank
and his partner staked out the bus route that Ron
(24:11):
supposedly took that night, interviewed the bus drivers who were
driving that route. No one had seen Ron, so there
was a lot of investigation that they had to do
into this story. But there was something that Duncan told
Rick and Frank that first interview that I think raised
(24:32):
their hackles a little bit, even though it didn't really
make sense. There was no indication at all that there
was any sort of animosity between Ron and Duncan and Nathan,
his two roommates. Do you want me to recount it?
Or Rick, do you want to explain what that thing
that Duncan said was that just struck you? And Frank
as odd.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (24:55):
That Monday we go over and eventually Frank and I
both interviewed the two females first that were there just
to get back on iron and things of that nature.
And Frank finished his interview with the one female first,
and so he began interviewing Duncan. And these were all
separate interviews they weren't done in the same room, we'd
(25:15):
go into a different room. So everybody there's some consistency,
and we don't want others being influenced by the other
things of that nature. And so after Frank's interview with
Duncan and we left that night and driving back downtown,
he told me, actually I didn't hear it, but Frank
told me that Duncan had said something that kind of
(25:36):
bothered him a little bit. And that was that On Saturday,
so two days after the murder, he and Nathan decided
to go out and try to be proactive. And that's
one detective told them, you know, reach out, go to
places he used to go, things like that, and they
said they went to Chatsworth Park, that he and Nathan
(25:56):
went to Chatsworth Park on Saturday morning to look for
Ron and they looked around the park, which was huge,
and then they went up to the tunnel and they said,
in retrospect, we don't know why we went up to tunnel.
We decided not to go in and then we left
and you know, that was the end of it. And
Frank would say, well, why would you go to this
(26:18):
park that Ron liked to go to if somebody had
kidnapped him. Why would you go to the park, you know,
because kidnappers aren't in the habit of taking people the
places they liked to go. Kidnappers take people other places
that worked best for a quote unquote kidnapping. And that
(26:38):
bothered Frank a little bit, And so I played the
devil's advocate, you know, said, well, you know, maybe they
just didn't know what else to do. They had to
do something. Nervous energy just we've got to do something
to find our friend, help our friends. So maybe they
just went there. But I thought it was a little
strange too. It was just very coincidental for him to
bring that up. So that in itself didn't mean a
(27:00):
whole whole lot, but it put a little place marker
in our mind about you know, we need to work
a little harder on on the two roommates as well,
because there were their own old bis for each other
and what they had done that night.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
But did everybody know at this point that he had
been found It was positively identified. He was in the
tunnel already.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
Let me try to clarify the timeline. Thursday night is
when the body is found as a John Doe and
also the family receiving these ransom calls. But the body
is not identified as Ron until Sunday.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
Oh okay, So unless.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
You're involved in the murder, you should not know until
Sunday that Ron is dead.
Speaker 1 (27:43):
Okay, now I get it.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
The belief among all of his friends is that Ron
has been kidnapped. Now we know factually Ron is already
dead because his body was found on Thursday night, but
no one else knows that except for the police until Sunday,
when and the police go to Ron's family and inform him.
Up to that point, Ron was a missing person's case.
Speaker 5 (28:07):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
And so the thing that struck Rick's partner Frank Garcia
as odd is, Okay, your roommate is supposedly kidnapped, and
you decide that you're going to go look for him,
and you're telling us that the place that you went
to go look for him is where his body was
actually found. And when they asked him why that's odd
(28:31):
that you would go look for him at Chestsworth Park.
Why would you go there? His answer was, well, we
know that Ron used to like to go to Chatsboroth
Park to meditate, and we thought that maybe he was
up there. But again, That doesn't make sense because if
you're a kidnapping victim, you don't get to choose where
you want to go.
Speaker 5 (28:49):
You don't get to.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Say, let's take me somewhere where I like to go meditate.
You go wherever the kidnappers are going to take you.
And so it was very odd for these guys at
a point in time when no one knew that Ron
was dead and no one knew that his body had
been discovered in this remote place, that they went to
go looking for Rob in that place. Now, it doesn't
(29:11):
rise to a motive or any anything like that. It
was just it was just strange and kind of inexplicable
that they would do that. So I think that's a
seed of doubt that gets planted very early in their
first interaction with Duncan Martinez, and significantly, by everyone's account,
(29:33):
Duncan and Nathan are the last two people to see
Rob alive, and they're both telling the same story that
they dropped him off at the bus stop together and
they never saw him again that night, and he told
them the same story that he was going to use
Cla to celebrate the summer solstice with his mystic circle friends,
and so again Rick and Frank have to look at
(29:53):
Duncan and Nathan because they're the last people seen with him.
So they really want to try to eliminate.
Speaker 5 (30:00):
Them to suspects because again.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
There's no sense at all of no money problems, no
personal problems, there's no sense of any of that.
Speaker 5 (30:09):
So they're just.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
Trying to confirm these guys stories that Ron got on
the bus and went to UCLA. But they keep running
into problems when they try to confirm that because they
speak to bus drivers, they show photos of Ron, they
speak to bus passengers.
Speaker 5 (30:25):
No one saw Ron get on the bus that night.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
None of the drivers they interviewed, all of the drivers
who were driving buses that night, no one recognized Ron.
No one remember seeing him get on the bus get
off the bus. None of his friends in use CLA
had made plans with him. And so it's a combination
of these factors that I think caused Rick and Frank
to hone in on Duncan and Nathan.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
What is the motive of Duncan or you know, Nathan,
or whoever is saying we went to the park, we
went to the tunnel before he's found. If they are
guilty of this, what is their motive of saying this
at all. Is this another pol holes people insert themselves
inexplicably into investigations kind of thing, or are they wanting
(31:10):
information from you?
Speaker 4 (31:12):
I would say at this point we had no idea
about any kind of motive. I mean, what would if,
let's say, if the roommates were involved. There didn't seem
to be anything that jumped out at us.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
And also good reasons to argue against these roommates being
involved because neither of them had a criminal record.
Speaker 5 (31:32):
Although Nathan was out of town on the day.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
Of that first interview when Rick and Frank interviewed Duncan,
he eventually came back to California and both him and
Duncan were very cooperative with the investigation, sat for multiple interviews,
were always cordial, never got defensive, lost their tempers. So again,
(31:57):
like the normal cues that you would expect if you
had something to hide or you wouldn't, you know, want
to engage with these detectives investigating a friend or a
roommate's murder, none of those red flags were there at all.
So again it was it was like something odd that
Duncan had said that didn't make sense, and there was
this there's the Manson tunnel stuff that's.
Speaker 5 (32:17):
Sort of floating around.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
There's these ransom calls that are floating around, and then
there's just the oddness of the idea that, Okay, you
thought your friend was kidnapped and you decided to get
a search party together and go look for him at
the place where his body was found because you knew
that he used to like to hang out there.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
Yeah, what happens between those interviews with Duncan and Nathan
and when this case cools or I don't know if
we say goals cold, is is anything else developed before
you kind of go I got other murders to deal with.
I will work this at the same time.
Speaker 4 (32:56):
Well, that's always the situation with what he says, You're
always have multiple cases ongoing the same time, and that's
why it's nice to be able to get a case
solved fairly rapidly. This one didn't seem like it's going
to happen just based on the early action in the case,
because you know, you don't know when another one's going
(33:17):
to land on your desk for you to take. And
at Robery Homicide Division, we were kind of lucky. We
got involved cases a lot of times that weren't cut
and dry most of the time, and that's why we
got called in on those to take over those because
we had the detective manpower, if you will, to work
cases for a longer period of times than the divisional ones.
(33:39):
But I would say we kept trying to eliminate Duncan
and Nathan because of some of the early things that
we've just talked about, but everywhere, everywhere who we went
to see if we could eliminate him, check them off.
It kind of pointed toward them, to be very honest,
little things. But after a while, things start piling up
(34:01):
and you know, you're shaking your head, But at the
same time, you can't let go and just move on.
You need to keep going that way. And so eventually
we asked Duncan Martinez to take a polygraph test, which
he was more than willing to do. He said, that's
where things changed significantly.
Speaker 3 (34:22):
To be very.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
Honest, Well, this is a good time to talk about
the polygraph. You know, I think the audience I've written
about it and they've heard this at nauseum at this point.
But you know, we know the polygraph isn't admissible in court.
It can be any inaccurate? Is this a way that
is this an intimidation thing or a way to pressure suspect?
Is that how it was used on Duncan At this point.
Speaker 4 (34:44):
My thinking of it, and I can speak for Frank
here because we were partners at the time and we
discussed this. First of all, do you want to see
what his reaction is going to be? Is he going
to get so no, I'm not interested, I don't trust
him or whatever, and he was like, no way, no,
I'll do it. So our feeling was this, if he
passed a polygraph test, I would feel fairly comfortable that
(35:07):
he wasn't involved. If he quote unquote failed it, it
depends on how bad he failed it whether I would
kind of group most likely he did it or are
we still having the room? Are there certain questions that
he seemed to pass by?
Speaker 3 (35:22):
Okay?
Speaker 4 (35:23):
On other ones that he seemed to separative on, like
knowledge of versus, were you involved?
Speaker 3 (35:30):
Were you there? Things? All of that nature. So it
was it was an investigative tool. It's the best way
to describe it, okay, And that's the way we looked
at it when we when we offered it to him.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
Are you continuing I have to assume everyone is continuing
to investigate the random stranger, you know scenario, which in
that area, in that tunnel, at that time of night,
you can't write off that somebody stumble. He's up there
for some reason. Right, he's got this pentagram around his
neck and we don't know why. But someone comes upon
him and there's an argument and then he ends up dead.
(36:03):
But that must almost feel impossible in La at that
point in nineteen ninety two.
Speaker 3 (36:09):
Yeah, we did eliminate people.
Speaker 4 (36:11):
We had one person and it didn't show up in
the book because we turned in seven hundred and seventy
seven pages for our book, and we knew that was unacceptable,
but we wanted professional editors to do it, you know. Yeah,
and we cut significantly, but that eventually we had a
guy that was interviewed in the park before had been
(36:33):
arrested for assaulting a park ranger with a knife, a
large knife, just months before, and so we could not
ignore that. And eventually it took us a while, but
because he was out of town, he lived, he roamed
the US, but we did eliminate it. We placed him
in a town back in Ohio at the date of
(36:55):
the murder, so we did look at other people, We
did look at occult stuff. It was running heavy with
the occult stuff early on big time, including Michael Conley,
the now famous crime fiction writer who at the time
had never written his first Bosh book yet, he had
written nothing, He had not published a book when he.
Speaker 3 (37:17):
Wrote this article.
Speaker 4 (37:19):
He also brought in the whole occult possibilities, which obviously
salt papers and it was not It hadn't been ruled
out yet, So we were dealing with that kind of thing,
taking a lot of phone calls from people that had
beliefs in naming people that hung out at the park as.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
Well as Rick said Duncan's polygraph was a major turning
point in the investigation, and he was asked, you know
a series of questions, some of them, I guess what
you would call control questions, what is your name?
Speaker 5 (37:49):
What year were you born?
Speaker 2 (37:50):
And then pertinent questions were you present when Rob Baker
was killed?
Speaker 5 (37:55):
Do you know who killed Rob Baker?
Speaker 2 (37:57):
Questions that pertained exactly, you know, precisely the cases being investigated,
and Duncan failed miserably, particularly with regard to the pertinent questions,
and at the conclusion of the interview or the polygraph
rack and Frank confront Duncan with the results, and he
(38:17):
swears that he's telling the truth and can't explain how
or why he would have failed this polygraph, and in
the wake of that he lawyers up. I think it's
only about a week or so after that that Rake
and Frank are woken in the middle of the night
by a call from the police telling them that Duncan
(38:38):
has reported himself the victim of a kidnapping himself, that
he had kicked up the phone and called one of
his friends, and because it was late at night, this
woman heard the phone ringing went to answer it. But
again in nineteen ninety people have answering machines that if
you don't pick it up by the third, fourth ring
(38:59):
or whatever, the machine picks up and begins recording. So
there's actually a recording of what Duncan said on the
phone that night when he called his friend, which was Lydia,
I've been kidnapped. They're holding me in a warehouse in
North Hollywood. And then a series of like violent noises
as if someone had caught him making this call, and
like a punching sound or the phone dropping, and then
(39:21):
the line goes dead. So again from Rick and Frank's perspective,
this is on the heels of Duncan failing a polygraph.
This is already a case involving one series of kidnapping calls,
and now this guy is reporting himself the victim of
a kidnapping and basically disappears. No one has heard from him,
and no one close to him, including Nathan, his roommate,
(39:43):
can explain who may have been targeting him, who would
you want him kidnapped and so forth. So a little
bit of investigation, Rick and his partner determined that that
phone call was actually placed from a payphone in the
gray bus station at the Las Vegas Airport. So as
(40:04):
soon as they traced that number, they know for a
fact that Duncan is lying because the call was not
placed from a warehouse in North Hollywood. It was placed
from Nevada. And a few days after that they received
word that Duncan had shown up at his birth father's
home in Kentucky, and it had shown up there, you know,
(40:25):
having arrived on a bus from Los Angeles.
Speaker 5 (40:29):
So not a kid nap victim.
Speaker 2 (40:32):
So at that point it's clear this is not our
genuine kid napping it's a fake kid napping. Duncan has fled,
but we don't know where he is, we can't interview him,
and most importantly, we don't know why he fled. And
for people like Ron Baker's family, Duncan's disappearance was particularly
terrifying because they didn't know if the same person who
(40:53):
potentially targeted Rod was now targeting Duncan.
Speaker 5 (40:57):
No one knew what the thing.
Speaker 4 (40:59):
And they were close Duncan too. You had been a
family friend, had been at their house many times.
Speaker 2 (41:04):
Duncan had delivered a eulogy at Ron's funeral and was
one of the pallbearers, so he was like.
Speaker 5 (41:10):
A family friend.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
And again, this is a case that goes through various stages,
and Duncan's quote unquote kidnapping kicked off a very protracted
period that lasted about eighteen months that sort of froze
the investigation because they couldn't reach Duncan. They had this
fouled polygraph result and this crazy story that he had
(41:34):
told that they knew was false.
Speaker 5 (41:35):
But they couldn't find him.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
And Nathan was consistent in terms of both his demeanor
and his willingness to cooperate and speak with Rick and Frank,
But at the same time hewing entirely to the original
story of we took Ron to the bus, and we
dropped him off to the bus, and we never saw
him since then.
Speaker 5 (41:56):
And I don't know what to.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
Tell you, guys, And I don't know why Duncan would
have felt polygraph or why he would have disappeared, But
I'm telling you the truth. And so for a considerable
amount of time, Rick and Frank aren't really able to
do very much to advance the investigation, apart from keeping
their eyes and ears open for dunkin servicing.
Speaker 5 (42:17):
At some point we.
Speaker 4 (42:18):
Were actively, you know, checking on him, doing FBI offline searches.
They might get a ticket or show up somewhere somewhere
in the United States.
Speaker 3 (42:28):
But for a year and a half he was gone.
Speaker 4 (42:31):
Until basically we get a call from the FBI in
Salt Lake City, Utah, in early ninety two, and they
have Duncan Martinez in custody using a.
Speaker 3 (42:45):
False name that he got.
Speaker 4 (42:47):
Eventually we find out he got it in Boston, Massachusetts.
He took on the identity of a child that had
died that would be about the same age from an
accidental ingestion of Dreno. He was one and a half
years old. Duncan became that child and actually cut records
out of the Hall of Records in Boston as if
(43:08):
the kid had not died, and he took on that name,
tried to get a passport, which they eventually determined was
a fraudulent application, a crime in itself, even if you
don't get the passport, just trying to get it. And
so when he eventually shows up in Utah and has
a traffic stop in ninety two, he gives that same name,
(43:31):
and of course there's now a warrant in the system
for him for the passport for our charges by the
FBI in Boston. And that's when eventually he decides with
his attorney that he wants to cooperate.
Speaker 1 (43:45):
It's just like the starkest contrast between Duncan and Nathan.
I mean, that's unreal. He just keeps digging. Duncan keeps
digging himself in deeper and deeper. What is that? I mean,
what is that somebody who is panicking and this is
where it comes from. He can't get it together, versus Nathan,
who is just going to dig in no matter what happens,
(44:06):
and stick with it is Nathan watch more crime shows
than Duncan. I mean, what's going on?
Speaker 4 (44:11):
Well, Nathan My partner at the time, Frank Garcia. The
first time we interviewed Nathan, we're driving back. He lived
out in Lake Elsiner with his girlfriend, and Frank says, man,
if that guy is involved, he's the coolest MF I've
ever dealt with in my life. Which is a top
chapter of one of our titles, and it's just something
(44:32):
that seared into my mind when Frank said that. So
Nathan's going nowhere, he's calm, collected, and he's ticking with
his story. Duncan is a different, different type of person,
and they're both very close. They were very close, as
was Duncan and Ron. It's like two best friends of
Duncan are the roommate and Nathan.
Speaker 1 (44:52):
So we are in nineteen ninety two and Duncan has
had enough of all of the silliness that he's been
pulling off. He and his attorneys say, Okay, we're ready.
Is this a plea deal situation to flip on Nathan
or what is this?
Speaker 2 (45:07):
It's very interesting and again, part of my experience working
on this book with Rick was learning how much work
has to be done on investigations. Like again, you can
suspect things and believe things to be true, and then
proving them at court is an entirely different matter.
Speaker 5 (45:25):
So to be.
Speaker 2 (45:26):
Clear, I don't think it's that he had some sort
of come to Jesus' remorse. I want to unburden myself
and do the right thing here. Duncan, he failed a polygraph,
he faked his own kidnapping, He fled, He stole the
identity of a deceased child in Massachusetts, long deceased child.
(45:49):
He tried to get a passport in that kid's name.
He did get a driver's license in that kid's name,
and he got.
Speaker 5 (45:54):
Caught in Utah. That's why he talked.
Speaker 2 (45:57):
It wasn't I'm tired of life on the run and
now I'm going to come forward. His hand was forced
to a degree when Duncan resurfaced. His attorney initially asked
for total immunity for Duncan to be able to tell
his story, and that obviously was a no go because
(46:18):
until the person gives you the information, you know, you
can't promise immunity. And then the person says, well, I
did the murder.
Speaker 5 (46:24):
And that you can't do anything about that.
Speaker 2 (46:27):
So the agreement that was negotiated between Duncan's attorney and
the DA's office was something called King for a Day
or Queen for a day, and it's basically a legal
arrangement by which someone can reveal information to the authorities
without the fear of that information that they're giving to
(46:51):
the police being used against that. So Duncan was permitted
to sit down with the detectives and it was a
recorded interview. There's audio of it. But the agreement was
made up front that as long as Duncan told the
truth and spoke only to the defectives about the events
in the case and did not go out then afterwards
(47:13):
and tell other people the same information that he was
telling the police, that that could not be used against.
Speaker 5 (47:19):
Him in court.
Speaker 2 (47:20):
And so under those terms, Duncan revealed the backstory and
the motive for the first time of what actually happened
on that night in June nineteen ninety when Rob was killed.
Speaker 1 (47:34):
Okay, well, which one of you wants to tell me?
What Duncan says?
Speaker 2 (47:38):
Duncan tells Rick and Frank a story that he and Nathan,
some months before the murder were home drinking beers and
watching TV when an episode of the TV show Dragnet,
the old LAPD show came on and Duncan explained that
this was an episode involving a kidnapping for ransom, and
(48:00):
he and Nathan started talking about how ham handed the
criminals in the episode were in terms of the plan
that they tried to pull off, and that if you
actually wanted to get away with the kidnapping for ransom,
that you would have to do it in a different way,
and him, Duncan and Nathan began talking and going back
(48:22):
and forth about this idea of how do you commit
the perfect crime. He claims that they were he never
thought that it was serious. This is part of the
backdrop of what Duncan is explaining to Rick and Frank
is we did have these conversations, Nathan and I, but
I never thought that it was serious. I never thought
that it was real. Yes, we discussed Ron as a
(48:44):
possible victim, but no, I never thought that it would
really happen, and basically walks through everything that happened that night,
but puts pretty much all the blame on Nathan in
terms of the actual stabbing and dunk and claims to
have been completely ignorant that this was actually a real
plan that was going to happen, and the blame that
(49:07):
he puts on Nathan includes admitting that Duncan himself made
the ransom calls to mister Baker that night, but he
insists that he only did it because Nathan ordered him
to and he was afraid that if he didn't, that Nathan,
having killed Ron, would kill him next. So with this
information out on the table, and part of the way
(49:27):
that we structure the book is that it's a series
of betrayals. The first betrayal is of Ron, particularly by Duncan,
because they're very close friends and they've been friends and
Duncan knows this family. The second betrayal with this King
for a Day interview is Duncan betraying Nathan. And if
you remember I said, one of the important terms of
(49:49):
the King for a Day riemant is that you're not
supposed to talk to other people about what happened, and
if you do, that information can be used against you
in court because it's outside of you know what you
would say on a given day. And so there's twist
and turns in this case from the beginning to the
end and even beyond the end, because this is a
(50:09):
case that occurred in nineteen ninety and it went to
trial in nineteen ninety six. Rick and I were writing
this book, you know, decades later, and there was a
final twist in the case that came about in twenty
twenty that again none of us anticipated. But Duncan's betrayal
of Ron with the murder and his betrayal of his
partner in crime Nathan, is actually not the final betrayal
(50:32):
in the story. There's at least one and maybe more
than one beyond that.
Speaker 3 (50:37):
I should say one thing real quickly.
Speaker 4 (50:39):
Duncan is making himself is least involved as he can,
obviously looking for some benefit here. There was something he said,
and he probably never realized he said it about the
mitigation of not really thinking this was going to happen,
or not really having planned it too much. He says
to me at some point on record that I looked
(51:03):
over at Nathan and it was supposed to happen then,
and when it didn't happen, meaning at the tunnel, then
I thought it's not going to That totally is in
conflict with I didn't think it was going to happen.
That shows you how much planning they put into it.
(51:23):
When he knew exactly when it was going to happen
and where it was going to happen.
Speaker 1 (51:26):
At the tunnel, God, Duncan. Duncan really has to know
when to shut the hell up, doesn't he? I mean,
it just keeps going.
Speaker 3 (51:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (51:33):
No. He is the most intriguing character in this in
this book.
Speaker 1 (51:37):
Are they both on trial? Is that what happens? I'm
assuming Nathan says he's not. None of us happened.
Speaker 4 (51:42):
There's a series of Duncan cooperates. There's a series of
phone calls he makes, and one in person visit where
he's wearing a wire, and we get significant information and
lack of denials of Duncan's statements to Nathan, Nathan not
denying them, and a lot of things like, hey, we
might this might not be a safe place to talk
(52:04):
about this kind of stuff. A lot of consciousness, consciousness
of guilt things. And eventually we charged Nathan with the murder,
not Duncan, because none of the evidence we have against
him is admissible as of yet. And then there's a
few more things he does while he's in Utah. Brother
he's pledging a fraternity, he's a student. So he's going
(52:26):
on with his life. Because not that we want that,
because we think he's still culpable and should be accept responsibility,
or we should charge him and hold him accountable. But
he's living the life of a college student frat boy
in Utah. And Nathan by now has been charged with
Ron's murder and it's sitting in prison.
Speaker 1 (52:47):
Now, tell me what does Nathan say. Does he deny
all of it or does he cop to any of it,
and does he illuminate Duncan's role at all in anything?
Speaker 4 (52:57):
Eventually, what happens we confront him. He goes through this
whole original story with us, and then we say, well,
we have something that's somebody telling us that you're involved.
And we had preset our other tape recorder to play
tapes when he got to that point, and we say, well,
I said, do you want to hear who's saying you're involved?
(53:19):
And we hit the button and here's the two voices,
and he just has head drops to the ground. Eventually,
he does admit it to some degree. He does not
implicate Duncan. At that point he says, I'll deal with it. Myself.
I'm not going to be like somebody else that we
know here and roll over on people that we have
an agreement with. But eventually that changes. When he gets
(53:43):
closer to trial, he starts trying to switch the message,
but it's kind of too late. Then it's pretty obvious
what happened.
Speaker 1 (53:50):
Do we end up getting both of these guys, I hope,
I mean, Rick, you had hinted, or one of you
had hinted that you got to keep your stupid mouth
shut for this king for a day agreement to be valid.
Does he on his mouth in Utah and then it
blows everything up? Or what happens?
Speaker 3 (54:04):
Yeah, he does. He gets arrested for a burglary.
Speaker 4 (54:08):
He's caught inside of a sporting good store and blames
it on somebody else that says, I'm going to tell
on you all this la stuff if you don't go
to do this burglary for me. Well, we disproved that totally.
But he already has his story by the officers taking
him to Once they walk him out of the store,
he's already telling them, Hey, I need to talk to
a detective. There's something I need to tell them. Well
(54:31):
he does, and we are aware that he's going to
talk to him, and so we have to make sure
it's recorded. And he lays this whole thing out to
a detective and using the whole story as his reason
that he needs to get out of this burglary. He
tries by blaming this other person, so all that becomes
admissible evidence. And it was an early Christmas It was
(54:53):
an early Christmas present for me. It was in December
of I think probably about ninety three or four. And
eventually he's charged and Marcia Clark was the prosecutor at
the time.
Speaker 3 (55:05):
She and we were all friends.
Speaker 4 (55:07):
And then of course she ends up leaving because OJ
happens a short time thereafter.
Speaker 1 (55:13):
So he goes on trial. They both go on trial, right.
Speaker 4 (55:16):
Well's gone trial separately, okay, because some evidence against one
is not evidence against the other ones, like the phone
calls and things like that. They're both convicted of life
without parole.
Speaker 2 (55:27):
So the way that the trials ended, with both Duncan
and Nathan both being convicted of first orgree murder, both
receiving the same sentenced life without parole, there was like
a certain symmetry to it where even though the physical
evidence suggests that it was Nathan who actually committed the stabbing.
In a lot of ways, Duncan is arguably the more
(55:48):
reprehensible of the two in terms of his behavior, because
his betrayal of Ron was so personal. Again, like we said,
he delivered a eulogy at Ron's funeral, knowing what had
really happened to Ron. He lied to the family members
in addition to the police, and so on and so forth,
So it seemed fitting that they would both receive the
(56:13):
same sentence, rather than one received more leniency than the other.
So things were actually kind of inequilibrium at the time
of twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen that Rick and I started
writing this book together. And what none of us anticipated
is that in the middle of writing this book, Duncan
would receive kind of out of the blue, and it's
(56:35):
something a story that we tell in more detail in
the last couple chapters of the book. But he was
granted a sentence commutation by Governor Gavin Newsom California, which
had the effect of reducing his sentence from life without
parole to twenty five to life, which is one step down.
And because Duncan had already served more than twenty five
(56:58):
years in prison, that made him immediately eligible for Pearl,
and some months after this commutation was granted by the governor,
Duncan received a parole hearing and was granted Pearl, and
some months after this parole hearing was in fact released,
(57:19):
and again throws this situation, which felt like it had
a bit of a balance in terms of the treatment
at the two suspects, again out of whack. Where Duncan
is is free living without any sort of supervision anymore
in terms of Pearl or probation or anything like that,
(57:40):
while Nathan remains in prison, serving his original sentence of
life without parole and not even eligible to receive a
parole hearing unless governor knew some where to intervene again
in his case. So that's where the story stands today.
But if we know anything from this case over the
(58:01):
last thirty some years, it may not be the last
twist in this case.
Speaker 1 (58:06):
When we walk away from this story, what is the
takeaway for what? We'll just Matt, what do you think?
What's the takeaway for you from this story? What are
we learning about anything besides how screwed up the justice
system can be.
Speaker 2 (58:22):
Well, I think the book stands as something of a
case study of a really fascinating homicide case at a
time of tremendous tension and transition within the city of
LA and maybe American culture, because some of these events
like Robbie King and the La Riots and oj Simpson
(58:43):
were yeah, for sure events in LA but also events
with the national and maybe even international impact. So the
backdrop and the characters of the quality of the case,
and then part of the book two is a bit
of a memoir of Rick, who's had a really incredible
career and served as a consultant to a lot of
(59:04):
really very influential writers, from Michael Connolly to James Alroy
to Joseph Wombaugh, and so helping Rick get his story
out there in book for him was also something that
was really exciting for me and something that I'm really
proud of now that the book is out.
Speaker 1 (59:21):
Well, Rick, let me end with you. Was this, you know,
collaboration with Matt Was this sort of a cathartic experience
for you or was it difficult to talk about some
of these things? Maybe you had some oh I wish
I had you know that that can be hard to admit.
Speaker 4 (59:36):
Yeah, there was a few parts in it that were
a little bit tough. During the midst of this, my
mentor and homicide was murdered and I handled his murder,
you know, which is really.
Speaker 3 (59:49):
Kind of unusual. And there was some personal stuff.
Speaker 4 (59:51):
I went to a divorce and ended up, you know,
being across country from my girls, who I always been
really close to.
Speaker 3 (59:57):
That was tough.
Speaker 4 (59:58):
But I love books. I've always loved books. I don't
read as much as I should because I read so
much other stuff, but I love books. And so having
worked with some of the writers that Matt listed, you know,
I was always around the publishing aspect of it, and
I always wrote well. I just didn't know if I
wrote well enough to write a book that would get published,
(01:00:21):
especially by a major publisher like a Little Brown And
so I wanted Matt, who would become friends independent of this,
and I read the Lastarus files, and I knew he
had the ability to put it together, I have to say,
and that will agree. I wrote ninety percent of the
first first drafts, or eighty to ninety percent of the
(01:00:41):
first draft of the whole thing. He was still burned
out from the craziness of writing that other book. And
then he made them better for sure, and together. We worked,
I mean we were on the phone because we lived
in different parts of the state. Now we were on
the phone daily for three four hours, especially during our
editing processes and stuff.
Speaker 3 (01:01:02):
So it was tough. The writing part was the easiest for.
Speaker 2 (01:01:05):
Me, I think, in terms of trying to open a
window onto how things work well and at other times
don't work well. I mean, how homicide real life homicide
investigation should go again in terms of events later on
that that led to one of these guys getting out
(01:01:27):
of prison. It's I think again, maybe not pleasant, but
certainly important to try to shed a light on how
the system works. It doesn't work, it could work better,
and it shouldn't be that when you have someone who
has such a record of dishonesty and manipulate the behavior
(01:01:50):
that that's the only person who the governor hear froms
and deciding whether or not to let that person out
of prison. There should be some sort of balance and
some sort of investigation that rather than no investigation when
these decisions are being made, so that there's a degree
of fairness. Because there's no doubt people who are in
(01:02:11):
prison who deserve a parole hearing and may not get
one and again Duncan received one and receive parole, And
people can read our book and judge whether they think
that was a well reasoned or a non reasoned decision.
Speaker 1 (01:02:39):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock and Don't Forget. There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast, Tenfold More
Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and
give them a listen if you haven't already. This has
been an exact plea write production. Our senior producer is
(01:03:02):
Alexis a Morosi. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This
episode was mixed by John Bradley. Curtis heath is our composer.
Artwork by Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen
Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer. Listen to Wicked Words on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
(01:03:24):
Follow Wicked Words on Instagram at tenfold More Wicked and
on Facebook at Wicked Words pod
Host
Kate Winkler Dawson
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